Low-barrier harm reduction and housing for older people in Vancouver’s opiate crisis: meeting people where they are
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on recent case-study data, this article explores innovative practices around harm reduction and housing for older people who use drugs. Although right-wing groups call for further criminalisation of drug use, in light of extraordinarily high levels of deaths from opioid overdose in Vancouver, Canada, the provincial government has quietly permitted the development of safe supply, the testing of illegal drugs to avoid poisonings and the provision of low-barrier, inclusive and supportive social housing, including housing specifically for older people. Drawing on crisis theory, the article analyses the provision of low-barrier harm reduction services for this marginalised and highly vulnerable group of older people and reflects on what we can learn about providing supports that are needs based and strengths based and embody meeting people where they are.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".