Lower-risk substance use guidelines accessible by youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Lower-risk substance use guidelines (LRSUGs) are an evidence-based harm reduction strategy used to provide information to people who use drugs so they can reduce harms associated with substance use. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to identify LRSUGs accessible to youth and to characterize the recommendations within these guidelines. The overall goal is to identify gaps in current LRSUGs and to inform researchers and policymakers of the kinds of health information youth can access. METHODS: We conducted a digital assessment using the Google search engine to identify LRSUGs that could be identified by youth when searching for official sources of information related to commonly used substances, including cannabis, caffeine, alcohol, hallucinogens, prescription opioids, nicotine, and/or prescription stimulants. LRSUGs were coded and data were extracted from them to identify gaps. RESULTS: One hundred thirty LRSUGs were identified; most focused on alcohol (n = 40, 31%), cannabis (n = 30, 23%), and caffeine (n = 21, 16%). LRSUGs provided recommendations about dosing (n = 108, 83%), frequency of use (n = 72, 55%), and when to use (n = 86, 66%). Most LRSUGs were published by health (n = 51, 39%) and third-sector organizations (n = 41, 32%), followed by provincial/state (n = 18, 14%), government (n = 14, 11%), municipal (n = 4, 3%), and academic (n = 2, 2%) sources. Only 16% (n = 21) of LRSUGs were youth-specific and one-quarter (n = 32, 25%) of LRSUGs provided gender-specific recommendations. Most guidelines featured information on short (n = 76, 58%) and long-term (n = 69, 53%) negative effectives and positive effects of substances (n = 56, 43%). Less than half (n = 50, 38%) of LRSUGs cited evidence in support of the information they provided. CONCLUSIONS: We identified several areas in the current LRSUGs for youth that need to be addressed. Among the gaps are a lack of LRSUGs developed specifically for youth, a lack of youth engagement in developing harm reduction strategies centered around them, and a lack of evidence-based LRSUGs. Youth-oriented, evidence-based LRSUGs are needed to better support youth who use substances and help them manage the negative effects of substance use.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".