Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market Books,discount prices 0618446702,

	Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (Edition 001) by Eric Schlosser
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Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 330 EAN 9780618446704 ISBN 0618446702 Manufacturer Mariner Books Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 352 Publication Date October 29, 2008 Publisher Mariner Books Availability Usually ships in 24 hours Product Description America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risqué video, or pay our kids' nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays — pot, porn, and illegal immigrants — Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns — and profits — from the underground. Schlosser blends big-picture analysis, intrepid reporting, and fascinating character studies to paint 'an enthralling yet appalling portrait of things too often ignored' (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow. As much as 10% of the American economy, and perhaps more, is comprised of illegal 'underground' enterprises, according to author and Atlantic Monthly correspondent Eric Schlosser. And while this segment is never discussed in the newspaper business pages, Schlosser tackles it with the same in-depth analysis and compulsive readability that made his Fast Food Nation a best seller. Reefer Madness spotlights marijuana, migrant labor, and pornography, three of the most thriving black market industries, and analyzes the often-tenuous place each holds in society as a whole. While each of the three could be the subject of its own book, Schlosser keeps his scope narrow by concentrating on the lives of the participants in the underground economy, especially Mark Young, an Indiana man given a life sentence for participating in a marijuana sale, and Ohio porn magnate Reuben Sturman. At just 21 pages, the treatment of migrant laborers in the California strawberry fields is dealt with more briefly but is just as compelling thanks to the first-person narrative of Schlosser’s investigation. In telling these stories, which are both personal and universal, Schlosser deftly explores the manner in which his subjects are treated (and punished) compared to others in more above-ground ventures. Along the way, he asks hard questions as to what that treatment says about America. Schlosser writing is passionately opinionated, but this is no mere opinion piece: his perspective is amply supported by extensive research and clearly reasoned interpretation of data. His direct and forceful writing style makes the impact greater still. After reading Reefer Madness, readers are likely to be shocked, appalled, and flat-out bewildered by what’s happening in the cracks and crevices of American business. --John Moe From the bestselling author of Fast Food Nation comes this captivating look at the underbelly of the American marketplace. In three sections, Schlosser, an Atlantic Monthly correspondent, examines the marijuana, migrant labor and pornography trades, offering compelling tales of crime and punishment as well as an illuminating glimpse at the inner workings of the underground economy. The book revolves around two figures: Mark Young of Indiana, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his relatively minor role in a marijuana deal; and Reuben Sturman, an enigmatic Ohio man who built and controlled a formidable pornography distribution empire before finally being convicted of tax evasion, after beating a string of obscenity charges. Through recounting Young's and Sturman's ordeals, and to a lesser extent, the lives of migrant strawberry pickers in California, Schlosser unravels an American society that has 'become alienated and at odds with itself.' Like Fast Food Nation, this is an eye-opening book, offering the same high level of reporting and research. But while Schlosser does put forth forceful and unique market-based arguments, he isn't the first to take aim at the nation's drug laws and the puritanical hypocrisy that seeks to jail pornographers while permitting indentured servitude in California's strawberry fields. Nevertheless, this is a solid-and timely-second effort from Schlosser. As world events force Americans to choose values worth fighting for, Schlosser reminds readers, 'the price of freedom is often what freedom brings.' Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Schlosser is the author of the best-selling Fast Food Nation (2001), which was a consciousness-raising examination of the fast-food industry. He now turns his reporting acumen to American underground economic activity, which, according to him, constitutes 9 to 10 percent of this country's economy--in other words, millions and millions of dollars that 'cannot be accounted for.' The black market in the U.S. 'is where economic activities remain off the books, where they are unrecorded, unreported, and in violation of the law.' The author focuses on three major black-market arenas: marijuana, the most widely used illegal drug in the U.S.; migrant workers in California, most of them illegal immigrants; and the pornography industry. Of course, woven into his account of this trio of black-market gold mines is also an examination of their effect on all of us, for the consequences are far reaching, from employing a child-care worker to downloading pornography off the Internet. His careful research and equally careful writing style contribute to a study that is certain to garner as much attention as his previous book. