Police discretion to charge young people who use drugs prior to cannabis legalization in British Columbia, Canada: a brief report of quantitative findings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Normalization theory posits a process where drug use is socially accommodated in society. We examine the extent of and factors related to police decision to charge young people who use drugs prior to cannabis legalization in Canada in 2018 and situate these findings within normalization theory.Methods: In the Youth Experiences with Police study, young people (aged 16–30 years) who use drugs from three cities in British Columbia, Canada, were recruited using a modified respondent driven sampling approach. Participants were administered a questionnaire focusing on their drug use, past encounters with police, and psychosocial and sociodemographic factors.Results: Among 449 participants, 3.6% of 56 in possession of cannabis by police were charged, whereas 41.2% of 34 in possession of other illicit drugs were charged (p < .001). Bivariate analyses showed prior criminal convictions (p = .001) as well as lower average monthly income (p < .05) was significantly related to being charged by police. Drug use stigma was significantly higher for weekly illicit drug users compared to weekly cannabis and those who did not use drugs weekly (p < .001).Discussion: Greater police discretion toward cannabis suggest it is more socially acceptable or normalized compared to other drugs. Police practices may reflect cultural conditions but could be structurally harmful to marginalized groups.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".