Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Attitudes Toward Marijuana Legalization: Temporal And Thematic Trends, Daniel James Krystosek

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation examines historical changes in marijuana legalization attitudes between 1974 – 2018, using a qualitative study of pro-legalization social movements in marijuana culture and quantitative analyses of measures from the General Social Survey (GSS). The main research question asks what themes have been prevalent in pro-legalization social movements (e.g., libertarianism, anti-establishment and anti-drug-war, medical/cancer patient advocacy, market incentives), how these themes have changed over the past several decades, and whether they connect to trends in legalization attitudes in the (GSS).

The first part of this study is qualitative, employing thematic content analysis of the most prominent national pro-marijuana publication. …