A Christian Case for Legalizing Marijuana

It might seem obvious that Christians should oppose legalizing marijuana. After all, getting high is sinful, isn’t it? The Bible clearly and repeatedly condemns drunkenness (e.g. Proverbs 23:29-35, Ephesians 5:19-21), and getting stoned is analogous to drunkenness. So since it’s clearly wrong, it ought to be illegal, right?

Well, not so fast. Clearly, legitimate medical uses aside, smoking weed is sinful…but not all sins are crimes. There are many evils that will lead straight to hell but ought not lead straight to a jail cell. There is no deadlier sin than pride, yet search high and low in our statutes and you will not find a law against it. Few sins in the whole Bible are condemned as relentlessly as idolatry, and yet I doubt we would wish to see the police raiding Hindu temples. So we ought to consider whether, just because it is a sin, getting high should be a crime as well.

In doing so, we may wish to examine first the Law of Moses, where God criminalized a whole range of sins, including many that we don’t criminalize today. Interestingly, although the testimony of the whole Bible is steadfastly against drunkenness, God never attached criminal penalties to it. Apparently in God’s opinion it was a sin but not a crime.

Now of course, this does not absolutely prove that it’s misguided to ban marijuana. Perhaps circumstances have changed so much that it is too dangerous to allow people to have it. But a couple things suggest this isn’t the case:

1. We allow people to drink. Drunkenness is, if anything, a more severe and dangerous condition than being high, yet we permit it. There’s a terrible lack of consistency here. Of course there are many dangerous activities, such as drinking and driving—but we ban those activities, not drinking itself. The same course could be pursued for marijuana.
2. Our prohibition is totally ineffective. I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much when I say that not a single person in America who has ever desired to smoke weed has been unable to obtain it because of our ban. If we worry that the country will be exposed to terrible dangers from letting a minority of the population smoke marijuana—well, we’ve had a sizeable minority smoking marijuana for decades, drug laws or no drug laws, and we seem to be coping. Indeed, it’s unclear whether there’d be much of an increase at all if we legalized it; some countries have even seen consumption go down after legalization.

And of course, we can’t simply consider in the abstract whether we’d like marijuana to be illegal. Prohibition creates a host of negative effects, as this country learned the hard way during Prohibition. It empowers the very worst and most destructive elements in society, empowering vicious gangsters like Al Capone in the last century and vicious drug lords in the current century. Indeed, our ineffective ban has utterly destabilized our largest neighbor, leaving tens of millions living in fear of brutal, bloodthirsty men who have grown rich giving Americans the drugs we want. Is it being a good neighbor to destroy a nation just to make the point that drugs are bad? And this curse is not confined to foreign nations; it hurts the weakest and most vulnerable communities in our nation and entices young men into lives of crime with the promise of easy gain.

The lust for intoxication, whether through wine or weed, is not one the church should try to defeat through the coercive power of the law. Indeed, we ought to learn from the mistakes of the church in an earlier chapter of American history, when it wasted untold time and resources crusading for a political solution to a spiritual problem—a solution that history judged be a tremendous failure. We should rather focus on turning people’s eyes upon Christ, who gives us wine to drink that satisfies the soul and gives us his Spirit to fill our hearts with joy that mere chemicals can’t provide (notice how Paul pairs this with his prohibition on drunkenness).

So, are you obligated to vote to legalize marijuana? Of course not. But if you do, I certainly hope you’ll have a better reason than "it’s wrong."