Name: Reefer Madness
ISBN: 9780618446704

Reefer Madness

author of Fast Food Nation investigates America's black market and its far-reaching influence on our society through three of its mainstays -- pot, porn, and illegal immigrants. The underground economy is vast; it comprises perhaps 10 percent -- perhaps more -- of America's overall economy, and it's on the rise. Eric Schlosser charts this growth, and finds its roots in the nexus of ingenuity, greed, idealism, and hypocrisy that is American culture. He reveals the fascinating workings of the shadow economy by focusing on marijuana, one of the nation's largest cash crops; pornography, whose greatest beneficiaries include Fortune 100 companies; and illegal migrant workers, whose lot often resembles that of medieval serfs. All three industries show how the black market has burgeoned over the past three decades, as America's reckless faith in the free market has combined with a deep-seated puritanism to create situations both preposterous and tragic. Through pot, porn, and migrants, Schlosser traces compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new technology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, how big business learns -- and profits -- from the underground. With intrepid reportage, rich history, and incisive argument, Schlosser illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.

What Hacker News says

CoolGuySteveNov 2019

This reminds me of defective/poisoned alcohol in the prohibition era causing blindness and whatnot.

If you're going to create a black market via regulation, you better be damn sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. In marijuana's case, that's definitely not true.

The book Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser covers the unintended consequences of black markets in depth and I can't recommend it enough. But pretty much any Schlosser book is great.

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jseligerApr 2016

Do you have any supporting information?

The parent commenter is overly mood-affiliated, but Eric Schlosser's book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market is good on this topic (http://www.amazon.com/Reefer-Madness-Drugs-American-Market/d...). I don't have a copy of it at hand, but making weed and other drugs illegal was wrapped up in racial fear and fears of what become known as counterculture.

Wade Davis's One River is about many things, including the ways hallucinogens came to the U.S., how they fit many indigenous religions, and why they're far more legitimate than the US makes them out to be. It's also an adventure story about the exploration of the deep Amazon and other South American rivers.

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mechanical_fishDec 2008

I've suggested a rationale for the taboo, but I don't think there is such a thing as a "rational taboo". That's not how they work. The whole point of a taboo is that it doesn't require, or even allow, much rational thought. That's a design feature.

The problem with rational decision-making as a universal strategy is that people can be really bad at it. Especially when they really want to hit on that hot 14-year-old, or stab their bastard half-brother, or eat that triple cheeseburger. You'd be amazed at the kind of "logic" that people can apply in a situation like that. Or when the data that's required to make a rational decision is outside their personal experience. (If every generation had to experiment with living in the swamp -- losing half its population to malaria in the process -- it would be a lot less efficient than a simple taboo against swamp dwelling.)

So, yeah, it's irrational. Sometimes that is a good thing. More often you need to use some applied hypocrisy to keep your taboos aligned with reality. And sometimes it's time to chuck the old taboos and develop some shiny new ones.

In the particular case of 14 year olds and porn DVDs? Technology is moving so fast that the taboos can't keep up. Only a few decades ago it was taboo for fifty-year-olds to rent porn DVDs -- read Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness for examples. That is changing very, very quickly thanks to the Internet, which has eroded the porn taboo pretty thoroughly. Who cares about DVDs anymore? We've only just woken up to discover that every 14-year-old in America has a free porn machine sitting on his or her desk, and social norms are struggling to catch up with that.

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