You are conflating two issues; the opioid crisis and the illegal drug war. They share nothing in common but the generic use of the word drug.

The analogy holds perfectly with the drug war.

Eh, not really. Even the legal sex industry jobs like porn are pretty much rife with abuse, scams, and ****ty people. There are wholesale problems with how we treat sex workers that aren't solved by merely legalization.

I get what you're saying here, but it reads a little too libertarian-simplistic. There are plenty of exploited workers in legally acquired jobs. A legal prostitution industry would still require additional protections unique to sex work.

I think porn and prostitution is sorta an apples and oranges thing. You legalize prostitution and it would become easier for workers engaged in the business to work independently and not have to rely on sketchy set ups. In porn the workers will always have to answer to film makers, etc.

Cracking down on legal producers and distributors of opiates and moving the market entirely into the hands of organized crime would not make the world a better place.

The question in both cases is what happens when you have an inadequate supply of barely legal teens. The answer is someone picks up drug addicts and offers them a choice between more drugs and doing what they are told or beatings if they don't.

I don't think legalizing prostitution whilst fighting human sex trafficking is an impossible feat.

"Fighting" isn't impossible for sure. It's not as straightforward as drugs. For one, it's been studied pretty thoroughly that legalization of drugs doesn't increase drug use, certainly not by a significant amount. If the same isn't true for prostitution, then it might make sex trafficking worse even if it's fought.

I think the issue calls for study and regulation and the best policy can't just be divined from principles.

Wages go up? Enslaving your workforce and not having to pay the going rate is something every employer could benefit from doing. The reason they don't is some mixture of the fact that it's morally abhorrent, it's illegal, and it's impossible/too expensive to control your slaves. That analysis suggests that having the sex trade run by criminals and putting all participants in sex work outside the law is likely to be a bigger contributor to slavery than anything inherent about the job (other than the supposition that the market wage for sex work is very high).

EDIT: Also, it's super, super, super obvious that concerns about the welfare of sex workers are not among the reasons for our current prostitution laws. The proof is that selling sex is illegal! You can come up with tortured rationalizations to say that the prohibition of buying sex helps sex workers, but it's obviously bad for sex workers to make them criminals.

Sure, studies would be great. But keeping prostitution illegal also makes it harder to track and licensing sex workers could possibly also have a positive effect on STD #s.

Prostitution is an especially ripe market for slavery. Not needing a fixed location it's easy to avoid regulation. There is an especially vulnerable workforce. The difference between the wages expected by an independent agent and a slave (the costs rather than wages) are huge. It's an extremely profitable business with a low barrier to entry.

I'm not suggesting the result is better one way or the other necessarily, just that it's not obvious and empirical results need to be studied. If legalization increased the use of prostitutes it may well result in more slavery. If it doesn't, then, like drugs, it's trivially obvious that legalization with the opportunity to have more monitoring and regulation would improve things.

At any rate I would suggest primarily punishing Johns and traffickers. If you do legalize it, then drop the punishment of Johns unless they could reasonably have expected the prostitute to have been unfree. Perhaps under a legalized system there should still be no legal way to act as an agent/pimp.

How do you not like Charlie Rose? He has the greatest voice of all time and does really good interviews.

In the UK it's strict liability so it's the responsibility of the john has to make sure the prostitute isn't subject to force.

Start at 1.35

That's another factor for sure. My main point here is that it's complicated and can't be decided based on principles. You can't know what will happen as a result of changing policy. Except of course there probably have been studies, prostitution is legal and regulated in places and I'm sure there are people who have studied this.

The current legal status has been based on principles though. Any change of legal status would probably entail legal documents lengthier than War and Peace and probably years of hashing out.

The Dutch probably have statistics and data. Though when I looked to see apparently they have issues with human trafficking.

This seems correct.

lol how are they supposed to know?

Yes. I think that is obviously true and if prostitution is illegal I think only the consumer and trafficker/pimp should be prosecuted in any way.

This could be regulated, with the state doing something to certify the prostitute is not coerced.

Or it could just be a standard like "a reasonable person would have concluded coercion was likely."

Dunno what the British law is or what chez is thinking. It would be pretty impossible to *know* such a thing.

Male and female promiscuity are always treated differently by society.

Yeah, my response is to chez's "strict liability" thing. Ideally the state would be responsible for checking this, and the consumer would only be responsible in "they should've known" type situations. Requiring the consumer to do extensive research into the background of the prostitute seems, um, impractical at best.

They can't be. They can be the ones to take the risk and it removes a lot of the defense from people who had a fair idea but could argue reasonable expectation.

Leeway on sentencing rather than on whether it's a crime makes some sense.

But why should they be legally liable if they have no way of knowing? Should I be legally liable if labor laws were broken in the production of goods I bought, etc?

It's the law as far as I know.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...ed-women-smith

I'm in two minds but can see the benefit of removing the 'didn't know' defense. There's downsides as well.

Defending the pharmaceutical industry is really not a good look.

The primary reason opiate addicts are created in the first place is the overprescription/production of these legal drugs. That's the first thing that has to be addressed.

/end derail