Evaluating explanations of the Australian ‘heroin shortage’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: In this paper we outline and evaluate competing explanations for a heroin shortage that occurred in Australia during 2001 with an abrupt onset at the beginning of 2001. METHODS: We evaluated each of the explanations offered for the shortage against evidence from a variety of sources: government reports, police and drug law enforcement documents and briefings, key informant (KI) interviews, indicator data and research data. RESULTS: No similar shortage occurred at the same time in other markets (e.g. Vancouver, Canada or Hong Kong) whose heroin originated in the same countries as Australia's. The shortage was due most probably to a combination of factors that operated synergistically and sequentially. The heroin market had grown rapidly in the late 1990s, perhaps helped by a decline in drug law enforcement (DLE) in Australia in the early 1990s that facilitated high-level heroin suppliers in Asia to establish large-scale importation heroin networks into Australia. This led to an increase in the availability of heroin, increasingly visible street-based drug markets, increased purity and decreased price of heroin around the country. The Australian heroin market was well established by the late 1990s, but it had a low profit margin with high heroin purity, and a lower price than ever before. The surge in heroin problems led to increased funding of the Australian Federal Police and Customs as part of the National Illicit Drug Strategy in 1998-99, with the result that a number of key individuals and large seizures occurred during 1999-2000, probably increasing the risks of large-scale importation. The combination of low profits and increased success of law enforcement may have reduced the dependability of key suppliers of heroin to Australia at a time when seized heroin was becoming more difficult to replace because of reduced supplies in the Golden Triangle. These factors may have reduced the attractiveness of Australia as a destination for heroin trafficking. CONCLUSIONS: The Australian heroin shortage in 2001 was due probably to a combination of factors that included increased effectiveness of law enforcement efforts to disrupt networks bringing large shipments of heroin from traditional source countries, and decreased capacity or willingness of major traffickers to continue large scale shipments to Australia.
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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 | 0.024 | 0.079 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".