“Criminalization Causes the Stigma”: Perspectives From People Who Use Drugs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction In light of North America's persisting drug toxicity crisis, alternative drug policy approaches such as decriminalization, legalization, regulation, and safer supply have increasingly come to the forefront of drug policy discourse. The views of people who use drugs toward drug policy and drug law reform in the Canadian context are essential, yet largely missing from the conversation. The aim of this study was to capture the opinions, ideas, and attitudes of people who use drugs toward Canadian drug laws and potential future alternatives. Methods This paper was developed as part of the Canadian Drug Laws Project, a cross-jurisdictional qualitative study conducted in British Columbia, Canada between July and September 2020. The qualitative data are from 24 semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of people who use illegal drugs. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed thematically by the research team. Results Two main themes and corresponding sub-themes are presented: (1) The experience of stigma as a consequence of criminalization; (2) The perceived benefits of drug law reform. Participants spoke in-depth about their experiences living within a criminalized drug policy context and offered suggestions for new pathways forward. Their perspectives illuminate how Canada's drug laws may shape public attitudes toward people who use drugs and the consequent manifestations of structural, social, and self-stigma experienced by people who use drugs. Conclusion Participants openly and profoundly believed that current drug laws produced and propagated the public attitudes and structural inequities experienced by people who use drugs in Canada. This matters, not only because our findings highlight the fact that people who use drugs experience stigma in tangible and clearly impactful ways, but it also suggests that the criminlilization of drugs shapes the experience of structural, social, and self stigma. Finally, participants believed that efforts to destigmatize people who use drugs would be ineffectual without the enactment of more robust forms of drug law reform such as the decriminalization of illegal drugs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 it