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

America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risque 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.

Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. 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 a groundbreaking book: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001). The book helped to change the way that Americans think about what they eat. Fast Food Nation was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years, as well as on bestseller lists in Canada, Great Britain, and Japan. It has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Schlosser’s second book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (2003), explored the nation’s growing underground economy. It also became a New York Times bestseller. In 2003, Schlosser’s first play, Americans, was produced at the Arcola Theatre in London.

Hoping to counter the enormous amount of fast food marketing aimed at children, Schlosser decided to write a book that would help young people understand where their food comes from, how it’s made, how it affects society, and how it can harm their health. Co-written with Charles Wilson, Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food became a New York Times bestseller in the spring of 2006. Later that year, Fox Searchlight Pictures released a major motion picture based on Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater and co-written with Schlosser. “It’s a mirror and a portrait,” the New York Times said of the film, “as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.” Schlosser is currently at work on a book about America’s prison system.