Shaping a Crisis, Constructing Addiction: Discursive Depoliticization of British Columbia's Drug Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This analysis sets out to inquire why the comprehensive public health response to the alarming surge in illicit opioid and stimulant-related fatalities in the Canadian province of British Columbia has not yielded the intended results, despite its forward-thinking policies grounded in a concern for health over criminalization (Govt of BC, 2016; Burton et al., 2021). I will claim that this purportedly progressive approach to public health has been ineffective because it fails to address the socio-political drivers of the overdose crisis. Relating the work of cultural anthropologist Philippe Bourgois on drug use as a coping mechanism and Carol Bacchi's ontopolitical approach to the issue, I will trace the discursive dynamics through which the opioid crisis has been constructed in a manner that obviates its structural roots in the political economy of capitalist democracies.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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".