“Physically ill individuals aren’t forced to accept unwanted (and often catastrophically health-harming) treatment.”

Yes, they are. Forced c-sections, forced bed rest, forced chemotherapy. Or coerced treatments (If you don’t try this dangerous/expensive/unproven, I will cut off your pain meds or report you to be drug-seeking.”)

Excellent point. Thanks for bringing this up.

It’s totally fair to say that some people are more okay to work high/ drunk than others, depending on what they’re taking and how they react. My coordination is bad enough when I’m sober, so I’m just not one of those people! I also worry about numbing myself to pain as a sub, as I don’t like to play that hard with clients and wouldn’t want them to do more damage than I’d agreed to.

Nope, I think the debate over offering extras in strip clubs still wins out. Why, you wanna try to drum up some more controversy? 😉

Did we hit a comments record Caty?

Best thing ever.

Totally off topic, but so others can read- Did you know that at APNSW and also WNU, that you and Melissa Ditmore are known respectively as Mel G and Mel D?
You’re like sex workers rights spice-girls!
Thanks for the PDF, I’ve been making do with our one paper copy for years, and it was the previous edition which Victoria gave to us.

In response to some of this, I said on the other round table post: “I find the interesting thing about alcohol is how people don’t class it as a hard drug. It’s actually the most destructive drug in terms of one’s health, causing organ damage and cognitive damage in a way that most class A substances don’t come near to doing, one can die withdrawing from it, and it’s the only drug causatively correlated with violence in studies.”
And given how alcohol is such a huge part of the job in so much of legal and grey market sex work…Also, there was a really interesting post that linked to this one in the blog of Korean escort agency worker, who writes about how drug dealing is an expected part of her job: http://chyma.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/momentum/

To clarify I should add — prescription pills aren’t criminalized per se, but sometimes folks are buying pills informally. Okay, done.