Current News & Announcements

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

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.”

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

ISSDP 2025 – Final Conference Programme

This podcast is the first of two about the ISSDP 2025 Conference. It involves conference host Rebecca Askew; ISSDP President and Vice President Caitlin Hughes & Beau Kilmer; keynote speaker Mat Southwell; and ISSDP Secretary Elle Wadsworth. The podcast is also available via Spotify.

As reported in our ISSDP April newsletter (emailed 04/04/25), our current Vice President Beau Kilmer will step down as VP after our annual conference in Manchester. In his resignation letter Beau explained that it is time to diversify our leadership so that we are truly an international organisation that values expertise and drug policy challenges outside the Anglosphere. By stepping down now Beau makes way for a new Vice President who will have two years to work with and be supported by the current President Caitlin Hughes and the Board before taking on the role of President in 2027.

We now seek nominations to fill the vacancy of the Vice President. We wish particularly to encourage nominees from the global south.

Nominations are due 19 May 2025 (by the end of day in the country of origin).

Nominations should be supported by a proposer and seconder who are both members of ISSDP. The proposer and seconder should ensure that the person nominated is a current ISSDP member (not affiliate) and is willing to serve. Self-nominations, with a proposer and seconder, are welcome also. To find out more details please reach out to below:

Nominations Committee: Aileen O’Gorman (Chair: Aileen.O’Gorman@uws.ac.uk); Simon Lenton; and Nicola Singleton.

Also please reach out to our current ISSDP President and Vice President if you would like to discuss your prospective nomination.

ISSDP is running a drug policy resource table at CND68, with books and journal articles covering a broad array of drug policy topics and contexts. Please come and say hi if you are at CND.

Here is a list of key resources available.

ISSDP is running at side event at the 68th United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs Meeting titled “A Scientific Analysis of Harm Reduction in Drug Policy”on Friday 14 March 2025 11:30-12:30 CEST. The event is co-sponsored by the UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch. Please join us in person or online.

[Event Flyer PDF]

ISSDP is also organising a drug policy resource table at CND68 to showcase drug policy resources for policy makers.

On 10 June 2025 two workshops are being held ahead of the 2025 ISSDP Conference in Manchester, UK. The first workshop “Methods Matter: A Workshop on Drug Policy Research Methods” is being hosted by the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy in collaboration with the Centre for Criminological Research of the University of Sheffield and the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Manchester.

Registration for workshops will occur through the main conference registration system.

The full agenda is now accessible at:
https://www.issdp.org/Methods-Matter-Workshop-ISSDP-2025-Conference-Final.pdf

The ISSDP Excellence in Research Award is an annual recognition sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. First conferred in Leuven, Belgium, in 2023, the award aims 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. Eligible topics include (but are 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 awardee/s will receive a formal certificate from the society, a monetary award of at least US $3000, an allowance to cover travel and conference costs, as well as the opportunity to give a 30-minute presentation at the annual ISSDP meeting (For 2025, this will be in Manchester, UK, on June 11 to 13). If the publication has multiple authors, they will have to choose one person to come to the meeting and accept the award

Eligibility criteria

• Any English-language research publication (article, book, or report), published in the past three years, is eligible for consideration. For 2025, the publication must have been published from January 2022 to December 2024.
• For the purposes of the award, “research” should be interpreted broadly and inclusively to refer to original and relevant scholarship in any subfield within the domain of drug policy, broadly construed. The award is open to both quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• The author/s of the nominated publication may or may not be an ISSDP member and will be considered regardless of their institutional affiliation or nationality.

Nominations
Anyone who wishes to nominate a paper for consideration (self-nominations are welcome) should send their nominations to Gideon Lasco (pdlasco@up.edu.ph) by March 31, 2025.

ISSDP will name an awards jury of five members from among its board members and drug policy scholars to evaluate the nominations. The decision of the committee will be relayed via email to the authors of the winning publication by April 15, and announced to the public during the annual ISSDP conference, both on-site and electronically.

ISSDP seeks expressions of interest to host an ISSDP conference in 2026 or in subsequent years.

This document outlines background information on ISSDP conferences, host responsibilities and requirements, and details to include in an Expression of Interest. We look forward to receiving your EOIs.

The Lisbon Addictions 2024 Conference was a great success, with over 2200 people from 103 countries. ISSDP was delighted to run the drug policy track once more and see so many people engaged in drug policy discussions. You can watch the ISSDP major session on “Cannabis legalisation in Canada and the US: policy variation, state of the evidence and ideas for future research” here that featured leading academics and policy makers from both countries:

https://www.lisbonaddictions.eu/lisbon-addictions-2024/sessions/cannabis-legalisation-canada-and-us-policy-variation-state-evidence-and-ideas-future

Each year the ISSDP Board provides an award to the best early career researcher presentation at the annual ISSDP conference. In 2024, the early career research award was awarded to 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.’

We are delighted to welcome five new members to the ISSDP board:

• Yatan Pal Singh Balhara – Professor of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, India
• Marie Jauffret-Roustide – Sociologist and Senior Research Fellow at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, France
• Alissa Greer – Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Bronwyn Myers – Professor and Director of Curtin University’s enAble Institute, Australia. Prior Deputy Director of the South African Medical Research Council’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Research Unit.
• Jessica Storbjörk – Associate Professor of Sociology and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden.

A huge thanks to everyone who ran and congratulations to our new board members!

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.

The 2024 awards committee consisted of:

• Peter Reuter (University of Maryland)
• Alison Ritter (University of New South Wales)
• Alex Stevens (University of Kent)

ISSDP has been running a table at CND with sentinel drug policy books produced, that has been manned by ISSDP scholars.

Here is a link to the list of drug policy resources.

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:

Peter Reuter, University of Maryland (preuter@umd.edu)
Alison Ritter, University of New South Wales (Alison.ritter@unsw.edu.au)
Alex Stevens, University of Kent (a.w.stevens@kent.ac.uk)

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

Final Programme

For those of you in attendance and who are members, you can access conference papers and presentations here.