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Pretzel Logic
It never ceases to amaze me just how quickly we get bent about things in this country.
A perfect example is the hullabaloo over “Tricks of the Trade,” the now-controversial pamphlet for prostitutes distributed by a local AIDS prevention organization called Prevention Point.
Last week, in a piece headlined “Undressed For Success,” Daily News columnist Elmer Smith criticized the pamphlet as too blunt, what with its explicit descriptions of how hookers can trade sex for money and still live to see the next day. Smith also chided Prevention Point — which receives $300,000 from taxpayers every year — for distributing it.
The next day, in a story also splayed across the People Paper’s front page, Mayor John Street was said to be so livid after reading Smith’s piece that he grabbed a copy of the pamphlet himself and ordered that it no longer be distributed. (It hadn’t been for months anyway, according to Prevention Point’s Robert O’Brien.)
Now I can’t blame the Daily News for playing this thing out on their front page. After all, sex sells.
But in this case, Smith, one of the most dead-on scribes in this city, was dead wrong.
Smith wrote that he “couldn’t get past the fact that some child or impressionable teenager might pick this up.”
“This” being, among other things, safety tips about keeping “lips, gums, thighs, vagina, and rectum slippery by applying a lot of water-based lubricants” and “pick your own parking spots and hotels.”
“The section on health maintenance is almost graphic enough to induce nausea,” he wrote.
Somehow, I doubt Daily News readers — who ate up the front page featuring Tollman Joe eviscerating a chicken wing — are quite that easily nauseated.
What’s really nauseating is HIV and what it can do to a person. What’s really nauseating are mutilated women.
Prevention Point is not advocating prostitution any more than it was advocating crack cocaine use back when it was slammed for telling crackheads the safest way to ingest crack, which sounds kind of crazy but really isn’t.
Prevention Point is dealing with reality. Regardless of whether this pamphlet is distributed, people will pay for sex and people will get paid for it. I doubt this pamphlet — with its glamour talk of wearing clothing that will allow you to escape a potential murder — induced anyone to get into the business. I doubt it enticed new clientele.
What it might have done, if it was at all successful, was inform one or two hookers that, if they are going to turn tricks, there are ways of surviving the worst of what their profession will bring them.
I don’t see the harm in that.
In Ron Avery’s story about the mayor’s pique, City Councilman Rick Mariano was quoted as calling for investigations into which city official signed off on the pamphlet. He also targeted Prevention Point’s main function — the technically illegal syringe exchange program — for City Council investigation.
On one hand, I can’t blame Mariano. The Seventh District contains some of the worst prostitution problems in the city, including the activity taking place under the blue steel trestles of the infamous Market-Frankford El.
Prostitution, and the accompanying drug dealing and theft, ruins neighborhoods.
But what Street, Smith and Mariano need to understand is that, while getting rid of the problem is a laudable goal, prostitution is going to happen somewhere and there is evidence to prove there is a benefit to reducing harm.
The AIDS rate, for instance, is more than twice as high in Philadelphia as it is in Amsterdam, where prostitution is legal and needle junkies are picked up by bus and taken to health clinics. According to Health Department spokesman Jeff Moran, Philadelphia’s AIDS rate, as of June 1999, was 757.5 out of 100,000, based on the 1990 census. The actual figure is even higher, because the city has lost nearly 150,000 residents since. By comparison, Amsterdam’s AIDS rate is 323.4 per 100,000, based on information provided by Amsterdam’s health department.
Now, Amsterdam is definitely not Philly. There’s no K&A or Point Breeze there, so it is no surprise that they have a much lower AIDS rate than we do. But that doesn’t totally explain the drastic difference between the two cities.
Amsterdam’s no-holds-barred attack on disease and risk has to be figured into the equation, Dutch health officials have told me.
“Ass fucking is dangerous,” read one Dutch AIDS pamphlet from the early 1980s, back before Rock Hudson and AIDS chic. The Dutch knew they didn’t have the luxury of squeamishness, that they would have to be brutally blunt and nonjudgmental to reach out to the downest of the down. They’ve had some success in the process. And Prevention Point’s Robert O’Brien tells me there is plenty of evidence — at least seven separate studies, at institutions like Yale University — to show that the needle exchange, which works so well in Amsterdam, is working quite well here.
O’Brien says he is willing to share the findings of those studies with anyone who will listen. He will also share the opinion of the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health Consensus Panel, all of which, he says, “have concluded that syringe exchange programs are effective in reducing the spread of infectious diseases and do not lead to increased drug use or new initiates to drug use.”
The point of all this: Lay off the pamphlets.
They don’t kill people.
Disease and murder — both preventable given the proper resources and attention — do.
