Sex, drugs and cheap vegetables

In his new book, "Reefer Madness," Eric Schlosser rips into the American hypocrisy that drives pleasures of the flesh underground -- and turns a blind eye to exploited labor.

By Gary Kamiya

May 15, 2003 | America is a monumentally two-faced country. We love to smoke reefer, but our laws treat marijuana as if it's the same as heroin, and we sometimes hand dope dealers longer sentences than murderers. We love to ogle pictures of people having sex, but our national line is still that we're shocked, shocked by the unspeakable vileness of pornography. And to save $50 a year off our grocery bills, we close our eyes to the fact that our choicest fruits and vegetables are picked by illegal immigrants who are among the poorest workers in the country.

Hypocrisy is one of the indictments Eric Schlosser levels against America in "Reefer Madness," his smart, levelheaded look at the unpleasant truths that emerge when you turn over the rock of mainstream American business and check out what's underneath. The other is that our worship of the almighty free market leads us to ignore injustice -- because, as he points out in his discussion of illegal laborers, "giving unchecked freedom to one group usually means denying it to another." It's hard to argue with these conclusions. But Schlosser's analysis takes a back seat to the vivid portrait he paints of three funny-money zones where punitive moralism, venality and Puritanism grow as luxuriantly as 10-foot-high Humboldt County sinsemilla. Although Schlosser is a meticulous reporter who rakes the muck with the best of them -- his bestselling "Fast Food Nation" emptied out the grease trap of the fast-food industry -- "Reefer Madness" is more of a guided cultural tour, by turns infuriating, depressing and weirdly entertaining, than a polemic. "If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed," he writes. "Like the yin and yang, the mainstream and the underground are ultimately two sides of the same thing. To know a country you just see it whole."

It isn't a pretty picture.

The title of Schlosser's book is somewhat misleading -- but in a way that proves his point about American hypocrisy. The book is ostensibly about black markets, so why is pornography one of his subjects? After all, peddling graphic images of people having sex is a more or less legit business now, an $8 billion to $10 billion industry in which stolid, respectable, often Republican-run companies rake in a lot of swag. The three groups Schlosser looks at -- marijuana dealers, growers who hire illegal immigrants to pick their crops, and porno-film magnates -- actually have very little in common other than that they all probably avoid bringing up the details of their business practices at their kids' school events. But porn has only emerged from the underground recently -- and Schlosser's point is that the unreflecting ease with which we have gone from prosecuting it and persecuting those who distribute it to consuming it en masse reveals how changeable our moral standards can be, and how wide the gap between our public pieties and private pleasures. It also shows how the almighty free market, worshipped by conservatives, opens a Pandora's Box of thoughts and desires that many of those same conservatives claim to abhor. (Although, as the case of Bill "hit me again" Bennett proves, sin is hard to eradicate from even the most spotless souls.)

Schlosser says that "the proper role of the state and the proper limits on the free market are central themes of this book." A classic liberal, he's for government control when economic justice is involved, and for individual freedom on most issues involving private moral choices; he thinks our laws should reflect a public morality that's consistent with our private one. The free market should be reined in when it perpetrates economic injustice, but marijuana and porn should be allowed to march under the banner of Adam Smith: he calls for decriminalizing marijuana for personal use and getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, and he seems open to legalizing porn altogether, like Denmark. (Schlosser notes that after porn was legalized there it briefly flooded the market, then dwindled to a trickle. But since porn is for all intents and purposes legal, absurdly ubiquitous and largely free here already, it's unclear what effect formally legalizing it would have.) But on economic crimes, like the use of illegal labor and the slick accounting tricks, overseas incorporations and other underground-economy type scams that, as Schlosser points out, mainstream companies have increasingly adopted, he believes in government intervention -- and strict sanctions. "Economic crime should be punished much more severely than behavior that is considered merely unconventional or distasteful," he writes.

Of the three classic American sins Schlosser explores -- sex, drugs and the desire for cheap vegetables (had he done a chapter on file-sharing, he could have completed the unholy trinity carved into a million high school desks) -- the best and most hard-hitting is the one on the war on marijuana. The American political establishment seems utterly impervious to reason on this issue: We continue to lock people up, invade their privacy and seize their property for possessing a drug that practically everybody has tried and most Western nations have decriminalized or legalized. Democrats refuse to touch it for fear of being accused of being "soft on drugs"; indeed, some of the bravest statements on marijuana have been made by conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. But the ascension of Bush and Ashcroft has not helped: The sanctimony, ignorance, bad science, rage at the "cultural left," and political cowardice that has kept America benighted seems only to be getting worse.

Still, one has to believe that sooner or later the gap between America and the rest of the developed world will become so embarrassing that our policies will change. When they do, clear-thinking, quietly passionate analyses like Schlosser's will deserve much of the credit.

Schlosser starts by pointing out that the so-called war on drugs -- an intentionally misleading and hysteria-inducing phrase -- is mostly a war on marijuana. "Marijuana is and has long been the most widely used illegal drug in the United States," he notes. "It is used more frequently than all other illegal drugs combined. Approximately one-third of the American population over the age of 12 have smoked marijuana at least once. About 20 million Americans smoke it every year. More than two million smoke it every day ... The value of America's annual marijuana crop is staggering: plausible estimates start at $4 billion and range up to $25 billion. In 2001 the value of the nation's largest legal cash crop, corn, was roughly $19 billion."

Marijuana, in short, has become almost as American as apple pie. But that doesn't mean that the powers that be are prepared to wink at smoking a joint -- at least not outside of a few areas. The statistics Schlosser amasses are staggering and shameful -- even more so considering how many middle-class white people smoke the odd joint at home with impunity, while an army of poor people and minorities are being warehoused behind bars for doing exactly the same thing. "There are more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in American history," Schlosser writes, including 20,000 inmates in federal prison and perhaps 25,000 to 30,000 more in state prisons and local jails. An incredible 724,000 people were arrested in this country in 2001 for marijuana offenses, of which 90 percent were for simple possession.

Schlosser holds no brief for marijuana or marijuana use, and he wisely argues that it should be kept away from young people. But he refuses to accept the thin, propagandistic arguments, based on dubious science, that hard-liners use to support America's draconian marijuana laws. The notion that it is a "gateway" drug leading to heroin or cocaine use is bogus, a classic case of confusing correlation with causation. And marijuana is considerably less dangerous to one's health than alcohol. Schlosser notes that "not a single death has ever been credibly attributed directly to smoking or consuming marijuana in the 5,000 years of the drug's recorded use."

Schlosser focuses on the case of an Indiana man named Mark Young, who received a life sentence without possibility of parole for brokering the sale of 700 pounds of marijuana grown on a nearby farm. (One of the more surprising tidbits in "Reefer Madness" is that most domestic marijuana is grown not on the West Coast but in heartland states like Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. It's not surprising: He notes that a bushel of corn sells for $2, a bushel of marijuana -- which admittedly requires several hundred times more labor to produce -- for $70,000.) By contrast, the average length of incarceration for an American convicted of murder is 11 years and four months. "How does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?" Schlosser asks. The answer is not flattering to a society that likes to think of itself as enlightened.

Next Page: For refusing to betray an old, penniless friend, he got life

• View blog reactions