In recent years,however,the public health policy regarding marijuana legalization has been swiftly changing in the United States.As of April 2018,nine states – Alaska,California,Colorado,Maine,Massachusetts,Nevada,Oregon,Vermont,and Washington – and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to authorize the production,distribution,and possession of marijuana.A total of 29 states and DC have allowed medical use of marijuana for patients with approved health conditions.States with medical marijuana laws have an evident form of patient registry,and they provide protection against arrest for possession up to a limited amount of marijuana for medical use.In the U.S.,marijuana legalization may be one of the most controversial issues including legal,policy,health,and economic considerations.For example,marijuana legalization has been a highly contested public health issue between state and federal drug laws.Also,the essential question may be whether marijuana has medical value.The national controversy over marijuana legalization has included discussion of both the benefits and risks of non-medical marijuana use.Additionally,it is important to consider economic effects of marijuana legalization.Communication researchers have examined how the news media can influence public perceptions or attitudes toward certain issues by using the notion of framing.According to Gamson and Modigliani,a frame refers to a key organizing theme or idea that provides meaning to issues or events reported in a news story.A frame is an idea organizer that packages an issue in a specific way,telling what the issue is about.Media frames suggest how the public can interpret an issue or event,and framing involves selection and salience.Thus,news framing can influence the public’s perceptions about public health policy including marijuana legalization.
Drugs have been described mainly as objects of government enforcement and negative connotations of use in the mainstream news outlets.In the issue of marijuana legalization,roll bench a variety of organizing themes can be presented.For example,a marijuana legalization story can be framed as a legislation issue,in which news stories primarily emphasize the legislative proceedings regarding marijuana use and marijuana legalization.Previous studies have explored how American news media frame the marijuana policy,including medical use of marijuana and recreational use of marijuana.Analyzing newspaper articles between June 2008 and June 2009,Vickovic and Fradella found that U.S.newspapers mainly discussed medical marijuana as legal and regulatory issues and passage of medical marijuana news.Although it is very prominently discussed in terms of public health,legal,policy,and economic perspectives,researchers had paid little attention to how the media presented this issue.In order to reduce the gap in the literature,we make an attempt to comprehensively investigate media frames about marijuana legalization.First,we examine the organizing theme of marijuana legalization stories.More specifically,this study investigates how U.S.newspapers present the issue of marijuana legalization from 1995 to 2014.Also,we look at whether the frequency of organizing themes remains steady or not over time.As a recent survey shows,public opinion on legalizing marijuana has dramatically changed.Second,we explore the tone of each news article.specifically,this study examines how the tones of marijuana legalization are presented and changed over time between 1995 and 2014.Coleman et al.suggest that story tone assumes affective perspective,providing the story a positive,neutral,or negative connotation.affective attributes consider audience’s emotional responses to media stories.Examining the tone of ethanol stories in U.S.newspapers,for example,Kim et al.categorized story tone into pro-ethanol,anti-ethanol or neutral.They found that 48% of stories described a bio-fuel issue as neutral.In this study,the story tone refers to answering the question of whether the story is overall in support of or in opposition to marijuana legalization.
Additionally,the political orientation of news outlets has been considered as a major factor that can influence the tone of news stories.Thus,it can be predicated that liberal newspapers tend to describe marijuana legalization with a positive tone more often than conservative newspapers.To select newspapers from both states where marijuana is allowed and illegal,we analyzed a total of 10 newspapers published in the United States.Considering the location,circulation,and political orientation of newspapers,three categories were selected for analysis: national newspapers,newspapers in states where marijuana is illegal,and newspapers in states where medical marijuana is legal.These newspapers were available at the search databases.According to the 2008 and 2012 presidential endorsements,liberal newspapers include the New York Times,the Washington Post,the Denver Post,the Seattle Times,and the San Francisco Chronicle,while others are conservative newspapers.News articles were retrieved using a key word search of three search engines: the Lexis-Nexis,the News Bank,and the Factiva databases.The keywords “medical marijuana” OR “marijuana use” OR “marijuana legalization” OR “legal marijuana,” appearing in the headline or the lead paragraph of the Lexis-Nexis database,in the lead or first paragraph of the News Bank database,and in the text of the Factiva database were used to find articles of coverage selected for this study between 1995 and 2014.This search yielded a total of 4186 articles – including editorials – from the 10 newspapers,and we produced a manageable systematic random sample of about 75 articles from each paper.This study excluded unrelated stories where marijuana was simply mentioned without being the main focus or where reported marijuana related crimes.After excluding these unrelated articles,a total of 640 articles were analyzed.The coding instrument was developed through a comprehensive review of news stories and previous studies.
