Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market - Hardcover

Schlosser, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618334661 ISBN 13: 9780618334667

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003

Synopsis

In Reefer Madness, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays -- pot, porn, and illegal immigrants. The underground economy is vast; it comprises perhaps 10 percent -- perhaps more -- of America's overall economy, and it's on the rise. Eric Schlosser charts this growth, and finds its roots in the nexus of ingenuity, greed, idealism, and hypocrisy that is American culture. He reveals the fascinating workings of the shadow economy by focusing on marijuana, one of the nation's largest cash crops; pornography, whose greatest beneficiaries include Fortune 100 companies; and illegal migrant workers, whose lot often resembles that of medieval serfs.
All three industries show how the black market has burgeoned over the past three decades, as America's reckless faith in the free market has combined with a deep-seated puritanism to create situations both preposterous and tragic. Through pot, porn, and migrants, Schlosser traces compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new technology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, how big business learns -- and profits -- from the underground.
With intrepid reportage, rich history, and incisive argument, Schlosser illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

About this title

Review:

Reefer Madness investigates the US marijuana business; it also examines the use of illegal migrant labour in the Californian agricultural industry and the stupendous profits to be made in the production and dissemination of pornography. Together, these three rather disparate types of illegal business illustrate the profound fault-line which separates, on the one hand, the public expression of morality in America, and, on the other, what Americans really spend their money on.

As Schlosser remarks, the disparity between what citizens publicly abhor but privately adore is profoundly revealing. This is a quite extraordinarily absorbing book, written in the best tradition of American research-based journalism--Schlosser is an expert muck-raker, with an advanced sense of irony, preferring to let his facts speak for themselves rather than hammering his points home with expressions of outrage. The facts are quite astonishing enough. Here are a few examples.

The first section of the book reveals that marijuana is arguably the biggest cash crop in the USA, yet, as a product of the doctrinaire and entirely ineffective War on Drugs, possession of even tiny amounts is punishable in many states by mandatory life imprisonment--a heavier sentence than for murder. In "The Strawberry Fields", we learn that Californian agriculture is increasingly dependent on the fantastically lucrative strawberry, a delicate, labour-intensive crop only made practicable by hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexican migrant workers, many of them trapped in a kind of economic slavery, with whose education, healthcare and pensions (indeed, life and death) the US government need not concern itself. An Empire of the Obscene, chronicling the career of Reuben Sturmann, "the Walt Disney of porn", while less sensational, is in many ways more revealing of the way in which the boundary between the legal and illegal fluctuates over time, with major communications corporations, hotel chains and other mainstream operators now deeply implicated in the supply of pornography.

Together these three essays present a portrait of a society so in denial over its desires that it seems almost in the grip of a psychosis. --Robin Davidson

Review:

"Reefer Madness is earnest, impassioned, and assiduously researched."

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0618334661
• ISBN 13: 9780618334667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310