IN THE NEWS| DRUG STRATEGY - London News, 17 Dec 06 - drug legalization argument destroyed - Again! | Subject: Prostitution & Drugs use in Britain
Red light tolerance zones would cause prostitution to rocket By Melanie
Phillips
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Last updated at 23:11pm on 17th December 2006
The serial murders in Ipswich have rightly shocked the country. The
killing of prostitutes is no less sickening than the murder of other
women.
The five prostitutes who were killed in Ipswich deserve pity and
compassion just like any other murder victims.
Nevertheless, the sentimental reaction in some quarters to the lives
they led makes it all too likely that many more such lives will be
wrecked, even if they don't meet such a violent end.
One of the most striking things about the Ipswich prostitutes was that
drug addiction - as often as not starting with cannabis - led them
straight into the trade that in turn led them to their terrible end.
This has caused some to conclude that both illegal drugs and the
prostitution trade should be legalised.
Quite apart from the fact that prostitution itself is legal, this is
based on the utterly misguided belief that if sordid and destructive
illegal activities are legalised and regulated, the damage they do will
be minimised.
That was the assumption of an article yesterday in a Left-leaning paper
by Katharine Raymond, who was an adviser to the former Home Secretary
David Blunkett.
She claimed that a Home Office proposal two years ago to set up
red-light 'tolerance' zones, legalise brothels and register prostitutes,
was shelved for fear of a hostile response from the tabloids.
How absurd. The proposal was binned because it was rightly thought that,
rather than reduce the harm done by prostitution, such 'zones of
tolerance'
would increase it by becoming magnets for sex tourism and trafficking.
Countries that have gone down this route, such as the Netherlands,
Denmark or Germany, have seen a vast increase in prostitution - and
worse still, child prostitution - which has helped fuel the stupendous
rise in global people trafficking.
It is also hard to see how this policy would prevent such murders from
occurring. Even Glasgow's 'tolerance zone' did not prevent a murder from
taking place there.
We don't yet know where the Ipswich women were murdered, but the
Yorkshire Ripper killed his victims while they were walking home;
indeed, some weren't even prostitutes.
No amount of regulation can protect against that. The danger to
prostitutes comes essentially not from where they ply their trade but
from the trade itself.
Prostitution embodies a view of women which is intrinsically
brutalising, dehumanising and predatory.
That is why the violence to which it gives rise is routine. That is why
it is so appalling that anyone should be arguing that it should be
regularised and thus condoned.
The crucial fact that such proponents fail to acknowledge is that if
illegal activities become legal, many more people will engage in them.
That means a huge increase in the damage they do - because it's the
activities themselves that are so harmful, not just the further crime to
which they give rise.
All countries which have liberalised their drug laws have seen a vast
increase in their drugs trade.
Ms Raymond herself, let us not forget, was an adviser to a Home Office
which effectively gave the green light to cannabis use, thus putting a
rocket booster under drug use in Britain - which in turn is inextricably
linked to an equivalent explosion of people-trafficking and
prostitution.
Now the drug legalisers are trying a new tack. Medicalise drug use by
legalising heroin, they cry, and drug crime will go away. Can people
really be so ignorant? After all, we've been here before.
In the 1960s, heroin - along with cocaine, methedrine and even cannabis
- was available on prescription. What happened? Heroin prescription
increased; over-prescribing was rife because it was impossible to
estimate precisely how much an addict needed; the heroin was sold on to
other users, and criminality rose.
The idea that legalising drugs would get rid of crime is simply risible.
Legal drugs would always be undercut - both by lower prices and higher
strengths - by a black market. The only way to eradicate such an illegal
trade would be to supply unlimited quantities of all drugs totally free
of charge.
But the argument that legalising drugs would magic crime away has been
promoted assiduously for years by a multi-billion dollar industry
working covertly to overturn internationally agreed conventions against
drug use.
This now has its tentacles deep into an alliance within Britain of
police officers whose views owe more to polytechnic platitudes than
street wisdom, gullible or amoral commentators, and public figures
intent principally on protecting their drug-taking offspring from the
risk of getting a criminal record.
Contrary to their argument that the 'war on drugs' has been a failure,
the problem is rather that we have never given an unambiguous signal
that all drug-taking is wrong.
We have never grasped that a coherent policy against vice means
criminalising not merely those who supply the prostitution and drugs
trades, but the male punters and drug-takers who make use of them.
That doesn't mean excusing drug-dealers or treating prostitutes as
victims.
But these evil trades will never be curbed unless we stop making excuses
for, or sanitising the behaviour of, those whose demand for both drugs
and paid sex drive the trades that supply the means for such personally
and socially destructive behaviour.
Sweden understands this very well. That's why it has criminalised both
drug-takers and those who use prostitutes.
The result is that Swedish drug use is a fraction of our own, while in
Stockholm street prostitutes have been reduced by two-thirds and the
number of men using them has dropped by some 80 per cent.
By contrast, for many years Britain has had not a drug prevention policy
at all, but a 'harm reduction' strategy giving a set of highly ambiguous
messages.
More widely still, it's our society's tolerance of drug-taking and its
reduction of sex to a commodity that have desensitised us to the evils
of both drugs and prostitution.
The well-publicised drug habits of Pete Doherty or Kate Moss, for
example, have caused barely a ripple in their careers.
Prostitutes are sanitised as 'sex workers' by a society which thinks
there is more shame in stigmatising prostitutes than paying for sex.
After all, there are students who think nothing of prostituting
themselves to supplement their student loans.
Lap-dancing clubs are seen as socially acceptable venues for a lads'
night out. Even Marks & Spencer was proposing to market a pole-dancer as
a Christmas toy until protests forced it to take it off the shelves.
Over and over again - with abortion, pornography, under-age sex,
drinking, drug-taking or prostitution - we have lifted the constraints
of both law and the informal sanctions of shame and stigma in pursuit of
an 'enlightened'
doctrine of tolerance, only to see harm explode as these activities have
become acceptable.
We tell ourselves that the problem is not so much prostitution or
drug-taking but the law that constrains them. So we propose to turn the
state into the biggest pimp and drug-dealer of all.
This is surely the very opposite of either true compassion or
enlightened politics. The essence of a progressive society is to
minimise harmful behaviour.
Our let-it-all-hang-out 'liberals' aren't progressives at all, but
deepest reactionaries who would institutionalise harm and enslave
millions in a post-moral degraded universe.
We must instead try to prevent the systematic abuse of human beings, and
reaffirm our belief that we can indeed create a better world.
Posted December 19, 2006
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December 15, 2007
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