This chapter critically considers the assumptions underlying policy proposals for sex-working drug users and drug-using sex workers in New Labour's prostitution strategy. In critiquing these underlying assumptions this discussion suggests that the strategy proposed in A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy (Home Office, 2006) (hereafter referred to as ‘the strategy’) reduces involvement in street sex work to a problem of drug use (Melrose, 2007) and at the same time misconceives problems of drug addiction. I argue that the punitive framework that has increasingly characterised policy towards problem drug users (Buchanan, 2004) has been imported into ‘the prostitution debate’ and now also frames policy responses to street sex workers (Scoular et al, 2007). Its potential to tackle the very real social problems experienced by those involved in street sex work is therefore severely compromised.

The chapter argues that by conflating sex work with other social problems, particularly drug addiction (see, for example, Cusick and Berney, 2005; Melrose, 2006a), the strategy conveniently sidesteps the wider structural problems associated with involvement in street sex work, such as poverty, social exclusion and homelessness. This means that what the strategy offers is punitive responses that provide ‘individualised solutions to de-contextualised social problems’ (Phoenix, 2003), rather than structural solutions to socially contextualised social problems (Buchanan, 2004; Cusick and Berney, 2005; Melrose, 2006a).

Sex-working drug users and drug-using sex workers

Previously, I have argued that it is conceptually important to distinguish between ‘sex-working drug users’ and ‘drug-using sex workers’ (Melrose, 2007). While this distinction may appear pedantic, it is an important distinction to make for the development of appropriate policy and practice. The distinction allows us to differentiate those individuals who are involved in sex work but whose drug use is not necessarily problematic from those individuals for whom there is a closer and more problematic connection between their drug use and their involvement in sex work. So ‘sex-working drug users’ may be, for instance, sex workers who are also recreational drug users. In contrast, ‘drug-using sex workers’ may be those individuals for whom drug usage has become problematic and/or those who engage in sex work specifically to fund their drug use.