Do you like your market black?

I recently finished reading Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, and I'm a little disappointed in myself because, well, I had pretty much the same reaction that everyone else I know had to it: Nice read, but it ain't no Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.

That first book was kind of transformational for me. I've been vegetarian now for three years, and I originally did it to make me eat a more healthy diet. But Fast Food Nation clarified for me some social reasons for my decision. And it isn't just a horrors-of-the-stockyard, modern-day The Jungle that one might expect; Schlosser really explores the economics of fast food, like the low-wage jobs or -- most compelling to me -- the screwed-up business of franchising restaurants. (I now try to avoid setting foot in any fast-food franchise, even for a baked potato or salad.) And he looks at the cultural effect of fast food, like the targeting of kids in marketing campaigns while completely ignoring any negative effects on their health.

Fast Food Nation, I think, was also the book primarily responsible for bringing to the world's attention the (already known but heavily underreported) fact that McDonald's french fries actually had beef byproducts added to them and they weren't as "vegetarian" as many had originally believed. For this exposé alone, the book was worth publishing. One in a series of comeuppances that Mickey D's has had to suffer through in the last few years. I'll supersize an order of that, with relish, please.

Reefer Madness did not inspire me quite the same way, though Schlosser can take the facts surrounding a non-fiction event and spin a story as well as any novelist I've read. And it's in the section that could easily have become the most titillating that he tells the most intriguing tale. The section is on pornography, and the story is that of Reuben Sturman, the indisputable former king of modern pornography, and his remarkable "run" from the law, capture, escape, recapture, and eventual demise. While Sturman was not nearly as evil as one Al Capone, his desire to not give the US government one cent of his income went way beyond obsessive and mad Capone look like a rank amateur at tax evasion.

Though he sometimes seems a little unsure, Schlosser is fairly certain that more government regulation is needed. I struggle with the idea of more regulation myself -- I want to see better things happen in our country, but I'm sufficiently cynical to doubt that grassroots movements can effect that change. I'm sure I should be even more cynical of government's ability to do this as well, but the way I look at it, as long as the current administration is going to expand government at an ever-dizzying pace, I can wish to see that expansion used for the common good rather than for the purpose of beating ploughshares into swords.

So I, who have never so much as held a joint to my lips, am in favor of legalizing marijuana, since, despite the cultural "tradition" of casting it as something evil, could not possibly be any more destructive than alcohol. And let's use the income from taxing weed to fund some kickass substance abuse programs.

Let's get some serious immigration reform -- not that pseudo-bill that Bush just pushed to us prior to his trip to Mexico. I worry for the future of California, a state near and dear to my heart, if we don't find a way to pay living wages -- and as FDR put it in 1933, "by living wages I mean more than a subsistence level -- I mean the wages of a decent living." We need to think about our relationship to those low-paying, "immigrant" jobs in a whole new way.

And let's get some backbone and toss the Comstock Law. It's a relic of the past, a joke, and it only seems to get exercised when some conservative mouthpiece way out of the mainstream decides (s)he needs some attention (s)he can't otherwise get and tries to justify a crackdown on free speech disguised as something for the good of "the family."

As for Schlosser, though my excitement about him was slightly dampened by this book, I'm betting his next book brings him back more to the center of a media maelstrom: He's writing about the American prison system.