The problem is that the government is very limited in its levers over society. There's the financial - taxes, subsidies, fines, grants. There's freedom curtailment - prison, compulsory community service, restraining orders, use of military force. There's "soft marketing" - PSAs, presidential speeches, all forms of information war.
These sound big and scary but they are blunt. There is no government equivalent of the kind of precise, directed, powerful social pressure that your friends and family can apply. The government can't sit down and tell you, in a serious tone, that you acted like a complete turd when you got too drunk last night and if it happens again you won't be invited over anymore. There's no substitute for social fabric.
But social fabric doesn't scale. It doesn't scale with the intensity of the problem - once someone's hooked on heroin, you can't shame them back out of it. And it doesn't scale with size, either - community identity doesn't work at city sizes. Why should someone care what you think, if they'll never see you again?
So this leaves us in a position where people see drug-related problems and feel powerless to stop them. Something must be done. And the only available thing - it seems - is the blunt instrument of the law. And hey, maybe that causes other problems - worse problems, even! But something is being done, at least.