Thinking About Drugs and Prostitutes

No, that’s not a description of how Eliot Spitzer wakes up every morning.

Robin Goldstein, over at Blind Taste, looks at the issues of prostitution and drug legalization in a way I hadn’t quite thought of: in terms of opposition to both stemming from a cognitive error.

Put simply, people mix up correlation and causation. Prostitution and drugs are correlated with crime, thus they cause crime. I suppose this isn’t entirely revolutionary, but I’d never thought about solving the public perception problem merely by separating out these concepts (as opposed to, for instance, taking on the moral arguments against these things).

Here’s Goldstein:

Prostitution will always be a profession, and it may always be a profession more risky than most. But in justifying the current policy, most prostitution prohibitionists make the same type of correlation-causation mistake that the drug prohibitionists make: they assume that the ills that sometimes surround the culture of prostitution—the pimps, the STDs, the robberies, the poor working conditions, and so on—stem naturally from the activity itself.

Yet there is better evidence that the organized crime, violence, and exploitative labor structures are drawn to the industry precisely because it is illegal—and thus outside the bounds of employment law, taxation, legal remedies for fraud, and other forms of regulation.

It’s the same fundamental correlation-causation mistake that’s made again and again by the White House Office of Drug Control Policy and other War on Drugs apologists: the failure to recognize that criminal behavior often arises from black markets just because they’re black markets, not because of what’s being bought, sold, or consumed.

As a libertarian who has long supported legalization of both drugs and prostitution, I am of course well-versed in this argument and believe it to be correct.

However, can you ever convince the public of this lack of causation?

Well, as David Boaz looks at in this recent piece, we have seen movement on the drug question recently — which he ties to the change also happening in views on gay marriage. Perhaps both are, in part, related to the public’s growing understanding that two perceived ills, drugs and gay marriage, don’t cause the problems they were once thought to cause. Gay marriage doesn’t cause family breakdown — no catastrophes of any kind have hit the states that have legalized it. And pot, to anyone with a brain, doesn’t cause societal breakdown.

Now, of course, pot has always failed to cause societal breakdown. So why the change now? Perhaps a growing understanding of the actual causation problem with pot prohibition (and drug prohibition generally): the violence that comes along with the illegal drug trade. With escalating violence in Mexico pouring over the border into the U.S., I’ve heard a lot more people — none legalization advocates — asking whether the violence of the drug trade could ever be outweighed by the ills that might be caused by legalizing drugs, especially relatively harmless pot.

Take the voilent drug trade in Mexico, add in the quasi-legalization experiment of the California medical pot program, and you’ve gone a long way to break the connection in people’s minds between pot and violence. Quasi-legal pot in California = no problems. Illegal drugs in Mexico = bloody civil war. Suddenly, it’s a lot easier for people to make the right connections.

So, could a similar shift ever happen with prostitution policies? Well, we have a very few experiments with legal prostitution in America, and it’s clearly led to a much safer prostitution industry where it’s been tried. The violence from the illegal prostitution business, however, is never likely to become the kind of problem that drug-trade violence has been.

Perhaps what’s needed is a new spokesman for the respectability of legal prostitution:

He’s looking to make a comeback, right?