ABSTRACT
Dutch cannabis policy is a staple of the US drug policy debate, because it the closest thing to drug legalization in a modern industrialized nation—for drugs other than tobacco and alcohol. Arguably, there are at least two normatively justifiable mechanisms for "biased" interpretation of evidence. First, from the standpoint of the Bayesian induction framework, disagreements about the a posteriori probability of a hypothesis, conditioned on the available data, are justifiable when judges differ in their "priors"—their subjective estimate of the a priori probability of the hypothesis. Second, because evidence strength is a matter of degree, the dichotomous decision to accept or reject a verdict requires a decision threshold or standard of proof. Drug policy fits these models perfectly. For many if not most Americans, the use of intoxicating drugs, at least illegal ones, is a profoundly immoral act and must be judged and policed on moral terms.