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved From Eric Schlosser, bestselling author of Fast Food Nation, this is an absolutely riveting account of the workings of America's underground economy. Taking three case studies, 'Reefer Madness', 'Strawberry Fields' and 'An Empire of the Obscene', Schlosser exposes the ludicrous legal, economic and moral contradictions that arise when government legislation on drug control, labour relations and obscenity is a piecemeal and opportunistic response to protecting the liberties, incomes and prejudices of affluent, conservative, white, Americans. Focusing by turn on the US's massive homegrown marijuana industry, the dependence of Californian fruit farmers on illegal immigrant labour, and the growth of the modern sex industry, Schlosser combines historical research with interview testimony in a swingeing critique of the causes and consequences of America's vast subterranean economy. Highlighting the fact that most of its growth has occurred in the past 30 years, he argues that this illegal economic activity is a crucial support for more mainstream markets. For example, he claims that the US dollar is the unofficial currency of the global underground economy and that three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside their country of origin, amounting to a gigantic interest-free loan to the US treasury. Schlosser's skilful combination of well-chosen facts and figures with moving and balanced insights into the lives of individuals caught up in the contemporary serfdom of migrant labour or within the bizarrely inconsistent federal system of sentencing for drug-related offences is guaranteed to stir his reader to react. Read this book and you will probably feel compelled to recite selected passages aloud to friends in a tone of outrage. Indeed, Schlosser specifically invites Americans to reconsider their dearly held beliefs on life, liberty and the pursuit of property. For readers outside the US it is a compelling insight into the shadowy depths of the richest nation in the world. (Kirkus UK) America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risqué video, or pay our kids' nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays — pot, porn, and illegal immigrants — Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns — and profits — from the underground. Schlosser blends big-picture analysis, intrepid reporting, and fascinating character studies to paint 'an enthralling yet appalling portrait of things too often ignored' (Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow. Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. In 1998 Schlosser wrote an investigative piece on the fast food industry for Rolling Stone. What began as a two-part article for the magazine turned into a groundbreaking book: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001). The book helped to change the way that Americans think about what they eat. Fast Food Nation was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, as well as on bestseller lists in Canada, Great Britain, and Japan. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. Schlosser's second book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (2003), explored the nation's growing underground economy. It also became a New York Times bestseller. In 2003, Schlosser's first play, Americans, was produced at the Arcola Theatre in London. Hoping to counter the enormous amount of fast food marketing aimed at children, Schlosser decided to write a book that would help young people understand where their food comes from, how it's made, how it affects society, and how it can harm their health. Co-written with Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food became a New York Times bestseller in the spring of 2006. Later that year, Fox Searchlight Pictures released a major motion picture based on Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater and co-written with Schlosser. 'It's a mirror and a portrait,' the New York Times said of the film, 'as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.' Schlosser is currently at work on a book about America's prison system. THE UNDERGROUND Adam Smith believed in a God that was kind and wise and all-powerful. The great theorist of the free market believed in Providence. 'The happiness of mankind,' Smith wrote, 'seems to have been the original purpose intended by the Author of nature.' The workings of the Lord could be found not in the pages of a holy book, nor in miracles, but in the daily, mundane buying-and-selling of the marketplace. Each purchase might be driven by an individual desire, but behind them all lay 'the invisible hand' of the Divine. This invisible hand set prices and wages. It determined supply and demand. It represented the sum of all human wishes. Without relying on any conscious intervention by man, the free market improved agriculture and industry, created surplus wealth, and made sure that the things being produced were the things people wanted to buy. Human beings lacked the wisdom, Smith felt, to improve society deliberately or to achieve Progress through some elaborate plan. But if every man pursued his own self-interest and obeyed only his 'passions,' the invisible hand would guarantee that everybody else benefited, too. Published in 1776, The Wealth of Nations later had a profound effect upon the nation born that year. The idea that 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' were unalienable rights, endowed by a Creator, fit perfectly with the economic theories of Adam Smith. 