KEEP OFF THE GRASS

The Author Of Fast Food Nation Takes On America's Shadow Economy -- Pot,
Porn And Migrant Labor

It's amazing that Eric Schlosser is still capable of being shocked. As the
author of Fast Food Nation, the best-selling indictment of the
burger-and-fries industry, he has peered into some pretty nasty grease
traps. But get him started on marijuana laws, and he's almost at a loss for
words. "Some of these people are facing 20 years in prison for selling a
glass water pipe with a pot leaf on it. I mean, that's just unbelievable.
When you think about the fact that the typical convicted murderer in the
U.S. does 10, it's...it's reefer madness."

Reefer Madness (Houghton Mifflin; 310 pages) is the title of Schlosser's
new book, and in it he widens his scope from a single industry to take on
the entirety of what he calls America's "underground economy"--that vast,
shadowy realm of financial activity that goes unrecorded because it's
either illegal or unsavory or both. Like the fast-food business, the
underground economy has ballooned over the past 30 years, to about $1
trillion, and Schlosser aims to find out why. He's hunting big conceptual
game here, nothing less than America's troubled, hypocritical soul. "If the
market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes," he writes, "then
the secret ones are just as important as the ones openly displayed."

Schlosser concentrates his search on three areas: pot, migrant labor and
pornography. (In case you're wondering whether combining porn and economics
makes economics interesting or porn boring, it's the former.) He follows
the money down some dark alleys: into peep shows and prisons, subterranean
high-tech hydroponic pot farms and camouflaged, garbage-strewn encampments
of illegal Mexican farmworkers. He introduces us to Reuben Sturman, a
humble Cleveland comic-book salesman who became the founding father of
America's $10 billion porn industry and who deserves a whole book of his
own. We meet Mark Young, a good-natured loser who got a life sentence --
without parole -- for his peripheral role in one marijuana deal. Schlosser
has a gift for spotting colossal numbers that hide in plain sight:
America's domestic marijuana harvest, he tells us, is worth upwards of $20
billion a year, making it the country's largest cash crop.

Schlosser isn't attacking the pot industry here; he's going after the
institutional hypocrisies that force it underground while leaving far more
damaging practices, like the abuse of migrant workers, to fester openly.
What ties Reefer Madness together is Schlosser's passionate belief that
America is deeply neurotic, a nation divided against itself into a sunny,
whitewashed mainstream and a lusty, angry, deeply denied subconscious. He
just might be the shrink America needs. His next book will take on the
prison system, and it will complete what amounts to a three-volume history
of the underbelly of late--20th century America. "In 1970 the prison
population was just dropping," Schlosser says. "Last week they announced it
was over 2 million. This is the land of the free, with the most prisoners
in history! It's unbelievable!" See? He's still shocked.