Reefer Madness
Subtitle: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
By: Eric Schlosser.
Edition: 1st Mariner Books ed. (1)
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company; Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Boston, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780618446704
Copyright date: 2004
Subjects: Informal sector (Economics) -- United States -- Case studies; Black market -- United States -- Case studies; Marijuana abuse -- United States; Migrant agricultural laborers -- California; Illegal aliens -- California; Sex-oriented businesses -- United States
Genres: Case studies.
Description: America's black market is much larger than we realize, and it affects us all deeply, whether or not we smoke pot, rent a risqué video, or pay our kid's nannies in cash. In Reefer Madness the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation turns his exacting eye on the underbelly of the American marketplace and its far-reaching influence on our society. Exposing three American mainstays — pot, porn, and illegal immigrants — Eric Schlosser shows how the black market has burgeoned over the past several decades. He also draws compelling parallels between underground and overground: how tycoons and gangsters rise and fall, how new technology shapes a market, how government intervention can reinvigorate black markets as well as mainstream ones, and how big business learns — and profits — from the underground. 

Reefer Madness is a powerful investigation that illuminates the shadow economy and the culture that casts that shadow.
(back cover)
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-311) and index.
"A Mariner book."
Originally published: 2003. With new afterword.
Table of contents: title: The underground --; title: Reefer madness --; title: In the strawberry fields --; title: An empire of the obscene --; title: Out of the underground --; title: Afterword : more madness.