Missions Resources - Bibliography
Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
Authors: Eric Schlosser
ISBN: 0618446702
Publisher: Mariner Books
Number of pages: 352
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary: This year, it’s immigration. Next year, the political hot potato in the United States will be a new issue – pollution, perhaps, or steroids. As a society, we seem ever less able to linger on an issue, because our political battle lines become so quickly entrenched along classic party lines. At that point – at the point where ideology overtakes serious discussion – we are merely talking past each other, and resolution gets ever less likely.
Reefer Madness, a book about the US black market, is a case in point. Well-researched and intellectually solid, it nevertheless displays some wild leaps of reason, along ideological fault lines. When writing about marijuana and pornography, author Eric Schlosser indignantly demands libertarian, utilitarian privacy. The government should keep out of private citizens’ private affairs. When discussing illegal labor, on the other hand, he passionately calls for strict enforcement of worker safety laws. We ought to legalize marijuana (what Schlosser calls a harmless drug), legalize pornography (at least those versions Schlosser deems harmless), and crack down on black market labor (which is harmful to the workers): it all starts to look a little inconsistent after a while.
Eric Schlosser, a well-respected correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, has written extensively on the American food supply and on the prison system. He is well-qualified to write this book, and each of the three sections, taken alone, would be quite credible. But once the first section of the book, on illegal marijuana cultivation in Indiana, is mashed together with a second section on illegal strawberry labor in California, along with a third section on a pornographer’s attempts at tax evasion, even Schlosser can’t tie the strands together. Worse, he comes to nearly opposite conclusions within the same book regarding government’s role in underground economics. By starting with an ideology of private individualism, he has a hard time justifying the labor laws he demands.
The main problem is not logic: Schlosser is quite consistent, relative to his utilitarian and individualistic starting point. The problem is that same starting point: intrusive social policies and cosmic rights of privacy are hard to reconcile. Should individuals have the right to harm themselves, as long as they don’t harm others? Absolutely, according to Reefer Madness. Does a government have a right to impose a collective will on the free choices of individuals? Only when the individuals in question are above the age of eighteen.
Is that true? Is there a Christian ethic that transcends privacy? Where are the boundaries between the church’s responsibilities and the state’s? Reading Reefer Madness made me smell a rat. Time to bone up on my political science, and on my ecclesiology. Reefer Madness is thus valuable on two fronts: first as an exposé of abuse in the migrant worker sector of the economy, and second as a study in how ideology can lead us from correct facts to questionable conclusions.
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