“There's what's on Paper and then there's What Happens, out on the Sidewalk”: Cannabis Users Knowledge and Opinions of Canadian Drug Laws
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the knowledge and opinions of cannabis users regarding Canadian laws regulating possession of cannabis. Our study is based on data from 165 in-depth interviews with adult cannabis users from four Canadian cities. Our participants revealed a limited awareness of cannabis policy in Canada. When researchers informed them about actual Canadian laws, the majority of participants regarded the specified laws as “harsh,” “excessive,” “absurd” and/or “ridiculous.” In practice, the common experience of participants suggests the existence of two sets of enforcement practice in Canada—“there's what's on paper and then there's what happens, out on the sidewalk.” We situate our analysis of these practices in the context of broader debates regarding the putative normalization of drugs like cannabis in Canada. We conclude that greater consideration of the character of local law enforcement practices has the capacity to add further conceptual and analytical clarity to existing theories of normalization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".