Necropolitics of the North: A rapid ethnography examining the effects of the closure of one of Northern Ontario’s only supervised consumption sites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Northern, rural, and smaller urban cities in Canada are disproportionately impacted by overdose. • There exists minimal research on harm reduction efforts in these communities. • Very few smaller communities have access to supervised consumption sites. • Closure of supervised consumption sites in Northern Ontario have negative individual and community impacts. • Necropolitical agendas deem people who use drugs unworthy of living. People who use drugs (PWUD) in Northern, rural, and smaller urban Canadian communities are disproportionately affected by drug-related harms and face barriers such as limited resources and heightened stigma. Supervised consumption sites (SCS) are intended to address individual and community harms. In 2024, the only SCS in Sudbury, a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada, closed due to a lack of provincial funding. In this paper, we explore the impact of this closure on PWUD. We conducted a community-based rapid ethnography inclusive of naturalistic observations and qualitative semi-structured interviews ( n = 27). Data were analyzed thematically using a participatory analytic approach and analysis was informed by theories of necropolitics and structural violence. Following the closure of the SCS site, participants perceived a reduction in access to harm reduction services, as well as negative impacts on personal well-being. Participants reported that the SCS’s closure forced local PWUD to begin unsafe consumption practices, resulting in increased overdose risk, physical health issues, and social stigma. The closure negatively affected safety, social connectedness, availability, and ease of access to harm reduction supplies. The SCS closure has exacerbated already limited support for PWUD in Sudbury and increased their exposure to a variety of risks and harms. Necropolitics of the state deem PWUD as unworthy of living, resulting in structural violence and the creation of death worlds for PWUD.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".