The legalization of sex, drugs, and gambling would help remedy these industries by bringing them into the spotlight, Tom Matlack argues.
Priests can’t have sex, but the Church—and law enforcement—has allowed pedophilia to run rampant for years (First One to Come Forward). Apparently the only place it every happened is Happy Valley (Look in the Mirror).
Strip clubs are legal, but if you are going to serve drinks, you can only be topless (Inside a Strip Club). The most explicit sexual acts are OK on the web as long as they don’t involve a minor. The states with the highest pornography consumption are the most religiously conservative: Utah and the Bible Belt. Meanwhile, the federal government has decided to invoke the 13th amendment to the Constitution and deploy Homeland Security resources to fight sex slavery .
Alcohol and cigarettes kill significantly more Americans than all other drugs combined. Yet they are legal, and the “bad” drugs are illegal. The demand for illegal drugs in the United States is ripping Mexico apart as rival cartels kill each other for a share of the enormous black market.
For many minorities in our inner cities, the only realistic way to make a living is to participate in the distribution of drugs (Blood Splattered). Because it is illegal, this requires gang-style violence to enforce selling territories and selling relationships. Drugs dominate not just the lives of our most vulnerable citizens, but the economies of their communities as well. It’s mob-style abolition on a massive scale.
A long time ago we stole the land of the Native Americans. We used guns, a concept of property that was foreign to them, and sometimes even spread disease in their midst with the intent to kill them off. To make up for this immoral behavior, we have allowed a certain few Native Americans have a monopoly on gambling casinos.
State governments have long used lotteries to raise much needed money. This has been proven to be a regressive form of taxation. But now with state budgets in disarray, lawmakers are looking to increase gambling as a last resort. In my home state of Massachusetts, we have been debating slots forever and have now passed a law approving new Vegas-style casinos.
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The United States government is very good at auctioning off licenses. Since 1994, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has conducted auctions of licenses for the electromagnetic spectrum. The government has raised billions of dollars to grant the rights to the airwaves to private communications companies. Why not do the same thing for the supposed vices that are tearing our country apart?
Here’s how it would work. Each state would be granted the right to sell off licenses to particular forms of prostitution, gambling, and drug distribution. Massachusetts might decide they want two statewide providers of legalized cocaine and city-by-city prostitution licensing. Bidders would not only propose a license purchase price but also detail a process by which they would manage, monitor, and keep control over the business once it’s established.
From the government standpoint, we would receive substantial upfront payment from selling all these licenses. We’d then have the right to tax all these vices heavily, to make them somewhat less attractive and continue to generate much needed revenue. And we would have the ability to regulate, making sure that women in the sex trade are not exploited, that drug dosing is uniform with no foreign substance, and that gambling is fair.
This change in strategy would produce two much needed consequences.
First, it would allow us to take the prevalence of drugs, gambling, and sex out of the darkness and bring it into the light for all to see. Think of what has happened to the tobacco industry in this country. We didn’t outlaw it. We sued the companies for killing people and lying about it, and we made it uncool to smoke through large ad campaigns and banning it in public places like bars and restaurants.
Every drug container would have a warning label outlining the risks of using that substance. We’d finally get clear on what drugs have what scientific impacts on the human body and make that public knowledge. For every form of gambling, we would advertise, in bold letters, the exact odds of winning and losing, making clear you have to be an idiot to play. And we could finally start advertising the actual statistics about what is going on in the sex trade from pornography to strip clubs to prostitution. It wouldn’t be made illegal, but we’d finally begin to deal with its influence on our society.
The second major change would be to move from criminal to civil prosecution of cases involving vices. With licenses bought for large sums by established private companies, their right would be to police against anyone selling their product without a license. What before was a criminal matter would become purely economic with private companies suing anyone infringing on their rights just the way a patent holder might bring suit against a rival for using their intellectual property.
