Archived News & Announcements

When: 6 July 2023 at 10am Vienna.

This one-hour webinar will feature an overview of the 2023 World Drug Report (WDR) from Angela Me, Chief of the UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch, and a discussion with a panel of ISSDP experts about three of the latest WDR topics, including emerging issues in research and policy on psychedelics, regulating medical cannabis markets and drug policy and the environment.

Please register at: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/issdp-and-unodc-webinar-a-scientific-look-at-the-2023-world-drug-report-tickets-667284886057?aff=oddtdtcreator

The webinar will be recorded and available to all ISSDP members for anyone who cannot view it in real time.

Dear ICARA members and associated colleagues,

We are proud to be hosting a hybrid research workshop at the Kettil Bruun Society 2023 Conference on Tuesday 6th June from 15.00-16.30 GMT+1.

The aim of the workshop is to discuss Alcohol, Tobacco and other Drugs (ATOD) research capacity strengthening needs in LMIC countries, as well as developing potential research partnerships with researchers from these countries. We will build on the existing research capacity and expertise of workshop attendees, and the assets that we have, to discuss ways to address identified research capacity.

Attendees will be split into smaller groups by region and discussions will focus on the following areas:

• What areas of ATOD research have been done well in your country/region so far?
• What types of ATOD research are priorities in your country/region today?
• What are the main ATOD research areas where there is a gap now?
• What are the main challenges in undertaking ATOD research?
• What are your specific needs for undertaking this research both locally and internationally?
• How do you think ICARA could support those needs?
• What kinds of research partnerships would be interested in fostering with other LMIC researchers, if any?

Facilitators will make notes of all identified strengths, gaps and needs for each region and a whole-group discussion will take place where together we will start to group these needs according to commonalities (themes). The next steps for strengthening research capacity needs will then be agreed on by the whole group, and the potential role of ICARA in supporting these needs will be identified.

We invite researchers at different stages in their career who are from the Global South, to attend this free, hybrid workshop. If you are attending the KBS Conference in Johannesburg, you are welcome to attend in person. If you are not attending the conference, we invite you to attend online registering here via Eventbrite! Please disseminate to anyone in your network who might be interested.

We look forward to meeting you there (or online).

ISSDP will be taking part in the 66th United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs Meeting in Vienna from 13-17 March 2023. We are sending our first delegation as an ECOSOC registered organisation and sponsoring two key side events:

Other events at which ISSDP members are speaking are listed below:

Tuesday 14 March – 8:00-8:50am CEST

PRINCIPLE TO POLICY TO PRACTICE. IMPLEMENTING A HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH WITH PEOPLE WHO USE DRUGS

Organized by the Release Legal Emergency and Drugs Service Limited with the support of Ghana, Norway, the Global Commission on Drug Policy and the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy.

In person (M6) & online: https://bit.ly/3Jr7R6V

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Tuesday 14 March – 8:00 -8:50am CET

URBAN DRUG POLICIES IN THE GLOBALISED WORLD: A LEXIMETRICAL FOCUS

Organized by the Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational Transparty with the support of the European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies.

Web-link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82200657239?pwd=Mk15SEJ0QjcxWFd4U01hVHUycy96UT09

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Tuesday 14 March – 14:10-15:00 (CEST/Vienna)

UNDERSTANDING THE DRUG TRAFFICKING THREAT ALONG THE SOUTHERN ROUTE: SPECIAL FOCUS ON THE SOUTHERN AND EASTERN AFRICA REGION

Organised by the United Kingdom with the support of the UNODC, South Africa, Kenya, European Union, USA, Japan, GI-TOC.

Click here to join

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Thursday, 16 March – 9.10-10.00 a.m.

MITIGATING THE RISKS OF CORPORATE CAPTURE FOR LEGAL CANNABIS MARKETS

Organized by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation with the support of the International Drug Policy Consortium, México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (MUCD), Health Poverty Action and the Norwegian Association for Safer Drug Policies.

In-person only (M0E07)

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Thursday 16 March – 13:00-13:50 (CEST/Vienna)

THE FUTURE OF ILLICIT ECONOMIES IN AFGHANISTAN

Organised by the UNODC Division for Policy Analysis and Public Affairs, with the support of GI-TOC, London School of Economics and Political Science and University of Birmingham.

Click here to join

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A link to other side events at CND66 is available here:
https://www.unodc.org/documents/commissions/CND_CCPCJ_joint/Side_Events/2023/2303166_Programme_CND_ebook.pdf

ISSDP 2023 will be hosted by RAND Europe in either Belgium or England either the last week of May or first week of June 2023.  Specifics on the conference will be coming soon.

General Membership Meeting, Tuesday November 22 in Lisbon Portugal at (online Zoom as well).  More to come.

ISSDP is launching a new excellence in research award that will recognise 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 a dinner at the annual ISSDP meeting.

Nominations are due by September 30, 2022

Please click here for further information

Registration for the one-day ISSDP conference is Lisbon is now open.

To register for the conference, please go to  https://issdp.memberclicks.net/pre-lisbon-conference-registration

The SSA is now accepting abstracts for oral presentations (deadline: 3 July 2022) and poster presentations (deadline: 14 August 2022) for its Annual Conference on 3 and 4 November 2022.

