Books reviews, current events, and other musings

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market is the latest book by Eric Schlosser, author of the excellent expose Fast Food Nation. Schlosser investigates three elements of the American underground economy: the marijuana trade, the migrant laborers who pick strawberries, and pornography.

Much of the marijuana section reviews the inane, destructive, expensive, and pointless nature of America's War on Drugs, especially when it comes to marijuana. Dan Baum's outstanding book Smoke and Mirrors: The War On Drugs and the Politics of Failure has a better treatment of the subject. It's clear from Reefer Madness that the marijuana situation hasn't changed at all during the last decade. Schlosser's depiction of one marijuana farm's operations, in which a few people grew over a million dollar's worth of marijuana in three months, was fascinating, largely because I hadn't heard about it before. The rest of the material, regarding the medical, law enforcement, and economic aspects, were familiar from the frequent media stories.

The section discussing strawberry pickers was more interesting, and significantly shorter, than the others. Harvesting strawberries is labor-intensive, exhausting work, and illegal immigrants are the main people who perform it. The migrant workers face the many disadvantages of a legal system that punishes them much more than their employers if caught: poor wages and unsafe work conditions. Many find themselves in exploitative sharecropper relationships with the large strawberry merchants, facing greater risk and receiving below-market prices while spiraling deeper and deeper into debt.

The porn section centered around Reuben Sturman, the world's largest pornography publisher and distributor from the 1960's to the 1980's. Schlosser traces the history of American porn: sexually explicit photos, novels, magazines, movies, peep booths, and the Internet. He also covers the government fight against porn, from Anthony Comstock to Ed Meese. The lengthy description of the tax charges that finally put Sturman in prison was somewhat dull; nobody can make an IRS investigation sound exciting. Reefer Madness spends just a few pages on the porn actors/models/whatever, and he doesn't examine the impact of pornography on society.

The opening and closing chapters explore the US underground economy in general terms. It's surprisingly large: 9.4% of the GDP in 1994 and growing. Schlosser points out that corporate America has absorbed several practices from the black market, such as pornography, gambling, and off-shore accounts for tax evasion. Reefer Madness is an informative fast read, but it doesn't measure up to Fast Food Nation.