Reefer Madness

Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market

Paperback, 336 pages

English language

Published Nov. 19, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

ISBN:
978-0-618-44670-4
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OCLC Number:
841413455

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3 stars (1 review)

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 kid's 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 technology 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. (back …

9 editions

Subjects

  • Informal sector (Economics) -- United States -- Case studies
  • Black market -- United States -- Case studies
  • Marijuana abuse -- United States
  • Migrant agricultural laborers -- California
  • Illegal aliens -- California
  • Sex-oriented businesses -- United States