Legalizing things I'm morally opposed to

Since I'm a religious person I naturally have many religious views regarding what I believe are welfare enhancing government policies.

In a democracy, government is an agent for the people, and so I can't support the government doing something that I feel is harmful to all parties involved.  From an eternal perspective, I believe that same-sex marriage has questionable results.  Since I respect the rights of gays and lesbians to make their own choices, I don't want the police to enter their homes and stop conduct that some find inappropriate.  But neither do I wish to encourage homosexual relationships by supporting legal same-sex marriages.

Different from the marriage situation, making drugs illegal requires enlarging government, which brings me to the topic of opportunity costs.  The rest of this blog will try to establish that for economic choices that we make, we forfeit some other good opportunity.

Because there is scarcity in the world, we have to make choices, and every choice has an opportunity cost.  In other words, there are not enough resources (time, money, etc.) in the world to do everything we'd like to do.  Thus we must decide what is most important, and as we make those choices we give up other good options.  The best foregone alternative, the situation we give up, is called an "opportunity cost."

The opportunity cost of enforcing drug laws is the time and money we have to spend to do so.  Those resources could be spent on treatment centers, education, sending missionaries to preach the gospel,and many other good things.

Let's pretend like our huge nation, including government and private individuals, is one person named Sam.  Sam has limited time.  If Sam spends 3 hours taking drugs from people and putting them in jail, then those are 3 hours that Sam doesn't have to share spiritual messages that could help people to have lasting behavior changes.

I don't oppose all legal restrictions on drugs; surely some efforts to get rid of these harmful substances are done most efficiently by the government.  But when marginal cost exceeds marginal benefit, production should stop. That means that if the additional resources that we're using don't create more good than those resources would create elsewhere, then we should allow those resources to go elsewhere.  I believe a lot of good can be done through individual and communal efforts to teach about the negative consequences of drugs.

I understand that this is a tricky situation.  For example, if we don't want to send the moral message that drugs are okay, we might keep them illegal but reduce spending on enforcement.  But when laws aren't regularly enforced and publicized, we lose some predictability with government.  I'm sometimes impressed that the anti-tobacco campaign succeeded in making tobacco pretty uncool.  Perhaps we can apply some similar principles?  Let me know your thoughts and we can learn together: )