He still believes

In the world of journalism, investigative reporters are the test pilots, almost as glamorous as foreign correspondents. Integrity, courage, dogged curiosity and a general disregard for personal hygiene are their movie-version personality traits. But mild-mannered Eric Schlosser has higher goals and lesser motivations.

He writes about the things that bug him: the grief of families of murder victims, the American prison-industrial complex, and the seduction of America by the fast-food industry. It is that book, “Fast Food Nation,” that gripped American audiences so tightly that it stayed on some bestseller lists for more than a year, went into six printings and sold more than 1 million copies in this country, Canada and Japan.

In his latest book, “Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market” (Houghton Mifflin), Schlosser, irritated by government hypocrisy and the failures of the free market, has written about the 9% to 10% of the economy that takes place outside the law: pornography, pot and illegal immigrants.

A reworking of pieces he has written for other publications, the book is peopled with porn kings like Reuben Sturman, whom Schlosser considers “the creator of the modern adult entertainment industry”; strawberry workers who make $7,500 a year in California for six months of work, and guys like Mark Young, imprisoned for a single marijuana joint.

These are the things that keep Schlosser, a youthful Adam Sandler-type 43-year-old, up at night in New York, where he lives with his wife and two children. The role of the journalist, however, does not keep him up at night. It’s something that was woven into his DNA and into the fabric of his upbringing by his father, a television network executive, and fueled later in life by his wife’s father, actor Robert Redford, long a respected liberal power in this country.

Schlosser believes, and he wants others to believe as well. In what? In America. In the progressive shift that he feels is coming. In the power of the media to do good. In the possibility of being prosperous and still compassionate. But most of all in common sense. These are the things that drive him.

He has the look of a super-cool, even cynical New Yorker, but has the heart of a Californian. Schlosser loves L.A. The mere opportunity to walk a few blocks through Brentwood puts a bounce in his step as he recalls his childhood in Beverly Hills, where he lived from ages 6 to 13. “These were happy years, before concrete.... We rode bikes.... Rich and poor lived next to each other, even in Beverly Hills.”

For his pieces in the Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, he has been compared to Mike Davis, Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair. It doesn’t get much better than that.

And on this day, he is happy just to be eating in a little Italian bistro. “To write about these issues,” he says, is to put yourself at risk. Schlosser does not want to romanticize the role of the journalist, but he has strong feelings and he tends to take on large corporations and other, shall we say, family-like organizations. His first piece on marijuana ran in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994. “When I wrote that piece, it was against the law to even visit marijuana growers.” Where was the risk in trashing hamburgers? “Fast-food companies tend to be very litigious,” he says, knocking wood.

He is curious. Would his lunch guest let her child smoke marijuana? There’s a pause. “My kids will absolutely not smoke pot,” he interjects. “It’s just too dangerous. They could end up in prison.

“These are not radical times,” says Schlosser, who is fond of understatement and is passionately opposed to the criminalization of marijuana. “The last 20 years have been very self-oriented. I was upper-middle-class, but I was not brought up to believe I was special. My father was a TV executive in a time when there were only three major networks. Things are better now, but I watched my dad struggle with corporate powers over ethical issues. He was a corporate executive, but he had a sense of public service.”

Schlosser refers to what he calls the current “Coolidge Agenda,” a policy of freedom and free market he says applies not to labor but only to certain commodities. “There is no free market,” he says. “If there was a free market there wouldn’t be water in this restaurant” (our waiter misunderstands the gesticulating man and rushes to fill his glass).

“Our government is way too interested in so-called moral issues,” he goes on. “That’s why there are currently 1.8 million people in prison for smoking marijuana. The price of oil, our most important commodity, is decided by a few men in a room, which we call OPEC. The Federal Reserve decides how much money to print. Gambling is totally controlled by organized crime, which is now mainstream. Free market,” he snorts.

All this doesn’t leave one feeling optimistic. “Where would you go?” he asks. How about Italy? “I love Italy,” he sighs, sitting back. “But I really love this country, and I’m appalled by it at the same time.”

“Here are some Reasons to Be Cheerful,” he says. “One: In the last five to six years, McDonald’s has lost money. These huge corporations are simply overextended. Two: The problems I write about are unnecessary and easily solved. Paying tomato pickers an extra 5 cents per pound does not require Marxist revolution.”

Schlosser studied with legendary literary journalist John McPhee in the 1970s at Princeton. “Everyone who studied with him wanted to write like him,” he says. “It was like watching a master word-worker. But sooner or later, you had to let go of it. There is no one way to write.”

Was he surprised by the success of “Fast Food Nation”? “There’s another reason for optimism!” he says, grinning. “The big houses wouldn’t touch it. There was no indication that it would be a big success. To me, the success of that book means something is changing.

“I’ll give you another reason for optimism,” he says, now on a roll. “I was a New Yorker on Sept. 11. I’ve never seen human beings behave so well. It was not a fairy tale. It was human beings behaving nobly. How about this,” he says, finding yet more good in our culture: “When I was born in 1959, black people had almost no rights. The Soviet Union is gone. The Berlin Wall is down. Apartheid is crumbling.

“And we can’t give migrant workers an extra nickel per pound?”