We’d finally stop putting so many minority men away in prison for becoming the foot soldiers in the illegal distribution of narcotics. Abolition didn’t work with booze, and it sure isn’t working with drugs. Booze may have bred the mob, but drugs have come to dominate manhood in our inner cities, and threatens to take down the whole of Mexico.
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Some might argue that legalizing drugs, sex, and gambling would make it more available and, therefore, increase the prevalence of these vices in our society. Just on first blush, I find it hard to believe that drugs, sex, and gambling could be any MORE dominant than they already are. Every state government is talking about opening casinos and expanding the lotto to pay their bills. Porn and the sex trade have become the biggest single entertainment industry. Drugs are arguably ruining our country as it is, both from use and by imprisoning so many men who might otherwise be useful members of our society.
These problems exist and are getting worse. We should legalize them, so we can actually get a grasp and start to make sense of it all, eliminating the dark underbelly, getting children out of prostitution and drugs out of our poorest communities.
We need to get radically honest about the impact of these vices on our people. Stop the hypocrisy of gambling under only certain nonsensical conditions that prey on the poor. Regulate and systematize the narcotic industry so we can focus on education and treatment rather than throwing away a whole generation. And finally, stop talking about sexual exploitation like it never happens when it’s actually omni-present.
Do you have a better idea?
—Photo Samantha Jade Royds/Flickr
About Tom Matlack
Vocalyze
The problem with the view that women are often sold into the sex industry against their will is that it is simply not true. The number of women (and men) who are found who have been “sold into slavery” every year is very, very small compared to the number of women (and men) who sell sex. It is not a norm: it is a small exception.
Yes, trafficking does occur. No, it is not the “normal” state of affairs in the sex biz.
Recent research into minors selling sex in NYC, for example, indicates that:
1) There are only probably a few thousand of them.
2) Half of them are boys.
3) Only 10% have pimps.
So if only ten percent of this very vulnerable population has pimps, we can reasonably expect that the number of people “sold” into sex is very small.
Furthermore, if your problem is slavery, sexual slavery is not really where you should be focusing your efforts. In countries like Brazil and Thailand, for example, there are hundreds of court cases of sexual trafficking of versus tens of thousands of cases of people freed from slavery in rural labor camps.
The “first world’s” obsession with sex makes it difficult for many people up there to comprehend that the vast majority of sex workers in a place like Brazil or Thailand are not slaves and that the vast majority of slaves here are people who are working to put sugar, coffee, orange juice and other tropical agricultural products on your table.
I will begin to take the U.S. and European anti-trafficking movements much more seriously when they quit worrying at the Village Voice’s adult ads section and begin to call for boycotts for products Europeans and Americans use everyday which are manufactured by slaves.
Yup – it’s easy to get indignant and upset over an op ed in a news paper over breakfast. A headline, some partial information and opinion expressed by an editor or journalist goes such a long way.
It even makes people reach for their coffee and fruit juice – and they don’t realize what they are consuming at the table. It was the same before the abolition of slavery in the US and Europe.
I’m interested in the NY figures – especially the one that Only 10% of child sex workers have a pimp. It does not agree with past studies I have been involved in as far back as the 1980′s.
One of those studies asked the child sex worker if they had a pimp or an adult who made them do it and those reports were balanced against the investigators real life observation of what was happening. The kids said “no pimp” which they had been coached to say – but direct observation identified adults who were controlling the child’s activity, either directly or even indirectly. It takes months to gain the trust of such kids before they start to open up and even make unguarded comments that reveal a deeper level of reality they live with. It’s shocking how kids will see a pimp as a friend and protector.
Pimping can be achieved by physical threat or by grooming. A child who is told they have to have sex under duress to provide income for the pimp is the stereotype. I have even had to deal with a whole family where the kids were sent out by the parents to bring back cash – no physical threat involved – it was just the family trade, and brought about by generations of intergenerational sexual abuse and exploitation in including incest by all adults, male and female. Both parents also worked the streets, and had done so since childhood. Apart from the obvious, it was a fairly stable and normal family unit.
