Fast Food Nation is one of my favorite books of all time. I read it and handed my copy off to a good friend, who then passed it on to his friend, and so on and so forth until, after about 5 swaps, I lost track of it and never saw it again. We all worked in a restaurant together and I would see the red and yellow cover pop up time and again and it felt awesome, like we were part of something larger than ourselves, an organic education that made me proud to be an alcoholic waitress and a lover of books.

SO, going into Reefer Madness I had high hopes (wokka wokka!), and the book just didn't deliver. Under the frame of the black market, Schlosser took on three subjects in this work- "pot, porn, and illegal immigrants." Unfortunately, each one of these three topics deserved its own full book. It wasn't bad, it just left me yearning for the detail of FFN. Last I heard he was working on a book about the prison system. I hope he does it right, even if it takes him another ten years.

This book is proof that Americans are really great at staying staunchly uninformed about things that either confuse or terrify them while fighting tooth-and-nail to make a senseless point. The moral majority isn't so much moral as it is uproariously hypocritical and unwilling to educate itself about the things that challenge the fragile little bubble -- a bubble that seems to keep out such evils as reality and the bigger picture -- in which it dwells.

It was worth being pissed off for nearly 300 pages just to get an idea of how backward so many of my countrymen are. This book is an eye-opening, fist-tightening and heart-wrenching look at the dirty underbelly of our country and how it tries (with great success, unfortunately) to lay the blame on the underground society its puritanical mindset has birthed.

All so true...

While I really enjoyed reading Fast Food Nation, I found Reefer Madness to be less comprehensive and less well-integrated in terms of tying all the topics together. The essays: on marijuana in the U.S., the immigration policies in California, and the beginning of the porn industry were all really interesting, but a little short and the last essay that was supposed to conclude the book felt rushed and random. I just feel that the book could've been more comprehensive in terms of relating the three, or even going more in depth...

This is a pretty good book, but it didn't take me anywhere I'd never been before. The best section is the third and longest -- the one about the porn industry. Who knew so much of the proliferation of porn could be chalked up to one wily rebel called Reuben Sturman? That part is interesting and really worth reading. The marijuana part and the illegal immigration part were unsurprising but still managed to make my blood boil -- which is also unsurprising.

I don't get this book at all. So there are 3 different segments of the underground economy that are covered: pot, agriculture and porn. They exist in a marginalized world, he briefly talks about them, a short conclusion is tacked on, and away we go? I had no problem with the three choices he made for describing said economy, but there was not enough relevant data to tie these choices together, and without that, I felt that each section left so much unsaid/unexplored. Sure there are loads of juicy details, but just not enough of them. A few men made porn, which is ceasing to be marginalized, the Mexicanization of agriculture relies on a brutal system of peonage that his achieved a modicum of respectability due to a cadre of lawyers working in an unjust system, and pot may have been one of the few success stories of a protectionist economy: ban imports to raise the value of goods at home. And each of these sections elicits a range of emotions: rage at injustice; frustration over stupidity; amusement over the government floundering to battle porn lords. So each section works as an individual snapshot of a problem, but without a cohesive framework to explain more about the significance of said economies, each section just sort of hangs there, incomplete and lacking the firepower it needs. I give it a three because each section is well written, but for a recommendation, I don't think that I can offer. If you are interested in either of the three previously mentioned topics, choose another, more focus tome. If you want to know what the underground economy/vast illegal activities say about the schism between reality and justice, you also have to go elsewhere. I am afraid that doesn't leave much....

This was a confusing book. The author writes about the underbelly of marijuana, illegal immigrants, and pornography. Sometimes he wants the government to step in and correct the problems, sometimes the government should not try to control what's going on in this market.

He tries to say that the smoking of marijuana has never directly led to a death...very few things have, except a gun shot to the head.

He says illegal immigrants are underpaid...thanks for the update.

He says the porn business can be quite sleezy and unscrupulous. REALLY!

If I were you, I would pass on this book.

Well written, but overall badly done....don't bother. This follows Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which was an excellent, well-researched piece of journalism. But this book is very disappointing.

It is supposed to investigate three illegal markets...marijuana, illegal immigrants, and pornography. The section on illegal immigration is less than 35 pages, which is pathetic and doesn't even skim the surface. (He confines his discussion to agricultural workers, leaving our all other categories of illegal immigrant labor.)

The section on pot is detailed, but still misses a lot. But the most annoying (and longest) section is on porn. While trying to convince readers that the pornographer he's focusing on was treated unjustly, he criticizes the government for treating the man like 'organized crime'. Then he describes the guy's tactics for tax evasion, intimidation, threats, and even paying people who bombed his adversaries...if that isn't organized crime than I'm a natural blonde with a weight problem.

Also, what have popular authors got against footnotes? He's got oodles of references at the back of the book, but you can't really link them to statements in the body.

I don't recommend this at all.

This is a great book on the underground economy in marijuana, farms, and porn.

To give you a taste both of this book and his writing, here is my favorite paragraph from the section on farm workers, "Driving back to my motel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County, one of the richest counties in the nation--big on family values, yet bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children's education, unwilling to pay off their debts, whining about the injustice of it, and blaming all their problems on the illegal immigrants. And I thought about Francisco, their bogeyman, their scapegoat, working ten hours a day at one of the hardest jobs imaginable, and sleeping on the ground every night, for months, so that he could save money and send it home to his parents [in Mexico]."

This book focuses on the black market in America and 3 economies that support it and continue to allow it to flourish: pornography, marijuana, and illegal immigrant labor.

The book compares and contrasts the industries and how the varying degrees of legality, tolerance, and prosecution affect each one and the overall black market as a whole.

By far, most of the book is about the pornography industry. About half as many pages are devoted to marijuana, and the chapter on immigrant labor is surprisingly short (I recall that it was about 10-15% of the pages of the book.) The book could have dealt with a more balanced approach to each industry.

This book is written in a straight forward journalistic style. It is slightly lacking in organization and flow from section to section. However, within each section the flow is very natural leading to the rare phenomenon of a nonfiction-page-turner. It is surprisingly unbiased in its presentation and commentary are generally given in separate places.

I read this book because I liked: "Fast Food Nation."

The section on marijuana was enthralling. What a mess. It's not exactly a surprising idea that senators' coke-dealing sons get off while minorities and the poor rot in jail, but the anecdotes were still pretty upsetting. Sadly, not too much shocked me about the sad state of agriculture and the immigrants who support our economy. That part of the book was heartbreaking and frustrating. I didn't care for the porn stuff as much, because I couldn't understand why Reuben Sturman couldn't just pay his damn taxes. If Larry FLint could do it, so could he.

I read and enjoyed Fast Food Nation several years ago. This book is by the same author, Eric Schlosser.

None of the detail or commentary in this book is original, but it is put together in a compelling package and in a manor that makes you think about how some of the laws and prejudices that we have in place are that way, and it just may make you think to question that.

There is a quote in the ending narration of the book that talked about what Freedom means, and it said that if you are going to be a nation with Freedom then you have to be willing to accept the good and the not necessarily so good that comes with it. That really hit home with me. While I'm not for example a supporter of pot smoking or paying immigrant farm workers extremely low wages, I don't necessarily think that the way our government currently treats these situations is the best either.

It is a compelling read, agree or disagree it should make you think about it.

Thumbs Up.