6. Changing Times
The absence of significant harms-to-others from vice lends an instability to vice policy. If burdens or punishments cannot be calibrated against the harm of an act to society, fads and moral panics tend to fill the vacuum. At any rate, vice regulation demonstrates tremendous variation over time and place, with specific vices sometimes banned, and at other times made widely available and all-but-lauded. Some of the recent trends will be outlined here.
(1) Tobacco The regulatory approach to tobacco, and particularly towards cigarettes, has become much stricter in recent decades. The tightening of restrictions on tobacco is a global phenomenon. The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control came into force in 2005, and has been joined by more than 175 nations. The Convention commits countries to an array of measures, including taxes and advertising controls, aimed at reducing tobacco consumption. In the US (which signed but never ratified the WHO Convention), higher taxes and diminished availability of vending machine outlets for cigarettes are two notable changes of the past twenty years, but perhaps most telling is the severe reduction in legal places to smoke in public. A trend that started with bans on smoking in airplanes and hospitals, has, in the US as in much of the world, spread to most workplaces, restaurants, and even pubs. In the US, the percentage of adults who smoke has fallen from over 40% in the mid-1960s to about 18 percent in recent years – a smoking rate that is near the global average (Holford, Meza, Warner, et al., 2014; Ng, Freeman, Fleming, et al., 2014). We have come a long way (baby), from the World War I and World War II eras, when cigarettes were included in the rations provided to soldiers and prisoners of war.
(2) Marijuana Marijuana has been globally prohibited (and covered by the UN conventions on drugs that promote worldwide prohibition) for many decades now, but the once near-consensus that a ban (usually extended to possession as well as purchase, sale, manufacture, and transport) is desirable has shown significant cracks. (The three UN drug treaties can be accessed at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/index.html?ref=menuside.) Initial forays have included the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes, a change that has occurred in 20 US states and the District of Columbia. (Marijuana, medical or otherwise, remains prohibited at the federal level in the United States.) Uruguay has legalized marijuana for recreational use, too, as have two US states, Colorado and Washington. Many countries and US states have adopted decriminalization or depenalization reforms that generally preclude any sort of serious punishment for marijuana users, though sellers might still be arrested and receive significant jail time.
(3) War on Drugs Marijuana is one of the more benign of the currently illegal drugs, and also the most popular. These factors, perhaps combined with pot’s obvious ability to offer relief to some patients in medical distress, help to explain why marijuana is the drug for which global prohibition is proving least sustainable. Nonetheless, the entire edifice of a prohibitory stance towards recreational drugs also has begun to crumble, probably due to the horrific consequences of the war on drugs. Portugal, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and some other countries have adopted fairly broad depenalization plans for personal use, and addiction is treated in many countries as a health problem, not a criminal justice concern. Still, much of the world, including Malaysia, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Iran, among other nations, enforces draconian penalties against those deemed to be in the illicit drug trade – and possession of rather small amounts of drugs is viewed as per se evidence as involvement in the trade.
(4) Gambling The last half century has witnessed a significant global liberalization of gambling regulations. Since 1960, the number of US states hosting legal casinos (including Native American casinos) has gone from one to more than 30, and the number of states offering lotteries has climbed from zero to more than 40. Asia recently has become a world casino powerhouse: gambling revenues in Macau are much higher than in any other casino locale, while Singapore’s two casinos have combined revenues from gambling that are about the same as that generated by the dozens of casinos in Las Vegas (Stutz, 2014).
One hopeful lesson from the expansion of global gambling opportunities is that this expansion has not been accompanied by a significant long-term increase in the proportion of the population facing serious gambling problems; nonetheless, in the shorter-term, there is evidence that problem gambling tends to rise with gambling availability (Williams, Volberg, and Stevens, 2012). One possible explanation of the differing short and long-term impacts is that with time, the novelty of easily accessible gambling dissipates, while some problem gamblers are able to adapt to abstinence or a more recreational style of play. [Adam Smith (1776, p. 518) noted such a pattern with respect to an increased availability of alcohol: “When a French regiment comes from some of the northern provinces of France, where wine is somewhat dear, to be quartered in the southern, where it is very cheap, the soldiers, I have frequently heard it observed, are at first debauched by the cheapness and novelty of good wine; but after a few months residence, the greater part of them become as sober as the rest of the inhabitants.”]
(5) Prostitution While tobacco has become more tightly regulated in recent decades, the trend for marijuana and other drugs, and in gambling, has been towards liberalization. Prostitution is harder to characterize on a leniency scale, as the world has been splitting between opposite approaches, one that accepts some forms of legal, regulated prostitution, and another that shifts the focus on the traditional ban from prostitutes to their customers. In much of the world, prostitution is illegal, though in some places where it is criminalized – including Thailand – it is tolerated, while in other locales it is severely punished. In Britain and Canada, prostitution per se is legal, though related activities, such a streetwalking or keeping a brothel, are illegal. Brothel prostitution is legal in many countries, including Germany and Switzerland, as well as in some Australian states. New Zealand has perhaps the most liberal rules governing prostitution: consensual agreements between adults for paid sex are legal, as are related activities, including streetwalking. The alternative approach of one-sided enforcement, where sellers are not breaking the law but buyers are, was instituted in Sweden in 1999, subsequently adopted in Iceland and Norway, and continues to be influential in prostitution policy debates.
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