Vulnerable, Helpless, and Hopeless: Representations of Youth Who Use Drugs in Canadian Substance Use‐Focused Anti‐Stigma Campaigns (2009–2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Involuntary treatment policies that remove youth autonomy threaten the well‐being of youth who use drugs (YWUD) and constitute a form of structural stigma. Recent debate in British Columbia (BC) on “secure care” legislation (e.g., support from wealthy White parents and opposition by Indigenous organizations) shows how the agency of YWUD is contested and how ageism intersects with racism and substance use stigma. How do substance use anti‐stigma campaigns contribute to this debate? We critically analyzed representations of 193 YWUD (15–29 years old) in 66 Canadian substance use‐focused anti‐stigma campaigns (e.g., videos, posters, social media posts, etc.). We also examined the implicit messages these campaigns expressed about YWUD's rights to autonomy. YWUD in campaigns almost exclusively appeared to be White and just one appeared to be Indigenous. A reflexive thematic analysis of campaign materials identified three themes: framing YWUD as uniquely vulnerable, framing YWUD and parents as powerless, and framing YWUD as forfeiting their autonomy. We discuss how anti‐stigma campaigns may target individual stigma but ironically contribute to support for involuntary treatment policies that bolster structural stigma.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".