As the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana in California and seven other states (plus the District of Columbia) attests, Americans, and those in many other countries, are realizing that the prohibition on drugs has been just as big a failure as was the prohibition on alcohol nearly a century ago. It has been an ineffective means of preventing what some consider to be a vice, and, more importantly, criminalization has robbed people of their liberty (including the freedom to make mistakes), separated families, destroyed career and income prospects and led to increased violence in dangerous black markets — all at tremendous cost to taxpayers.

With this change in thinking in mind, perhaps it is time to push the envelope a little further. For if prohibition/criminalization is counterproductive and antithetical to liberty for the supposed vices of alcohol and drug use, then it is also undesirable for other alleged vices, such as prostitution.

There has been a growing movement in recent years, backed by a number of human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch and the U.N. Global Commission on HIV and the Law, to decriminalize the practice. The Erotic Service Providers Legal Education Research Project, which represents sex workers, is challenging the anti-prostitution law here in California. The case is currently on appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. And an online petition at ThePetitionSite.com calling for Gov. Jerry Brown to meet with sex workers to discuss decriminalization has garnered nearly 30,000 signatures.

Legalizing prostitution would bring it out of the shadows, improving the health and welfare of sex workers and clients alike. Criminalizing it only ensures that it must take place in seedy motel rooms and unsafe back alleys or clients’ vehicles, and precludes both parties from seeking legal protection or recourse in the event of rape, theft or other crimes. Many sex workers have even been victimized by rogue police officers.

The difference can be seen in an example from New Zealand, which legalized prostitution in 2003. “We used to wave the police down for help, and they’d keep driving, but now they take sex workers’ complaints seriously,” Annah Pickering, who does outreach for the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective, told the New York Times Magazine last year. “One client negotiated with a street worker; she did the act, and he refused to pay. She waved a cop down, and he told the client he had to pay and took him to the ATM to get the money.”

At the heart of the matter is whether one has the right to control his or her own body. Whether consenting adults trade sex for cash; or charm, good looks and drinks at the bar; or love, kindness and security, is immaterial. So long as one is old enough to responsibly enter into such contracts, and arrangements are entered into voluntarily without force or coercion, or the threat thereof, the state has no right to interfere.

Some may object that such activity should be banned because it is immoral. But these are two distinct questions. Just because some — even a majority — may find something distasteful or immoral, it does not mean that “there ought to be a law” preventing it.

“Vices are not crimes,” political philosopher, abolitionist and entrepreneur Lysander Spooner maintains in his essay of the same name. “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another,” Spooner contends. “Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.”

“In vices, the very essence of crime — that is, the design to injure the person or property of another — is wanting,” he adds.

Just as we must rigorously defend unpopular or offensive speech if the freedom of speech is to mean anything — for popular speech needs no protection — if we are to take seriously our professed devotion to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all, then we must protect the right to engage in behavior that many may consider base or even immoral, so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others.

Adam Summers is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.