This is a great look at the underground economy in America. The black market of our country is a huge part of our true economy but is never considered and rarely discussed.

The first section is about the illegal drug market.
The second section is about illegal labor.
the third section is about the adult entertainment industry.

These are three very real aspects of economics for Americans and he tackles them all very well and individually.

I found it very interesting and although it is not reading for the masses, if you're curious about this part of life that typically goes unnoticed, its worth the read.

Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness seems a bit dated, given that it was published over a decade ago. In particular, his discussion of the economics and policy of marijuana cries out for an update given the changes that have happened in the past five years. The material on migrant laborers is probably still on point, sadly, since he does a good job of detailing the misery too many of them struggle through. Despite its age, I think this is a thought-provoking work, and one the looks at some societal issues through a slightly different lens.

“Reefer Madness” was interesting, but I wouldn’t say that I loved it. The book is composed of three distinct long essays that are brought together by the introduction and conclusion. The general focus of the book is the black market in America. The first essay deals with marijuana illegality, the second explores migrant labor in California’s strawberry industry, and the third and longest discusses the history of pornography in America. There is a lot of well-sourced information here, but I think that it is brought down by Schlosser’s liberal, anti-free market bias at times.

I will not go into overwhelming detail about each essay, but Schlosser comes to the general conclusion that marijuana illegality and criminalization is extremely harmful, migrant labor in California is heavily exploited, and that porn and other “obscene” material has won its battle against forces battling for censorship. I thought the first and third essays were very strong. The heavy criminalization of marijuana is ridiculous; no one should be spending years in prison for possessing marijuana. I think we will see wide scale legalization in the near future, which is what Schlosser asserts when he says that a group of powerful men will eventually come to the conclusion that they can most benefit from marijuana by regulating it and taxing it. The third essay focuses on the story of Reuben Sturman, a fascinating character. He was the central force bringing pornography to the mainstream, specializing in distribution, new product innovation, and operation of peep-show machines across the United States and Europe. He battled the U.S. government for the majority of his adult life, fighting federal obscenity charge after federal obscenity charge. Finally, due to the efforts of a zealous IRS criminal investigator, Sturman was taken down for tax fraud. Sturman had continually laundered money to offshore accounts and utilized an amazingly complex web of offshore corporations and aliases to conceal his affiliation with and ownership of his companies. He got away with it for many years, but was finally taken down late in life. As if the story couldn’t get any more interesting, Sturman briefly escaped from prison after he was finally convicted. This was a very compelling story weaved masterfully with a narrative of the history of pornography in America.

I believe that the second essay is fairly weak. Schlosser is the most preachy in this section; he continually calls for the government to intervene, enact tougher laws, and bolster the power of the unions in California. I do not argue that migrant workers live a tough life, but they know the downsides of this work and yet still choose to make the trek to perform it. All that I would like to see is for the government to make it easier for these workers to get temporary status in the U.S. This would enable them to sue for injustices such as not being paid for all hours of work or any other breach of contract by the employer. If employers wish to trade off lower labor costs for a significantly less stable workforce, I have absolutely no problem with it. I do not believe that the government needs to engage in further protectionism to conceal American workers from foreign competition. Schlosser supports protectionist policies, implying that all of America’s low wage workers could eventually be living in states of peonage without minimum wage laws, tough immigration policies, and government intervention in unfettered capitalism. I believe that this is all overly sensationalized and biased.

Overall, I thought “Reefer Madness” was interesting and it held my attention. I would have liked to see a bit more unity between the long essays; instead, they were just thrown together. I also fail to see how Schlosser can (rightly) attack the U.S. government’s regressive policies on marijuana and pornography over the years, yet expect government intervention to be the solution to the “exploitation” of migrant workers.

Schlosser's examination of the black market makes a strong argument for the reform of the drug laws, as it gives what is essentially a history of anti-drug hysteria in the US; gives a fair assessment of the situation in its chapter on migrant workers and illegal immigration, but really kicks in in its third section, that dealing with the porn industry. Who knew that one guy, named Reuben Sturman, nearly single-handedly ran the porn industry during its most historic period, the 60's/70's? The only thing missing here is pretty glaring, i.e. a chapter on prostitution.