Coding was conducted by one of the authors and one graduate student.Coders first read a story carefully,and then decided an organizing theme of each story by examining what was the main focus.Because researchers paid little attention to examining news frames of marijuana legalization,more than 100 news articles were carefully reviewed to find out organizing themes in stories related to marijuana legalization and medical marijuana.Then,six organizing themes were identified after examining marijuana legalization stories and previous studies.Each story was categorized into one of the six organizing themes: legislation,law enforcement,youth drug use,economy,patients,and medical effects.When coders found more than two themes in an article,they checked both.The description of organizing themes is presented in Table 1.Coders then coded overall tones of a story.This study used the way to indicate overall tones examined by the previous studies.Coders first decided that each paragraph was positive,neutral,or negative toward medical or recreational use of marijuana.There were three major considerations to examine: what was emphasized in the headline and lead,how the balance or imbalance of the pros and cons of marijuana use were described,and how the metaphor mentioned in each story were related to positive or negative social norms.Coders then decided story tone as an ordinal category by classifying 1 to a negative,2 to a neutral,or 3 to a positive story.When at least two-thirds of the paragraphs could be considered as either negative or positive,coders selected one of either category.Otherwise,the story was coded as neutral.Two coders coded articles after having conducted a series of training and pilot-test sessions.Intercoder reliability was calculated by double coding a random sub-sample of the data.Intercoder reliability corrected for agreement by chance ranged between 0.79 and 1.00 with an average reliability of 0.88.This study aims to answer the question of how U.S.newspapers have presented the issue of marijuana legalization between 1995 and 2014.Newspapers have largely described marijuana legalization as a law enforcement issue rather than an economic issue or a medical issue.Taken together,our findings are consistent with previous studies that have revealed that marijuana has been mainly discussed as a legal and policy issue.Framing can affect the way the readers evaluate a certain issue,influencing their judgment.Thus,it can be argued that Americans are more likely to evaluate marijuana legalization as a public policy issue,rather than a public health issue.There can be several explanations for these findings.First,marijuana legalization is essentially the theme about the legislative acts.A number of legislative measures that allow for recreational use of marijuana have been passed since 2012.Second,marijuana stories often involved conflicts between federal and state governments,between enforcement agencies and citizens,and between governors and congresses.
The conflict perspective is a popular frame because conflict is a recognized news value.Thus,this conflict may influence journalists to report marijuana stories as a law enforcement theme.Third,a medical effect theme and a patients theme might appear less often because we examined stories related to recreational use as well as medical use.Nonetheless,criticism of newspapers’ tendency to define marijuana stories as legislation or law enforcement stories may be justified.Because these themes were clearly dominant,the issues surrounding medical marijuana were not commonly highlighted in the news.Although the issue of marijuana is important in terms of public health approach,our findings indicated that journalists paid little attention to the medical effect theme when covering marijuana stories.Our findings also revealed that organizing themes appeared differently according to the presidential periods.First,newspapers frequently described marijuana stories with a legislation theme during the Obama administration period.Since Colorado and Washington initially allowed for recreational use of marijuana in 2012,other seven more states have followed.As Griffin et al.pointed out,the passage of drying rack cannabis laws significantly increased news stories.During this period,frequent legislative activities caused media attention.Second,an economy theme more frequently appeared since 2009.Block also found that marijuana legalization was discussed mainly as a business issue in 2014.In particular,many news stories reported the expected and actual economic effects of legalization during those years.Third,a youth drug use theme peaked during the first Clinton administration period,and then it has decreased.Interestingly,according to Monitoring the Future survey,the actual use among youth was somewhat declined between 1995 and 2008.Thus,newspapers probably reflected this trend.Although more than half articles described the issue of marijuana with a neutral tone,positive stories were published more frequently than negative stories.These findings can be explained by two-sided framed stories,which often result in a neutral tone.As Sniderman and Theriault indicate,the public should make choices between several competing values in real politics.In a two-sided frame,a story presents both frames of an issue.For example,the media may present reasons to both support and oppose marijuana legalization in the same story.Over the past decade,the political discourse around marijuana legalization has been dominated by competing frames over the legal,law enforcement,economic,and public health consequences of proposed state and federal government policies.These two-sided or non-framed articles likely present the issue with a neutral tone.Our findings have several limitations.First,we examined only newspapers.If marijuana stories were retrieved from other sources for 20 years,1995 to 2014,it could be very hard to manage the sample.Thus,one of the major reasons to analyze only newspapers was to obtain a manageable sample size.Also,newspapers still provide a useful channel to deliver information,as they can play a key role in setting the agenda for other news media.
In addition,many mainstream newspapers have provided their online versions through their own web pages and social media.Thus,news stories from these newspapers can be widely exposed to Americans.Future research should include other news sources.Second,the selection of newspapers has limitations.Because some newspapers were not available through online search engines,we examined less representative newspapers,which can cause concerns regarding the generalizability of the findings.Thus,it is necessary for future research to include more representative newspapers as much as possible.Third,it can be pointed out that the categories of themes were inductively determined because there have been only a few previous studies on the topic of marijuana legalization.The coding categories used in this study may raise questions about the results in terms of validity and reliability.Thus,future studies should test the same categories that this study used and then develop more correct coding categories.Lastly,the time period for this study was between 1995 and 2014.Although marijuana was initially legalized in 2012,the first recreational sales were in 2014.Thus,news stories during 2014 could be quite different than stories from previous years.The development of high-performance materials made from natural resources is increasing worldwide due to their abundant source in the nature,low cost,light weight and high specific modulus in contrast to the synthetic fibers.In addition,they are biodegradable,renewable,have low specific weight,high specific strength and stiffness than glass fibers,ease of processing,reduced wear,good thermal and acoustic insulating properties.Hemp fiber is recently gaining attention as diversified reinforcing applications in composite industry,housing,railways and aerospace applications due to its high specific strength and stiffness.Hemp offers excellent mechanical strength and Young’s modulus.However,the foremost limitation of natural fibers used as reinforcement is the poor interfacial adhesion between polar hydrophilic natural fibers and non-polar hydrophobic polymers.Different coupling agents have been used to increase compatibility between natural fibers and thermoplastic matrices,thereby augmenting the composite’s performance.The increasing use of polyethylene in number of applications is posing a serious environmental threat and thus the researchers are motivated to undertake studies concerning recycling of polymer waste.The literature consulted so far reveals that the studies pertaining to mechanical characterization of hemp fiber reinforced polyethylene composites,especially containing recycled PE,are rather scant.In the light of these facts,it is decided to investigate the mechanical behavior of hemp fiber-recycled PE composites.