I have seen cases, far too many in fact, where it is a family member who gets the child involved without physical threat, be that parent, sibling, other blood family member.
I’d love to see the full report you mentioned – and possible links or hints on where to find it?
Are you referring to “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in New York City – Volume One -
The CSEC Population in New York City: Size, Characteristics, and Needs, Curtis etal – 2008″ – funded by the U.S. Department of Justice – John Jay College of Criminal Justice?
It has some interesting figures including the proportion of pimps who are female and trading upon both male and female children.
The report is seen as having a higher value than others due to the ethnographic work done where the researchers actually went out on the streets to see reality – and didn’t just rely on questions and answers on paper. The scope was limited though due to funding and time factors.
One flaw in that report that has been discussed with the investigation is recruiting participants by peer referral – that is kids are given coupons to pass onto others they know to be sex workers. If the child had what would be seen as a classic Pimp – it was not checked how many of their coupons were redeemed by other child sex workers under the pimps control. It’s easy to see that a Pimp would discourage other members of their stable from collecting the $20 coupon reward, when it could be a police trap and the kid could earn 10 times as much in the same time period.
In any case The Report does provide quite an insight into a world that far too few are aware of, and which far too many make pronouncements about.
Are you referring to “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in New York City – Volume One -
The CSEC Population in New York City: Size, Characteristics, and Needs, Curtis etal – 2008″ – funded by the U.S. Department of Justice – John Jay College of Criminal Justice?
It has some interesting figures including the proportion of pimps who are female and trading upon both male and female children.
The report is seen as having a higher value than others due to the ethnographic work done where the researchers actually went out on the streets to see reality – and didn’t just rely on questions and answers on paper. The scope was limited though due to funding and time factors.
There is interesting coverage of the study citypages.com Nov 2 2011.
I understand that the DOJ have been pushing the studies findings since 2008 – but it seems some groups refuse to accept them. I have also heard that the study is being extended across a number cities on a national basis – with federal grant funding. Many are awaiting further findings to see in the New York sample is nationally significant.
I’m glad that someone else has started to criticize our culture’s obsession with “sex trafficking” or what I like to call the “phantom menace.” By the way, as far as human trafficking goes I would love to see the west take very strict stands on other types of human trafficking such as conscripting soldiers and particularly child soldiers. For some reason we in the first world become very squeamish when it comes to the remote possibility that women and children may be trafficked in the sex trade but tend to ignore the fact that men, children and at times women are forced to fight, kill and die in some very disturbing conflicts. I wonder how many of the anti-sex trafficking advocates would jump on board with putting pressure on first world governments demand that any foreign group that they support will at the very least not use the so-called “child soldiers.”
Awsome article Matlack! If you look around the World, you’ll find many countries wherethere are either no laws against these vices,or if there are, they only exist “on paper” and are’nt enforced. These countries don’t seem to be any worse off than us in this regard. When I was in 7th grade or so I remember this new government pharse “The War on Drugs”. Well, it’s been 45 years or so. So , how’s that war going anyway?( This is why I shudder when I hear the pharse “The War on Terror”). In High School, I remember it was easier for us to buy pot than beer. (Pot dealers didn’t proof you). Just realize that if drugs are legalized, expect “Big Pharma” to take the lead. After all, who has more money to spend or more government influence already bough and paid for?
“Abolition didn’t work with booze, and it sure isn’t working with drugs.”
Truer words are rarely spoken! Regulation, not prohibition, is the key to controlling these things. Legalizing and regulating these things is what the world needs! If there is anything that we can count on, its that the IRS will get their tax money! Drug dealers wont stand a chance!
Yeah, continuing to ruin people’s lives is ok, as long as the IRS get their money and we get rid of drug dealers, right.
