Eric Schlosser interview

Good morning, this is Michelle Schroeder Fletcher at 90.7 FM, KBOO community radio. Today, we're speaking with Eric Schlosser, author of the best-selling book Fast Food Nation. His new book is Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. Good morning, Mr Schlosser. Good morning. And thanks for coming to KBOO and, while we're at it, thanks for writing this new book. For all of us over 40, it's been a strange evolution of frustration and hypocrisy on some really important social issues, and what I loved about reading the book is it's not only confirmed where we really are as a culture, but also how we got here. Um, many people ask how did you go from writing a relatively mainstream book to writing about pot porn in the labor market? Um, well, you know, the first book, I tried to take a mainstream subject, turn on its head and show what was behind the cheery, happy surface of the fast food industry. This book actually

came out of reporting I was doing before a look at the fast food industry. The first big piece of investigative journalism I did was for The Atlantic Monthly and it looked at the marijuana industry and it looked at the long prison sentences being given to marijuana offenders and it made me start thinking about the underground - underground economies, black markets. Um, you know, I did the reporting in Indiana, where I was finding all-American farms where millions of dollars of marijuana were being produced in a very short period of time, and I explored to Indiana marijuana-growing subculture and it made me think about other black markets in America, and this book is actually a book that I'd hoped to do before Fast Food Nation, uh, but other, you know, publishers weren't interested in publishing it. So, um, in - in retrospect, though, I'm glad that this one came out afterwards because there is a very logical flow from this book, which is about the workings of the black market and when the law intervenes and doesn't intervene and who we choose to punish and who we let get off the hook... And it... ..and my next book, which is on prisons... Yeah.

..which, you know, is the next logical step from cracking down on black markets. Yeah, and it was probably also fortuitous in the sense that you got a lot of mainstream coverage for Fast Food Nation. It really took off it and gave you a really expanded forum for all of us who we are so grateful. Well, thank you. Um, for our listeners, the book is set up in three distinct parts, that we can talk about in depth in a minute, but first let's talk about the overarching theme - the underground economy and the black market. Yeah. You know, we've lived with this free market rhetoric now for 20-odd years and it all started when President Reagan took the portrait of Thomas Jefferson down from the cabinet room upon taking office and put up the portrait of Calvin Coolidge, whose philosophy was "the business of America is business." And I guess what i've been trying to do is look at some of the businesses that don't fit into their free market ideal. Um, the black market has been grown enormously in the last 25 or 30 years. It's a gigantic

segment of our economy - maybe 10% . Anywhere from $800 billion to 1.5 trillion dollars is off the books .That's huge and I believe that by looking at this black market and looking at the underground you learn a lot about the mainstream because the two are inextricably linked um like the yin and the yang are 2 parts of 1 whole so this book's about America and what's happened in the last 25 years. [Host] yeah it certainly is, um maybe we should first talk about um, uh, how, how the book is divided in the kind of go starting with the first section which of course, um, for me was, was just riveting, um, the one that I personally found most disturbing about drugs in America, um, and it can tell us a little about Mark and America's drug culture. [Guest] Yeah, well just an overview of how the book is divided. The first part is about marijuana which is a black market commodity

the most widely used illegal drug in America. The second part is about migrant farm workers who are mainly illegal immigrants, that's black market labor. And the third part is about hardcore pornography which started out as a very small minor subculture and black market and became mainstream became a corporate product. So it's almost a, it's a case study in how the underground becomes the mainstream and corporate controlled. Mark Young, to get back to the first section, is a hippie biker in indiana and his case came to my attention because he'd never been in prison, never been in jail, never been busted for marijuana in his life. He was involved in a marijuana transaction, didn't grow the pot, didn't sell the pot, introduced the buyer to the grower but when the, when everyone got arrested he refused to rat, he refused to inform on other people so he was sentenced to life without parole under federal law and sent to one the most dangerous prisons in America, Leavenworth

