Drugs? I suppose some form of regulation would be better. Governments get scary when they attempt to legislate morality. Drug use is immoral (IMO), but perhaps it shouldn't be illegal.
you'll have to explain here, because it seems to me that under a legal regime, a prostitute making a clear decision to sell sex is no more a victim than the owner of a convenience store deciding to sell slurpees.
What percentage of the market has to be drugged-out sex slaves (often imported from some other countries, if the horror stories are true) before it's acceptable to shut down the whole market by criminalizing it?
Does criminalizing the market help those drug-addicted sex slaves, or does it make their situation worse?
Prostitution is illegal as a matter of public health, codified by religious texts. It doesn't jibe well with the notion of individual liberty, nor does the personal use of drugs, defended also as a matte of "public health."
These types of laws (cascading down to the less oppressive blue laws) are attempts to create a unified morality. The problem is fares poorly with human behavior, hence the inevitable creation of black markets.
Is there evidence that the Nordic model (of prostitution laws - go after buyers, not sellers) accomplishes anything, or is it a feel-good law that at first glance looks like it has the right law enforcement incentives (don't punish the sex workers), but doesn't deliver on making sex workers safer or improving their lives?
http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/04/criminalizing-sex-work-cli...
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/02/25/european-parlia...
>> Since the introduction of the law, street prostitution has decreased (while increasing dramatically in Sweden’s neighbors) and Sweden has become an undesirable destination for pimps and traffickers. In addition, the new law has influenced attitudes regarding the purchase of sex: from 1996 (before the law) until 2008, the number of male sex buyers decreased from 13.6% to 7.9%.