'Life, liberty and estate' was the well-known phrase that Thomas Jefferson amended slightly for the Declaration of Independence. The United States was the first country to discard feudal and aristocratic traditions and replace them with a republican devotion to marketplace ideals. More than two centuries later, America's leading companies—General Motors, General Electric, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Boeing, et al.—have annual revenues larger than those of many sovereign states. No currency is more powerful than the U.S. dollar, and the closing prices on Wall Street guide the financial markets of Tokyo, London, Paris, and Frankfurt. The unsurpassed wealth of the United States has enabled it to build a military without rival. And yet there is more to the U.S. economy, much more, than meets the eye. In addition to America's famous corporations and brands, the invisible hand has also produced a largely invisible economy, secretive and well hidden, with its own labor demand, price structure, and set of commodities. 'Black,' 'shadow,' 'irregular,' 'informal,' 'illegal,' 'subterranean,' 'underground'—a variety of adjectives have been used to describe this other economy. Although defined in numerous ways, at its simplest the American underground is where economic activities remain off the books, where they are unrecorded, unreported, and in violation of the law. These activities range from the commonplace (an electrician demanding payment in cash and failing to declare the payment as income) to the criminal (a gang member selling methamphetamine). They include moonlighting, check kiting, and fencing stolen goods; street vending and tax evading; employing day laborers and child laborers; running sweatshops and chop shops; smuggling cigarettes, guns, and illegal immigrants; selling fake Rolexes, pirating CDs. Economists disagree about the actual size of the underground economy and how to measure it. Some studies look at the discrepancy between the amount of personal income declared on tax returns and the amount of money that is actually spent. Other studies examine changes in currency supply, the velocity of money, levels of electricity usage. Each of these methodologies has its merits. All have produced conclusions that are debatable. There is general agreement, however, on two points: America's underground economy is vast—and most of its growth occurred in the past thirty years. Any estimate of illegal economic activity is bound to lack precision, since it attempts to quantify things that people have carefully tried to hide. Nevertheless, the best estimates convey a sense of scale and proportion. In 1997 the Austrian economist Friedrich Schneider calculated the rise of America's 'shadow economy' by tracing changes in the demand for currency. According to Schneider, in 1970 the size of the underground was between 2.6 and 4.6 percent of America's gross domestic product (GDP). By 1994 it had reached 9.4 percent of the GDP—about $650 billion. Using a different methodology in 1998, Charles Rossotti, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, told Congress that during the previous year Americans had failed to pay about $200 billion of federal taxes that were owed, an amount larger than the government's annual spending on Medicare. Assuming an average federal tax rate of 14 percent, that means Americans somehow neglected to report almost $1.5 trillion in personal income. The IRS estimate did not include undeclared earnings from criminal activity. Two other periods in modern American history were marked by thriving underground economies. From 1920 to 1933, the prohibition of alcohol led to widespread trafficking and the rise of organized crime. At the height of Prohibition, Americans spent about $5 billion a year on alcohol (roughly $54 billion in today's dollars). This black market constituted about 5 percent of the U.S. gross national product at the time. When Prohibition ended, some bootleggers became well-respected businessmen. During the Second World War, the imposition of rationing and price controls created even larger black markets. A system designed to distribute scarce commodities fairly had some unanticipated effects: a burgeoning trade in ration books and a hidden cash economy. Perhaps 5 percent of the nation's gasoline and 20 percent of its meat were soon bought and sold illegally. According to one estimate, by the end of the war Americans were failing to report as much as 15 percent of their personal income. The underground subsided amid the prosperity of the Eisenhower era. Wages increased, tax evasion decreased, and no illegal commodity generated the sort of profits once supplied by bootleg alcohol. And then at some point in the mid- to late 1960s the underground economy began to grow. Conservative economists point to high income tax rates and excessive government regulation as the fundamental causes. Liberals contend that declining wages, unemployment, union busting, and the business deregulation of the Reagan years were much more responsible for shifting economic activity underground. The explanations offered by the left and the right are not mutually exclusive. A stagnant economy prompted Americans of every background to work off the books. The hippie counterculture of the 1960s and the anti-tax movement of the late 1970s shared common ground in their dislike of government, encouraging defiance of the IRS. A new drug culture provided new opportunities for organized crime. The expansion of America's underground economy over the