“There is a new drug in the schedule”: The Criminalization of Cannabis in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada has recently concluded its prohibition on the recreational use of cannabis, which lasted for nearly a century. However, when cannabis was first criminalized in 1923, there was effectively no use of it in Canada at that time, and scholars have struggled to identify the specific reasons for which cannabis was added to the schedule of prohibited drugs. When situated within the drug discourse of the time, the lack of an explanation for criminalization becomes less surprising; the contemporary links between addiction, drug use, and racism likely transformed any prohibitive drug control measures into the kind of policy that did not require debate or analysis on the part of Parliament. Drugs and racial minorities were presented as connected threats to the integrity of the white Canadian population and to moral order, and moral reformers capitalized on this connection to support the criminalization of drugs. While the documentary source of the criminalization of cannabis remains unknown, these discursive conditions are of far greater import in understanding why cannabis was criminalized.
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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".