Reefer Madness
Eric Schlosser
310 pages including index
published in 2003

When I think of black markets, I associate them with World War II and occupied Europe; not with modern day America. Yet, as Eric Schlosser shows in Reefer Madness, they are alive and well. America's underground economy may be as big as ten percent of its Gross Domestic Product, though obviously any estimate of by definition hidden economic activities is bound to be imprecise. Nevertheless, it is clear that there's a huge hidden economy shadowing the official economy. In Reefer Madness traces three different parts of it: the marijuana trade, porn and illegal labour in Southern California. Schlosser's intention is to use these examples to illuminate the way in which the underground and official economies are linked and how these underground economies influence the country as a whole.

I don't think he succeeded completely in turning what are in essence three separate essays into a coherent argument. The three aspects of the underground economy he looks at are not embedded in much of a context, apart from a short foreword and a slightly longer afterword, while the crosslinks between the essays are also missing. In theory Schlosser could've provided a good overview of how illegal and semi-illegal industries interact with the socalled official economy, as he has an example of an activity vigerously combatted by government and industry alike (marijuana trade), one that's officially illegal but which is not just tolerated but to a certain extent encouraged (illegal migrant labour) and one which is now legal but barely condoned though financially enormously succesful (porn). Unfortunately however he remains stuck at a semi-anecdotal level, providing a lot data on each of these fields but without the analysis to match it. On their own the essays are quite good, but the book as a whole therefore doesn't quite gel.

In the first part, "Reefer Madness", the focus is on the war on drugs and how this means that non-violent, small time weed "dealers" in some states get much longer prison sentences than even murderers. Reading about how this war destroys more lives than the drug itself does is nothing for me, but Schlosser very deftly manages to weave the personal stories of people involved in the trade with the history of marijuana suppression and the politics that caused the war on some drugs.

The second part, "in the strawberry fields" shows how the economy of southern California, especially the agrarian sector, depends on supposedly illegal migrant labour from Mexico. Again Schlosser is good at telling both the story of the migrants themselves as well as the people who hire them, who depend so much on cheap, illegal migrant labour because that's the only way they themselves can get the work done cheaply enough to make a small profit or even survive, as they are often sub contractors to the real big farm businesses themselves. In a sense, the sole reason a labour intensive industry like strawberry growing can persist in California is because of illegal migrant labour, which is also why that labour needs to stay illegal. If it were legalised, it would become too expensive.

The final part, "an empire of the obscene", is the weakest part of the book. It is supposed to show the rise of porn from despised, thoroughly illegal enterprise to a proper entertainment industry bigger than Hollywood, but it turns out to mostly be the story of one of the porn pioneers, Reuben Sturman. It's an interesting, even fascinating story, but it fails the supposed purpose of the book.

Reefer Madness is therefore a bit of a disappointment, as the individual subjects were interesting enough, but didn't gel together for me. For those interested in the subject, I don't think this has got much new to offer.

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