Sex, drugs and cheap vegetables

After the harshness of the penalties themselves, perhaps the greatest injustice of the marijuana war is how unevenly they are dispensed. Class and race play a role, as do harsh sentencing laws, as does blind luck. Schlosser relates a few of the many cases in which the children of politicians got a slap on the wrist for offenses that could have earned less connected individuals 20 years. Mark Young got life (his sentence was later reduced on appeal and he is now out of prison) because of a random confluence of events. He had been convicted of two previous felonies, one more than 17 years old. His first felony was for trying to obtain diet pills with a fake prescription; his second was for possession of "a few amphetamines and Quaaludes." These heinous offenses made him a three-strike offender and a "career drug offender" -- liable to be sentenced, at the U.S. attorney's discretion, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Schlosser follows in the footsteps of Wendy Kaminer and other writers in savaging harsh mandatory minimum and "three strikes" laws, which he argues have degraded the judicial system by putting unprecedented power in the hands of prosecutors, taking sentencing discretion away from judges and encouraging defendants to turn informer. One of the reasons that Young got life was that he refused to betray a fishing buddy who played a minor role in getting the deal together. "This guy has nothing ... This guy couldn't buy half an ounce of marijuana, okay?" Young said in a jailhouse interview with Schlosser, explaining why he didn't turn him in. Asked if he would turn him in if he had another chance, Young said, "No, I wouldn't do it any other way." In the brave new world of mandatory minimums and hysterical demonization of "drugs," Young's moral rectitude, instead of earning him a favorable evaluation and a lenient sentencing, assured that he was sentenced to life.

Young's story is chilling, but no more so than the following statistic: "The number of drug offenders imprisoned in America today -- more than 330,000 -- is much larger than the number of people imprisoned for all crimes in 1970." It is impossible to finish Schlosser's account of the failed and ruinous war on marijuana without thinking that with regard to its attitude toward drugs, American society desperately needs an intervention.

Schlosser's exploration of the burgeoning use of illegal immigrants is important in a completely different way -- because it is so underreported, and because no one cares anymore. The "Harvest of Shame" that Edward R. Murrow exposed on the day after Thanksgiving so many years ago has never gone away -- but our awareness, and our shame, have long disappeared. "The rise in the number of migrant workers in California, along with the growth in the proportion who are illegal immigrants, reflects a national trend that has passed largely unnoticed," writes Schlosser. In the days of Cesar Chavez, there were perhaps 200,000 migrant farmworkers; today, their numbers swollen by the gross disparity between what a worker can earn in Mexico and what one can earn in California, there may be a million. (Membership in the UFW, meanwhile, has plummeted.) And they are being paid far less than they were before: "The hourly wages of some California farmworkers, adjusted for inflation, have dropped more than 50 percent since 1980. Migrants are among the poorest workers in the U.S. The average migrant is a 29-year-old male, born in Mexico, who earns less than $7,500 a year for 25 weeks of farmwork. According to one estimate, his life expectancy is 49 years."

The crops most picked by illegal, exploited migrants are high-value specialty crops -- strawberries, avocados, lettuces, peaches, plums. Schlosser focuses on the strawberry harvest -- a brutal job that must be done by hand. The risks of growing strawberries are great -- an entire crop can be wiped out by a few days of rain -- which encourages growers to save money on labor costs by hiring illegals, who they underpay and don't put on the books. The real scam, though, is "sharecropping" -- the practice of letting workers become fake "owners," who are responsible for hiring workers and getting in the crop. What happens, all too often, is that the sharecropper inherits all of the risk and little or none of the reward. Schlosser exposes how this benign-sounding practice actually often condemns the sharecropper to a lifetime of debt peonage.

Schlosser acknowledges the intractability of the problem: As long as a strawberry picker in California can make far more than he could make in Mexico, illegal immigrants will flock to the California fields. (Indeed, he points out that illegal workers are increasingly moving into nonagricultural work in America's heartland, becoming meat packers and doing other jobs at wages that undercut American workers.) His solution is to raise minimum wages and enforce existing labor laws.

Schlosser makes a harrowing visit to a squalid migrant shantytown in San Diego County, where he meets an 18-year-old Mixtec man named Francisco. Francisco got up every day at 4:30 to pick strawberries for 10 or 12 hours a day. He sleeps on the ground in a 5-by-7-foot shack with two other men. In four months he saved $800, which he sent home to his parents. In the most passionate passage in the book, Schlosser writes, "Driving back to my motel that night, I thought about the people of Orange County, one of the richest counties in the nation -- big on family values, yet bankrupt from financial speculation, unwilling to raise taxes to pay for their own children's education, unwilling to pay off their debts, whining about the injustice of it, and blaming all their problems on illegal immigrants. And I thought about Francisco, their bogeyman, their scapegoat, working ten hours a day at one of the hardest jobs imaginable, and sleeping on the ground, so that he could save money and send it home to his parents."

Schlosser concludes, "No deity that men have ever worshipped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked; there is no reason why shantytowns should not appear on the outskirts of every American city ... Left to its own devices, the free market always seeks a work force that is desperate, hungry, and cheap -- a work force that is anything but free."

The wild-card chapter in "Reefer Madness" is the final one on pornography -- specifically, on the long, strange, sad saga of a man named Reuben Sturman, a former comic book salesman from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who became the father of the modern porn industry after he discovered that people were buying more sex magazines than anything else. Sturman built his empire, in large part, by pioneering the use of peep booths, which advanced beyond "stag films" by allowing customers to watch skin flicks in private. (Hilariously, Schlosser notes that watching stag films was a completely accepted practice, sponsored by Kiwanis Clubs and other respectable organizations. As long as only men were present, the cops and judges looked the other way.) But Sturman drew the attention of the morality police, who repeatedly tried to bust him on obscenity charges -- and lost every time.

What finally did in Sturman was the same thing that did in Al Capone: taxes. Schlosser tells the engrossing tale of how a dogged federal tax investigator named Richard Rosfelder chased the elusive Sturman for almost 15 years, a convoluted cat-and-mouse game spanning several continents in which the porn mogul tried to hide his assets by using fake holding companies, picking names of "directors" out of phone books and a host of other tricks. His foes, besides just-the-facts-ma'am tax investigators like Rosfelder, were such apostles of morality as Charles Keating, a towering anti-porn crusader who was later brought low by the savings and loan scandal.

It's a pathetic tale: Sturman was sent to a minimum-security prison, escaped, but refused to flee the country because he wanted to see his wife and child. He was recaptured and ended up dying in prison. The moral of the story: sell no porn before its time. Yes, Sturman deserved prosecution for tax evasion, but he was subject to a vendetta that went far beyond his tax crimes. Today Fortune 500 companies make billions of dollars by selling graphic sex, a fact that will probably prevent America's ubiquitous scolds and bluestockings from driving it underground ever again. But it's useful to remember that just a few years ago, with great fervor and the full support of the government and the citizenry, the hounds were set loose on those who sold exactly the same thing the men in the penthouse suites are selling now.

"American society has become alienated and at odds with itself, like a personality beginning to decompose," Schlosser concludes after his tour of the underbelly of American business. It would be naive to expect America, or any society, to cease to be hypocritical overnight. But American morality is more two-faced than most nations'. After reading Schlosser's book, it's hard not to think: Wouldn't it be pleasant if this country acknowledged the facts of life, just a little?

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