Mass Media and Popular Culture
Reefer Madness Review
Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and cheap Labor in the American Black Market touches on the three pillars of the US underground Economy; Marijuana, Migrant Labor and Pornography. Published in 2003 and written by the American journalist Eric Schlosser, also renowned for books such as Fast Food Nation and Chew on This. Schlosser known for his investigative journalism analyzes the unpleasant truths when you turn over the rock of mainstream American business and check underneath. Attesting America as a monumentally two-faced country.
Schlosser starts with the so-called war on drugs, beginning with the unjustly justice system. Mark young at the age of thirty-eight was convicted under federal law to a life sentence in prison for simply introducing two people wishing to sell a large amount of marijuana to three people hoping to buy it. Yong was arrested a year and a half after the offence occurred, had no previous criminal record and no physical evidence that he was even linked to the crime. His conviction was based solely on the testimony of co-conspirators cooperating with government. Mark Young was sentenced without any possibility of parole. Young’s story is one of many justifications of government corruption and intentionally misleading and aberration of the phrase war on drugs.
Adding to the effect of this amoral system are the figures for an American found guilty of murder; on an average they will serve eleven years and four months of prison time. Compared with the minimal of twenty years to a life sentence for growing, selling, possessing, or even buying marijuana. Today there are more people behind bars for violating marijuana laws than ever in American history.
There are no notable records of any deaths caused be marijuana. One of many valid points by Schlosser, although he never condones the drug he neither condemns it. He simply argues it should be kept away from young people....
