Assessing options for poppers policy in Canada : A call to action for evidence-based policy reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When inhaled, poppers products (alkyl nitrites) relax smooth muscle tissue and produce a pleasant “rush.” As such, they are used by some gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (sexual minority men), including during anal intercourse. In 2013, Health Canada cracked down on poppers sales by introducing threats of fines and imprisonment and seizing poppers in stores and at the border. While no new legislation was introduced, Health Canada takes the position that poppers fall within the definition of a “drug” under the Food and Drugs Act because they “modify organic function” in humans. This crackdown has not prevented poppers use and has added harms related to an illicit and unregulated drug supply. In an effort to reduce harms and advance more equitable and public health-centred approaches to poppers drug policy, we discuss how a series of anticipated outcomes (accessibility, equity, consumer safety, commercial feasibility, and stigma) relate to the following alternative approaches to regulation: (1) poppers as a prescription medicine; (2) poppers as a non-prescription drug (likely accessible ‘over-thecounter’); (3) poppers as a consumer product rather than just a medicine; and (4) ending the crackdown without legislative changes. To improve health equity and reduce harms among sexual minority men in a way that is politically and commercially feasible, we recommend the last approach—ending the crackdown without legislative changes—including ceasing the confiscation of poppers products in stores and at the border.
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 | 0.127 | 0.259 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.031 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
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".