Young sexual and gender minority men’s perspectives on drug checking services in Metro Vancouver, Canada: a qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Young sexual and gender minority (SGM) men experience disproportionate risk of drug-related harms. Improving access to drug checking services (DCS), where people can receive information about the contents of their illicit drugs, is critical to facilitate safer drug use among this population. However, no research to date has explored their perspectives on DCS.Objectives: To explore perspectives on DCS among young SGM men in Metro Vancouver, Canada.Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 50 young (ages 18–30) SGM men living in Metro Vancouver in 2018. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded. Themes were identified using inductive-deductive approaches and interpreted by drawing on the Risk Environment Framework.Results: Two key themes emerged. First, participants generally had limited awareness and experience with DCS. Nevertheless, given concerns over the increasingly toxic drug supply, they perceived benefits to getting their drugs tested, including reducing their risk of overdose. Second, participants identified social (e.g. anti-drug stigma), policy/legal (e.g. drug criminalization), and physical (e.g. lack of services outside of downtown Vancouver) barriers in the current context of DCS. To improve access, participants encouraged the expansion of DCS in community settings (e.g. bars) and through community-based approaches (e.g. integration within community sexual health programming) tailored for young SGM men.Conclusion: Despite low levels of awareness and experience with DCS, young SGM men demonstrated a strong interest in accessing these services. Efforts to adapt and scale up DCS need to account for the social, policy/legal, and physical contexts that shape the lives of young SGM men.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".