Drug use trends in Victoria and Vancouver, and changes in injection drug use after the closure of Victoria’s fixed site needle exchange
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Overview This 6th CARBC statistical bulletin reports trends in injection drug use in Victoria and Vancouver from the BC Alcohol and Other Drug Monitoring Project (www.AODmonitoring.ca). As well, changes before and after the closure of Victoria’s fixed site needle exchange in June 2008 are examined. Results are reported from 464 interviews (226 in Vancouver, 238 in Victoria) with adult injection drug users conducted in 5 waves using a standardised sampling strategy, every 6 months from July 2007 to December 2009. Around the time of the closure of the fixed site needle exchange in Victoria, there were shifts in the types of drugs injected and an increase in unsafe injecting practices. At the same time, numbers of clean needles distributed in Victoria since the closure fell by over 15,000 per month. Across both cities and all time periods, crack cocaine was the most commonly used substance, after tobacco, in the past 30 days (86%), followed by powdered cocaine (70%). When the needle exchange ceased operation on May 31, 2008, the data shows a brief decrease in daily injection among the sample, followed by a steady rise to higher levels than pre-closure over the next year. Trends show a decline in Vancouver during the same period. By the second half of 2009, there was a substantially higher proportion of frequent drug injectors in Victoria than Vancouver (89% vs. 29%). Needle sharing was significantly more common in Victoria than Vancouver (see Figure 1). Rates increased to 23% in Victoria, up from 10% before the fixed site needle exchange closure, compared with 8% in Vancouver - a concern highlighted by qualitative data suggesting this increase was directly linked to the closure. It is recommended that measures be taken to increase ease of access to both clean needles and crack- using paraphernalia to limit the spread of blood-borne viruses in the community.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 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".