WRITER LOVES SWIMMING AGAINST THE AMERICAN TIDE

Eric Schlosser Will Speak Tonight on U of T Campus

Takes Aim at Tough Pot Laws, Fast Food, U.S. Black
Market

Some commentators and interviewers have called Eric Schlosser a
socialist. In the United States of America, that's tantamount to being
called a satanist. It may be even worse than being called an atheist.

The New York journalist, author of the bestseller Fast Food Nation: The Dark
Side of the American Meal and Reefer Madness, draws such epithets for both
expressing his support of decriminalization of marijuana, regulation of the sex
trade, and for his criticism of America's growing underground economy.

He's no enemy of the state, he says in a telephone interview from
California. He's there working on his next book, a look inside the
U.S. prison system.

"I love my country. I wouldn't write any of this if I didn't think it
could be fixed. I write about social issues that are avoidable."

Schlosser gives a talk tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the University of
Toronto's Bahen Centre. One thing he's bound to touch on is his belief
that U.S. federal and state governments ought to abandon punitive
marijuana laws, and look to Canada, where a proposed law would lift
criminal penalties for possession of up to 15 grams of pot.

In Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, And Cheap Labor In the American Black Market, he
tells hair-raising stories of people sentenced to life in prison on a first
offence for simple possession, or in the case of a 38-year-old Indianan, for
being a first-time middleman in a dope deal.

American laws against possession and trafficking in Cannabis sativa
accelerated in severity from 1982, when Ronald Reagan launched an
all-out war on drugs, having labelled marijuana "probably the most
dangerous drug in America today."

The Office of National Drug Control Policy still wields much power,
headed by drug czar John Walters. In May, 2003, Walters warned of the
consequences of Canada's plans to decriminalize possession of small
amounts of marijuana, forecasting an increase in pot smuggling
southward across the border.

"You expect your friends to stop the movement of poison to your
neighbourhood," said Walters.

Two weeks ago, Schlosser renewed the grass debate in the New York
Times, re-stating in an opinion piece his case for lowering penalties
on marijuana use.

"Under federal law, it is illegal to possess any amount of marijuana
anywhere in the United States. Penalties for a first marijuana offence
range from probation to life without parole," he wrote.

"If most Americans knew the real workings of these laws," he opines,
they might well want to repeal them. "Something like two-thirds (of
Americans) support medical use and most people support
decriminalization. That's what makes (the U.S. government's) attacks
on the Canadian government so absurd." He believes that by passing the
proposed law, "Canada could have a real effect on marijuana policy in
the U.S."

Schlosser's investigations into the U.S. growing underground economy
in Reefer Madness have left him with an uneasy feeling about his home
country. A thriving underground drug trade, a rapidly expanding sex
trade and pornography industry and a growing underpaid,
under-the-table worker sector add up to an unhealthy nation.

"If you were in a Soviet-style economy, the black market would be the
closest thing to freedom," he says. "But in a major Western
industrialized country, it's a very bad thing."

"First, it's a sign of alienation. People feel the laws of the land
don't represent what they want or what they feel. Secondly, it's a
sign of regression."

Among the myriad statistics and studies he cites is the startling
estimate of 28 to 30 per cent of workers in Los Angeles County getting
paid in cash.

Corporate tax reductions and pure tax evasion, he writes, is just as
alarming an area of leakage. "Corporate inversions (relocations to tax
havens) now cost the federal government an estimated $4 billion a
year. A 1998 Internal Revenue Service estimate of unpaid taxes
translates into $1.5 trillion in personal income that went
unreported."

It wasn't just Reaganomics and Republican policy that brought America
into an era of widening gaps between the rich and poor. It was under
President Clinton's watch, Schlosser points out, that the welfare
system was largely dismantled.

"The free-market myth is promoted as a national religion in this
country," he says.

Free for whom, he asks. He says the U.S. in the 1950s under Dwight D.
Eisenhower was a far kinder, gentler era.

"Bring back Ike!" says the so-called socialist, only partly kidding.
"The economic policies of his era were far more liberal and
compassionate than what we have today. There were high levels of union
membership, vigorous anti-trust enforcement, a graduated income tax
and an indexed minimum wage."

Schlosser hasn't earned a lot of friends in high places with his
journalism, which began when he gave up writing plays and novels. He
praises his editors at The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone for
sticking behind him whenever he's taken a run at American sacred cows
- -- literally, in the case of the meat packing industry he held to
account in Fast Food Nation.

He praises director Morgan Spurlock, who took Schlosser's thesis about
the dangers of the fast-food industry one step farther with his
current documentary Super Size Me, by showing the results of eating at
McDonald's every day for 30 days.

"It's both funny and brave. McDonald's is as mean a company as I've
come across," Schlosser said. In the paperback edition of Fast Food
Nation, he documents the extent to which the restaurant chain tried to
publicly discredit him.

Thanks to rigorous review by lawyers and a careful accounting of his
sources, Schlosser hasn't been threatened with libel suits.

But he knocks on wood as he says it, alluding to media ownership
concentration -- as evidenced Disney's refusal to distribute Michael
Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 -- as another clear and present danger.

"In the name of the free market," he notes, "the antithesis is being
created."

He's beginning to think that a '60s-style revolutionary movement is
the inevitable consequence of such a large number of Americans
experiencing disenfranchisement.

He wouldn't welcome it: "Not when you think about how violent and
turbulent and divisive it was."

An Evening With Eric Schlosser starts at 7:30 p.m., at the University
of Toronto's Bahen Centre, 40 St. George St. Tickets are $12.