This is a powerful book. Broken into 3 parts, it deals with the history of our approach to marijuana use; our use of illegal immigrants, specifically in the strawberry fields of California; and the development of porn in our country, how it grew, and how our government's attempt to suppress it only continued to spark the flame.

Eric Schlosser's meticulous research is written in an easy to understand form. He states the facts without any bias. For instance, you'll learn that a young man, with no prior record, arrested for marijuana possession can receive a longer prison sentence than a convicted murderer or rapist. And, while our country is in an uproar over illegal immigrants, our government allows these people to be used like slaves when convenient. When they are no longer needed, they are rounded up like cattle and sent back to Mexico.

In the end, whether you agree with his conclusions or not, a new light is shed on a world most of us pay no attention to. And perhaps tells us that we need to get more involved.

I agree that this book falls short of "Fast Food Nation", but it is a decent read nonetheless.

The three essays on marijuana, illegal migrant workers in California's strawberry fields, and pornography is presented under the unifying "US black market" theme.
However, I don't think Schlosser ever got around to actually wrapping this unifying notion up. This leaves the three essays, good as they are individually, flapping in the air and their aspects as three sides of the US black market unaddressed. Indeed, it almost seems as if the unifying theme is not so much the US black market, but US desires (for intoxication, cheap fresh strawberries, and sex) and how the various levels of the US government (local, state and federal) has responded to the production, sale and consumption which sates such desires.

Finally, and this is at the end of the porn essay and thus the book, I think that Schloasser's reference to Christianity as the changing factor in the relation between (Western) human beings and their bodies is just plain wrong.
The conflictual nature of body and mind/spirit stems not mainly from Christianity, but from Platonism and its derivatives. It was through the Hellenistic world of thought in which Christianity originated that these ideas became part of Christianity.
However, in Christianity the idealisation of the mind/spirit was quickly tempered by the theological battles in which gnosticism and especially docetism were designated as heresies. Thus, what became orthodox (note small "o") Christianity always had a very "bodily" aspect as seen even today in the Catholic creed of transubstantiation.

I had been meaning to read this book since it came out, so when I found it recommended at the back of my economics text, it gave me an excuse to pick it up. The marijuana chapter held no surprises - as a vancouverite, the insanity of pot laws is familiar territory.

However, the middle chapter - about migrant labour in california agriculture - split open the immigration reality in america. there are whole industries in the united states economically dependent upon the reality of illegal immigrants providing dirt cheap migrant labour. Which is why so many conservative politicians in california look the other way when passing laws that allow this to continue. The immigration "debate" is a lot like the drug "debate". A debate without facts or history - based in hysteria and dishonestee. I shouldn't be surprised or disappointed, but, of course, I am.

And the last chapter is about the rise of pornography in america. again, pornography is a political issue in vancouver as well, what makes it across the border sometimes depends upon the politics of the viewer.

But I learned some fascinating things about the creation of america's porn empire, including the story of mr.reuben sturman - american folk hero of sorts. Mr. Sturman began porn as big business in america and as a result, he is an interesting study of a) law enforcement harassment techniques out to destroy you no matter how dirty they need to play b) how to fight the authorities on every legal front you can and sometimes win for the greater good even when selling dirty stories.

quote:

"as Gay Talese noted in 'Thy Neighbour's Wife" it was the publishers of sex pulps [including such titles as 'Sex life of a Cop'] - and not mainstream literary publishers in [elitist] New York - who won freedom of expression for America's novelists."

The obscenity test developed by the Supreme Court arose from attempted porn prosecutions - the same test that liberated Ginsberg, Lawrence, Whitman, Tolstoy and Shaw. An informative chapter about how freedom can be won and by whom. In this case, unromantically - a smut peddler from Cleveland, Ohio.

I enjoy books like this because I am tired of being sold platitudes by programs that please their sponsors and repeat beck, palin and talking points ad nauseum. Those people aren't finding solutions because they aren't really talking about problems in real terms.

Yay Eric Schlosser. I wish everybody agreed with him. I'm sure a lot has changed in the few years since this book was published, but it's still fascinating. It was a little unbalanced - the immigration section was quite short compared to the porn section. And I felt the porn section lost focus somewhat. But, he still ties everything to his thesis and has a good conclusion. Very informative and a quick read.

