Rating: 
Summary: interesting but random
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book and I learned a lot from it about the black markets, laws, hypocrisy and tragedy in our country. Schlosser keeps it exciting and amazingly makes non fiction suspenseful. However, I did find that the three main sections of the book, one about pot, another about migrant workers and the last about the porn industry to be a bit random. It doesn't quite make as much sense as Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, but nonetheless Reefer Madness is a thought provoking read that leaves quite an impression.
Rating:
Summary: Loose Collection of Essays
Review: Hot on the heels of his massive success with the superb "Fast Food Nation," author Eric Schlosser has filled in the gap between it and his next project with "Reefer Madness." The book purports to explore the American underground economy, and Schlosser's preface tries to link the book's three sections together using that theme, but it ultimately doesn't come together as a cohesive whole. The three individual topics (the criminalization of marijuana, the exploitation of migrant farmworkers and the rise of pornography as a major industry), however, are quite interesting.What's obvious is that Schlosser has reported on these subjects before and has merely updated them to be put into book form. The incidents he describes for the most part took place back in the 1990s, which makes them less than immediately topical. Nevertheless, like with "Fast Food Nation," the author has some strong views and isn't shy about sharing them. Schlosser is a refreshing breath of fresh air as a journalist in that he refuses to buy into the conventional wisdom and asks the kind of questions that rarely get asked in other forums. Overall, "Refer Madness" is a good stopgap for people who enjoy Schlosser's style. It made me look forward to his next project, which will explore the American prison system.
Rating: 
Summary: The Invisible and Nameless Economy
Review: This is another eloquent and scholarly journalistic effort by Schlosser focusing on issues resonant with practically anyone in American society. Readers will be impressed with the author's substantial researchm which is organized and presented in an eloquent yet unpretentious and "readable" fashion. "Reefer Madness" marks a shift by Schlosser to more partisan journalism by his conspicuous and passionate observations about the social justice implications of our reliance upon undocumented "illegal" farmer workers, as well as the irony of how an agricultural economy based upon such labor, as well as the hypocracy and inconsistencies of our "moral" legislation regulating America's immense demand for recreation drugs and pornography, in actuality work to undermine our legitimate economy. While the thread of commonality throughout this work is the immensity of this parallel economy, and the impact upon and threat it poses to our "legitimate" economy, the three topics he studies are pretty much distinct and separate issues. It requires the reader to stretch a bit conceptually to see the valid, but somewhat subtle connections. Schlosser's sorrow, outrage, and angst -- especially concerning undocumented workers -- are moving and heartwrenching, especially since they are backed by irrefutable statistics. Readers should be warned that you will find yourself hard pressed to ever again eat a farm raised strawberry in good conscience in light of the exploitation and oppression its production represents.
Rating:
Summary: Reefer Madness is gonna get your children
Review: Schlosser's newest work is simple, to the point and straightforward in a way in which a entire 600 page tome on each topic of marijuana, illegal immigrant workers, and pornography would be overblown and boring alongside the many that already exist. I found the writing engaging, detailed and filled with facts alongside personal/historical content. Very few opinions from Schlosser arise with exception to his conclusions. Otherwise this book sticks to the facts and figures and some are quite alarming. Reuban Sturman is almost like a small-time chump change character in the wake of the Enron boys. The chapter on porn was more or less insightful for a variety of reasons. First, Reuban was always dealing with overzealous prosecuters and wealthy backers that in the end were actually as big a crook as himself. Savings and loan scandels, offshore banking, swiss bank accounts are mostly the hallmarks of American wealthy elite. The very people that are actively locking up middle class and poor Americans that attempt to do business as they do to try and make ends meet or climb the ladder in a stagnating economic environment where your damned if you work a minimum wage job and damned if you sell some marijuana. Bush and the Enron clans are very much at falt as are Reagan and the Clintons. The supposed leaders of our country try to enforce laws with which they can't even abide by themselves, as if they are above the black market that helped create them. The reality is they are all fallible. Every last one of them, and until we change the laws to reflect our behaviors and habits Americans will suffer the consequences. If any leader had a conscious they'd release all the non-violent drug offenders and really go after the murderers or excutives skimming the cream off the the top of most Americans paychecks, $140million for Dick Grasso?? Gee I wonder why so many dotcommers are out of work? Even Flynt