“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 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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".