Why has the Opioid Crisis Remained Unchanged in Canada? The Limits of Bio-Scientific Based Policy Approaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s latest drug policy, the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy (CDSS) with its emphasis on an evidence-based public health approach to substance misuse, has remained unidimensional in response to the current opioid crisis. Its coexistence with a prohibitionist drug policy—the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act contravenes the evidence frame of drug addiction as a health issue rather than a crime. We argue that CDSS’s focus on individualizing, bio-scientifically driven tools involving naloxone, opioid agonist therapy, supervised consumption sites, and surveillance of legal opioid prescribing do not fully explain why the opioid crisis has remained intact, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations by not including social factors as a key component of the strategy. By examining contradictions inherent in these bio-scientific evidenced interventions, we call for a more holistic drug policy framework that considers broader structural conditions including a greater emphasis on engaging with those misusing substances to address underlying issues that affect them.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".