Recent legislative efforts, such as Ohio’s age verification mandates for online adult platforms, reflect a growing societal panic over minors accessing harmful digital content. The core objective of these laws—protecting children from explicit material—is hard to argue against. However, the mechanism of age verification is fundamentally flawed. Attempting to gatekeep adult vices while keeping them legal for adults creates an endless game of digital whack-a-mole. If a commodity or vice is legal for adults, minors will inevitably find a way to access it, whether through indulgent parents, older peers, or technical workarounds. To truly protect society and shield children from negative commodities, lawmakers must abandon half-measures like age verification and instead pursue the total illegalization of both pornography and harmful drugs, such as cannabis.
The Failure of Gated Legality
The foundational flaw of age verification policies is that they treat a systemic leakage as a minor technical glitch. Human history proves that if a product is legally manufactured, sold, and consumed by adults, the barrier protecting minors is porous at best. Consider tobacco: it is strictly illegal to sell cigarettes to minors, yet youth smoking has persisted for generations largely because adolescents acquire products from adult environments, older siblings, or parents.
Age verification software on adult websites functions under the same naive assumption. Platforms require government IDs, credit card checks, or biometric estimation, but these systems invite massive privacy vulnerabilities for adults while failing to stop determined teenagers who easily bypass digital barriers using virtual private networks (VPNs) or shared household devices. When something remains legal and widely available to the adult population, it remains culturally sanctioned, ensuring that the supply chain is robust enough for minors to tap into it.
The Case for Total Prohibition and the Precedence of Collective Safety
If a product or commodity is genuinely destructive to individual minds and community well-being, regulating access through age barriers is logically inconsistent. Just as we regulate or ban substances based on their public health hazards, vices that rot the social fabric—namely commercial pornography and mind-altering drugs like cannabis—should be outlawed entirely for all citizens, young and old.
The argument against total prohibition usually leans heavily on personal freedom and libertarian principles. However, the dangers and societal external costs of widespread pornography and drug availability far outweigh any abstract claim to individual indulgence. Studies and clinical observations increasingly link heavy pornography consumption to warped relational expectations, neurological rewiring, and compulsive behaviors, mirroring the chemical dependency fostered by narcotics and cannabis. When an industry thrives on exploitation and psychological degradation, the state has a compelling interest to step in.
Managing the Underground Market for the Greater Good
Critics of total prohibition frequently argue that outlawing substances or explicit content only drives the market underground, empowering cartels, black markets, and illicit distributors. While this is an inevitable byproduct of prohibition, it misunderstands the ultimate goal of public policy.
Even if a total ban creates an underground market, that market is inherently restricted. It becomes difficult to access, socially stigmatized, and removed from mainstream advertising and normalization. When a vice is legally restricted to an underground status, it is effectively limited to people who are already deeply compromised or actively seeking out deviance. Crucially, it drastically slows down the rate at which society at large—and children in particular—are infected by the commodity. By removing pornography and harmful drugs from the open market, we protect the broader public health, restore moral clarity, and ensure that the next generation is not sacrificed on the altar of unbridled commercial freedom.