Overdose escalation and the pandemic: An urgent reminder to innovate Canada’s response to the opioid epidemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A ‘dual crisis’ situation in Canada has gained more attention in the past two months, as deaths by overdose have reached record highs within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic overtaking the opioid epidemic. Given the already dire state of the prevailing overdose crisis (with no sustainable gains in improving mortality rates despite being declared a national emergency in 2016, expanded harm reduction and access to treatment), this acute spike is an urgent reminder of the unsustainability of the current system, in this case demonstrated by its inability to withstand stress.
 Under this premise, this article reviews recent literature on possible factors contributing to the present surge in overdoses, with the aim of identifying pre-existing systemic issues exacerbated in the past months of pandemic response. Sociopolitical issues were found to be most contributory; specifically, legal restrictions to innovative, evidence-based approaches to harm reduction (i.e. “safe supply” programs and decriminalization of drug use) based in stigmatizing attitudes. An overview of potential ways these issues may be addressed by innovative initiatives (both current and proposed) is included. Advocacy leading to prompt expansion of such interventions may help address the alarming rise in opioid-related mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic and promote a more progressive and sustainable approach to the overdose crisis.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".