Vice versa: sex work and drug use during the HIV epidemic in Thatcher’s Britain

This article traces the origins of the present-day association of prostitution and drug addiction in Britain. Through an examination of a variety of political discussions in the 1980s that centred on sex work, drug use, and HIV/AIDS, I locate the emergence of the cultural legitimacy of narratives of addiction within discourses of prostitution. I argue that it was in the 1980s, within the context of the rise of heroin use and the concomitant emergence of AIDS, that the interwoven discourses of drug addiction and prostitution were forged and cemented. Within the context of these two 1980s epidemics, the discrete and intelligible figure of the 'drug-using prostitute' emerged. Public health policy approached sex work within the context of AIDS as inextricably linked to IV drug use both in their policy discussions and policy implementation. Yet, the emergence of the 'drug-using prostitute' also served other political and punitive ends, being used in debates around the criminalization of drug possession and sex work. Overwhelmingly, these political discussions gendered the sex worker and positioned her in opposition to the idealized heterosexual family, necessitating the policing and pathologization of both drug use and sex work. The use of the figure of the drug-using prostitute sits at the convergence of discourses of disease, criminality, publicness, gender, and moral depravity, and thus, this article contributes to the historiography of sex work, drug culture, public health, 'deviance', and Thatcherite Britain.