This is a book about Marijuana policy embedded into the context of the history and mainstream emergence/tolerance of Pornography and immigrant labor issues, specifically within the realm of Cali strawberry farms. Or, perhaps, it’s an equal and parallel treatment of all three issues. Either way this was a quite interesting read.

Schlosser, of Fast Food and meat industry shenanigans exposé fame, provides an overview of these three areas - with their Black Market machinations - in an attempt to expose these as important and contentious US phenomena. I don’t know that the three segments always directly interrelate, but all of this receives a high level of consideration by the author.

The Porn portion is perhaps the most interesting (well, aside from the often bizarre imbalances in drug penalties versus murder, rape, and other arguably more heinous crimes. Murder gets you 11 years and 4 months on average whereas some states mandate life for certain quantities of weed involved!) The emergence of the prerecorded sex industry is interesting in many ways - the initial viability of VHS and, later, the Internet can be almost fully credited to the Republican-majority led skin flicks industry. Porn and all that is not admittedly high - or even on - my list of general interests so perhaps this was simply the section that I found most informative. I’ve already read about the exploits of the slaughterhouse / meat packing industries via Schlosser, Sinclair, et. al. so the sorry state of labor-relations in the strawberry fields wasn’t unexpected or surprising. Also the specificity or limited scope of this in relation to a more comprehensive history of porn’s rise (so to speak) makes the dirty movies/mags overview more engaging. It’s hard to top the legalistic absurdities inherent in such observations as, “Although an eighteen-year-old woman cannot legally purchase a beer in Southern California, she can be paid a few hundred dollars to screw half a dozen men in a porn film without breaking any law.” Indeed. One area that I think received too limited attention - though I think it was broached - is the fact that sex-for-money on film (that is then available to be seen by the masses) is legal but sex-for-money in some Chevy in an alley (where typically only the John and “vendor” are exposed to it) is illegal. Is it just me - that’s messed up right?

Anyway, the pot-specific part is also packed with great information and ridiculous inconsistencies such as the predictable scenarios where Governmentally embedded anti-drug/harsh penalty proponents get their kid off the hook when he/she gets busted. The comeback kid Newt G. introduced a bill as early as 1981 to legalize medicinal marijuana. Then, fifteen years later, sponsored life-sentence marijuana legislation! Plenty of fun facts abound - the first American drug law outlined that every household was required to grow marijuana in my home colony!

It’s not a simple issue obviously - Schlosser seems to stay neutral though logically you can assume he stands on one side of the divide - but the wanton disparities in how this is handled state-by-state and over time is mind-boggling. For the more cynical set, the innumerable absurdities that have plagued all three topics might make you think we operate on some Dark Ages judicial system where the vagaries of crystal-ball feedback determines everyone’s fate. Perhaps all judges are controlled by strings wielded by those Kardashian broads - one of whom Peter Sagal recently speculated got divorced in order to “keep working as the leading stain on our national honor.”

After reading Fast Food Nation, I was looking forward to this book. Although parts of it were eye-opening and educational, I felt the pornography section was drawn-out and tedious. If it wasn't for the story of Reuben, it would have lacked anything compelling at all, and turned into a list of political back-and-forths. Well-researched and referenced, you can see how much work Schlosser put into the book and I think that is admirable, but to be honest, I lost interest after the section on migrant workers.

My laziness with non-fiction reared it's ugly head with this book. Broken up into three sections investigating, respectively, the marijuana industry, migrant farm labor and pornography, this book is actually very readable. A lot of the book tells short biographies of people affected by either government policy or big business in the various industries. I especially liked the section on migrant labor, which focuses primarily on the Santa Maria valley in California, where my mother grew up. I got bogged down in the pornography section, by far the longest part of the book, and could have been edited a little more. I also found parts of the narrative could be preachy and sensationalist, but you learn more than you ever thought possible about the underground economy.

A fairly interesting and quick read about three aspects of the black market - marijuana, cheap labor, and pornography - and the effect they have on the American economy. I think I was most shocked by the marijuana section. The punishments for getting caught with pot are outrageous. I was of the opinion that it shouldn't be illegal before, but now I'm all for decriminalization and legalization. Ridiculous.