I found this in the bookcase at my sublet. Schlosser looks at the American black market, focusing on marijuana, migrant labor, and the pornography industry. Because much of the information is familiar already, it's the personal stories that he uses to explore these industries that make this an interesting read. Since he doesn't do so with the part about migrants (how could you?), that part is less compelling. But the stories a man convicted to life in prison for serving as a go-between in a pot deal and the life of Reuben Sturman, porn king, make for compelling, if less than literary prose. I found myself wondering why Schlosser was so insistent about his position that America should decriminalize marijuana, yet never made a similar claim about repealing the obscenity laws.

Fun facts:

Oklahoma is the worst place in America to be caught with marijuana. Someone was sentenced to years in prison for possessing .16 grams. Good thing I got out of there ...

The Comstock Law, a 19th century prohibition against distributing "obscene" materials through the mail, is still on the books.

What suprised me was to learn that the lion's share of domestic marijuana is being produced in the agricultural midwest and that places like northern California and Hawaii are just fringe markets maintained by the weed connoisseurs. The other thing that suprised me (and as one of the reviewers here mentions this was a first class piece of investigative journalism with thorough citations of source material) that there was but one bull headed capitalist who fought the powers that be for decades to make pornography a legitimate business. The section on illegal farm workers is scant, dated and could be omitted entirely from an otherwise fascinating text. This book is more creditable than most of what I have come to expect from non-peer reviewed, or public "research".
I could not add a word to improve what Belarius wrote about this text and would recommend his review as both accurate and insightful.

I loved Fast Food Nation, and Eric Schlosser seems to be in fine form here as he analyzes our screwy drug laws, the porn industry, and migrant labor. I love how he paints these elements of our underground economy as symptoms of a flawed nation still conflicted by its puritanical roots. We pride ourselves on our freedoms, but then our government feels compelled to make bad economic choices on the grounds of morality. Schlosser makes no moral judgments about the subject matter, and instead chooses to show the ways our country has cultivated and adapted a thriving underground market, for better or for worse. Fascinating stuff!

The FAST FOOD NATION author takes a look at underground, but still incredibly lucrative, markets in the US. We also read about the varied ways different Presidential administrations/governments have dealt with these markets. For example, President Clinton famously joked about trying marijuana and not inhaling, but marijuana policies under his administration tended toward harsh and merciless. And President Reagan's "business first" attitude decried regulations on worker treatment and environmental preservation as unfair and unnecessary, but his administration attacked adult-oriented businesses and put them out of business--even those whose wares seem quite mild to modern eyes.

An insubstantial book of very specific american interest. The "notes" section is impressively thick and responsibly detailed, although perhaps a little too thick and detailed for such an impressionistic survey of the disconnected subjects it covers. Personally the "case study" approach didn't work for me, although it made for a more engaging narrative thread to tie up the analysis. Schlosser is shy of making loud moral statements, despite dealing with thorny issues, and prefers to make observations about the bigger picture, making glib references to ancient Rome and medieval Christianity. I thought these parts cheapened the journalistic tone and their only value was to point towards some interesting further reading in the bibliography. I would personally have preferred a more frank moral assessment from Schlosser himself. Overall I wouldn't recommend it, except for some interesting insight into how illegal labor is structured (Schlosser unfortunately misses the chance to draw the bigger picture here).

Reefer Madness is divided into three sections. One about American law enforcement policy pertaining to Marijuana, mainly concentrating on the ridiculous sentences that are doled out for a "drug" that is less harmful than what your Doctor prescribes. The second section he talks about exploitation of illegal Mexicans by California agribusiness in the strawberry fields. He treads politically correct waters in that part of the book but the exploitation and wretched working condtions can't be denied. The last section mainly focuses on the rise and fall of porn kingpin Ruben Sturman, who ended up dying in prison for tax evasion. This book isn't nearly as good as Schlossers Fast Food Nation but its worth reading if any of the subject matter interests you.

I would love to give this book 5 stars. The first two essays, Reefer Madness and In The Strawberry Fields, are prime examples of what makes Schlosser's writing so great. He conveys meaningful information in concise but thoughtful prose that keeps you interested and informs you. Just like in Fast Food Nation, with this book, Schlosser changed my opinions on every topic he addressed. Unfortunately, the last essay, Empire of the Obscene, is very boring and I had to drag myself through it out of obligation. Maybe I just don't care enough about porn!

Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market is every bit as interesting as his excellent and informative previous book Fast Food Nation. The first section “Reefer Madness” looks at the underground economy of marijuana. It underscores the ridiculous mandatory sentencing drug laws that keep non-violent, low-level drug dealers in jail longer than murderers, rapists, and child molesters. Just another holdover form the overzealous Regan administration’s “War On Drugs”-just another misguided governmental policy like prohibition and anti-pornography crusaders (more on this later). Let’s just legalize it and tax the hell out of it like cigarettes and alcohol. The second section, ”In The Strawberry Fields”, is an investigative piece about the exploitation of illegal immigrants and the underclass as laborers in Californian strawberry fields, low pay, no benefits, improper housing, poor conditions, etc…It’s tantamount to slave labor, sweat shop style management ethic that we ignore now that most of it takes place offshore in developing countries like China and Vietnam. The whole book makes you want to become an activist, but it also details the system and mentality that you’re up against in these situations-so it seems futile. The last section details the folly of the government’s demonization of pornography, which seems ridiculous in retrospect since Disney has holdings in pornography these days where hard core images are just a mouse click away. What a waste of time, money, and resources that was. As usual, Schlosser has done an admirable job researching his subjects in revealing the folly of man.

Journalism as social criticism--or vice versa

There are three long, but very well-written essays in this book, portions of which previously appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone and the US News and World Report.

The first, the title essay, is on the marijuana business in the United States with a concentration on the "killer weed's" legal history, its economics and how it is cultivated today. Schlosser presents the unembellished facts along with some vivid detail about the growers, the sellers, the law enforcement people, and the politicians. Reading this reinforces my belief that the "new prohibition" (not so new anymore of course) is really a full employment program for the law enforcement establishment endorsed by hypocritical social conservatives (Rush Limbaugh would be a fine example) and Christian fundamentalists, most of whom have little idea about what is going on.

The second essay, entitled "In the Strawberry Fields," is about Mexican laborers in virtual peonage in California, the history of this phenomenon, its politics, its economic consequences, and the reality of today's conditions in the field and across the border. The endemic political and economic hypocrisy is illustrated by Scholosser's eye-opening observation on why Mexican migrants are routinely rounded up and sent back to Mexican in a kind of (wink, wink) revolving door policy. When migrants are allowed to settle here and raise their children, the states end up paying for their education and welfare. However by periodically deporting them we benefit from their cheap labor "while Mexico...in effect...[pays:] for the education, health care, and retirement of California's farmworkers." (p. 95)

The third essay, "An Empire of the Obscene" is about the pornography business with the focus on porn king Reuben Sturman and his nemesis IRS agent Richard N. Rosfelder, Jr. who finally got Sturman for tax evasion. Although this is the longest essay in the book (longer than the other two combined), I found it the least interesting. That Sturman was able to launder and hide his profits off shore in the same manner as drug dealers (and, for example, Enron) was interesting, as was the way Schlosser chronicles how pornography has become such a huge business that it now accounts for a significant part of the revenues of some Fortune 500 companies.

Holding the essays together is Schlosser's idea that the private morality of Americans is inconsistent with our public morality, and that the evidence for this is especially compelling in these three domains of the black market economy. He frames the essays with an introduction called, "The Underground," and a postscript named rather hopefully, "Out of the Underground."

Some highlights:

"Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States." As Schlosser notes, this "serves, in essence, as a gigantic interest-free loan" from them to us. (p. 7) (I just hope that George W. Bush's huge deficients don't lessen the world's love for the Yankee dollar and lead them to adopt the Euro instead!)

"Import barriers [on marijuana:] drove prices high enough to make domestic production extremely profitable," allowing UCLA professor Mark A. R. Kleiman to note that this is "a rare instance in which protectionism actually worked." Schlosser adds, "Some American marijuana is now worth more per ounce than gold." (p. 36)

"The new mandatory minimum laws [for marijuana possession and trafficking:] took...power from the judge and handed it to the prosecutor" who could decide who to prosecute and for what. (p. 45) This results in an uneven application of the law and "de facto sentencing by police and prosecutors." (p. 53) Added to the power the police have because of the forfeiture laws, and one sees that justice in marijuana cases can be anything but. Schlosser cites an example in Ventura County, California in which drug agents had first obtained an appraisal of a $5-million ranch and then raided it for marijuana cultivation only to find nothing growing there. (p. 62)

A further point about the forfeiture laws (which I think are unconstitutional since they are seizures without due process) is that informers may get up to one-quarter of the proceeds. Schlosser claims that this has resulted in a "new business: the buying and selling of drug leads. Defendants who hope to avoid a lengthy...sentence...can now secretly buy information from vendors on the black market." (pp. 62-63)

Recalling that justice Douglas H. Ginsburg (nominated by Reagan) declined nomination to the US Supreme Court "after confessing that he smoked marijuana as a young man," Schlosser recalls the McCarthy era's "defining political question"--"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?"--with today's question that congressmen and political candidates have to answer: "Are you now, or have you ever been, a pot smoker?" (p. 49) On page 51 Schlosser notes however that "Legislation to impose drug testing on members of Congress has repeatedly died in committee and never reached the floor for a vote." One wonders why.

