Circumstances of first crystal methamphetamine use and initiation of injection drug use among high‐risk youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite the widely noted increase in crystal methamphetamine (CM) use, there are few studies on circumstances of first CM use or correlates of use among high-risk populations (e.g. street-involved youth). METHODS: Street-involved youth in Vancouver, Canada, were enrolled in the At-Risk Youth Study (ARYS) prospective cohort. Extensive outreach produced a representative sample of Vancouver street youth who use illicit drugs. We examined circumstances of first CM use and factors associated with CM use among the cohort. RESULTS: Among 478 participants, 339 (70.9%) had used CM previously. Despite intensive covariate adjustment, a history of CM use was associated independently with having initiated injection drug use [OR = 3.15 (95% CI: 1.89-5.2); p < 0.001]. Among those who had used CM, route of first administration included: 11 (3.2%) oral ingestion; 25 (7.4%) injected; 105 (31.0%) snorted; 231 (68.1%) smoked. The proportion of respondents reporting current CM injection was significantly greater than the proportion reporting injection as the route for first CM use (18.3% vs. 7.4%; McNemar's test p < 0.001). Ability to obtain CM the first time was reported as 'very easy' or 'easy' by 93.5% and 5.3% of participants, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Crystal methamphetamine use was independently associated with injection drug use, and significant increases in injecting as the primary mode of administration were observed when patterns of use were considered longitudinally. The easy accessibility of CM and its common use during transition into injection drug use demonstrate the need for innovative drug policy to address this growing concern.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".