Reefer Madness
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 @ 03:57
And Other Tales from the American Underground
by Eric Schlosser (2003)
Three essays on different aspects of American underground — marijuana trade (Reefer Madness), migrant labourers (In the Strawberry Fields) and porn industry (An Empire of the Obscene) — offering general, if rather superficial and unsatisfying, view of ‘illicit’ industry.
In the first essay (Reefer Madness), Schlosser addresses the question: how does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun? Giving general historical data of marijuana in its relevance in the United States, from the first American law concerning marijuana in 1619 (which required every household to grow it), the marijuana (and other illicit drugs) association with oft-resented foreign migrants (xenophobia), parents’ groups, to present day. Schlosser drew general comparison to European countires (Netherlands included, obviously), but the arguments are familiar.
In In the Strawberry Fields, those who’ve read Fast Food Nation would find echoes of workers’ (and migrants’) exploitations, but being the briefest of the three, while we’ll find the same workers’ level observation and scathing remarks, but the scant pages makes the research unsatisfactory.
The thickest of the three, An Empire of the Obscene, gives (again, superficial) history of porn industry, with particular attention paid to the underlying economics and one of its pioneers, Reuben Sturman. Unfortunately, in the light of current situation where pornography is no longer considered underground activity, the pages dedicated to this section seems ill-deserved, almost as if the thicker coverage was more for the titillating nature of the subject.
In the end, the book seems like a rushed, unsatisfactory hodge-podge of three subjects, especially considering he has the power to make his views heard in common mainstream audience after the popularity of Fast Food Nation. While just as accessible, it’s a tremendous shame that he didn’t treat his later book with the same care he did to his better known one.
