Consider the Black Market Condom

January 4, 2013

In a slate.com article, Peter Andreas recalls the unintended incubation of the US pornography and birth control industries by the 1873 anti-vice law that came to be known as the Comstock Act. Like most prohibitions, Andreas writes, the Comstock Act did not eliminate the sale and manufacture of so-called smut, but rather transformed it. The article draws from Andreas' forthcoming book Smuggler Nation.