Sex, drugs and cheap labor will be the topic of a speech tonight in Campbell Hall.

Eric Schlosser, the best-selling author of Fast Food Nation, will speak tonight at 8 p.m. Admission to the event will be $10 to the general public and $8 for students. Schlosser’s speech tonight will focus on his most recent book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, which focuses on the underground economies of porn, marijuana and migrant labor. Though Reefer Madness only focuses on marijuana in one of its three sections, Schlosser says the title is appropriate.

“In that title, the keyword is ‘madness,'” Schlosser said. “The subjects are linked together by the huge amount of irrationality that goes into them, whether it be the way our marijuana laws are crafted, the way illegal immigrants have been scapegoated and demonized, or the country’s simultaneous obsession with and condemnation of porn.”

Schlosser said his research on marijuana laws influenced the subject matter of his next book.

“In Reefer Madness, I looked at some of the marijuana sentences being handed out, such as life without parole for first-time, nonviolent marijuana offenders,” Sclosser said. “That really got me looking at the criminal justice system and how it’s operating. The book I’m writing on America’s prison system right now is inspired by much of the research that I did for Reefer Madness.”

His next book is centered on the fact that America’s prison system is the largest in world history, Schlosser said.

“The central question of my upcoming book is how the ‘land of the free’ came to have the biggest inmate population in the history of the world,” he said. “To lock up two million people in prisons, you’ve got to be a really wealthy industrialized society, and no one has ever come close to doing it until now. No society has ever put so many of its own citizens behind bars.”

America’s prison industry has grown because people are not confronted with it on a regular basis, Schlosser said.

“I think prisons have been able to grow like they have because they are placed in remote rural areas rather than right in the heart of places like Santa Barbara,” he said. “These places are out of sight, out of mind, and the people we are locking up are the poorest members of society. Mainstream America doesn’t have to deal with this. The cost of what we’re doing is a very ethnically stratified society with a permanent underclass that can’t vote, can’t work and is pretty pissed off about it.”

Prison building, Schlosser says, has been America’s primary construction project for the past two decades.

“You can really learn a lot about an era by its great public works projects,” Schlosser said. “For example, in the 1930s you had the construction of post offices and dams. In the 1950s we were building interstates. There was a whole optimism to these huge construction projects, but the symbolism behind the prison building boom of the last 20 years is very different. It is not at all optimistic or about building a beautiful tomorrow. It’s all about punishment and confinement and it’s crazy.”

Schlosser has had a history of incendiary reactions to his work. After the publication of his article “Why McDonald’s Fries Taste So Good” in The Atlantic Monthly in 2001 – a precursor to his best-selling book Fast Food Nation – Hindus destroyed McDonald’s restaurants and staged riots all across India, and vegetarians sued McDonald’s over the beef content of their french fries.

But Schlosser said his Wednesday night presentation is meant to inform rather than to preach.
“In my work or my speech, I’m not trying to tell people how to live at all,” he said. “I’m just trying to make them think about how they live and then let them draw their own conclusions. The goal of my kind of reporting is to open people’s eyes to what’s happening and then it’s up to them to deal with it [or] not deal with it. I don’t go into it trying to get people to disagree with me, just to ask them not to live in ignorance of what’s going on.”

Schlosser’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report. Reefer Madness is his second book, and he is currently working on a third book on the American prison system for future publication.