UNDERGROUND EXPOSED BY AUTHOR

Daily Lobo: How did you decide on the black market as a topic for this book?

Eric Schlosser: You might think of a black market in New York City, but you
wouldn't think of it in the heartland of America. So that started me
thinking about the workings of the underground. Each part of the book looks
at an aspect of the underground - marijuana as a black-market commodity,
farm workers in California as black-market labor and the pornography
industry as a case study on how the black market becomes a corporate
mainstream market.

DL: If not marijuana, what do you think is the most devastating and
detrimental drug in our society?

ES: If you were to pick a deadly toxic drug that really threatens the health
of this country, it's alcohol. It's all about cultural taboos. Even though
marijuana is much less toxic than alcohol, you can lose your student loans,
you can lose your driver's license, your house, your federal benefits and go
to prison, but we're advertising Budweiser on the Super Bowl. I can't accept
that.

DL: Would the first step in lifting the taboo off of marijuana be to
decriminalize it?

ES: Absolutely. I think the United States could decriminalize marijuana
tomorrow and the only effect would be that the police would spend more of
their time going after armed robbers and rapists and murderers, and not
having to worry about busting someone for an ounce of pot. This country is
taking massive amounts of drugs right now, except instead of the drugs being
marijuana and ecstasy, those drugs are Paxil and alcohol. The notion of
America being drug free is just absurd. Children are being given Paxil and
Ritalin.

Not to mention Bob Dole, former Republican nominee for president, selling
Viagra, and yet somehow we're supposed to be drug free? It's just a little
hypocritical, don't you think?

DL: Why is the war on drugs such a failure?

ES: It is a failure in the sense of preventing people from smoking pot, but
it is a success in terms of punishing people who are not conformists. You
know if those people don't get busted, those people still cannot be hired by
the mainstream corporations who do rigorous drug testing of their employees.
So, it's a way of keeping out of influence and keeping out of power people
who have alternative ways of living. To that degree, it is a success, but I
think it is succeeding in doing something totally wrong. It's another war
that we're fighting that doesn't look likely to be won.

DL: What was your reason for choosing the pornography industry as a facet of
the black market to examine in your book?

ES: It is an interesting look at the huge triumph of the religious right in
American society. It is far more powerful and prevalent than any other
western industrialized nation, yet America also has the most hardcore porn.
That is revealing of the huge contradiction in our culture that having this
right-wing, Christian domination of so much of the culture breeds an
obsession with sex in the most plastic and superficial way.

DL: What should the government's limit be on obscenity laws?

ES: I think we should get rid of the obscenity laws completely. Obscenity is
a religious concept connected to notions of blasphemy, and I just don't know
that it has any place in our laws.

DL: After writing about the ignorance, contractions and exploitations in
this country, is it hard to keep your opinions out of your work?

ES: I must be really repressed. What I try to do in my work - and this is
where the repression comes in - is to try and write about these things in a
calm and non-judgmental way and allow the facts to speak for themselves
because that speaks louder than any argument I could make. A lot of my work
is taking people who don't have access to the mainstream media and allowing
them to have a voice.

DL: Does the book you are working on connect with the themes or ideas in
your previous books?

ES: This book is going to try to answer a simple question: How did the land
of the free become the biggest prison nation in world history? We have more
people in prison than any society, ever. The book is going to try to
understand how that happened.

DL: Any guesses on how this happened?

ES: If the laws reflect what people feel, then people obey the laws. If
there is a law against smoking a joint and yet millions of Americans do it
every day, then the law is out of step with people. I think that
increasingly on the left and the right you can find a real alienation in
this society from the government and the laws.

DL: What changes would you like your work to ideally affect?

ES: I really wouldn't presume that anything I write is going to change the
world, but what I would really love to think is that people who read my work
will think. I'm not setting out to persuade them one way or another. People
have to make up their own minds, but to not know, to live unaware of what's
going on, is to me the saddest part of it. I'm angry about a lot of what is
going on in America, but at the same time I really love this country. If I
didn't feel like things could be changed or things could be different, I
wouldn't bother writing any of these things at all. I still think if people
know what is going on, things could be different.

DL: If there is one piece of advice you want readers to take away from your
work, what is it?

ES: Open your eyes.