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

Schlosser, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618446702 ISBN 13: 9780618446704

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2004

Synopsis

America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risqué video, or pay our kids' nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays -- pot, porn, and illegal immigrants -- Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns -- and profits -- from the underground.
Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that 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: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0618446702
• ISBN 13: 9780618446704
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336