Drug Policy, Harm Reduction, and Christian Institutional Justice: A Constrained Public-Economics Approach

Abstract

This article develops a public-economics framework for evaluating drug policy in which Christian conceptions of justice operate as binding institutional constraints rather than as welfare weights. Standard economic analyses of drug prohibition typically treat incarceration, collateral sanctions, and enforcement disparities as costs to be balanced against reductions in drug consumption or crime. This approach obscures whether such outcomes are morally admissible at all. Drawing on Christian social thought, the paper identifies three justice constraints-limits on coercive captivity, distributional injustice, and permanent exclusion-and incorporates them into a constrained optimization framework. Within this framework, conventional prohibitionist drug regimes become normatively inadmissible, not merely inefficient, because their institutional logic predictably violates these constraints. By contrast, harm-reduction and health-oriented regimes remain feasible and perform comparatively well on conventional outcome measures such as mortality, public health, and fiscal cost. The analysis demonstrates how Christian ethics can discipline economic reasoning without displacing it and argues that harm reduction represents the most defensible institutional response to drug use once justice-based limits on coercion are taken seriously.

Keywords: harm reduction, incarceration, Christian economics, institutional justice, drug policy

JEL Classification: I18, K14, H75, D63, Z12