The burning issues

Eric Schlosser is best know on this side of the pond for Fast Food Nation, his expose of the burger-and-fries culture that has made the US the fattest society in the history of the world. In Reefer Madness, he presents us with three essays that between them try to limn the extent, proclivities and impact of the illegal economy in the States.

Schlosser's guiding principle is to take issue with that philosophical prophet of the modern market economy, Adam Smith. Taking as his yardstick Smith's belief that "the invisible hand" of God was present in the way the free market balances supply and demand, improves agriculture and industry, creates surplus wealth, and provides people with products they want, Schlosser investigates the workings of the illegal markets in marijuana, labour and pornography.

There's nothing wrong with this enterprise - I don't know anyone who doesn't have some interest in dope, copulation or exploitative labour - but it wasn't clear what Schlosser was saying at the outset, and by the end I was not much clearer. This is because the fine detail he applies to areas of his investigation is married to a pleasing, but woolly, classical liberalism.

He starts promisingly by telling us that by 1994 the underground American economy was estimated to be worth $650 billion. At 9.4 per cent of the economy overall, this represented anything between a two and a threefold expansion in 25 years.

Other statistics are equally enlightening. The preference of criminals worldwide for the US dollar as a vehicle for their transactions means the Fed prints $20 billion's worth of currency every year for export to foreign countries. This is, of course, tantamount to a vast, interest-free loan to Uncle Sam, hardly what we expect from the war on drugs (or international terrorism).

But while Schlosser takes us through the arguments advanced by conservatives for the burgeoning black market - increased government regulation, higher taxes - and rightly dismisses them as groundless, he's hard put to supply a convincing analysis of his own which can explain why one man's ambrosia is another's anathema.

In the title essay, Schlosser takes us over all the familiar facts surrounding the debate on marijuana, and hammers home some unsavoury new ones that we here, in the marginally more tolerant UK, would do well to remember. Despite the presidency of Puffing Billy, prosecutions for marijuana offences Stateside have almost doubled in the past 20 years, and penalties - especially at federal level - can be punitive in the extreme. There are hundreds of people serving life sentences for marijuana offences in the American gulag.

Schlosser gives us a nice tour of the vast "weed belt" in the American heartland, where most of the marijuana that is consumed domestically is now grown. But I couldn't see the point in all the minutiae of the busts, the defences and plea-bargains that he details.

With the issue of illegal immigration, the human face is more germane. Certainly the conditions under which Mexicans labour in the Californian strawberry fields are an affront to common decency, and the idea that this pernicious trafficking in human souls goes on unabated - and has even expanded to include industrial labour - makes a mockery of the "amnesty" on illegals during the last Bush administration.

As Schlosser puts it so eloquently, "if things carry on this way, America won't have to import a peasantry, it will have created one of its own."