Reefer Madness; Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket./Very good. [10], 310 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Signed by author on the title page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Eric Matthew Schlosser (born August 17, 1959) is an American journalist and author known for investigative journalism, such as in his books Reefer Madness and Command and Control. Schlosser studied American History at Princeton University and earned a graduate degree in British Imperial History from Oxford. Schlosser started his career as a journalist with The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts. He quickly gained recognition for his investigative pieces, earning two awards within two years of joining the staff; he won the National Magazine Award for reporting for his two-part series "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law". He has also written Reefer Madness, a three part book that discusses the history and current trade of marijuana, the use of migrant workers in California strawberry fields, and the American pornography industry and its history. Derived from a Kirkus Review: Three disparate essays demonstrate how the off-the-books world thrives with pot, porn, and poor farmworkers. First, the author considers marijuana's history in America. Marijuana farming is a major cash crop. Schlosser recommends decriminalizing use while keeping it illegal to supply dope, but he doesn't fully explore how fostering legal demand for illegal supplies would work. Another significant cash crop, handpicked strawberries, keeps Mexican pickers and California growers in a symbiotic embrace, so long as the pickers stay migrant and undocumented. He then turns to the free market of pornography, which feeds nice profits to blue-chip corporations as well as dirty old men. In its present state, the industry was the brainchild of one Ruben Sturman, the Disney of Porn, whose lifelong battle with the Feds is engagingly reported. Schlosser's pieces remain disparate, though individually they make fine reading. Three kinds of muck, raked by an adroit reporter.