Prostitutes vs. Drug Dealers

There is a challenge to the laws connected to prostitution working its way up the Ontario court system right now and one of the central issues being discussed is how to keep prostitutes safe while simultaneously punishing their customers. In the words of the national newspaper The Globe & Mail (G&M), "The appeal has dwelt on prostitutes to the exclusion of the real culprits – male customers."

Now, I could complain about the culprits being stereotyped as strictly male but that is a trite criticism and, to be honest, most johns probably are men. Instead, I'd like to speculate on why we accept that prostitutes are morally superior to their customers but we think drug dealers are much worse than their customers.

As proof of this distinction, first consider that under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, trafficking in opium, cocaine, or meth can get you as much as life in prison while merely possessing those same drugs can't get you more than seven years. In contrast, prostitution is technically legal in this country (and may be headed towards greater legitimacy) but soliciting the services of a prostitute is an offence. The pervarding opinion is that people who buy sex should be the focus of the fight against prostitution while people who buy drugs are a peripheral concern in the war on the drugs.

Let's start with what prostitutes and drug dealers have in common: Both peddle vice. Both have high demand for their product despite decades/millenia of intervention by the state. Both sell on street corners at the lowest levels. Both spread disease -- prostitutes in the form of STIs and drug dealers less directly through the needles their customers share. Both operate in a black market which prevents them from appealing to law enforcement when things go awry or they find themselves in danger. For both groups, operating outside the law makes them an easier target for violence, as does the criminal element they deal with in the course of their business. If anything, an addict is going to be more likely to resort to violence if he or she cannot get their fix relative to a john.

So, in an effort to explain the dichotomy, I have come up with some theories about what is going on, consciously or subconsciously, that would cause the moral repugnancy to lie with the producer/distributor when it comes to drugs and with the consumer when it comes to sex.

1. Theory #1: Agency: You cannot really be a victim if you have agency and both drug dealers and johns have a choice when it comes to what they do. Drug dealers could easily quit if they weren't so greedy but addicts don't have that same option since they are constrained by their chemical dependency. Similarly, prostitutes are also victims of circumstance forced to sell their bodies because of a dearth of other options.
   
   The primary problem with this theory is that it only applies to a fraction of prostitutes. Some of them are street walkers but others (the majority?) chose the vocation because it is better than working 8-hour shifts at Starbucks for a fraction of the income. For example, there is "Victoria Love (her trade name)" who has a condo in Toronto's east end and "lives a comfortable, middle-class existence after 15 years in the business." You cannot claim to have no other options if you are living a middle-class and have the social skills to run a small business (even if that small business happens to sell its customers sex). And there is the "attendant" at Studio 409 in Toronto "who was attracted to the idea of stepping outside her workaday life, she works two evenings a week servicing men: 'I get to meet a lot of interesting people,' she says. 'And it gives me money to go travelling.'".
   
   The secondary problem with the theory of agency is that johns are not rational actors free from instinct or compulsion either. The human sex drive is a powerful force and sex addiction is a real problem. Similarly, drug dealers might not have had a wide variety of professions to choose from if they grew up in the wrong environment.
   
   For the most part, however, I think the theory of agency explains a lot about how we go from an intuitive stereotyping of drug addicts and prostitutes as victims of circumstances to them not being morally culpable, even if those stereotypes do not necessarily reflect reality.
   
   
2. Theory #2: Robert Pickton: Some attitudes and opinions are not the result of an overview of all the evidence on both sides of an issue but a reaction to one egregious incident which is then flamed by the media's bellowing. For the purposes of this theory, the one egregious incident is Robert Pickton's murder of 49 women, most of them prostitutes. Not only did Pickton murder the prostitutes, he cut them into pieces and fed them to his pigs. That is the sort of story that gets a reaction. In this case, the theory goes, the reaction is sympathy towards prostitutes and antipathy towards those who would pick them up.
   
   But the theory doesn't really fit chronologically: the push towards greater acceptance of prostitutes already seemed to be gaining traction in Canada before Pickton was arrested. And geographically the theory does not fit either: 1) If Pickton's murders were really the motivating factor, then wouldn't you expect to find the prostitution laws challenged in British Columbia; and, 2) Countries that do not pay attention to Canadian murder trials like Australia, Germany, and Sweden have been drifting towards decriminalizing prostitution for a long time without any real cultural awareness of what was going on in BC. Moreover, many of Pickton's victims were also drug users but I am not aware of any new push towards protecting them that could be construed as fallout from the murders. Lastly, prostitutes have been the main targets of several serial killers -- including Jack the Ripper -- but there has not been this type of response before.
   
   
3. Theory #3: Prostitutes = drug addicts: Keep in mind that the common conception of a prostitute is a drug addict forced to sell her body to pay for her addiction. If the prostitute is a sympathetic figure and the prostitute is also a drug addict then the prostitute and the drug addict should be treated with the same sympathy. The conclusion would still be valid if you started with the assumption that drugs addicts are sympathetic.
   
   Of course, this raises three new questions: 1) Which condition is initially sympathetic: prostitution or drug addict? 2) Why is that condition sympathetic in the first place? 3) Why aren't johns or drug dealers sympathetic? Any answer to these questions requires its own separate theory.
   
   
4. Theory #4: Sexism: When you envision a typical drug dealer you think of a man but when you envision a typical prostitute you think of a woman. When you think of a criminal you think of a man, so if prostitutes are women then they do not fit the profile of a criminal. What I am getting at is that if prostitutes are understood to be women and we struggle to conceive of women as criminals then we have to place the moral culpability of any repugnant act with the male involved, i.e. the john.
   
   This theory is more likely to offend than convince but I do think it is a powerful explanation. In a country where a man is about 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than a woman, our concept of what a criminal looks like tends to be masculine.
   
   
5. Theory #5: The product's inherent dangers: Illicit drugs can kill people or, even worse, cause the user to go so crazy they kill someone else. Sex, meanwhile, does not harm the man paying for it. Sure, he might pick up a disease but the sex won't cause him to jump out of a seven-story window because he thinks he can fly. Plus, drugs are usually addictive so selling drugs can have a long-term deleterious effect.
   
   But if selling sex is within acceptable limits because sex is not going to hurt anyone, why is it bad to buy sex? If you say it is because sex can still hurt the prostitute who is vulnerable then we are back to theory #1 and the difference between women who take advantage of prostitution and those who are taken advantage of. Also, there are psychological dangers with prostitution that do not exist with drugs, like objectifying women's bodies because they are being rented by the hour.
   
   
6. Theory #6: Illegality: Prostitution is not actually illegal, so it is OK that prostitutes sell it but drugs are always illegal so drug dealers cannot claim that exception.
   
   Well, first of all, drugs are not always illegal: you can get prescriptions, buy over-the-counter drugs, or buy drugs like alcohol and tobacco. More importantly, this theory begs the question of what grounds we have for making this distinction in the first place; you cannot say it is ok to sell sex because the law says it is ok to sell sex. That is circular. Morality should dictate the law, not the other way around.
   And even if we accepted that prostitution is good and drugs are bad as a starting point, wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that buying sex is much more acceptable than using drugs? Because that's not what most people think, as far as I can tell.