Decriminalization of the possession of illicit substances for personal use: A proposed theory of change to improve community safety and well-being outcomes in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Addressing the harms associated with criminalizing the problematic and addictive use of substances is a complex undertaking. In many cases, problematic substance use has a relationship to prior and current adversities and has been characterized as an “affliction of inequality.” Community partners, leaders and policy makers will benefit from an informed understanding of the potential role of decriminalization as part of system-wide efforts that have the potential to achieve urgent societal goals. We draw on relevant and up-to-date domestic and international research to present a theory of change for approaching the decriminalization of personal substance use as one part of an integrated strategy addressing health and safety. The proposed theory of change should serve as a guide to understanding, designing and participating in effective whole-of-system strategies and actions. As a living document—and starting point for collaborative community safety andwell-being planning—the material presented here should be refined as additional evidence and insights become available.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| 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".