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Drug classification: science, politics, both or neither?

2010· article· en· W2123615244 on OpenAlexaff
H. Kalant

Bibliographic record

VenueAddiction · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicCannabis and Cannabinoid Research
Canadian institutionsCentre for Addiction and Mental Health
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHarmPoliticsCannabisHarmony (color)DrugValue (mathematics)Function (biology)Control (management)PsychologyPolitical sciencePublic relationsSocial psychologyLawComputer sciencePsychiatryArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Governments currently classify illicit drugs for various purposes: to guide courts in the sentencing of convicted violators of drug control laws, to prioritize targets of prevention measures and to educate the public about relative risks of the various drugs. It has been proposed that classification should be conducted by scientists and drug experts rather than by politicians, so that it will reflect only accurate factual knowledge of drug effects and risks rather than political biases. Although this is an appealing goal, it is inherently impossible because rank-ordering of the drugs inevitably requires value judgements concerning the different types of harm. Such judgements, even by scientists, depend upon subjective personal criteria and not only upon scientific facts. Moreover, classification that is meant to guide the legal system in controlling dangerous drug use can function only if it is in harmony with the values and sentiments of the public. In some respects, politicians may be better attuned to public attitudes and wishes, and to what policies the public will support, than are scientific experts. The problems inherent in such drug classification are illustrated by the examples of cannabis and of salvinorin A. They raise the question as to whether the classification process really serves any socially beneficial purpose.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.031
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.046
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.994
Threshold uncertainty score0.163

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0310.046
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0050.008
Science and technology studies0.0060.037
Scholarly communication0.0190.033
Open science0.0020.004
Research integrity0.0120.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.004

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.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.323
Teacher spread0.301 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations43
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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