Penitentiary. Now, um, it just was incredible to me when I heard about this case. The typical convicted murderer in America spends 11 years behind bars and here was a nonviolent marijuana offender getting life without parole. So the first part of the book poses the question, "How does a society come to punish a person more harshly for marijuana than for killing somebody with a gun?" And it's an exploration of you know marijuana, the marijuana industry and the government's willingness to intervene in this market unlike [Host] Unlike [Guest] on moral grounds. [Host] Right because your morally wrong if you smoke pot and we're gonna punish you for it so that's what's created this gigantic underground in marijuana. [Host] Oh and you know, throughout this whole vignette about marijuana and drugs just over and over again all the examples of victimless crimes for the most part, people caught and trapped in, in financially um compromising positions

and just the governments unrelenting pursuit. I found it interesting being over forty and I uh, it was very interesting in the book how mo- most importantly the great job that you've done in the journalism is how we got here because of course if people had set up to say, you know from where we were at in the sixties here. I don't think any of us would've believed it. [Guest] That's incredible and uh I wanna make clear that I'm not telling people smoke pot. [Host] Exactly. [Guest] I'm not saying the pot is good for you. Um, but I think adults can make that decision for themselves and what's so remarkable to me is when you look at the really dangerous drugs like the one that I used pretty frequently like alcohol um, about 100,000 Americans a year, more than a 100,000 die from alcohol. The most dangerous drug is tobacco. Over 400,000 Americans die from tobacco. The governments subsidize tobacco, subsidizes tobacco growing, and then you look at marijuana which again, you know, has all kinds of potential harms but is not a toxic substance.

There's no known fatal dose you can't overdose from it and the tough tough laws against it. And in, in looking at the history the marijuana prohibition you know,I really came to the conclusion that the laws on marijuana have very little to do with the drug itself and a great deal to do [Host] And we haven't even been able to study the drug in any rational way because you there's [Guest] They've studied it as much as possible to find what's wrong with it, but they're not eager to study, you know, ways it could be medically used medically useful but the point I was going to make is the laws on marijuana have very little to do with the drug and a great deal to do with who has smoked the drug and who smokes the drug and it's much more a war on minorities and non conformists um then it is a rational policy based on the pharmacological properties of this drug. [Host] Again the whole history of um the drug czar and and um that taking it from being a child of the sixties taking it from a rather

liberal relaxed moving into a realm in which like you say not advocating for it but at least putting it in some rational productive. [Schlosser] President Carter advocated the decriminalization of marijuana and marijuana was being decriminalized in the United States and the really crazy uh marijuana laws from the fifties and sixties were being rescinded and all that stopped when President Reagan was elected. President Reagan launched this war on drugs it began as a war on marijuana and the first drug czar America's first drug czar was a man named Carlton Turner who is a scientist expert on marijuana and one of his conclusions as Reagan's first drug tsar is that smoking pot could make you gay and it's that sort of mentality that led to incredibly punitive laws for marijuana and without most Americans realizing how the laws being changed. [Host] And that's the part that I found fascinating as like I said it kind of if they had gone to implement this all at once, of course it couldn't have happened. I think the human outcry would've been

hurt everywhere. But [Schlosser] I had no idea when I started the reporting that you could get a life sentence without parole for marijuana and I found many other people who are serving life sentences for nonviolent marijuana crimes. One one person I found you know was serving a life sentence for less pot then would be in a small roach just a tiny insignificant amount of marijuana um and this has happened without most people realizing it. [Host] Yeah matter of fact there is a quote in the book that it was in 1982 President Reagan signed an executive order creating a new post in his administration Head of the White House Drug Abuse Policy Office soon known as the Drug Czar and appointed a chemist that's the one you referred Carlton Turner to the job. Turner had for many years directed the Marijuana Research Project at the University of Mississippi running the government's only marijuana farm. According to a profile in "Government Executive Magazine" Turner thought that marijuana use was inextricably linked to the present young adult generations involvement in anti military,

anti nuclear power, anti big business, anti authoritarian demonstrations. He also thought that smoking pot could turn young men into homosexuals. In 1977 the DEA had acknowledged that decriminalization was worth considering. Three years later it called marijuana the most urgent drug problem facing the United States. When you um when you lifted off all of these things I thought well that is probably ninety percent of the cable listening audience that you are just now described which is which is why i'm sure i also that that this was a wonderful and informative statement. When President Reagan watched the drug war in 1982 88.5% percent of high school students said it was easy to obtain pot. In 2000 after authorities spent billions on the drug war 88.5% of high school students said it was easy to obtain pot. [Schlosser] Well the unfortunate truth is that tough marijuana

