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.