New Working Paper: Drug Policy, Harm Reduction, and Christian Institutional Justice
Reframing Drug Policy Through Justice Constraints Rather Than Welfare Tradeoffs
I’ve just posted a new working paper that reframes the drug policy debate through the lens of justice constraints rather than welfare tradeoffs.
The core argument:
Standard economic analyses of drug prohibition treat incarceration, criminal records, and enforcement disparities as costs to be weighed against reductions in drug use or crime. But this approach obscures a more fundamental question: are some outcomes—like mass incarceration and permanent social exclusion—morally inadmissible regardless of their efficiency?
Drawing on Christian social thought and constitutional political economy, the paper develops three justice constraints that limit the legitimate use of state coercion:
The captivity constraint: limits on large-scale incarceration for nonviolent conduct
The distributional justice constraint: limits on policies that systematically burden marginalized communities
The restoration constraint: requirements that punishment remain reversible and preserve pathways to reintegration
Within this constrained framework, conventional prohibitionist drug regimes become structurally inadmissible—not merely inefficient—because their institutional logic predictably violates these constraints through enforcement incentives, political dynamics, and rent-seeking behavior.
By contrast, harm-reduction regimes (decriminalization, medication-assisted treatment, supervised consumption, naloxone distribution, record expungement) remain feasible within justice constraints while performing comparatively well on mortality, public health, and fiscal outcomes.
The methodological contribution:
Rather than encoding Christian ethics into a social welfare function, the paper treats them as side constraints—moral boundaries within which policy optimization occurs. This preserves the tools of economic analysis while making explicit the limits on coercion and exclusion that justice requires.
Why this matters:
Drug policy debates often polarize between efficiency arguments and moral concerns, with each side talking past the other. A justice-constrained framework shows that harm reduction isn’t a utilitarian compromise or moral permissiveness—it’s the dominant policy class once we rule out institutional arrangements that rely on widespread captivity and permanent stigma.
The paper also demonstrates a method for integrating Christian social thought into pluralistic policy debates without reducing theology to subjective preference. Justice functions as a constraint on admissible tradeoffs, not as an alternative maximand.
📄 Read the full paper:
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6150648
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/158501748/
Comments welcome. This is a working draft under review, and I’d value feedback—especially on the constrained-optimization framework, the political-economy analysis of prohibition, or the application to other policy domains (criminal justice, immigration enforcement, welfare administration).
If you found this useful, please share it with anyone working on drug policy, criminal justice reform, or the intersection of economics and ethics.