Archibald Kaiser: Harm Prevention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this episode, Professor Kaiser of the Schulich School of Law looks at drugs and substances issues in the criminal law as public health issues, and explores Canada’s drugs and substances strategy on harm reduction post-Cannabis Act. Drawing insights from international law and human rights, he explores how a rights-based approach to harm reduction may offer promising opportunities for reform in these, and other areas of the criminal justice system.\nProfessor Kaiser is an expert in the fields of criminal justice, criminal procedure, mental health in the criminal and civil law, and disability law. He also holds a cross-appointment as Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine.\nContents: 1:45 – The origins of using the criminal law as a way to deal with drug use, and the subsequent total failure of the “war on drugs”\n2:50 – How over-reliance on the criminal law has caused more harm than good\n5:45 – How to define harm reduction and human rights? What are the connections?\n5:50 – Health and Human Rights Resource Guide\n13: 50 – Legalization of marijuana in Canada: The Cannabis Act\n17:10 – The Cannabis Act suggests the government may be making progress in some areas; but in others, is still stigmatizing drug use and lacking in efforts at comprehensive harm reduction\n17:55 – The 2017 “Insite” Case (PHS Community Services v Canada (Minister of Health)\n19:20 – The 2019 election: the parties’ platforms on harm reduction\n25:35 – Until we get to the point where decriminalization of currently illegal drugs is considered, we will be “stuck in the criminal mold”\n26:45 – For the majority of governments, drug policy remains an ideological issue – rather than a societal issue that needs to be addressed based on evidence and dialogue.\n30:10 – The human rights of people who use drugs – drug use, drug dependence\n31:30 – Professor Kaiser explains, referencing the UN, how drug use and drug dependence should not be conflated; and the “right to health is applicable irrespective of the fact of drug use” and access to health is a fundamental human right.\n38:20 – The fundamental problem with the policy outlook that would support only abstinence and prohibition\n43:30 – A moral and legal obligation on governments to provide harm reduction services—and a public policy imperative to support decriminalization\n47:45 – The enforceability of either the implications of the outcome of the Insite case, or of instruments of international law, remains uncertain\n52:20 – Canada’s new Drugs and Substances Strategy\n59:20 – The role of Provinces in relation to federal strategy; Nova Scotia’s non-profit, non-governmental overdose prevention site, HaliFIX; broader human rights and public health strategies yet to come?\n1:06:20 – The role of the legal profession in engaging with substance-use-related issues in the criminal justice system. Defence lawyers, Crown attorneys, judges in a limited capacity, police, attorneys general, even law students – all have a role to play in upholding human rights, thinking about the evolution of the law, and engaging in law reform.\n1:15:34 – Possibilities for applying the principles of harm reduction and a public health lens to other areas of the criminal law.
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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.372 | 0.066 |
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".