complains that there is "too much" pornography. It seems impossible for marijuana, software, music and porn to maintain any real value in an oversaturated market where the idea of scarcity is no longer valid. The laws against these crimes are based on 19th century thinking. They are irrational in light of the changes that have since taken place. With pronography everywhere it no longer matters to people, the same would be true of marijuana. The reality is more people occasionally use drugs than really let on, why would somebody tell the truth on a survey? It's true that people can maintain a job and have families yet still use a little every once in a blue moon. The fact that beer is everywhere doesn't mean everybody is addicted to alcohol. The logic of the drug war is childish, and more akin to a school bully mentality. If Corporate businesses can cry and complain about taxation and get away with pilfering billions in offshore accounts than laws against drugs should be taken off the books. But then with transparency the corporate types can't get away with their activites, turn the spotlight off drugs and onto the enron types and watch as renewed calls for stiffer drug penalties, more funding for DARE, prisons and the like get brought up in the house or senate. For leaders to admonish the public about the dangerous black market of internet smut, marijuana and illegal immigrants and yet have no problem with making a profit in some way from all three is the point of this book and the reason it merits 5 stars because nobody could have said it better(maybe PeterMcwilliams). I'll also say though that Fast Food Nation is good for entirely different reasons than Reefer Madness. Glad to see somebody doesn't write the same book over and over.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing after "Fast Food Nation"
Review: After bring impressed with "Fast Food Nation," I began "Reefer Madness" with high expectations which simply were not met. While the book is reasonably well-researched, there is simply too much preaching. The obvious biases of the author in all three essays (!) brings the accuracy of his hard data into question. The writing style is rather dry, which makes a strange climate for the sensationalism of Schlosser's claims. This book is neither as objective, nor as well-researched (there are more field anecdotes and narrative history than hard numbers), nor as interesting as "Fast Food Nation." What a shame.
Rating:
Summary: solid but disappoints after Fast Food Nation
Review: When looking at the title of Schlosser's newest work, one's first response has to be 'how did he manage to cover sex, drugs, and cheap labor all in a single book?'(some might even say he couldn't have covered their own personal experience with all in a single book). The answer, as one might have assumed, is simple'sketchily. A look at America's underground economy, the editing begins immediately with the decision to limit such an analysis to these three gargantuan topics'clearly there's a lot more going on in the shadow economy-- just ask the folks at RIAA.
Any one of these topics would have been enough for an entire book, so if Schlosser is to be criticized for skimming through the information (which he does), it's hard to see how, once the original decision for the book was made, he could have done otherwise. The look at cheap labor, for instance, is only a few dozen pages. The section on 'drugs' is really only focused on marijuana and the laws surrounding it, and even these are occasionally tossed out more as lists than in any sort of more reflective analysis. The section on pornography is longer, which might lead you to think it's more in depth, but just as with the drug section, Schlosser narrows his field and focuses more on a single pivotal figure in the development of pornography as a mainstream business. Its general history, modernization, feminization, incorporation, etc. are mentioned, but all too briefly. Finally, anyone who has read any recent lengthy article on any of these topics will probably not find much (beyond the individual figures themselves) new here. Even the context of the underground economy is not particularly original, as all three are oftentimes analyzed in just that context in their own right (how many articles on pot does one see that doesn't mention the estimated amount of money spent on growing or consuming it?). And that context is weakened somewhat by the section on pornography. After all, when The Greatest Hits of Nina Hartley is being distributed daily by AOL-Time-Warner or the Marriot and Larry Flint is running for governor of California, just how underground is this business?
That's the bad. The good, and there is a lot of it, is just what one would expect from the author of Fast Food Nation. The prose is highly readable and extremely lucid. The research is well-documented, effective, clearly explained, and (mostly) seamlessly interwoven into the stories. And the personal stories (a man sentenced to life for being a middle-man in a pot deal, the long-time attempt of the federal government to indict porn purveyor Reuban Sturman, along with others) lend a sense of humanity, realism, and intimacy to the discussion, which all too often remains on the abstract level in most analyses'so many people in prison, blah blah blah. Schlosser rifles off the statistics as well, but he grounds them in the stories of real people, and that is what makes this book at least somewhat effective, despite its sketchy nature.
