> In turn, that makes it feel odd that the prevailing opinion in these parts is often that the police enforce things too harshly, but the cure for every economic and social ill is always more Government micro-managing...

Show a principle that is broader than introducing new micro-regulations but would result in better outcomes. Considering the complexity of our reality, I doubt it's possible. Edge cases, functional requirements of life are numerous, and sure, there are a lot of old policies on the books, simply removing them would also cause too much perturbations. And no one cares enough about abstract efficiency, elegance and such to propose and fight for a plant to gradually deprecate them. (Minor examples are various tax exemptions, major example is the whole social security problem looming on the horizon. And the whole problem of healthcare economics fits here. People are rational, but have nasty time-dependent preference inversions, just to point out a problem with going with a simple and general solution.)

And this not too surprisingly has nothing to do with too harsh enforcement of some laws. (You just guessed the war on drugs. And general over-militarization of the police and the hostility of the criminal justice system.)