Absolutely. People are going to do what they want to do. When you ban something that's the end of your regulation on it. So it goes underground and becomes l

Absolutely. People are going to do what they want to do. When you ban something that's the end of your regulation on it. So it goes underground and becomes less safe for everybody that's involved with it. When you legalize it you can be more nuanced with the regulation, ultimately making it safer and having better outcomes for a huge majority of the people involved. You won't get 100% but it's certainly better than the 0% you're getting with a ban. Of course the more you over-regulate and create effective bans the lower that % of people following your regulations is going to be and you're back to square one. Take a look at the history of abortions through being banned, coming into legality, and then back into over-regulation/effective ban in some places. Rate of abortions doesn't go down meaningfully when they're explicitly or implicitly illegal but rate of complications from abortions goes way up. An anecdote for you: someone I know was instrumental in getting the "condoms in porn" law architected in LA county. The goal was to normalize condom use in the face of multiple STD epidemics including HIV. On the surface this is great. But porn with condoms is insanely less popular than porn without condoms - effectively making this new law a ban on producing porn in LA county. So what happened? Productions either went half an hour down the road to the next county or they just stopped actually filing permits and went unregulated meaning no more enforcement of the regimen of testing etc that porn actors were previously required to adhere to, leading to less safe outcomes for the folks involved and no meaningful increase in the amount of porn featuring condom use.