The Framing of Minority Threat and Moralization to Criminalize Behavior: The Case of Cannabis in the Early 20th Century

Abstract

Abstract Understanding why particular behavior is encoded in law or other systems of rules has been a core topic of sociology since its inception. Although differing rhetorical frames have been identified in policy debates, little research directly links such rhetoric and policy passage. Centering framing theory, we use the case of U.S. cannabis criminalization via mixed-methods content analyses of 9,707 nationwide newspaper articles and event history analysis of state-level criminalization to make several contributions. First, we go beyond describing rhetorical frames, demonstrating that core framing tasks were associated with spatial and temporal state-level cannabis law passage. Second, we emphasize that consolidation of two “master frames,” legal and racial, are particularly pertinent to criminalization and permit incorporation of rhetorical minority threat into framing. Third, an overreliance on population-based minority threat exists in the literature; however, threat can operate absent minority groups. While demonstrating the effect of vilification of Mexican people, we show that a heterogeneous “othering” of cannabis, by attaching threat to numerous minority groups, was significant for cannabis criminalization, regardless of minority groups’ actual presence. In addition to interrogating longstanding assumptions regarding cannabis criminalization, our analyses demonstrate the importance of framing and rhetorical racial threat in the social construction of law.