Description
What does drug legalization mean and imply? We searched its definition in the universal encyclopaedia of Wikipedia. The topic of drug legalization is tightly linked to the concept of drug liberalization, drug decriminalization, and drug prohibition. The latter discourages recreational drug use and possession by banning them, the other two either promote the total or partial removal of government control over drug use - drug liberalization - or else claim to reduce control and penalties compared to existing laws - drug decriminalization. All these aspects have a very complex cloud of themes linked to them like: war on drugs, freedom of thought, legal drug trade, drug trafficking, self-medication, culture war, prohibition of alcohol, tobacco control and many others. The first visualization shows the edges connecting the nodes, which are the Wikipedia’s pages. Every word is a node and their dimension depends from the numbers of In and Out Degree links, which is the number of pages that has a direct connection with that node (how many pages have that link in their See also section). They have been shown just the most important nodes. The second visualization on the other hand illustrates all the clusters by theme found thoughout all the nodes. Each circle has a colour assigned that corresponds to the cluster or main topic it refers to.
Since we also wanted to understand which of our main queries was the most used and debated on, we used Google Trends and found the legalization, specifically of marijuana, of broad and current interest.
From the correlated queries of the words “legalization” and “marijuana” on Google Trends we noticed that appeared the title of a song and several states of the U.S. That is why we decided to proceed our research with two parallel paths, one with the goal to see how the debate configure itself in the United States and the other to observe which influence the songs may have in perceiving the subject studied.
