Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
By Eric Schlosser (Mariner Books, 336 pp., $13)
The author reads at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, April 20, 7:30 p.m.
In his first book, the critically acclaimed Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser teased the invisible from the visible, revealing the reality of a fast food industry concealed behind clown masks and cartoon characters. In Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, first published in 2003 and now out in paperback, Schlosser teases the visible from the invisible, penetrating America's vast black market with his analytic eye. Schlosser's goal isn't to render a final judgement on the underground economy but to explore the moral and political ambiguities it represents, to examine our attitudes about profit and regulation, drug use and the law, sex and decency. For Schlosser, the black market's recent expansion, its relationship with the legal market, its influence on our wages, sexuality and freedom, and our own reaction to it together form nothing less than a page in the biography of the contemporary American mind.
According to Schlosser, the black market functions as a virtual economic unconscious in the depths of the U.S. "free market;" it is the factory where our American greed, hatred of authority and innermost desires are all produced and consumed. Although today's underground economy has historical precedents in both the bootlegging days of Prohibition and the illegal market which grew out of the price controls and rationing caused by World War II, today's black market stands as an economic phenomena without equal. In 1970 America's black market accounted for somewhere between 2.6 and 4.6 percent of our gross domestic product; in 1994 it was closer to 9.4 percent—an estimated $650 billion in illegal transactions. With clarity and insight, Schlosser demonstrates both how and why this expansion of the black market happened, and its profound effect on American society.
Reefer Madness is essentially three long essays, each focusing on a particular facet of the black market: the marijuana trade, migrant farm workers and the sex industry. In the marijuana section, Schlosser traces the plant's evolving significance in American society, explaining how and why it became demonized and then criminalized, ultimately creating the world's most profitable and morally contested black market. Here's a historical irony: The first marijuana law in the U.S. required Virginia colonists to cultivate the plant for its industrial uses. But by the time of Prohibition, marijuana was seen as a subversive trick that outsiders deployed to undermine white Christian America—a connection that persists today. After a brief period of decriminalization in the 1970s, Reagan-era drug warriors convinced Americans that marijuana was the number-one threat to the moral well-being of America's children, and marijuana laws became draconian.
Science had demonstrated that marijuana is not physically addictive and does not butcher brain cells, and proved the benefits of controlled use of marijuana for a myriad of health problems, but after 1980 the national conversation was closed. A black market enterprise exploded, and prisons did, too—and the result, for Schlosser, is an obvious moral and political disconnect: "A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis," he writes. His solution? "For too long the laws regarding marijuana have been based on racial prejudice, irrational fears, metaphors, symbolism and political expediency.... We need a marijuana policy that is calmly based on the facts."
"In the Strawberry Fields" demonstrates how a perfectly legal industry can produce a monstrous black market through the machinations of an unregulated free market. In the last 20 years the rising demand for California's specialty crops—strawberries, grapes, avocados, peaches and plums—has been supported by a vast network of migrant farmworkers, many of them illegal immigrants from Mexico. This influx of workers has driven wages down some 50 percent (adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s: Today the average strawberry picker works a six- or seven-day week, and makes between five and six dollars an hour; undocumented workers have no sick days, vacation days, or health care benefits. And no homes: Those who don't squat beneath the stars shelter in one of the many makeshift shantytowns which dot California's agricultural landscape, and which are regularly bulldozed by authorities at the behest of suburban homeowners. Schlosser doesn't mince words when it comes to the migrant worker experience: "All those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good look at what is happening in California. Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate and cheap—a work force that is anything but free."
In "An Empire of the Obscene," Schlosser shows how the black market has dramatically transformed pornography from an "outlaw industry" to one now driven by corporations and public personalities. According to Schlosser, when the state prohibits and attempts to control human desire, consumer tastes will always find a way to satisfy themselves. Though he concentrates on a few of the illegal sex industry's key players, Schlosser makes it clear that a "handful of people" are not responsible for today's porn: "On the contrary, that responsibility extends far and wide, to men and women all across America, the movers of the invisible hand, to leading citizens in every state, to people whom you know well and would never suspect. The content of America's porn says a lot about the state of the nation. Like the rest of popular culture, its serves as a mirror."
Reefer Madness takes on questions about the proper role of the state, appropriate limits on the free market, and the strange amalgamation of morality and politics which constitute the black market system itself. Schlosser concludes that the black market represents more than just unreported dollars. It is the place where our search for profit, pleasure and a better life for our families all co-exist. Hence it is a schizoid terrain, given to incompatible moralities, designs and desires. Peering into it, Schlosser writes, "There's America now, right before you, the darkness and light."