laws don't stop people from smoking pot.If you look at the marijuana laws that were on the books in late fifties and early sixties they were much tougher than the ones we have now and that did not prevent you know the drug culture and the hippie counterculture from forming the late nineteen sixties when people were smoking even more pot than today with even tougher drug laws. Pot use began to decline around 1979 after decriminalization and declined by about forty percent before the new marijuana prohibition laws were imposed in the mid 1980's. The thing that tough marijuana laws is very effective at doing is creating incredibly profitable marijuana. Uh marijuana is a weed, it grows wild in all fifty states. It's very easy to grow. It doesn't have a huge value commercial value unless you start throwing around life sentences in which case as a black market commodity the value of the marijuana immediately soars so a lot of a lot of marijuana today is worth more per ounce than gold and if you want to try to figure out

why so much marijuana is being grown in the midwest and that's a big part of this part of the book is about how you know the farm belt of America has become a major marijuana producing area. Well if you're a farmer in the midwest and you're selling corn you can get about two dollars a bushel for your corn. On the other hand you can get $70,000 a bushel for marijuana so the laws against marijuana fuel the black market for marijuana and make it even more profitable for growers while not reducing the supply, while having no effect on whether kids smoke it or not and in a lot of ways you know one of the problems with the drug war is when you crack down on non conformists and minorities through a drug, the drug attains this whole symbolic importance that I don't think it deserves. [Host] Right [Schlosser] Now marijuana is a weed and when you smoke it you get high but it's associated with all these subcultures because of how the government has condemned it and you give it an elevated importance by cracking down on it this hard. Um we don't have the same kind of

culture around aspirin you know we don't have the same culture [Host] or pharmaceuticals So you know when you read the commission that President Nixon appointed to study marijuana. and its report which came out in 1972 it argued for nationwide decriminalization. It argued for demythologizing the drug and removing the symbolism and basically allowing adults to do, in the privacy of their own home, what they want to do as long as they're not hurting people. As long as you're not driving stoned, as long as you're not giving marijuana to kids or using in a public way that's offensive. You know government should mind its own business when it comes to what grownups want to do. [Host] yeah no it also is just a huge impact on the prison population. I think that's the other part is the disparity of punishment that I found so troubling and again just the general pervasive hypocrisy. I don't think there is any thinking intelligent adult that doesn't have some concept that that this is just horribly,

you know, horribly hypocritical. When as you say in the book you could be sitting on your couch smoking a joint in the privacy of your own home and you would be held to a higher standard and punished more strictly than somebody driving under the influence and hurting somebody. [Schlosser] your listener, well not hurting somebody but your listener should be aware that about twenty states now have smoke a joint lose your license laws. And as you said you can be on your couch in your living room smoking a joint. Your car could be ten blocks away in a parking garage and if you're busted with that joint your driver's licenses is suspended even if you weren't driving, had no intention of driving, the car battery could have been dead in those same states you could be busted driving drunk and not lose your license and you can go on and on any of ways that our laws are insane and and literally the speaker of reefer madness and you know your listeners should also be aware that the present administration has vowed to escalate

the war on marijuana. And Attorney General Ashcroft and his justice department sent a memo nationwide to all prosecutors to enforce the marijuana laws to the maximum. About a month before we went to war with Iraq while we were at code orange highest alert for Al-Qaeda attacking American cities. The Justice Department took time out from hunting down Al-Qaeda to stage a nationwide roundup of bong manufacturers and roach clip manufactures. Had you heard about this? [Host] Yes I think it was in the paper. [Schlosser] Operation Pipe Dreams over a thousand law enforcement officers nationwide involved in coordinated raids. I mean this is madness. [Host] you know and it's un and I think the hardest part is I have teenage children and there's very good reasons not to smoke weed [Schlosser] absolutely [Host] and they can I mean and I can talk about that in a rational way that this is the reason that you don't do it, a multitude of reasons um and

