Medicine, Moral Panic, and the International Context of Canadian Cannabis Prohibition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amongst controlled substances in Canada, cannabis now occupies the anomalous position of being both a medicinal and recreational drug, the legal status of which is currently governed by two parallel systems—an intentionally constructed legislative framework borne out of a federal election mandate, and a medical access program originally formed through a series of reluctant governmental concessions resulting from various high court cases. Across the world, lawmakers and public health officials are increasingly calling for an approach to drugs premised on the principles of education, harm reduction, and restricted legal access. In this sense, Canada’s experiment in creating a national and government regulated legal market in cannabis serves as an integral part of a wider reconsideration of the multilateral policy framework underlying official attitudes towards illicit substances. This article examines the relationship between this international regulatory apparatus, Canadian policymakers in the legal and healthcare sectors, and the origins, evolution, and eventual abolition of cannabis prohibition in Canada. It draws on an eclectic variety of sources, including specialized monographs, peer-reviewed articles, contemporary journals, Parliamentary debates, governmental commissions, and reports by the League of Nations and United Nations.
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".