Prosecuting Overdose: Manslaughter Charges Against People Who Use, Share, and Sell Drugs in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examines the recent proliferation of manslaughter charges and subsequent prosecutions brought against people who have shared, sold, or provided drugs that have led to overdose death in Canada. It presents a documentary analysis of news media coverage, court decisions, and Access-to-Information and Freedom-of-Information requests of materials from criminal legal institutions. The analysis finds that the vast majority of those who face manslaughter charges are engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade, are themselves people who use drugs, and are often intimately known to the deceased. Messaging by police, prosecutors and the courts mobilize the overdose crisis as rationale for these charges and prosecutions, positioning them as a form of redress to impacted communities. This phenomenon illustrates how punitive criminal legal responses to the overdose crisis have deepened alongside the retreat of criminal law in other circumstances, contradicting claims of a therapeutic turn in Canadian drug policies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".