Looking beyond harm: meaning and purpose of substance use in the lives of marginalized people who use drugs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Substance use among marginalized populations has historically been constructed as a social problem to be managed, cured, and eliminated. Much social science research concerning drug use among marginalized populations focuses on risks and harms, with little attention to positive aspects of substance use. In this paper we explore positive roles of drugs/drug use among marginalized people who use drugs. We draw on in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with 50 people who use drugs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. Forty-three participants reported positive aspects of drug use. Participant narratives revealed four main themes regarding the role and function of drugs and drug use in their lives: (1) pain relief and management; (2) alleviating mental health issues; (3) fostering social experiences; (4) pleasurable embodied experiences. Our findings show that despite known negative consequences of substance use, in many ways drug use was beneficial for these individuals. Our study demonstrates that given the opportunity, meaningful and useful conversations that shed light on why people take drugs is possible. By understanding why marginalized individuals choose to consume the drugs they do we can begin to engage in truly helpful conversations about how to reduce drug-related harm.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".