Finally, Schlosser compares America's attitude toward the drug Viagra with its attitude toward marijuana. He recalls Bob Dole's TV commercial for Viagra and then notes that "Elizabeth Dole, now a US senator from North Carolina, apparently doesn't oppose this sort of recreational drug use."

Bottom line: social conservatives will deplore this book, and right wing AM shock jocks will rant against it, while most of the rest of the country will ignore it. Too bad. This is a fine piece of work by Schlosser and everyone involved in the project, and an engrossing read.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

Schlosser wrote FAST FOOD NATION, which I felt was well researched but lacked consistent writing. I figured he might be a better writer by now, so I picked up REEFER MADNESS, the unfortunately named book that is not strictly about marijuana so much as it's about underground economies.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which deals with marijuana. You could write a book entirely about marijuana cultivation in the US, and many people have. Schlosser touches a little on the absurdity of the drug war, a subject that riles me up like few others do. Schlosser, like me, believes that the war on drugs is a senseless waste of blood and treasure that destroys lives far in excess of the drugs that big government seeks to protect us from. The ones who profit are drug dealers, the law who steal property in forfeitures, and the people who build and staff prisons to house these non-violent offenders.

I had a hard time listening to the first section. Even though I don't do drugs and don't know anyone who's been affected by our asinine drug war, denying civil liberties and wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money to defend someone else's arbitrary moral code makes me very sad. I stuck it out, however, and listened to the next section, which is about illegal immigrants.

The section about illegal immigrants focuses mainly on strawberry pickers in the central valley of California. It talks about the poor working conditions of the illegal immigrants who migrate north every year from Mexico looking for work. He briefly touches on the history of agriculture in California, and its historical dependence on a low-paid "peasantry" to subsidize fruit, vegetables, and other cash crops.

While I would have liked to hear more about the history of agriculture, Schlosser delved into this subject more deeply than other books I've read, so I found it informative. He deals with this subject objectively, discussing the costs and benefits of illegal immigrant serfdom from the point of view of growers and workers alike. It's a complex issue, and he treats it as such. In the end of the book, Schlosser does give his opinion on what should be done RE: illegal immigration, but during this section he maintains objectivity.

The third section is by far the longest, dealing with the port industry. I don't watch porn, and know very little about the industry, so its history was completely unknown to me. I didn't realize the extent to which obscenity laws curtailed pornographic or erotic images, and how much they fueled censorship and the war against contraception. He delves into the career or Ruben Sturman, who was the leading figure in the porn industry for most of the twentieth century, finally brought down int he 90s by a tax evasion suit. I found myself rooting for Sturman, and indignant at the cocky young IRS agent who devoted his life to bringing him in, like some twisted Javert dedicated to destroying Jean Valjean. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not. I usually have little sympathy for tax evaders, but I also get indignant at a government that tells me I'll be irrevocably harmed if I'm able to watch naughty movies.

I found the third section the least interesting, not because of its subject, but because of its length. The sections are not 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, but 1/4, 1/4, 1/2. I learned some interesting things about the sex industry, but the long, complicated discussions of the legal battle against Ruben Sturman went on too long. Schlosser made pot, migrant labor, and porn interesting, but he couldn't do the same with tax evasion and laundering.

I recommend this book for people who are interested in political theory.

Like others who have read Fast Food Nation, I picked this up with great hope. Like others who have read this book, I was sorely disappointed.
It is what it is: a gussied up textbook version of marijuana, porn, and migrant labor statistics that feels as sterile as a World Book encyclopedia. I would have been completely disinterested if the book was not peppered with personal accounts. Still, in pages where these stories were absent, reading became unbearable, as if I was in high school again and been given a horrid research assignment. I grit my teeth and read on, but at the end I felt really guilty; I could have spent my time reading something else worthwhile about te same subject matter.
The only redeeming points about this book is the migrant labor section, especially during this immigration crisis the United States is enduring. Perhaps if all were made to read this section, along with researching other informative texts, instead of carrying uninformed and rather ignorant opinions based on no facts at all, we would be much farther along in the immigration issue than we currently are.

This incredibly engaging book was a fantastic read. The first article dealt with the criminalization of marajuana and how much misinformation is out there about it. I was absolutely appalled to learn that getting caught with marajuana can have a punishment worse than murder. This drug has been highly controversial for many years and I am so glad to have read this book and discovered how ridiculous that is. It really changed my opinion on weed. The second article was about migrant workers and no matter what side you are on regarding this issue, this article is worth reading. It really shows all sides of the complex issue and though I already held the opinion represented in the article, I still learned so much. The third article was about the sex industry and the mostly unheard of man who can be credited with starting the sex industry as we know it today. He is also the biggest tax evader in history. This was a fascinating article all about how this industry has changed in the last 30-40 years and the effects it has had on mainstream culture. All these articles are must reads and though it is likely to make you as mad as I was while reading it, it is so necessary in informing your opinions based on fact and not hearsay.