By Nina Zdinjak What has influenced the recent marijuana legalization movement? A new study revealed that generalized content, character judgment-based arguments, and moralistic focus had a larger impact on marijuana legalization than anecdotal content. The study, a dissertation from Ph.D. candidate Babak Hemmatian titled: “Taking the High Road: A Big Data Investigation of Natural Discourse in the Emerging U.S. Consensus about Marijuana Legalization,” examined more than three million Reddit posts from 2009 to 2019. The generalized precedents of legalization in the two periods shared argumentative and moralistic focus but had distinctive clause-level profiles. Meanwhile, legal and medical arguments were sidelined, meaning the novel consensus was not informed by much of the relevant information,” the study author highlighted.