Reefer Nation by Eric Schlosser

brundle lent me Reefer Nation by Eric Schlosser, after hearing how much I liked Fast Food Nation.

This is a book about the underground economy of the United States, and looks in detail at three areas - marijuana, strawberry picking in California and pornography.

The strawberry picking section complements Fast Food Nation, in that it again stresses how low-skilled, underpaid (and often illegal immigrant) workers are being exploited in order to turn a fast buck, and again asks what the ultimate consequence of this is likely to be. What with Schlosser's two books and Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting with Jesus, this whole issue of the dead-end, low-paid menial workforce seems to be an issue that's going to rear its head at some point. Part of Bageant's book was explaining why we don't hear much about it at the moment, but it's disquieting, and Schlosser charges that it's a natural consequence of worshipping the gods of the market above all else.

The marijuana section is sort of centred around the sad story of one guy who was sentenced to life imprisonment for being the 'middle-man' in a big deal, but really is more about the injustice of mandatory minimums in sentencing than anything else. The underground economy in the marijuana situation is pretty self-explanatory - since the stuff's mostly illegal, all the trade is in the black market.

With porn, frequent constitutional battles have asserted the right for the stuff to exist, but that doesn't mean that the people making their money out of the business wish to share their riches with the taxman. This section, then, is sort of a case study of how the IRS went after Reuben Sturman for fifteen years, finally getting him incarcerated on tax avoidance charges when other parts of the federal government had never been able to make obscenity charges stick.

The section that resonated with me most was the worker-exploitation one - partly, I suspect, because it ties in so closely with the other two books I mention above. It does make me wonder, though, had I been born in Mexico rather than Eastbourne, whether I too would be attempting to scrape a living picking strawberries and living in shanty town slums hidden in orchards in California. This is why this matters, to me - we all start off the same way at birth, but circumstance of location, more than a great deal else, seems to determine far more than it should in terms of our future quality of life. What's wrong, here, is that (some of) the strawberry farmers are setting out to exploit that difference for their own personal gain, treating these people as an expendable resource rather than an asset deserving of investment.

The Order of the Phoenix Re-Read: Chapter 34

( OotP Ch 34: The Department of Mysteries )