Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
by Eric SchlosserHoughton Mifflin, 310 pp., $23
Reuben Sturman, for more than two decades, single-handedly dominated the production and distribution of pornography worldwide; a devoted tax evader, he was also a pioneer in the use of offshore dummy corporations and other accounting dodges later made famous by Enron and Arthur Andersen.
Mark Young, a part-time motorcycle mechanic, arranged a meeting between an Indianapolis marijuana grower and a prospective buyer; though he apparently never even saw the pot in question, he was caught in the middle when both buyer and seller turned state’s evidence and was sentenced to life in prison under federal mandatory minimum-sentencing guidelines.
Francisco is an 18-year-old Mixtec Indian, who works picking strawberries outside of San Diego. He works 70-hour weeks, sleeps on the ground, and last year netted $800, which he wired home to his family in Oaxaca.
What do these three men have in common? They’re each part of the underground economy — a black market that accounts for perhaps one-tenth (or more) of all the economic activity in the U.S. And they’re each a central character in Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, the follow-up to his wildly successful Fast Food Nation.
The book is actually three distinct essays — on marijuana prohibition, illegal labor in California’s strawberry fields, and the pornography industry — strung around a couple of premises. The first is that if you want to talk about the free market, you have to include the black market as part of it. And the second is that of all the distortions the market suffers, perhaps the worst is prohibition.
Even Adam Smith believed that the free market was defined by the interests of the consumers. When government makes a free-market activity illegal — smoking pot, buying porn, being an illegal alien — it creates a black market that’s untaxed, unregulated, and often dangerous. And if you want to see where the government is interfering with the workings of the market, look at the underground economy.
Marijuana may currently be the nation’s biggest cash crop. Yet the government spends $4 billion a year to enforce pot laws, and there are perhaps 50,000 people currently in prison for marijuana offenses. Does that make sense? An estimated 28% of the workers in Los Angeles County are being paid in cash, to evade government regulation. Is that a failure of the workforce, or is it a failure of labor and immigration policies that are out of touch with reality?
As he has in Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser will be answering these questions and others, no doubt, when he appears at BookPeople this week.
This article appears in May 16 • 2003.