Ultimately government has to weigh the likelihood that most of the population will obey laws with which they disagree strongly or not.
The government realized that not even murdering 10,000 people (by poisoning them with methanol) whose only crime was to buy illicit alcohol would eradicate alcohol consumption. That is what ended the government's attempt at Prohibition. Even when threatened with murder, sometimes the People do not roll over.
There is a well-known tendency in human psychology that when confronted head-on, the force applied sometimes generated a galvanized resistance instead of compliance.
