A qualitative exploration of prescription opioid injection among street-based drug users in Toronto: behaviours, preferences and drug availability
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is evidence of a high prevalence of prescription opioid (PO) and crack use among street drug users in Toronto. The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe drug use behaviours and preferences as well as the social and environmental context surrounding the use of these drugs among young and old street-based drug injection drug users (IDUs). METHODS: In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 PO injectors. Topics covered included drug use history, types of drugs used, how drugs were purchased and transitions to PO use. Interviews were taped and transcribed. Content analysis was conducted to identify themes. RESULTS: Five prominent themes emerged from the interviews: 1) Combination of crack and prescription opioids, 2) First injection experience and transition to prescription opioids, 3) Drug preferences and availability, 4) Housing and income and 5) Obtaining drugs. There was consensus that OxyContin and crack were the most commonly available drugs on the streets of Toronto. Drug use preferences and behaviours were influenced by the availability of drugs, the desired effect, ease of administration and expectations around the purity of the drugs. Distinct experiences were observed among younger users as compared to older users. In particular, the initiation of injection drug use and experimentation with POs among younger users was influenced by their experiences on the street, their peers and general curiosity. CONCLUSION: Given the current profile of street-based drug market in Toronto and the emergence of crack and POs as two predominant illicit drug groups, understanding drug use patterns and socio-economic factors among younger and older users in this population has important implications for preventive and therapeutic interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it