GOING OVERBOARD ON THE UNDERGROUND

Schlosser's Portrait Lacks Some Focus

When Eric Schlosser published "Fast Food Nation," it made waves across the
United States and beyond. For good reason. The author, combining sound
documentary research with the kind of dogged footwork that distinguishes
the best investigative journalism, dissected what has become the
quintessential symbol of both American pop culture and commercial success:
the hamburger, and what gets dished up along with it. All the more
effective because of its wry, understated tone, "Fast Food Nation" deserved
its success. By raising awareness of the social, economic, and
environmental damage the fast-food business has wrought, Schlosser managed
to do more than put a portion of the country off its favorite food. He
raised profound questions about core industrial and social values, both
their desirability and their sustainability. And he had solidly based
opinions about what is necessary to reverse the damage. In accomplishing
these things, Schlosser inevitably whetted the appetite of readers for his
next work.

Unfortunately he probably also whetted the appetite of his publisher to
cash in fast on the success of "Fast Food Nation." The result is "Reefer
Madness," a rather superficial and disjointed whistle-stop tour of the
underworld of sex, drugs, and illegal alien labor.

Make no mistake. All three topics are well worth investigation. And the
author has amply proven himself to have the brains, commitment, and skill
to produce a fine work on any of them. The problem is that he didn't.

This failing is perhaps best captured by the fact that, subtitle
notwithstanding, the book is not about sex, drugs, and cheap labor: It is
really about one man's pornography empire, US-grown marijuana, and Mexican
workers in the California strawberry fields. The latter set of topics is
not necessarily a reliable guide to the former. While there is some
reference to the role of pornography in the broader American sex industry,
links are suggested only in passing. By focusing on marijuana, the author
ignores, among many other things, the burgeoning business of do-it-yourself
synthetic drugs; and by focus ing on home-grown, he ignores the 50 percent
of American consumption accounted for by imports. Although the California
strawberry fields are fascinating in themselves - the lessons cry out for
generalization throughout the American labor market - there are tantalizing
hints of this but no follow-through.

Nor is it ever clear why these three were singled out of a wide range of
possible topics from the American underground, or what organic link
supposedly exists among them. In what may be intended to make those
interconnections, the book starts with vague and discursive comments about
the American underground economy, along with some numbers supposedly
showing that it is growing by leaps and bounds.

In reality, no one has a clue how big (or small) the underground economy
(or any of its components) is either in absolute terms or relative to the
legal gross domestic product. In fact it is not even clear how it ought to
be defined. When the author tries to offer some hint about its breadth, he
cites as components everything from check kiting to chop shops to pirating
CDs. Some of the things on his list do increase total economic activity
while remaining unreported; others either have no net impact or may well
decrease it. The big difference between predatory crimes that simply
redistribute wealth, and underground market transactions that increase
total income, gets lost. Nor, contrary to what the author seems to believe,
is there any one-for-one relationship between the underground economy and
tax evasion.

Indeed, the author's use of this kind of data is strikingly at odds with
his political purpose. If he had examined the ideological predilections of
most of the people churning out numbers purporting to show a dramatically
growing underground economy, he would have quickly realized that their main
objective is to justify slashing income taxes on behalf of the rich and
rolling back social services and working-place regulations on behalf of the
poor. Yet these are exactly the kinds of government services that the
author himself identifies as essential to deal with problems like the
appalling conditions of workers in areas like the fast-food and
agricultural labor sectors.

At the same time, there is clear merit in some of the material, though
unevenly so. The chapter on marijuana tends to recycle standard stories
from standard sources, and says little that is new or particularly
insightful. The section on pornography is better: It touches on an aspect
of the sex trade about which little was previously known. But it is flawed
by the author's efforts to conjure up the porn business's equivalent of a
Ray Kroc, someone who can be single-handedly credited with revolutionizing
the business. The most interesting section deals with illegal labor in
California. Here the author captures effectively the short-sighted greed
and its human consequences, the hardship and the heartache, that he so well
diagnosed in "Fast Food Nation." This section succeeds probably because it
represents an extension of one of the major sub-themes of the previous
book. But it, too, is ultimately disappointing - the topic cries out for a
much broader and more thorough investigation.

According to the jacket blurb, Schlosser is currently at work on another
book, this one dealing with the American prison system. That is certainly a
topic worthy of close and critical examination. Hopefully the quality of
his research and writing about prisons will be appropriate to the topic,
particularly since there have been excellent recent exposes about
prisons-for-profit and the rise of a prison-industrial complex in America.

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

Houghton Mifflin, 310 pp., illustrated, $23