Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Yes, the Swedes are doubling the tax on Vice Squad's favorite harm reducer, the smokeless tobacco snus. So there's an end of the year run on snus to beat the foreseeable price increase; under refrigeration, according to the linked article, snus can remain fresh for a year.
Serial killers might target prostitutes even if sales of sex were legal -- but the murderers would have a much harder time of getting away with it, repeatedly. The recent events in Ipswich provide more evidence -- though the redundancy in the existing stock is itself overwhelming -- that a safe, legal form of prostitution, and probably even street prostitution, should be adopted. What are we afraid of, that adults might engage in sexual activity for monetary reasons? How many additional murders are we supposed to countenance to lower the amount of consensual commercial sex that takes place?
Update: Here's a BBC story that includes the views of the English Collective of Prostitutes. They mention the legalisation experience of New Zealand.
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Concerned about an upsurge in prostitution? Have you considered whipping the customers of prostitutes? No? Well, neither has the government of Malaysia. But whipping the prostitutes, now there's a policy worth considering: "Malaysian lawmakers have called for foreign prostitutes to be whipped as a deterrent to others considering coming here to work in the sex industry, a report said on Tuesday." Even Lear, in his madness, could see through that one:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;
Thou [Thy blood] hotly lust'st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp'st her.
The Malaysian parliamentarian -- this learned Theban, this noble philosopher -- asks, logically enough, 'If we can impose whipping for drug addicts, why can't we do the same for prostitutes'?
Though flaying isn't bad enough and hanging would be fair, at least for those druggies, it seems. Four students, it is alleged, were found in possession of less than $2000 worth of marijuana. "The students face death by hanging under Malaysia's harsh anti-drug laws if found guilty."
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Beer Label Censorship
Today's New York Times brings word that the state of Maine is hoping to keep its alcohol shelves safe from naughty pictures -- such as Eugene Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People". The state Bureau of Liquor Enforcement decided against the offending beer labels in September; now, their ruling is being challenged by the Maine Civil Liberties Union on free speech grounds.
Vice Squad has long been concerned with the application of standard commercial free speech rules to the vice arena. The rationale for such rules is to empower consumers by ensuring that they have access to information, and to protect the speech rights of sellers, too. But these laudable ends are less obviously served by extending the usual speech protections to vice good labeling and advertising. First, in the case of the traditional vices, we have somewhat less reason than we usually have to assume that the informed choices of consumers serve their own best interests, as they themselves would define them. Second, and more importantly, the government (for better or worse) has the power to ban vice goods, and many such goods are banned. There is no free speech protection in the US for advertising illegal goods. Unfettered advertising for a vice good might lead to less speech and less freedom, not more, as governments ban such goods rather than tolerate the advertising. This is easier to see in the case of those currently illegal goods rather than in the case of alcohol. A state or nation might be interested in legalizing cannabis. If legalization entails full commericalization and advertising, however, governments are less likely to legalize in the first place.
As with free speech, commitments to free trade and free competition (antitrust) similarly do not serve their usual purposes (at least to the same extent) when these commitments are applied to the traditonal vices. Vice should form an exception to these commitments -- and it will. The choice in practice often is whether the exception will be in the form of legal vice but controls on advertising (or trade, or competition), or in the form of a vice prohibition.
Nevertheless, there is a good chance that the Maine Bureau of Liquor Enforcement will have to back away from its label objections -- and really, the objection to Delacroix is a bit over-the-top (topless?), anyway. Bad Frog Beer has paved the way.