Anyone coming to this from Fast Food Nation is probably bound to be disappointed and one wishes his publisher had convinced him (or agreed to allow him) to do a single book on each topic. Anyone not coming to it with preconceived high standards set by the author himself, and just looking for a readable, quick, informative look at each and any of these could do a lot worse.
Rating:
Summary: Promises Much More Than It Delivers
Review: In this book Schlosser promises an investigative examination of the economic and social issues behind black market activity in America (just look at the cover), but such promises do not materialize effectively. Instead of the in-depth manifesto promised in the prologue and summarized very quickly in the epilogue, the main body of this book is merely three essays about different types of black market activity. The first concerns marijuana, and here Schlosser comes close to a strong sociopolitical treatise on public vs. private attitudes toward recreational drug use. Instead, the essay merely becomes a dissertation on the ridiculous politics and inaccurate morality behind the drug war. Schlosser's ideas are certainly accurate, as the drug war is definitely a dismal failure. However, this subject has been covered extensively in dozens of other books, and Schlosser's short essay here offers nothing new. The second essay, concerning black market migrant labor, sticks closest to the book's presumed focus on the economic and social phenomena behind illegal activity. Unfortunately this essay is very short and Schlosser does not give the amount of detail and in-depth research that this issue deserves. I propose that he write a full book on this issue as his next project. Problems similar to those in the marijuana essay also afflict the final portion of the book, dealing with pornography. Schlosser's supposed focus on the economics of that industry devolves into an unnecessarily detailed biography of the longtime porn kingpin Rueben Sturman. It's an interesting story but surely detracts from the book's focus. Schlosser's writing has improved since his opus "Fast Food Nation," which was marred by sarcastic polemics and flimsy conspiracy theories. The main problem with "Reefer Madness" is that Schlosser fails to achieve the goals which are loudly proclaimed on the busy cover, and which he promises to examine in the introduction. It's true that Americans (plus their politicians) publicly condemn but privately crave black market phenomena such as drugs and pornography. These supposedly illegal markets are the best examples of truly unregulated capitalism, giving people what they want efficiently, although supposedly free-market politicians try to crush them. These markets also make up surprisingly large portions of the American economy, with potentially major social implications. Schlosser promises to examine these issues, but mostly doesn't. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating:
Summary: not nearly as good as Fast Food Nation
Review: The subject matter in the book is interesting, but I didn't get the feeling that Mr. Schlosser's research was nearly as thorough as what he did for Fast Food Nation. I would have much rather heard more about any of the three topics of the book than the limited coverage.
Rating:
Summary: pretty good
Review: I really enjoyed eric schlosser's previous work, fast food nation, so i was expecting a lot from reefer madness. It's a collection of schlosser's magazine articles as opposed to a book so the three essays don't exactly work together to produce a singular work. However each essay does provide a pretty good understanding of each issue. The underground economy is a pretty big sector of our economy that needs to be looked. Most people participate in it to some extent since it includes certain mundane things like babysitting and lardwork for cash that goes unreported. The first essay deals with marijuana and the effect it is had. Over time, marijuana has been increasinly cultivated domestically often in places like the midwest and kentucky so a very middle american thing really. It furthere goes into how there is a great variety of punishment depending on where you are and how sometimes the punishment can seem severe. The second essay deals with migrant farm workers, mainly those who work on the strawberry fields in California. It looks at things like the effect of agriculture, minimum wages, union and ill-legal immigration affect our society. The last essay deals with the pornograph industry looking at how it has increased over time and government attempt to limit it. Pretty good overall though schlosser could have written a book on each one of the three topics.
Rating: 
Summary: Writer madness, Money, Cheap essays and the gulibleAmerican
Review: Need I say more than this could maybe be three good magazine articals. Instead we have three disjointed flat essays without flow. All I could think of is Fast food writing.
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