More Information

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 a dinner 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 since January 1 of ISSDP Conference year minus 3 years.
  • g., For 2022 ISSDP, eligibility date begins 1/1/19.
• Clock does not start until the research is officially published.
  • g., A paper first made available online in 2017 but not assigned volume/page numbers until 2018 would be eligible for 2021

Nominations

We will create a webform on the Memberclicks membership site where nominations can be submitted by anyone (including the author).

In addition to providing the citation, the nominator must provide a 200-500 word justification for why this piece of research has made a significant contribution to drug policy scholarship (e.g., an important finding that improves how we think about drug policy or drug policy analysis, creation or application of a novel methodology)

Timeline

For this first award, we will be accepting Nominations through June 2022.  Reviews of papers and discussion by the committee will take place by October.  The decision will be announced the first of November, and notified privately, but will not be publicly announced until the annual meeting.

Congratulations to former ISSDP President Professor Alison Ritter on election to the 2021 Fellows of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia – a wonderful and well deserved achievement.

More information: https://socialsciences.org.au/academy-fellow/?sId=0032u00000HpeAgAAJ

Satellite ISSDP conference at the Lisbon Addictions Meeting, Tuesday November 22. More details and call for abstracts coming in late November. Lisbon Addictions Conference Wed – Friday November 23-25.  ISSDP is co-producing the thematic track on Current and Future Challenges in Global Drug Policy.  Abstracts for this are currently open here:   Call for abstracts | Lisbon Addictions 2022

It is with great sadness that ISSDP reports the passing of our friend and colleague, Tomáš Zábranský MD, PhD. Tomáš was part of ISSDP during its origins, contributing both as a highly-regarded epidemiologist who studied blood-borne diseases and mortality among those who used drugs as well as someone who understood the importance of rigorous research reaching policy makers and the need for objective evaluation of government programs and spending. He was an early ISSDP Board member, serving the organization until 2014, sharing his knowledge and experience of how to build bridges between policy research and policy in practice. In 2014, he became the Advisor on Drug Policy to the Czech Prime Minister and later served as the Envoy of the Czech Minister of Health for the Implementation of Medical Cannabis into the Czech Medical System and for Illegal Drug Issues, thereby playing a key role in the development of the Czech drug policy. He also headed up the Czech National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (the national focal point). Tomáš never quit his academic scholarship, authoring over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals in addition to several official reports. His smile, quick wit, and razor focused intellect will be sorely missed by all of us.

For more information on his life and contributions, please see the following:

https://www.remembr.com/tomas.zabransky

https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/news/2021/memoriam-tomas-zabransky_en

The ISSDP Board and 2021 Host committee have had to make the difficult decision to fully cancel the 2021 conference in Aguascalientes Mexico due to ongoing uncertainties and restrictions caused by COVID-19.

We are very disappointed that we will not be able to meet as a society in Mexico as originally planned, and hope that we will get another opportunity to meet there in coming years. Moreover, we have further decided that, due to the logistical difficulty of managing an engaging conference when dealing with all the world’s time zones, we will not shift the 2021 conference to a virtual setting. Instead, we  encourage you to participate in the ongoing ISSDP virtual seminar series that we have scheduled in an alternating time zones allowing members to join when it is convenient, and catch taped versions later when it is not convenient.

A complete list of our upcoming mentoring and research seminars can be found here: https://www.issdp.org/webinars.

‘How COVID has changed cannabis markets, use and policy’

Chair: Rosalie Liccardo Pacula.

Speakers: David Hammond, Judith Albridge and Bernd Werse.

Date:  June 17, 2021
Time: 17.00-19.00 SAST | 15.00-17.00 GMT | 16.00-18.00 BST/UK time

You will not be able to join the webinar without pre-registering.

Registration link:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_05_OvzfqQNaJMqnKMxx-Ig

The March 31st ISSDP Research Webinar was recorded and is available to our ISSDP members via the link below.

https://www.issdp.org/webinar-presentations/

ISSDP is launching a new ISSDP research webinar series that will run throughout 2021. Join us for the first webinar on 31 March to hear from Laura Atuesta from CIDE Mexico on “Organized crime-related disappearances in Mexico: Evidence from Durango, Tamaulipas and Coahuila.”

For details of this and future webinars see:
https://www.issdp.org/webinars/

On October 28th, Harm Reduction International will be launching a new report that draws on positive impacts of COVID on opioid substitution therapies from multiple countries. Be on the look out!

https://www.hri.global/

 

Key Findings from a Global Drug Survey survey that ran for 7 weeks from May – June 2020 are now available: 

https://www.globaldrugsurvey.com/gds-covid-19-special-edition-key-findings-report/

ISSDP has partnered with MemberClicks to create an administrative and communication system for its membership.

As ISSDP is growing and becoming increasingly global, Memberclicks can help us stay on top of membership, registration for events, communications and help us do a better job at facilitating more communication between our members.

Please be sure to update your portfolio by going here:

https://issdp.memberclicks.net/login#/login

A scientific look at the 2020 World Drug Report

A joint ISSDP-UNODC webinar took place on 2 July 2020.

The webinar featured an overview of the 2020 World Drug Report by Angela Me (Chief Research and Trend Analysis Branch, UNODC) and an ISSDP panel of experts discussing three key topics: 1) socioeconomic circumstances of heavy use, 2) access to controlled medicine and 3) the rise of meth and stimulants.