Explore ways to reduce the rate of HIV infection in street prostitutes--and the inescapable connection between the heroin trade, prostitution, and HIV!This unique book draws on face-to-face interviews that the author conducted on the streets, with heroin-addicted street prostitutes in Southern California and their counterparts in four large Mexican cities. Author David James Bellis illustrates the significant--and surprising--differences in the risk of exposure to HIV and other STDs that exist between street prostitutes in the two countries arising from national differences in the legality, sociology, and economics of sex work. He points out that Mexican prostitutes, for whom sex work is a simple means of livelihood, are "choir girls" compared with their beaten-up, drug-addicted sisters north of the border who perform sex for drug money and are at much greater risk of HIV and other diseases, like Hepatitis C. This book explores those differences, suggesting new directions for United States prostitution and heroin-control policies--laws currently so interwoven that they reinforce each other, accounting for a deadly circle of crime and disease. In addition to the fascinating results of the author's interviews with 72 female street prostitutes in San Bernardino, California, and 102 more in Tijuana, Cd. Ju