Pot Pedagogy

Against Legalizing Recreational Marijuana

In debates over drug legalization, concerns about minimizing black markets have taken center stage. Cannabis should be legalized, proponents argue, because if it isn’t, users will turn to unregulated, untaxed, and dangerous black markets for illicit substances.

Many conservatives and Christians have accepted this argument. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 52% of weekly religious service attendees support legalizing recreational marijuana. Republican support has declined somewhat in recent years, but a 2025 Gallup poll still found 40% of GOP voters in favor of legalization.

The political tide appears to be moving toward full legalization. Twenty-four states have legalized small amounts of marijuana for both recreational and medical use; sixteen more permit it for medical use only. North Carolina hasn’t legalized marijuana for either purpose but has decriminalized it, so first-time possession no longer carries jail time. Of the sixteen medical-only states, seven have also decriminalized recreational possession. Only nine states still prohibit cannabis use outright.

Even federally, the Department of Justice recently reclassified FDA-approved marijuana products from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also announced the initiation of an expedited administrative hearing process to consider rescheduling marijuana more broadly.

In departing from their traditional opposition to drug legalization, conservative Christians are often well-intentioned. They want to minimize harm — whether from dangerous substances bought underground or families destabilized by drug-related incarceration. But their efforts may be self-defeating, and the underlying premise reflects a stunted view of civic justice: one that treats the law’s duty as ending at the prevention of interpersonal injury. Conservative Christians need to return to a more holistic vision of morality and law.

Classically, law did more than prevent people from harming each other — it was meant to inculcate virtue. It did this by restraining evildoing, and in doing so, habituating individuals into a way of life that excluded immoral action. Thomas Aquinas writes that when people refrain from evil out of fear of the law, they “leave others in peace” and, through this habituation, are “brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear,” and thus become virtuous.

At first, the law may scare people into behaving rightly — or at least into not behaving wrongly. But right behavior soon becomes the default. In this way, the individual is bettered, and all of society benefits from the resulting virtue.

In historic Protestant thought, the law of God has three uses: it reveals mankind’s wickedness and need for a savior; it restrains evil; and it guides the believer toward right living. Applied to civil law, the second use is usually emphasized — law exists to stop bad things from happening. But what’s often overlooked is how the second use supports the third: when not doing bad things becomes the norm, doing good becomes desirable.

If laws are good, the patterns they enforce are good. Theft is a useful example. For some, stealing is a great temptation; only the law and its threat of punishment hold them back. But after a lifetime of restraint — because stealing corrodes the soul — avoiding it becomes second nature, even desirable. Good habits are hard to start, but once formed, they become voluntary, because they establish good structures for living.

Good laws are, in essence, good habit-formers. Under a regime of just, well-enforced law, not just individuals but society as a whole begins to improve. When the temptation to break the law arises, legal coercion isn’t the only pressure, cultural pressure reinforces it. Law encourages behavior that culture comes to desire for itself, and a culture begins to police its own adherence.

Voluntary goodness is preferable to forced goodness, and when people willingly avoid actions harmful to the common good, legal restrictions can be relaxed. This is why the founding fathers emphasized personal and cultural virtue as essential to the American experiment in self-government — and why they considered a robust expression of Christianity essential to virtue formation and the health of the republic.

But the reverse can also happen. When laws are imprudently lax, and religion and virtue grow weak, society begins to decay. Habits of righteousness once reinforced by law and culture together are forgotten.

Many Christians and conservatives, and perhaps many liberals, would prefer that people simply choose not to smoke weed, especially in public. But when forced to choose between outlawing it and permitting it, many who find the practice distasteful would rather see it permitted by law. Of course, any functioning society must legalize some practices that portions of the population find distasteful. Is recreational marijuana use one of those practices?

It is not. Cannabis can be criminalized for the sake of inculcating virtue and preventing the habituation of societally destructive vice.

Dr. Brad Littlejohn distinguishes, as Christians historically have, between vices and sins. A vice, he writes, is “the habituation of one’s character in a form of foolish living” — a pattern of behavior that “leads to destruction, not just self-destruction, but the degradation of any community in which it becomes endemic.” In Aquinas’s simpler formulation: sin is a bad action; vice is a bad habit. Just as law restrains evil to cultivate virtue — good habits — it is also meant to uproot vice.

Legalizing recreational cannabis gives individuals the means to dull their senses, check out of life, and develop dependencies on a potentially dangerous substance. This is habituation toward destruction. A republic can only be sustained by citizens capable of governing themselves. Marijuana doesn’t contribute to that capacity — it undermines it.

Americans shouldn’t watch idly as our cities fill with the smell of secondhand smoke. Do we want the next generation to associate that smell with urban life? Places of civic and commercial life should be places of productivity and hope. Yet even amid the struggles of modern life, we’ve decided it’s just to permit a habit that makes things worse.

Of course, some people will break the law and seek marijuana on the black market, and yes, the state will lose tax revenue. But as Aquinas writes, “Every law aims at being obeyed by those who are subject to it. Consequently it is evident that the proper effect of law is to lead its subjects to their proper virtue: and since virtue is ‘that which makes its subject good,’ it follows that the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given, good.”

The fact that some will disobey the law doesn’t change what law is for.

To accept the black-market argument is to lose sight of that purpose. Law exists to instill virtue and cultivate the conditions for the flourishing of all citizens. Legalizing cannabis, even with good intentions, encourages the habituation of a vice that leads to societal degradation. For that reason alone, its legalization should be opposed.

Cooper Cobbs (@cobbscooper) is a 2026 Chesterton media fellow at New Guard Press. A rising junior at Patrick Henry College, he is the incoming student body president and will be the editor-in-chief of PHC’s student newspaper, the Herald, this fall.