Impact of supply-side policies for control of illicit drugs in the face of the AIDS and overdose epidemics: investigation of a massive heroin seizure.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: More than 93% of the nearly $500 million spent annually on Canada's drug strategy goes toward efforts to reduce the illicit drug supply. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this strategy. On Sept. 2, 2000, Canadian police seized approximately 100 kg of heroin in one of the nation's largest-ever seizures of this drug. An ongoing prospective cohort study of injection drug users afforded an opportunity to evaluate the impact of this seizure. METHODS: The Vancouver Injection Drug User Study is a prospective cohort study of injection drug users that began in 1996. The present study relied primarily on data acquired from participants who were seen during the 30-day periods immediately before and after the seizure. We compared drug use and behavioural characteristics, heroin and cocaine prices, and participants' reports of whether law enforcement had affected their source of drugs or the types of drugs available on the street, as well as overdoses, in these 2 periods. RESULTS: The 138 participants seen before the seizure were similar to the 123 participants seen after the seizure with respect to age, sex, ethnic background, education, HIV serostatus, neighbourhood residence, instability of housing, employment status, use of methadone maintenance therapy and all other measured potential confounders (all p > 0.10). We found no difference in the extent to which participants in the 2 groups reported daily use of heroin, frequency of nonfatal overdoses, or whether law enforcement had affected their source of drugs or the types of drugs available on the street (all p > 0.10). Although we detected no difference in the price of cocaine, the median reported price of heroin went down after the seizure (p = 0.034), which suggests that other shipments compensated for the seizure. External evaluations of deaths from overdoses and heroin purity indicated that the seizure had no impact, nor was any impact seen when the periods of analysis were extended. INTERPRETATION: The massive heroin seizure appeared to have no measurable public health benefit. Closer scrutiny of enforcement efforts is warranted to ensure that resources are delivered to the most efficient and cost-effective public health programs.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".