The only downside to legalization is that it means more government control in our lives. Government regulatory agencies don’t always do their jobs very well. There is not a more regulated industry than Banking and Wall Street. And you see what a great job those agencies did there!
Initially I would have been against legalizing any of these crimes and vices, simply because they’re illegal and corrupt. But I have a change of mind.
I think once these things are legalized… government, police enforcement, media, schools and social agencies can work toward educating and weening people off of these bad habits. This is being done with cigarette smoking. Smoking was banned in malls; soon after came restaurants, workplaces and now vehicles with small children as passengers. Also stores had to hide cigarette packages from view. These changes came in small stages and people were warned ahead of time of when the laws were coming into effect. Despite knowing smoking kills, some would be furious no matter what, but majority felt less threatened by this gradual shift to change their behavior.
Sex trafficking is prohibited, so are street drugs – yet there are a lack of or no campaigns targeting these issues, telling people to not do them because it’s illegal and x, y and z can happen (to open up people’s consciousness and understand the consequences). Why is this? Is it because sex trafficking and street drugs are underground enterprises and shameful to target people with? Because in doing so, such social awareness advertising may sully a city’s or neighbourhood’s reputation? I think some people need shaming…to let it be known those are crimes and are not good practice or acceptable social norms.
Someone earlier mentioned Wilberforce and the British campaign to end the international slave trade in the early 1800’s, as an example of a society pulling together to end human trafficking. This is an interesting choice of inspiration, but maybe not in the ways intended. Wilberforce was moved by religious belief that slavery was evil, but the British business elite was thinking of long-term economic benefit.
The big business leaders of the time realized that slave labor was less efficient than wage labor, and the imperialists reckoned it would be better for the British empire to have Africans as employees and subjects instead of slaves. They saw that they would make more money by paying people than by enslaving them, and more money by leaving them in Africa and then colonizing them. They thought that slavery was morally backwards, but mostly they thought slavery was economically obsolete. The abolitionists also argued that if former slaves were able to become wage workers, then they would be truly independent human beings.
Better to pay people than enslave them? Sounds to me like an argument for the legalization of prostitution.
Gambling is legal here in Australia and we have big signs next to the pokies saying what an idiot you are for doing it and…it’s still a huge problem that ruins lives and families regularly. Just like the legal products of alcohol and tobacco. And just like what legalised drugs would do.
Legalizing ‘illicit’ sex/substances/activities will in the short term most likely create immense societal chaos. The social system would be required to adapt, in some ways against the values of the majority, and I do not mean the moral minority, I mean the majority of prefered and ingrained values in the 1st world. Abuse of other human beings perpetuates the trauma wherein people fil their lives with addictions to lust and drugs and gambling and whatever drugs are available. People raised in shame are so accostomed to feeling shame that propoganda creating shame around that consumption is most likely only to fuel their use, never curb it. The sorts of trauma that humankind inflicts upon its own members creates people who value themselves so little as to sell sex on street corners as wel las the people who purchase those acts of sex which undermine their values, their families, their incomes, their physical, mental, and emotional health; and/or drink themselves, drug themselves, hate themselves into ruin. Legalizing the substances we use to abuse each other and ourselves will never resolve these conflicts of human nature and nurture. These things will never be regulated into balance. Legalizing only serves to deflect financial investment of the society away from surpressing these activities, and allowing governments to tax the resultant self medication of a neurotic population, perpetuated by the very acts of society which create them, i.e. war, humans living without support, violence in the home and in the streets. Sadly, these very human traits are far beyond the scope of any religion, any governmental organization, any support group.
Awesome article, Tom. I totally agree.
I just shudder when reading “Legalize sex”! Like it’s been illegal…
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(ok, I know for some people it should be
I think it’s a poor choice of words, and misleading.
Okay, grammar police here: “Apparently the only place it every happened” WTF?! This piece has been up for almost 1Q and no one’s corrected this?