VICE GRIP

REEFER MADNESS: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor In the American Black Market By
Eric Schlosser Houghton Mifflin. 310 pp. $23

Sex, drugs and slave labor are as American as apple pie. And in the finest
tradition of all-American muckraking, Eric Schlosser takes on each subject
in this riveting new book of three essays, stressing how a little-studied
network of illegal or dubiously legal trades pivots on the intersection of
hedonism, greed, bad laws and big business. This multi-billion dollar
underground economy, he writes, "reveals the extent to which American
society has become alienated and at odds with itself."

Schlosser attacks this big theme with admirably thorough reporting and a
refreshingly clear, no-nonsense writing style.

The first exposé in the collection crosses the frontlines of the war on
drugs, uncovering the mayhem caused by law enforcement's obsession with
persecuting marijuana sellers, growers and even befuddled smokers.

In the second section, Schlosser -- whose earlier book was the bestselling
Fast Food Nation -- again challenges our appetites with an up-close look at
the human cost of America's favorite dessert fruit, the strawberry --
nicknamed "fruit of the devil" by the Mexican migrant workers who are forced
by poverty to pick it. And finally, his third study traces the history of
the porn industry through the Horatio Alger story of Reuben Sturman, a used
comic-book salesman who went from operating out of a garage in Cleveland in
the late 1940s to become the King of Porn during the 1970s and '80s.

Schlosser's first essay alone is worth the price of admission.

He organizes his foray into the drug world around a simple question: "How
does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than
for killing someone with a gun?" The simple answer is the War on Drugs.
During the 1980s, in a moral hysteria reminiscent of the "1950s
anti-Communist crusade" ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a pot
smoker?"), politicians sought to demonstrate their "true Americanism" by
enacting strict federal mandatory minimum sentences.

Schlosser blasts Democrats and Republicans alike for their zeal in passing
zero-tolerance marijuana laws. At a cost to federal law enforcement of more
than $4 billion each year, almost three quarters of a million people are
arrested on marijuana charges -- the vast majority (more than 85 percent!)
merely for possession. More Americans are currently imprisoned for drugs,
Schlosser reports, than were locked up for all crimes in 1970. The criminal
justice system is now so clogged up that some overcrowded prisons have been
forced to release violent criminals in order to make room for the drug
offenders who are subject to mandatory sentences.

This means that the war on drugs has backfired, in Schlosser's view. By
trying to seal our international borders to smugglers, law enforcement has
created an artificially protected market for pot. Arguably it is now the
nation's most profitable agricultural cash crop, estimated at between $4 and
$25 billion per year, compared to $19 billion for corn, the largest legal
crop. Meanwhile, the organized crime cartels, like all good entrepreneurs,
simply diversified. They switched from smuggling bulky marijuana to
higher-value, lower-volume heroin and cocaine.

As a result, both marijuana and heroin are now more potent, easier to buy
and more popular among America's youth than they were before Ronald Reagan
launched the war on drugs in 1982.

Strawberries, unlike marijuana, are a low-markup and legal crop. But, as
Schlosser explains in his second chapter, their cheap price and
profitability arise out of an exploited labor market.

Strawberries are cultivated and harvested by a vast underpaid army of
undocumented laborers who are purposefully kept outside the limits of the
law. Indeed, the underpaid, back-breaking labor of Mexican migrant workers
- -- many of them Mixtec Indians who are fleeing starvation conditions in
their birth villages -- subsidizes the cost of much of fresh produce on U.S.
dinner tables.

But the average family realizes only a $50 annual savings on produce from a
labor regime that penalizes and impoverishes illegal immigrants. The lion's
share of the profits from cheap produce goes to big business.

Even more agricultural profits will stream upward under the North American
Free Trade Agreement, which, as Schlosser writes, "permits the free movement
of American capital across borders without offering any legal protection to
Mexican migrant workers."

Schlosser is worried that corporate America's insatiable appetite for cheap
undocumented laborers and the American citizen's indifference to the working
poor are undermining the American Dream. He urges us to "take a good look at
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."

Indeed, he also argues that these conditions distort other economic choices
in the nation's largest agricultural state.

Immigration laws that persecute starving workers rather than the wealthy,
stable employers who violate labor codes have skewed market incentives in
Californian agriculture against investing in productive technology. And this
"deskilling" of the American workforce is spilling over into other low-wage
sectors.

As Schlosser notes, the real, constant-dollar value of the U.S. minimum wage
has declined by 37 percent since 1968.

Finally, Schlosser surveys the burgeoning America skin trade, as it has
moved into the cable and video mainstream. American pornography began as a
cluster of mom-and-pop entrepreneurs operating on the edge of organized
crime in the 1950s, then metastasized during the 1980s into a
multibillion-dollar cash cow for mainstream corporations. The United States
is now the world's leading producer of smut, and Schlosser is angry that
companies like AT&T Broadband and AOL Time Warner are laughing all the way
to the bank, beaming cheaply produced sex into our hotel rooms and living
rooms.

Schlosser is not concerned with the abstract morality of porn or with its
aesthetics. What irks him is the exploitative work conditions and the
hypocrisy of the profiteers and consumers.

The renting and selling of videos generates some $3.9 billion a year,
accounting for almost half of the legal sex market in the United States
today.

No less than 211 new hard-core videos are produced every week -- much of it
"in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, right beside the
Hollywood movie industry." The industry's "borderline legal status" render
it especially abusive for young, vulnerable women who are generally poorly
educated.

According to Schlosser, "few actresses last more than a year or two" before
they are passed over by an industry and a consumer public that demands a
constant flow of new "fresh-faced actresses in their late teens and early
twenties."

As is the case with revenues from the strawberry industry, very little of
the $8 billion that Americans spend each year on legal porn trickles down to
the people who actually do the hard, dirty work. "There is an oversupply of
women in Southern California hoping to enter the porn industry.

Wages have fallen, and some newcomers will work for $150 a scene." And as is
the case with strawberry pickers, few porn movie performers or sex workers
are unionized. "Although an eighteen-year-old woman cannot legally purchase
a beer in Southern California, she can be paid a few hundred dollars to
[have sex with] a half dozen men in a porn film without breaking any law."

As corporate power and fundamentalist extremism run amok across the globe, a
lucid, humane voice like Schlosser's gives hope and inspiration. He also
arms us with conscientiously well-documented facts (including a 67-page
appendix of sources and bibliography) that come alive in compelling human
portraits of the victims of bad government and corporate greed.

He has identified a state of emergency in America, and does not want big
business and bad government to go on as usual.