BRATTLEBORO — Writing in response to Sandy Golden's letter, I am sorry that my intention in making my point about pornography, drugs, and prostitution might have been unclear. It was a complicated piece to write, and I went through about 12 drafts, but I am still not certain I got it right. I appreciate the points, and I can see how this element of it could have been more explicit.
Human drives cause us to behave in certain ways, and it is important to have clear rules, including laws, about behavior that impacts the larger social good.
The cost of victimless crimes in America is almost incalculable, in many different ways.
It is clear that criminalization of behavior is an approach that has not only failed but has also ruined the lives of so many young people - especially young black American and Latino men, but also poor white men and young women of any color who are torn away from their children and placed in prison. Only Russia and South Africa rival us in our rate of incarceration.
Pornography is basically legal and almost completely unregulated in our Brave New World of the internet. It is an industry as large as toothpaste and bathing soap, but we almost never talk about it explicitly and the harm it causes.
The criminalization of sex workers essentially creates trafficking and makes the victims of the industry, which is huge, into the ones who are prosecuted. Go to Riker's Island in New York sometime and watch the pimps pick up their girls, busted by cops who are following laws that don't prevent prostitution but just turn the victim into the criminal.
The current problem with opiate addiction in the U.S. has been almost entirely fueled by the poorly regulated prescription of drugs, mainly pushed out by a single pharmaceutical company, as a recent New Yorker article demonstrated in a dispositive way. A criminal approach to victims of a disease that is essentially created by the medical profession is really obscene, and it just creates more waste and tragedy.
These all are social ills, and I stand against them. I believe deeply in the rule of law and the importance of having regulations to guide behavior and to try to assure the least harm and the greatest good. Secrecy and criminalization are not the ways to do that, and that was my point.
I am sorry that these points, which underlie the perspective I tried to convey in my piece, were not clearer.