Blue Laws and Black Markets

A review of Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, a nonfiction collection by Eric Schlosser.

by Andrew Hearst • The New York Sun • May 7, 2003

Few recent books have critiqued American consumerism as effectively as Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s 2001 polemic about the sinister underbelly of the fast food industry. The book, which earned the author comparisons to Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair, was sort of a cross between Stephen King and Peter Mayle: Hungry for a nutritious and satisfying meal, the intrepid reporter encountered maimed humans, killer bacteria, selfish businessmen, and grasping politicians everywhere he turned. In painting this scary portrait of a corrupt industry, Mr. Schlosser also highlighted the hypocrisy and internal contradictions that mar turn-of-the-century American capitalism. 

Mr. Schlosser’s second book concerns itself with similar questions about the state of American capitalism, and if it doesn’t match the earlier book’s sharp focus and strong narrative voice, it does shine a light on some disturbing aspects of American economic life. His subject this time is three major sectors of America’s so-called shadow economy, the world where “economic activities remain off the books, where they are unrecorded, unreported, and in violation of the law.” 

One study has estimated the size of the underground in 1970 to be between 2.6 percent and 4.6 percent of America’s gross domestic product; by 1994, the study found, the figure was 9.4 percent, or $650 billion. This rapid expansion “stemmed not only from economic hardship and a desire for illegal profits,” the author writes, “but also from a growing sense of alienation, anger at authority, and disrespect for the law.” 

The ballooning underground economy is a sign, Mr. Schlosser believes, that the delicate balance of capitalism has been upset. When laws consistently favor the rights of employers over those of workers, and the rights of manufacturers over those of consumers, he argues, we should not be surprised that more and more people choose to take their economic lives into their own hands. And we should modify our laws in order to reestablish that delicate balance. 

The book's first section explores the “racial prejudice, irrational fears, metaphors, symbolism, and political expediency” that have shaped America’s marijuana laws. In the 5,000 years of the drug’s recorded history, Mr. Schlosser notes, pot hasn’t caused a single known death, and yet its use is punished far more severely than that of alcohol, which causes thousands of deaths every year. At a time when the federal prison system is filled to 30 percent higher than capacity, some 20,000 marijuana offenders, most of them convicted of nonviolent crimes, currently languish in federal prison, and an even larger number are cooped up in state and local jails. To illustrate many of his points, Mr. Schlosser presents the case of Mark Young, an Indiana man sentenced to life in prison in 1992 for facilitating the sale of 700 pounds of pot. 

It’s hard to disagree with the arguments put forth by the author, who concludes the section by advocating the decriminalization of marijuana. But practically every one of his arguments has been made countless times before. Even the most subliterate High Times subscriber could recite chapter and verse. 

The second section, the shortest of the three, looks at the plight of California’s migrant farmworkers, many of whom are illegals from Mexico. California’s huge agriculture industry relies heavily on these migrants, who live in squalor and earn an average of about $7,500 a year for six months of back-breaking work. In the 1980s and 1990s, creeping urbanization helped do away with more than 300,000 acres of California farmland, but the availability of cheap labor, and Sacramento’s gutting of the state’s tough labor laws, has allowed the industry to maintain its production levels. These hard-working migrants are basically subsidizing what is still the California economy’s most important industry, Mr. Schlosser writes, and yet they are widely resented throughout the state. 

He points out that migrants can’t logically be accused of taking jobs that would otherwise go to American citizens, because few Americans will, or do, agree to work for such an anemic wage. And things don’t need to be this way: “Maintaining the current level of poverty among migrant farmworkers,” the author writes, “saves the average American household about $50 a year.” 

The third section, which focuses on the right’s attempts to criminalize pornography and a single businessman’s success at profiting from it, contains the book’s most compelling story. In telling the tale of Reuben Sturman, a former comic-book salesman in Cleveland who built an elaborate porn empire, Mr. Schlosser finally cuts loose with a sustained narrative. Two years older than Hugh Hefner, and probably more influential, Sturman fought off dozens of zealous prosecutors as he pioneered the worldwide distribution of sex toys and pornographic books and magazines. He and his lawyers and accountants also pioneered many of the accounting tricks—including the shifting of money among various offshore accounts to hide profits and avoid taxes—later used to such stunning effect by Enron and other supposedly legitimate businesses. 

Mr. Schlosser knows he’s stumbled onto a great story, and he relies on it to drive the entire second half of the book. This is a mistake, because Sturman's influence peaked years ago, and he died in 1997. The examination of Sturman’s career provides a solid sense of the forces that shaped the modern porn industry, but Mr. Schlosser doesn’t go on to examine the modern porn industry itself with any real depth. Sturman’s story would have worked much better as the first hundred pages of a book-length exploration of American porn. 

One of the great strengths of Fast Food Nation was the way it combined damning research into the fast food world with in-depth portraits of people whose lives have intersected with the industry. Reefer Madness is heavy on facts and bookish research but light on the sort of human stories that could have propelled the narrative. The book’s overreliance on explanation and argument at the expense of reportage often gives the book the feel of a position paper, albeit a solidly written one. The three sections have been revised and expanded from magazine pieces that appeared several years ago, so the contents feel slightly stale, and the three sections seem stitched together. 

It appears that Mr. Schlosser does his best work when he’s got a single, clearly defined world to investigate. He’s currently working on a major book about the American prison system; here’s hoping it marks a return to form.