Four years ago, Anastasia Ryan argued in an openDemocracy article that supporting sex workers’ rights shouldn’t feel like a stretch for the drug reform movement. She stated that there were many obvious overlaps between the movement for the decriminalisation of sex work and the movement for drug reform, and asked us to consider “why a shared platform of advocacy for rights, recognition and respect has not emerged within the landscape of UK activism.”
While we take seriously Ryan’s call to broaden solidarity and join together in struggle, we think she missed something important. The parallel to the movement for sex workers’ rights isn’t the “drug reform movement” – it is the drug user movement. It is here that real questions arise of bodily autonomy and medicalised dehumanisation caused by public health strategies seeking to win short-term policy gains.
Those strategies hinge on conveying us – drug users and sex workers alike – as vectors of disease and public health threats, which are used to justify the criminalisation of survival activities. The movement for drug policy reform may touch on some of these same points, but the key difference here is that their main advocates aren’t organising while navigating related risks in real time.
