Reflections on the Impending Lawsuits by Governments Against Pharmaceutical Opioid Producers in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Canada has experienced an unprecedented opioid-related public health crisis. Several Canadian (provincial) governments are preparing lawsuits against pharmaceutical opioid manufacturers towards liability and reparations for the extensive costs of opioid-related harms. We briefly examine these efforts on ethical, practical and commonsensical grounds. Specifically, the opioid drugs fuelling the crisis were actively approved by public regulators, and governments for long neglected explicit warnings about and failed to implement crucial interventions towards the emerging opioid crisis when needed. The opioid crisis arose out of interactive dynamics (of actions and non-actions) by multiple protagonists neither accounted for nor corrected by one-sided responsibility assignments. Le Canada a connu une crise sans précédent au niveau de la santé publique liée aux opioïdes. Plusieurs gouvernements canadiens (provinciaux) préparent des poursuites contre les fabricants d’opioïdes pharmaceutiques pour responsabilité civile et réparation en raison des coÛts élevés des méfaits liés aux opioïdes. Nous avons examiné ces efforts aux niveaux éthique, pratique et logique. Plus précisément, les médicaments opioïdes qui alimentent la crise ont été activement approuvés par les régulateurs publics, et les gouvernements ont longtemps négligés les avertissements explicites. De plus, ils n’ont pas réussi à mettre en œuvre des interventions cruciales contre la crise des opioïdes émergente en cas de besoin. La crise des opioïdes est née de la dynamique interactive (des actions et des non-actions) de multiples protagonistes. Elle n’a été ni expliquée ni corrigée par des attributions de blâmes unilatérales.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".