Annual Awards

Goal
To recognize a piece of research published in the past 3  years that has made a substantial innovation in how we think about or conduct research in the area of drug policy, including (but not exclusively limited to)  the methods and data used for conducting drug policy analysis, the theoretical models of or frameworks guiding work on the agents (consumers, suppliers, regulators) or systems (drug markets, health providers, criminal justice system, social services) that influence drug policy, and/or practical understanding of drug policy in the world today.

Award
The selected individual will receive a formal certificate from the society, a monetary award of $3000 US plus $500 in travel expenses, as well as the opportunity to give a 30-minute presentation at the annual ISSDP meeting.Eligibility criteria

• English-language publication (article, book, or report)
• Can be authored by an ISSDP member or a non-ISSDP member
• If the publication has multiple authors, they will have to choose one person to come to the meeting and accept the award
• Published in the last three years (since January 1 of the year of the ISSDP Conference). For 2024, this if from January 2021 to December 2023.

Nominations and Committee
Anyone who wishes to nominate a paper for consideration (self-nominations are welcome) should send their nominations to Peter Reuter (preuter@umd.edu) by March 31, 2024.  The Committee reserves the right to nominate papers. The decision of the committee will be announced electronically by April 15, 2024.

The committee consists of:

1. Gideon Lasco – University of the Philippines Diliman (chair)
2. Alex Stevens – University of Sheffield
3. Jessica Storbjörk – Stockholm University
4. Karen Joe-Laidler – University of Hong Kong

ISSDP Excellence in Research Award winners

2025

Congratulations to the 2025 ISSDP Excellence in Research Award winner Indhu Rammohan from the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation, St Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, Canada for her paper titled ‘Overdose mortality incidence and supervised consumption services in Toronto, Canada: an ecological study and spatial analysis.’ The paper was chosen by a committee consisting of Alex Stevens, Karen Joe-Laidler,  Jessica Storbjörk, and Gideon Lasco and found to be a very elegant, well-executed, and important study that provides new evidence that not only the introduction of supervised consumption sites (SCS) can reduce mortality, but also that their design matters.

Rammohan, I., Gaines, T., Scheim, A., Bayoumi, A., & Werb, D. (2024). Overdose mortality incidence and supervised consumption services in Toronto, Canada: an ecological study and spatial analysis. The Lancet Public Health, 9(2), e79-e87.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(23)00300-6/fulltext

2024

With great pleasure we announce the 2024 winner of the Excellence in Drug Policy Research. This recognizes a highly significant piece of research that was published between 2021 and 2023.

The winning study is Alpert, Abby, William N. Evans, Ethan MJ Lieber, and David Powell. “Origins of the opioid crisis and its enduring impacts.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137, no. 2 (2022): 1139-1179.

The paper examines the role of the 1996 introduction and marketing of OxyContin as a potential leading cause of the US opioid crisis. On the one hand it shows the importance of state level controls, namely the triplicate prescription programs.  On the other, it shows the deleterious effect of Purdue Pharma marketing of its powerful opioid.  Recently-unsealed court documents involving Purdue Pharma show that state-based triplicate prescription programs posed a major obstacle to sales of OxyContin.  These documents suggest that less marketing was targeted to states with these programs; OxyContin distribution was about 50% lower in “triplicate states” in the years after the launch. While triplicate states had higher rates of overdose deaths prior to 1996, this relationship flipped shortly after the launch and triplicate states saw substantially slower growth in overdose deaths, continuing even twenty years after OxyContin’s introduction. These results show that the introduction and marketing of OxyContin explain a substantial share of overdose deaths over the last two decades.

The committee was impressed by the careful and ingenious use of multiple data sources as well as the rigorous modeling.  Most of all, the study reflected a thoughtful analysis of the interaction between policy interventions and corporate strategy.

2022

Gideon Lasco, MD PhD has been awarded the first ISSDP Excellence in Research Award for his paper ‘Drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in Asia: illustrative examples and implications for drug policy‘ published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in March 2020.

More information: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955395920300098

Nominations for the best presentation can be made by any early career scholar who is presenting at the ISSDP conference.

Criteria:

• Presentation at the ISSDP conference
• First author is within five years of her/his PhD (or last degree)
• The presentation represents outstanding and unique drug policy research

Selection process:
The presentations will be judged at the conference by the ISSDP Board members present, and announced at the closing of the annual conference.

Early Careers Researcher winners

Each year the ISSDP Board provides an award to the best early career researcher presentation at the annual scientific conference. (Awards did not run during COVID-19). The past winners are:

2025: Hudson Reddon, BC Centre on Substance Misuse, Canada, for his talk “Cannabis Use and Risk Factors for Fatal Overdose Among People Who Use Drugs: An 18-Year Prospective Cohort Study in Vancouver, Canada.”

2025: Isabelle Volpe, UNSW, Australia, for her talk “What is youth participation in drug policy?”

2024: Parker Tope, McGill University, Canada, for her paper ‘Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Impact of Opioid Prescribing Guidelines for Opioid Prescription Initiations and Discontinuations.’

2019: Jack Spicer, University of the West of England, Bristol, for his paper ‘Between gang talk and prohibition: scapegoating and the transfer of responsibility for County Lines‘.

2019: Jack Spicer, University of the West of England, Bristol, for his paper ‘Between gang talk and prohibition: scapegoating and the transfer of responsibility for County Lines‘.

2018: Kari Lancaster, UNSW Australia, for her paper ‘A more accurate understanding of drug use: A critical analysis of wastewater analysis technology for drug policy‘.

2017: Bryce Pardo, University of Maryland, for his paper ‘What relationship does access to cannabis have on the consumption of synthetic cannabinoids?‘.

2016: Thu Vuong, UNSW Australia, for her paper ‘Economic Evaluation comparing Centre-based Compulsory Drug Rehabilitation with Community-based Methadone Treatment in Hai Phong City, Vietnam‘.

2015: Laura Atuesta, Drug Policy Program, Centro de Investigacion Docencia Economicas (CIDE), Mexica, with her paper entitled ‘Narco-messages’ as a way to analyse the evolution of organised crime in Mexico‘.

2014: Lolitha Jaikar, Stella Maris College, India and International Federation of Catholic Universities, France with her paper entitled ‘Policies and practices of drug use in india: a situational analysis‘.

2013: Sandra Rozo, UCLA with her paper entitled ‘How are anti-drug programs affecting producers? Evidence from coca leaf production in Colombia‘.