doodledee

Eric Schlosser has a new book out. Called Reefer Madness, it explores the 'underground economy' in the United States from the perspective of marijuana, migrant workers, and hardcore pornography. This stands in contrast to his first book, Fast Food Nation, which seems much tamer as it talks about how a potato becomes a french fry.

Mr. Schlosser was in town last Friday doing a book reading over at Ruminator Books on the Macalester College campus. Being a fan, I went over to hear what he had to say. Being a cynic, I was giddy as can be.

It was a pretty full house. All the chairs were taken so some people had to stand or sit on the floor. Mr. Schlosser came out right on time and launched into what turned out to be about a 45 minute talk. He started by raging about the the misconception we have of the 'free market' and how the Pentagon used economic freedoms to [at least partially] justify the war in Iraq. That was fun. Then he moved into the marijuana portion of the program, describing several of those cases where some kid in Indiana gets busted with a joint and ends up being sentenced to 90 years without parole. That was also fun. Finally, before taking questions, he did a reading from the migrant worker portion of his book. Can't complain.

Overall I found his talk reasonably solid, but occasionally it was hard to track where he was going. Trying to find a common thread was difficult because his talking points at times seemed to contradict one another. At one point he would be arguing for a more 'free market' - one that allows us to buy and sell whatever we wanted - namely marijuana, but then he would turn around and argue that we need more government regulation and oversight in the market, including things like wage and benefit guarantees. Hmm... So we're supposed to subsidize hemp once we make it legal? Is that it?

The audience questions were a total hoot. One dude brought up the old marijuana v. the paper industry conspiracy theory - Schlosser shot it down; another went crazy talking about how 'all poor people smoke pot and drink a lot' - Schlosser looked uncomfortable; perhaps most bizarre, a classic liberal wacko raised her voice and called for a global minimum wage. I laughed out loud at that one.

Good times.