they don't but for this, like you say, for all the people with uh without the resources, without the means and and looking to escalate their social ?cross? and just the whole thing is up side down.[Schlosser] if you're busted with a joint you lose your federal student loans. If you're busted for a marijuana felony which can be an ounce of pot in some states is a felony.You cannot receive federal welfare benefits or food stamps for a marijuana felony a conviction.If you're convicted child molester or a convicted murderer or a convicted rapist you still can get those uh food stamps and federal welfare. So it is it is a war on marijuana and it's a war on non conformists and minorities and anybody who smokes pot should be extremely extremely careful. [Host] Yeah well and like I said I know you aren't and I am certainly not defending anybody's smoking or taking any mind

altering drugs of any description or marijuana I'm just simply saying can we have a conversation about public health in the arena where it belongs. Well anyway to get to the second vignette near book it's surrounding migrant labor and again you might want to give us a little bit of background. I did there was one quote in here that I thought was extremely telling. We depend on misfortune to build up our force of migratory workers the commission concluded and when the supply is low because there is not enough misfortune at home we rely on misfortune abroad to replenish the supply. [Schlosser] What we found and what we've done in this country for over a century is to import uh extremely poor people to compete for jobs with a poor who are already in the United States and the recruitment of illegal immigrants and in California agriculture created a business model and a labor model that's now being adopted throughout the United States. In "Fast Food Nation"

I looked at how illegal immigrants were recruited by meatpacking companies to break unions and drive wages lower and provide an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. And in the California strawberry fields you can see this business model in many ways at its purest. Now what's so interesting to me is how the government on moral grounds is eager to intervene to punish pot smokers but for when it comes to labor suddenly the free market applause and suddenly the government is unwilling to intervene. So you know minimum wage laws go unenforced, overtime laws, worker safety laws, there's been a real effort to get the government off a business businesses back and not enforce laws and remove regulations and as a result of a level of exploitation has just grown and grown. And if you go back to the early 1970's for the first time in this country's history farm workers were making real gains

in income. The UFW the United Farm Workers Union was really growing and even the farmworkers who didn't belong to the union saw their wages and working conditions improve because of the strength of the union. You had a couple of republican governors in California who stopped enforcing labor laws. The growers imported illegal immigrants mainly from from ?Juhaca? who are different ethnically from the Mestizo migrant workers who were in California broke the union drove wages down and in California some of the wages of farm workers have dropped by fifty percent over the last twenty years.In Florida some of the wages have dropped seventy five percent. We're talking about the poorest workers inAmerica becoming even poorer and yet the government won't intervene on moral grounds. And there's a real contradiction there and black market laborers spreading as a result throughout our economy. [Host] And again I think that the theme throughout the book that is hard to ignore is

that I don't live in California but even having visited there and even throughout the Portland and surrounding Hillsborough area people know that this is occurring. People are not unaware that there is something buoying up this market and something that that is unaccountable so the hypocrisy of it is just it's it's it's so apparent to anyone who looks around. [Schlosser] and the exploitation of Mexican workers has been occurring in California and the southwest for over a century. What's new is that the exploitation of Mexican immigrants who's now occurring in Nebraska and in Colorado and in Chicago. I live in New York City. We have never had Mexican illegal immigrants in New York City until recently and now there's a sizable number of them. I tried very hard in the book not to scapegoat these immigrants, not to demonize them, you know I spent time with the illegals in meatpacking and in California agriculture and

these are incredibly hard working uh religious people who've come here at great risk in order to help themselves and help us.[Host] to make a better life.[Schlosser]Yet these are some of the best American virtues you can imagine but you know the criticism that I am misdirected at the employers who are deliberately recruiting them in order to drive wages down for the people who are already in the country. The people who are hurt the most by the new wave of illegal Mexican immigrants in California are the Mexicans and the Mexican Americans who are already in California because wages are driven down for the poorest of the poor in this society. So [Host] and it was in some and you'd to speak to this a little bit it it must have a toxic effect for the entire culture I mean there you know regardless of you know the initial hurting of the poorest of the poor it moves out from there. [Schlosser] As black market labor increases in society

