Also, Portugal legalized all drugs, and instead of locking people up, they put them in clinics, give them clean needles, etc.
What Portugal did, and what is likely to happen across much of Europe in the near future, is to make the possession of small quantities of drugs an administrative rather than a criminal offence.
What this means is that if you are caught in possession of drugs in Portugal, your case goes to a panel consisting of medical professionals, social workers and lawyers which decides what level of risk your case poses and whether any action should be taken. Usually, no action is taken, but the panel can take a range of measures ranging from referring you to counselling services through to compulsory rehabilitation.
The point was never to create a "marketplace" for drugs. It is not legal to sell drugs in Portugal, or to possess them in quantities considered to be too high to meet the criteria for personal use. It's a harm-reduction strategy and one that seems to work really really well, as did the even more permissive approach taken by Switzerland. Both countries have seen a very large reduction in things like drug related deaths and HIV transmission via needles.
One of the main goals, for example, is to stifle the trade in opioids. By making it extremely easy for addicts to get opioids by prescription, for example, those addicts become less dependent on their dealers, which reduces the potential profits of dealing drugs like heroin and ultimately means less being brought into the country in the first place.
But imagine if the sale of drugs was legal. Now you have a situation where a legal business is in direct competition with state-funded medical services, where social workers and medical professionals are working hard to treat addiction while companies are trying desperately to get more people addicted so they can sell to them. In essence, it's the same situation we have with tobacco, only potentially a lot more messy.
Also, many sex workers have to face a war against their livelihoods. Many are arrested by the police for example, and many face abusive pimps. I would rather all of that be given a spotlight, and the sex workers are given more workers rights up to, and including unions.
There's a huge problem here which by definition we don't hear much about.
Most people who end up doing sex work don't want anyone to know, and most people who end up doing sex work aren't choosing it as a permanent career. They're doing it to meet some immediate need or accumulate some savings, and their ambition is to leave and do something else. Those people don't necessarily want to be on a registry somewhere, they certainly don't want to join a union. As nice as it may be to think otherwise, a lot of sex workers are not hugely proud of what they do, and certainly don't want what they do to be public knowledge.
The problem is that this word "sex work" describes so many different things, and so many different people, all of whom may have completely different needs. But a huge, huge proportion of the people who do sex work aren't visible within the discourse around it because they don't want to be visible at all. That lack of visibility is a part of what they need.
Again, the point is not that we shouldn't decriminalize these things, but that doing so is a very involved process that in some cases would require society to work very differently to the way it currently does.
