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

Eric Schlosser

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apr 1, 2004 - Social Science - 320 pages

America’s black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risqué video, or pay our kids’ nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays — pot, porn, and illegal immigrants — Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new techonology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns — and profits — from the underground.
Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

What people are saying

Reefer madness: sex, drugs, and cheap labor in the American black market

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Atlantic Monthly correspondent Schlosser made a muckraking splash with Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (an LJ Best Book of 2001). He continues to extend the investigative ...

Contents

• 1 Reefer Madness: 11
• 2 In the Strawberry Fields: 75
• 3 An Empire of the Obscene: 109
• Out of the Underground: 211
• More Madness: 223
• Notes: 241
• Bibliography: 303
• Acknowledgments: 313
• Index: 315
• About the Author: 338
• Back Cover: 339
• Spine: 340

About the author

Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for the Atlantic. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. In 1998 Schlosser wrote an investigative piece on the fast food industry for Rolling Stone. What began as a two-part article for the magazine turned into the New York Times bestseller Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. His other books include Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market and Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food, a children’s book he cowrote with Charles Wilson.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
• Author: Eric Schlosser
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004
• ISBN: 054752675X, 9780547526751
• Length: 320 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture