Schlosser, Eric. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. Audiocassette. Simon & Schuster, 2003.

This was a book on tape, listened to on a 12-hour drive home from Austin, Tex. (very enjoyable, thanks for asking). I read Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation years ago, and was impressed by the thoroughness of his research and the compellingness of his argument that eating fast food regularly isn’t just dangerous to the self, but dangerous to the society as well.

This book isn’t as cohesive as its predecessor; Schlosser (or, probably, his publisher) seems to be riding the wave of his book’s success by culling three pieces of prior journalism and research into one volume. There’s a connection—marijuana, migrant labor, and pornography are things we Americans want very badly and yet because of their relative “naughtiness” are forced into the underground, where their effect on our national economy is hard to measure—but this connection is set up in the opening and not really developed in the individual pieces. Sure, you get to know a lot about pot and porn and illegal immigrants, lots of it historical, but the economic side of things wasn’t explored as much as I was hoping for. I know now what would happen to our criminal justice system if marijuana possession and use was legalized tomorrow (which, I’m convinced, it should be), but what would happen if the money made from the selling of pot were to, I dunno, stop being made? Who would it hurt, and how much? And does this tie into porno in any way?

My pal T. read from the book a distaste toward trial attorneys and criminal prosecutors. “They’re so many of them in this country,” he said. “Of course they’re going after soft, harmless criminals. Otherwise they’d get bored.” And I had to agree, after listening to examples of prosecutors (named and nameless) gaining life sentences for people who merely introduced sellers to buyers, or corporate lawyers organizing and funding dummy citizens’ groups in order to stave off unions. I think in the end, the book is a paean to the individual, and the rights of the individual. It is extremely critical of the idea of a free market. “Freedom for whom?” it asks. Schlosser does a good job of showing, um, listeners, in this instance, that freedom for corporations rarely, if ever, means freedom for consumers.

And also: freedom from what? I want that word to be dropped like lint from the fabric of our contemporary discourse. And no, I’m not happy with that simile, either.