REEFER MAN

by Todd Peterson, Mon Sep 8, 2003

Story by Todd Peterson Photo by Brian Jahn Eric Schlosser’s best-selling Fast Food Nation provided an unsettling view of the ingredients in burger joints’ all-beef patties and of the iron grip these multinational corporations have on our culture, from slaughterhouses to ad agencies. His new book, Reefer Madness, focuses on the enterprises that drive America’s underground economy: illegal immigrant labor, pornography, and marijuana.

In Reefer Madness, Schlosser details the harms that have been perpetrated by the government in the name of fighting marijuana. While he avoids endorsing legalization, he poses what ought to become a fundamental question in the war on drugs: How does a society come to punish a man more harshly for selling marijuana than for killing someone with a gun?

His next book will be on the prison system.
In …READ MORE