PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2024, Arts and Sciences: Political Science

Legalizing marijuana is often advocated as a measure to address the persistent racial injustices within the American criminal justice system. Previous research indicates that support for marijuana legalization has become increasingly entrenched. However, there has been no prior study that directly evaluates the influence of pro- and anti-legalization arguments by elites, specifically those framed in terms of their impact on the African American community. Considering this, the primary objective of this study is to understand how deeply rooted opinions about marijuana legalization are. I do so by examining the extent to which elite racial appeals prime voters' racial predisposition to marijuana policies. Specifically, I investigate the effect of explicit elite racial framing on respondent's policy position on the extent of legalization (recreational use nationwide, medical use nationwide, illegal nationwide, or leave the decision to the states), social equity-focused policies (reparative justice), and beliefs about whether legalization would help improve underrepresented communities. I further study why some sectors of the population are fiercely opposed to marijuana policies even when exposed to positive information about legalization, thereby investigating whether the American public is willing to change their beliefs towards marijuana policies in the face of countervailing information that confounds stereotypes. To address these research inquiries, I employ a two-step methodology. Initially, I analyze support for marijuana policies utilizing nationally representative surveys. Subsequently, I incorporate a novel survey-embedded experiment to assess the impact of elite racial communication on voters' views about marijuana. The experimental manipulation revealed statistically significant differences across the three conditions on several dependent variables. These include respondents' policy positions on the extent of legalization, opinions on th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Stephen Mockabee Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Brian Calfano Ph.D. (Committee Member); David Niven (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2023, Arts and Sciences: Geography

Drug abuse is an important issue in the United States. Marijuana is one of the most commonly used types of drugs, and the long-time use of marijuana can lead to health problems. But as the medical uses of marijuana have been discussed in recent studies, laws and attitudes toward marijuana in the United States have become more permissive. Some studies have explored the impact of the legalization of medical marijuana on people's attitudes toward drugs and drug-related criminal activities, but gaps remain in research, and the relationship between the legalization of medical marijuana and drug activities is still inconclusive. This study aims to analyze changes in the temporal and spatial distribution of drug activity at the micro research unit and test the impact of the legalization of medical marijuana on it. Three main research questions are explored: (1) Is there a change in the amount of drug activity before and after the legalization of medical marijuana? (2) Is there a change in the concentration of drug activity before and after the legalization of medical marijuana? (3) Is the effect of medical marijuana legalization on drug activity statistically significant, with the socio-economic factors and land-use factors controlled? Ohio became the 25th state in the U.S. to legalize medical marijuana on September 8, 2016. Cincinnati, Ohio is the chosen research area and call for service data collected by the emergency telephone service from 2013 to 2018 is used to count drug activities. Results indicate a significant decrease in drug activities since legalization. The number of street segments with drug activities also decreased, suggesting that drug activities became more concentrated. Medical marijuana legalization has likely had a significant effect on drug activity and it is possible that the legalization of medical marijuana has changed people's attitudes towards marijuana-related activities, which in turn affected the likelihood of reporting via 911 calls. The res (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lin Liu Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Changjoo Kim Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeffrey Brewer Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Geographic Information Science

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2022, Economics

This paper investigates the causal relationship between cannabis consumption and mental health using state-level longitudinal data in the United States from 2005-2018. We first estimate the impact of cannabis legalization on cannabis consumption and mental health among the states that have legalized cannabis using recent developments in the difference-in-differences literature to account for treatment heterogeneity across cohorts and time under staggered treatment adoption. We then estimate the direct effect of cannabis consumption on mental health using an instrumented difference-in-differences (DDIV) approach exploiting state-level variation in the legal status of cannabis. We link the legalization of cannabis to an average increase of 1.59 percentage points (7.3 percent) and 0.92 percentage points (5.0 percent) in the proportion of the population with symptoms of a mental health disorder for adults aged 18- 25 and aged 26+, respectively. Our DDIV estimates suggest that, among the states that have legalized cannabis, roughly 2 out of 10 adults that engage in frequent cannabis consumption developed symptoms of a mental health disorder.

Committee: Jing Li (Advisor) Subjects: Economics; Health; Public Health; Public Policy