SELLING OREGANO

Eric Schlosser, The 'Fast Food Nation' Scribe, Serves Up Leftovers With
'Reefer Madness'

It's an hour before Eric Schlosser is scheduled to speak to the crowd at
Bookpeople in Austin, but already the folding chairs are filling with the
fans and fanatics. In the front row, a smartly arrayed woman in her 30s sits
primly; behind her, 20-somethings munch on snacks and flip through
magazines.

Everyone has a crisp copy of Reefer Madness - the hotly anticipated
follow-up to the best-selling Fast Food Nation. Anxious Bookpeople employees
flutter about with clipboards; Schlosser is twenty minutes late. A steady
stream of people ascend the stairs to the off-limits third floor where his
entourage is rumored to be. After some time, this reporter is summoned - led
through a side passage up to the room where Schlosser sits surrounded by
copies of his books.

Reefer Madness begins with a short explanation of "The Underground": the
secret black market that drives an unknowable portion of our economy. The
Gross National Product, the unemployment rate, the inflation rate: "What do
those statistics really mean," posits Schlosser, "if 20 percent, 10 percent,
or even 5 percent of a nation's economy somehow cannot be accounted for?"
His is a tough question that shakes the very foundations of our beliefs, and
Schlosser attempts to answer it through an examination of the industries
that "don't advertise": the marijuana trade, migrant farm workers involved
in the growing of strawberries, and the porn industry. The eponymously named
first section centers on the story of Mark Young, an Indiana ho-bunk who was
given life without parole for his negligible role in a drug deal - a tale
that is interspliced with a brief history of marijuana laws, the War on
Drugs in the '80s, and the sentencing reforms that resulted in today's
mandatory minimums. The second section, "In the Strawberry Fields," is a
history of the strawberry industry plucked straight off the vine: detailing
the evolution of the modern sharecropping debt peonage system that allows
the companies to maintain control over their product while avoiding much of
the legal and moral responsibility for their workers. The last section, "An
Empire of the Obscene," chronicles the rise and fall of Rueben Sturman, the
little-known king of porn distribution and production, with digressions
detailing the history of anti-obscenity laws; the desperate quest of a porn
star for "credits" (in adult films); the Adam and Eve mail order company;
and Roman sexual practices. If you're wondering how this all ties back into
the underground economy, you're not alone. Schlosser tried unsuccessfully in
the mid-'90s to find a publisher for Reefer Madness, but it was only after
the success of Fast Food Nation that he had the power to "leverage getting
this thing into print."

True to the tradition of his first book, Reefer Madness is a solid piece of
reporting: driven by first-person interviews, and buoyed by extensive
statistics - all conveyed with Schlosser's carefully measured narrative. In
person, Schlosser is as soft-spoken as his reputation would have you
believe, proffering his phone number for follow-up questions, and
considerately pausing when the tape on the recorder runs out. In the crowded
Bookpeople office, flanked by a photographer, a store employee, his handler,
and myriad ringing phones, faxes, and modems, Schlosser polishes off a snack
before turning his attention to the large stack of books before him. He
methodically signs the books as he talks, making eye contact with the
windows, and punctuating his answers with peppery asides to the room as he
scrawls his signature: "Oohh ... shit! I was in the mode ... 'For Vicky'...
OK, I'm with you, I'm here." Mentioning Fast Food Nation frequently,
Schlosser quotes facts from his latest book with photographic attention to
detail - sometimes even using similar adjective sequences. Unnervingly, he
makes few references to materials not covered within his book - resulting in
an unusual conversation that parrots his text.

Approaching the underground economy, Schlosser was armed with three
investigative pieces he wrote in the mid-'90s, and when it came time to link
them, he chose a cautious approach: "What I really didn't want to do was
change them so that they referred to one another in the text, because I
really felt like that would be untrue to them as individual pieces of
writing." Instead, he continues, "I tried to, tried in some subtle ways, to
order them and write them, so that by the end of this book there is almost
an argument that has unfolded."

True to his word, Reefer Madness is faithful to the "individual pieces of
writing," leaving Schlosser's argument almost unfolded. A close reading
reveals that he made very few changes to the initial articles, which made no
attempt to tackle the larger subject of the shadow economy. With the
exception of a few additional paragraphs and updated factoids, "In the
Strawberry Fields" is virtually indistinguishable from the 1995

article of the same name, printed in Atlantic Monthly. The second section,
"Reefer Madness," is essentially a compilation of two articles written for
the same magazine in '94, with additional and updated materials. "Empire of
the Obscene," the most heavily revised piece, is based off a '97 U.S. News &
World Reports article on Rueben Sturman. While there is nothing inherently
wrong with a seasoned reporter culling together previous articles into a
book, a cautious reader might catch a whiff of deception when that culling
is marketed as a "groundbreaking new book," investigating "another
overlooked but powerful force - the black market economy - and its affect
(sic) on our everyday lives." Schlosser doesn't pretend that his articles
were written with the idea of tackling the underground economy, and he is
adamant in the defense of his book: "It's not just a collection of magazine
articles. Because there are other articles that I have written that I'm
really proud of, and I care about, and are totally irrelevant to the theme
of this, and I really spent time reworking this, so the book ideally would
read from the first page to the last."

Despite his "reworking," the three sections of Reefer Madness reflect their
vintage, with few references to events of the past five years. Readers
familiar with the subjects will be disconcerted by references to out-dated
events - for example, a section on the '96 Arizona referendum on medical
marijuana, without a mention of the heated legislative battles in '97 and
'98, in which the legislature tried unsuccessfully to castrate the popular
voter referendum. When asked about the discrepancy, Schlosser seemed
surprised: "What did I miss?" Only the past five years.

Chronological discrepancies aside, Reefer Madness is most disappointing for
what it failed to address. For a book purportedly about the underground
economy, the omission of any post-9-11 analysis is striking - especially in
the migrant worker and pot pieces, where the impact of strengthened border
security is felt the strongest. When asked about his re-writing process,
Schlosser responds with this contradiction: "Sadly, you know, I think that I
didn't have to change these very much, especially with the marijuana and
migrant worker pieces, things have actually gotten significantly worse." The
porn industry underwent a "fundamental restructuring" after the explosion of
VCR and DVD technology, writes Schlosser, but "Empire of the Obscene" barely
mentions the Internet -let alone its impact on the pornography industry. Via
e-mail, Schlosser dismisses porn on the Internet as "overhyped," although he
concedes that by using Sturman as his narrative frame, he gave "the article
somewhat of a historical bias." (Sturman's porn empire crumbled in '92, and
he died in '97 - well before the advent of totallyteensluts.com.)

"I tried to write them so they're not history pieces," Schlosser said.
"There are some collections that are evocative of the date that they were
written, but for me, I wanted these to read as though they were written
yesterday." But given his mild revisions, Reefer Madness remains a solid
collection of three tangentially related articles - a well-written
indictment of 1997's status quo. For the uniniated, Reefer Madness serves as
a primer: laying out the history of our hypocrisy when it comes to sex,
drugs, and cheap labor. These are issues that must be discussed, and deserve
a solid place in the public discourse. But by putting out a book whose
research was freshest five years ago, and whose overriding theme is scarcely
developed, and then marketing it as a polemic on the "proper role of the
state and the limits of the free market," Schlosser plays us for fools. Fast
Food Nation taught us to examine critically what we consume: to peek under
the "New and Improved!" wrapper, and to decide for ourselves what we are
swallowing. In the case of Reefer Madness, it's just the same old bun and
patty.