iscussion of this option before rejcting it out of hand. But no sooner had legalization became a central question in the drug debate, it seems, then the debate itself faded from the media and political spotlight.
These two phenomena the election cycle pattern in the rise of the rhetorical drug crusade, and its decline as soon as legalization became a central question can be related by proposing a general hypothesis: that the drug war was popular mainly as a dramatic but non controversial issue, suitable for selling a media audience to sponsors and for selling politicians running for office.
Until the legalization issue was seriously raised, there was not really any "debate" about drugs: the only contest was to see which media would tell the most dramatic horror/suspense stories, and which politicians would propose the toughest solutions. No politician needed fear criticism or contradiction for proposing to get tough on drugs. Thus, drug war rhetoric escalated each election cycle, when it was to most politicians' advantage to promote it. But once legalization was seriously proposed, a genuine debate threatened to develop. Politicians were not eager for this, and the mass media were also not eager to publicize an issue that hinted of real controversy rather than simple tough cop verbal and visual imagery.
Note that all of the above is subjective and impressionistic. It is also based on reading and watching the mass media, which in turn are inherently subjective and impressionistic. However, the power of content analysis as a tool is precisely that it can be used to obtain objective information from seemingly subjective data. There are basic limits to our ability, through content analysis, to examine any hypothesis about why media or politicians promoted a drug war.1We can, however, rather easily trace the rhythm of the media drug war, and we can almost as easily trace the rhythm of the legalization ...