What do marijuana, pornography and illegal immigrants have in common? They
are all black market commodities, Eric Schlosser says in his new book,
"Reefer Madness," and business in all of them is booming.

America's underground economy spans a vast array of enterprises - from
paying nannies off the books to running sweatshops and smuggling guns - and
much of its growth, Mr. Schlosser says, has occurred in the last 30 years.
One study cited in this book credits it with 9.4 percent of the gross
domestic product; another suggests that in 1997 Americans failed to pay
about $200 billion in federal taxes that were owed.

While many conservatives attribute the growth in the black market to high
income-tax rates and excessive government regulation, liberals tend to
blame declining wages, unemployment and the business deregulation of the
Reagan years. Mr. Schlosser suggests that "a growing sense of alienation,
anger at authority, and disrespect for the law" have also played important
roles in driving economic activity underground.

He says that "the underground is a good measure of the progress and the
health of nations," that "when much is wrong, much needs to be hidden,"
that black market activity recedes "in importance when our public morality
is consistent with our private one." In brief opening and closing chapters
he raises such intriguing questions about the relationship between the
underground and the mainstream, but in the remainder of the volume he fails
to develop such ideas.

"Reefer Madness" feels exactly like what it is: a collection of three
stand-alone essays, portions of which originally appeared in Atlantic
Monthly, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and U.S. News & World Report. The
subjects of these three essays - the growth of the domestic marijuana
business, the plight of illegal immigrants working the strawberry fields of
California and the development of the pornography business in the last half
century - are poorly situated within a larger narrative; connections among
them are only cursorily explored.

The section titled "An Empire of the Obscene" - which chronicles in tedious
detail the career of a little-known pornography entrepreneur named Reuben
Sturman, who was convicted of tax fraud in 1989 after a drawn-out battle
with federal agents - is a dry canned history of the American pornography
industry, from the days of Playboy's greatest success through the age of
seedy bookshops and movie theaters to the current era of amateur-run sex
Web sites. It displays none of reportorial verve that Mr. Schlosser
demonstrated in his last book, "Fast Food Nation," none of that volume's
instinct for the telling detail.

The people Mr. Schlosser focuses on - like Nina Hartley, who is described
as a radical feminist from "a long line of American iconoclasts," and
Philip Harvey, a former Exeter and Harvard student who is described as
having "the bearing of a patrician and the slightly rumpled, tweedy
appearance of an Ivy League professor" - are hardly representative figures
in the pornography business, and yet the essay feels like a tired retread
of familiar observations.

For the other two essays Mr. Schlosser has clearly done more legwork, and
he uses his keen eye to give the reader a palpable sense of his subjects'
experience: the painstaking and often nerve-racking work of being a
marijuana farmer, and the physically debilitating and poorly recompensed
job of being a strawberry picker, a job so unforgiving that it is done
mainly by illegal aliens unable to find other work.

Mr. Schlosser rails against the absurdities of a justice system that can
give a person more jail time for marijuana possession than for murder, and
he laments the unfairness of labor laws that rarely hold employers
responsible for hiring (and often grossly underpaying) illegal immigrants.

But while Mr. Schlosser is impassioned and articulate about these
inequities, he never pulls his thoughts together into a larger thesis about
underground economies and their relationship to mainstream society. His
book remains a slapdash if intermittently absorbing collection, a volume
published, the reader hopes, simply to mark time between "Fast Food Nation"
and another more substantial book.