Displacement of Canada's largest public illicit drug market in response to a police crackdown
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Full frame distilled prediction
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.
- Candidate categories
- Metaresearch, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
- Consensus categories
- none
- Domain
- Candidate signal: noneConsensus signal: none
- Study design
- Candidate signal: Not applicableConsensus signal: Not applicable
- Genre
- Candidate signal: EmpiricalConsensus signal: Empirical
- Teacher disagreement score
- 0.262
- Threshold uncertainty score
- 0.998
- Validation status
machine_predicted_unvalidated·codex-gemma-dda1882f352a
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
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.
- Teacher spread
- 0.267 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Law enforcement is often used in an effort to reduce the social, community and health-related harms of illicit drug use by injection drug users (IDUs). There are, however, few data on the benefits of such enforcement or on the potential harms. A large-scale police "crackdown" to control illicit drug use in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside provided us with an opportunity to evaluate the effect. METHODS: As part of our ongoing prospective cohort study of IDUs in Vancouver, we examined data collected from 244 IDUs in the 3 months before the police crackdown and from 142 IDUs in the 3 months after the start of the crackdown, on Apr. 7, 2003. All study subjects were active drug users. We also examined external data on needle exchanges and syringe disposal. RESULTS: The 2 groups of IDUs were statistically similar: they were mainly young (mean age 39 years) and male (63%), and they had injected illicit drugs for 13 years on average. Ethnic background and the proportion homeless were also similar. There were no statistically significant reported differences (all p > 0.1) in the street price of heroin, cocaine or "crack" in the 2 periods. In the 3-month periods before and after the crackdown, respectively, the rates of daily heroin injection were 27.9% and 26.8%, daily cocaine injection 28.7% and 27.5%, and daily crack use 59.4% and 60.6% (all p > 0.1). The proportions of study subjects receiving methadone treatment, 41.0% and 44.4% (p = 0.516), did not differ. However, the proportions reporting a change in where drugs were used, 22.5% and 33.8% (p < 0.05), and the proportions reporting a change in the neighbourhood of use because of police presence, 18.1% and 26.8% (p < 0.05), increased significantly. Needle-exchange data confirmed that the community levels of drug use were unchanged. Disposal statistics demonstrated that the monthly average number of used syringes found on the streets outside the traditional area of drug use increased from 784 in the 3 months before Apr. 1 to 1253 in the subsequent 3 months (p = 0.002) and the monthly average number of used syringes found in public boxes for the safe disposal of syringes decreased from 865 to 502 (p = 0.018). INTERPRETATION: The effort to control illicit drug use did not alter the price of drugs or the frequency of use, nor did it encourage enrollment in methadone treatment programs. Several measures indicated displacement of injection drug use from the area of the crackdown into adjacent areas of the city, which has implications for both recruitment of new initiates into injection drug use and HIV prevention efforts.
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.
The record
- Venue
- Canadian Medical Association Journal
- Topic
- HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk
- Field
- Medicine
- Canadian institutions
- University of British Columbia
- Funders
- National Institute on Drug AbuseCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchNational Institutes of HealthMichael Smith Health Research BC
- Keywords
- HeroinMedicineIllicit drugMethadoneLaw enforcementPublic healthDemographyEnvironmental healthDrugPsychiatryPolitical scienceLaw
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes