Ted Leggett’s book is timely, as the issue of the legalisation of prostitution is about to go before the Constitutional Court. Leggett is acknowledged as one of the finest experts of the smudged line between sex work and the drug trade in South Africa.
After a long introduction on drugs that is uncertainly poised between speaking to parents, drug users and academics, Leggett gets into the real heart of the book about halfway through, looking at the links between sex work and the drug trade, which formed part of a major thesis he did some time back for the United Nations and others. It is here that he starts providing some real insights into the world of sex and drugs.
One can’t help feeling, though, that better editing would have helped him transform his thesis into a far more gripping book. The problem is not with the facts available to Leggett, it is in the layout and structure of the book — if he were not a researcher I respected, and the field was not one in which I have a great deal of interest, I would have abandoned it.
As an author who has just completed my sixth book, I know how writers can often drown in the wealth of information and know-ledge they accumulate and set to paper. A good writer becomes far better with an accomplished editor, but poor editing can reduce good works to mediocrity and the reader to puzzlement. Take this sentence as an example: “Calling all the publicly listed escort agencies in Durban (there are just over 20 of them) yields a surprisingly low count of total staff, with more than 100 but less than 200 sex workers on any given night.”
Leggett’s book is by no means mediocre, but too much of what fills the early pages tells any regular newspaper or magazine reader what they already know. The second half of the book comes alive with anecdotes. Leggett’s insights into the relationship between the seedy accommodation hotels that proliferate in Durban and Johannesburg, in particular, and their role in providing safe havens for drug traffickers and sex workers is the best part of the book. That and his suggestions for remedying the present situation: South Africa has become known as one of the world’s premier transit and consumption routes for hard drugs.
Leggett writes: “Vice enforcement is a very dangerous business. If you want to keep drugs and prostitution illegal, you have to watch the people in charge of enforcement very carefully. It has the potential to turn your police force into a group of drug-addicted servants of the syndicate, too busy worrying about their next hit to be of any use to society”.
I recalled, while reading, sitting in on a drug bust some years ago; it went on for hours, and when the
policemen were finally given the go-ahead by the officer in charge, he was out of his mind on cocaine that he had snorted with the small-time dealers who were then bust.
Leggett has excellent ideas for removing young people from conditions that encourage drug-taking. “As harsh as it sounds, we can pack a good part of South Africa’s drug problem on a plane and send it back to where it came from” — meaning a crackdown on sleazy hotels. He also has an excellent idea for adult entertainment centres that would create an environment for safe sex work.