Policing and access to harm reduction services among young people who use drugs and young Indigenous people who use drugs before and after the pilot implementation of decriminalization of personal possession
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: On January 31, 2023, the province of British Columbia, Canada, implemented a pilot decriminalization of personal possession of certain drugs. This study investigated temporal trends in policing-related barriers to accessing harm reduction services among young people who use drugs (PWUD) in Vancouver before and after decriminalization. METHODS: Data from 2021-2024 were collected from an open prospective cohort of street-involved young PWUD. Logistic regression with generalized estimating equations (GEE) assessed trends in self-reported policing-related barriers to harm reduction services before and after decriminalization, with calendar time and decriminalization (plus their interaction) as primary explanatory variables. A sub-analysis was conducted among participants who identified as being of Indigenous ancestry. RESULTS: Among 319 participants, the median baseline age was 28.0 years, and 83 (26 %) reported policing-related barriers to harm reduction services at some point during the study period. In multivariable GEE analysis, an increasing trend in reporting police barriers was observed before decriminalization (adjusted per-year odds ratio [AOR]=2.41; 95 % confidence interval [CI]: 1.29-4.51). At the implementation of decriminalization, a significant level drop of 65 % was observed (AOR=0.35; 95 % CI: 0.15-0.82), with no trend observed post-decriminalization (AOR=1.12; 95 % CI: 0.48-2.58 per year). In sub-analysis among Indigenous participants, a significant decreasing trend of 72 % per year in reported policing-related barriers was observed in the post-decriminalization period (AOR = 0.28; 95 % CI: 0.08-0.97). IMPLICATIONS: Among young PWUD, we observed relative reductions in experiencing policing-related barriers to harm reduction services after the pilot implementation of decriminalization, and this benefit extended to young Indigenous PWUD.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".