last thirty years stemmed not only from economic hardship and a desire for illegal profits, but also from a growing sense of alienation, anger at authority, and disrespect for the law. During roughly the same period similar phenomena occurred throughout the western industrialized world. The underground economy of the European Union may now be larger than that of the United States. Years of high unemployment, high tax rates, illegal immigration, and widespread disillusion with government have created enormous undergrounds. According to Friedrich Schneider's estimates, these shadow economies range in size from an estimated 12.5 percent of GDP in Great Britain to an estimated 27 percent of GDP in Italy. Countries that were once part of the Soviet Union have even larger black markets. In Estonia the underground is now responsible for an estimated 39 percent of GDP; in Russia, for an estimated 45 percent; in Ukraine, for an estimated 51 percent. The underground is sometimes the most vibrant sector of these transition economies, the place where free enterprise has finally bloomed. But in many ways the growth of black markets in the developed world represents a step backward. An expanding underground economy is often associated with increased corruption and a greater disparity in wealth. For years government officials and members of the Communist Party secretly profited from the Soviet Union's 'second economy,' offering services and commodities unavailable through the mainstream. The largest undergrounds are now found in the developing world, where governments are corrupt and laws are routinely ignored. In Bolivia the underground economy is responsible for an estimated 65 percent of GDP. In Nigeria it accounts for perhaps 76 percent. The U.S. dollar now serves as the unofficial currency of this new global underground. During the late 1960s and early 1970s American economists began to notice that the amount of currency in circulation had grown much larger than the amount ordinary citizens were likely to use in their everyday transactions. The discovery led to the first inklings that an underground economy was emerging in the United States. While business publications heralded the advent of a cashless, credit-based economy, the use of banknotes quietly soared. The $100 bill soon became the underground favorite, not just in the United States, but overseas as well, thanks to its high face value and the relative stability of the dollar. During the late 1970s the outflow of currency from the Uni... The American black market accounts for 10 percent of the U.S. economy, according to this crusading journalist. 'When much is wrong,' he writes, 'much needs to be hidden.' Examining this dark world for injustices, Schlosser reports that punishment is more severe in some states for selling marijuana than for killing with a gun. Anti-porn laws are equally nonsensical, and illegal immigrants work in conditions so wretched as to throw a shadow on the land of the free. Three magazine articles are roped together here, with a brief essay to start and another to finish. While this book lacks the artful unity of the author's bestselling FAST FOOD NATION, Schlosser's precise outrage is as compelling off as on the page. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Customers who bought this item also bought Fast Food Nation The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things Chew On This: Everything You Don't Want to Know About Fast Food The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used and Abused Drugs from Alcohol to Ecstasy, Third Edition Customer Reviews for: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (Edition 001) Rating - This book changed my life. I read this book as I am interested in the topic of how the war on drugs has hurt our country more than helped it, and was looking for more information. However, it was the section on immigration that changed my life. Until I read this book I used to be pretty liberal Florida Democrat and a bit of an environmentalist. The only two people I have voted for president that won were jimmy Carter and Al Gore. After I read in this book the speech Sen Kennedy made in 1965 after changing our conservative immigration laws to an open door policy favoring non traditional immigrants that has flooded our country with millions of immigrants ... Read More Rating - Where's the follow through? Schlosser's examination of the underground economies of marijuana, illegal immigrants, and porn does a lot to give you background information and then takes it nowhere. Every essay feels like a detailed exposition with no further material. Some of you intellectual types like to say this encourages you to think for yourself - I say it's lazy writing. Nothing new of real interest is revealed - pot is still popular and unfairly punished, California's agriculture thrives on exploited immigrant labor, and porn makes a ton of money and is more mainstream than ever before. And that's it - that's what this book covers. I ... Read More Rating - Don't Casually Mention This Book By Name Suffice to say it's a wonderful read, eye opening and well thought out. Unfortunately, it has a title that will automatically dissuade the people who need to read it from doing so--along with the fact that it is a book. For God's sake, don't casually recommend it by name to anyone who's not very bright; they'll start rumors about you if you do. Highly recommended. Michael see more reviews See all books by author Eric Schlosser

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