Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

Reefer Madness investigates the US marijuana business; it also examines the use of illegal migrant labour in the Californian agricultural industry and the stupendous profits to be made in the production and dissemination of pornography. Together, these three rather disparate types of illegal business illustrate the profound fault-line which separates, on the one hand, the public expression of morality in America, and, on the other, what Americans really spend their money on. As Schlosser remarks, the disparity between what citizens publicly abhor but privately adore is profoundly revealing. This is a quite extraordinarily absorbing book, written in the best tradition of American research-based journalism--Schlosser is an expert muck-raker, with an advanced sense of irony, preferring to let his facts speak for themselves rather than hammering his points home with expressions of outrage. The facts are quite astonishing enough. Here are a few examples. The first section of the book reveals that marijuana is arguably the biggest cash crop in the USA, yet, as a product of the doctrinaire and entirely ineffective War on Drugs, possession of even tiny amounts is punishable in many states by mandatory life imprisonment--a heavier sentence than for murder. In "The Strawberry Fields", we learn that Californian agriculture is increasingly dependent on the fantastically lucrative strawberry, a delicate, labour-intensive crop only made practicable by hundreds of thousands of illegal Mexican migrant workers, many of them trapped in a kind of economic slavery, with whose education, healthcare and pensions (indeed, life and death) the US government need not concern itself. An Empire of the Obscene, chronicling the career of Reuben Sturmann, "the Walt Disney of porn", while less sensational, is in many ways more revealing of the way in which the boundary between the legal and illegal fluctuates over time, with major communications corporations, hotel chains and other mainstream ope