there's generally a widening gulf between rich and poor. There are also all kinds of ethnic tensions that can result even among Mexicans even Mestizo versus Indian and ?Juhaca? and ideally you have people being paidy decent wages legally but they pay taxes on and that they receive government services for. Right now in Los Angeles County I found this incredible statistic twenty eight percent of all wages are being paid in cash. Now that's a reversion to all forms of economic transactions that's that's Los Angeles county become more more like a developing or third world nation and so you know my argument is not to stigmatize any ethnic group [Host] Right [Schlosser] and ultimately I don't even care about a person's legal status legal, illegal, black, white, brown, what matters are the wages and the working conditions [Host] And like you said it should matter

[Schlosser] There's a quote in the book I'll have to find and read because this is a quote from I think our greatest president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and this is what people have to keep in mind when it when it comes to these jobs. No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country By living wages I mean more than a subsistence level, I mean the wages of a decent living and that attitude is in very short supply in government in America today. And as a result you know I visited with the farmworkers who are living in the hillsides of of San Diego county that a third of the farm workers in northern San Diego county are homeless and there are thousands of people who are living outdoors and going to work for ten to twelve hours a day and this is America the year 2003 .[Host} I know, I know I know um the last chapters are about pornography and can you tell us

a little you know there again there is some wonderful uh statistics and information on average two hundred and eleven porn new porn videos debut every week in America. A two thousand poll conducted by Christianity Today magazine found that 27% of American pastors sought out porn on the internet ranging from a few times a year to a couple of times a month. Um it's it's fascinating to me and I'm a novice and not very knowledgeable about it so it was very interesting. Um can you tell our listeners a little bit about the issue and um about the chapters. [Schlosser] Well I set out to really look at porn as a commodity from a business point of view, an economic point of view and I start out the book by quoting Adam Smith and by referring to Adam Smith's notion of the market which has been so popular for the last twenty years and Adam Smith argued [Host] not an accident [Schlosser] Adam Smith argued that the market was the fullest expression of democracy that what people wanted to buy what

other people wanted to sell was in many ways a result of, you know,the divine hand, the invisible hand. So I'm trying to turn that around a little bit and say well if the market is the fullest expression of democracy let's look at this market and how does this market fit into the ideology thats been running this country the last twenty years. A lot of the free marketeers have also been very anti porn and they have to deal with the fact that Americans are now spending eight to ten billion dollars a year uh on this industry. I'm not defending the product I'm not celebrating it in any way I'm trying to understand America by what it buys and what it wants and often the secret purchases and the secret desires are just as important as the public ones. Now this started out as a very small black market. In 1970 a federal commission estimated the total value of the hardcore porn in America was about five to ten million today it's billions. And what's interesting is how um you know in the early sixties when non conformists

were were were using swear words and were involved in sexually explicit material the government came down very hard on them. I mean Lenny Bruce was sent uh sent away and imprisoned for a few months for saying a few swear word during his nightclub act. On HBO you will on a typical night see stuff that is much more explicit no shortages of swear words and if you wanna see where tens and tens of millions of dollars are being earned from pornography it's not by fringe bohemian figures any more it's by companies like AOL Time Warner and Hilton and Marriott and the satellite providers and the major cable companies. So in looking at porn, you know, you start to wonder about the lines between the underground and the mainstream and when they change and who benefits when they change and in this instance you know these corporations are not being prosecuted in the same way uh that individuals were just fifteen twenty years ago.Ultimately my aim [Host] yes [Schlosser] is trying to make you think about these issues and try to make you rethink what's going on in

this country and challenge some of the governing assumptions. I mean ultimately I'm not trying, my book is not a manifesto, it's an effort to expose things that I didn't know about and I think are being hidden but most of all to make people think.[Host] yeah yeah and it really does. I want to thank you again for being here and again thanks for such a fascinating and important information. Um it it's you made it easy to get and to understand and because of your original research and reporting you've done us all a really great favor. I can't tell I can't thank you enough [Schlosser] Thank you. [Host] this has been Michelle Schroeder Fletcher at KBOO 90.7 FM I've been speaking with Eric Schlosser whose new book is "Reefer madness sex drugs and cheap labor in the american market black market