REEFER MADNESS

'Reefer Madness': Notes From the Underground Economy

Sex! Drugs! We'll get to cheap labor in due course. "The current demand for
marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing," Eric Schlosser writes in
the introduction to "Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the
American Black Market," three essays that explore facets of America's
estimated $650 billion underground economy. "Here are two commodities that
Americans publicly abhor, privately adore and buy in astonishing amounts."
Schlosser, who delivered a stirring indictment of the business and culture
of American appetites in his first book, "Fast Food Nation," now throws
more muck rakes at our national mores.

The first is a chapter on the booming business of American marijuana
cultivation -- and a damning of the nation's mandatory minimum sentencing
laws. The last is a serious romp through the recent history of pornography
in the United States, a story that hangs on the tale of Reuben Sturman, the
self-styled Walt Disney of porn, who died in a prison hospital in 1997.
Stuck in the middle is an investigation of the terrible working conditions
endured by illegal immigrants in California in order to harvest
strawberries under the hot sun.

What connects these three reports? The free market. We are a nation of
consumers. (Perhaps our demand for strawberries is less revealing of our
souls or culture than our desire for filmed sexual intercourse or a
quarter-ounce of pot, but we do purchase a lot of them all the same.)
Schlosser's guiding principle for "Reefer Madness" seems to be that the
three essays can add up to a refutation of Adam Smith's theory of the
modern market economy. "The idea of the marketplace as the fullest
expression of democracy has a strong appeal," he writes in the conclusion,
"Out of the Underground." "But it assumes that economic motives are the
only human motives. If making money were all that mattered, there would be
no nurses, teachers, poets, farmers, soldiers, police officers or
professors of medieval literature." To which list I would add: no stoned
video-store clerks or onanistic builders of amateur porn sites on the Web,
either. And, of course, no advocates for fair wages for migrant farmworkers.

Schlosser's argument walks a difficult, winding path. Porn, he says, should
be made legal across the board, and pot as well. Both actions would throw
light upon the darkness of the black market and thus reduce America's gross
national pretense of virtue. At the same time, though, he writes, "All
those who now consider themselves devotees of the market should take a good
look at what is happening in California. Left to its own devices, the free
market always seeks a work force that is hungry, desperate and cheap."
Which is true enough. As Schlosser smartly notes: "The sort of black market
labor once narrowly confined to California agriculture is now widespread in
meatpacking, construction and garment manufacturing. The growth of the
underground has lowered wages, eliminated benefits and reduced job security
in these industries."

But we were talking about pot and porn. The addition of labor to the
discussion renders the argument muddy. And as a result, "Reefer Madness"
often seems more a congealed denunciation of American hypocrisy than a
volume that came together as the result of careful thought. Small-time drug
dealers in jail for life, migrant strawberry workers living on the edge of
slavery, porn stars reclaiming their sexual power and businessmen profiting
from that goal -- this all may be the underground, but you can't see it for
the fog.

You know what, though? Never mind. There are other measures of a
journalist's success than the cohesion of a collection of essays. Schlosser
is a fine and diligent reporter with a real gift for description, and his
three dispatches are fascinating pieces of work. In particular, Schlosser's
riveting profile of Mark Young, an Indiana man convicted on federal charges
for his part in arranging a large marijuana sale, does much to humanize his
examination of America's domestic marijuana business, a business, the
author reports, that is worth more than $4 billion a year.

"One of the great ironies of American drug policy is that antidrug laws
have tended to become most punitive long after the use of a drug has
peaked," Schlosser writes, adding: "Marijuana use among the young peaked in
1979. Strict federal laws were passed seven years later, when use had
already fallen by about 40 percent; and the explanation most young people
gave for quitting marijuana was the perceived health risk, not fear of
imprisonment." Young, who had introduced a buyer to a seller of marijuana,
received a life sentence, Schlosser reports, and was placed in the federal
penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan.

Schlosser's investigation of California's strawberry harvest, meanwhile, is
harrowing in its description of workers who labor six-month years for less
than $7,500 and have life expectancies under 50. It is also fiercely
eloquent in its conclusions. "If the current abuse of illegal immigrants is
allowed to continue," he writes, "the United States soon won't have to
import a foreign peasantry. We will have created our own."

His chapter on pornography, "An Empire of the Obscene," the longest in the
book, rockets along on the heels of its protagonist, Reuben Sturman, a wily
porn magnate and antigovernment agitator who could make a fine noir hero
for Hollywood. "You wanted to know how the industry started," Sturman tells
Schlosser when they meet in a medium-security prison in Kentucky a year
before Sturman's death. "Well, you're looking at the person who started it."

Here's what to do. Read these three pieces as if they were distinct
articles in the same magazine, one that can afford to have only a single,
hard-working reporter on staff. This is very good journalism, after all,
stacked like cordwood. And there is much to learn about the evils of this
world -- even if there's no need to tie them all together just yet. Black
markets, Schlosser writes, "will always be with us. But they will recede in
importance when our public morality is consistent with our private one."
See you then.

Sam Sifton is the editor of the Dining section of The Times.