Current News & Announcements

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 2026, this if from January 2023 to December 2025.

Nominations and Committee
Anyone who wishes to nominate a publication for consideration (self-nominations are welcome) should send their nominations to Beau Kilmer (kilmer@rand.org) by January 15, 2026.

Congratulations to Aileen O’Gorman on being elected the new Vice President of ISSDP.

Aileen is a Professor of Substance Use and Social Policy and Programme Leader: Contemporary Drug Studies, University of West Scotland, Scotland.

Aileen is a long term ISSDP member and her primary research focus is on the social, structural and systemic determinants of health inequalities. She has a special interest in the framing and problematisation of social issues such as poverty and drug use; the unequal distribution of drug-related harms and deaths in marginalised communities; and the role of policy in the production and reproduction of harms and inequalities. Congratulations to Aileen!

Interested in drug policy and building academic scholarship? ISSDP is seeking a new board member. Don’t miss this opportunity to join the board!

Nominations due 24 November 2025. The election will run 26 November to 10 December 2025.

ISSDP Board: The role of the ISSDP is to advance education and research on drug policy through publication, dissemination, and engagement. Board members are the Charity Trustees of the Society. Their role is to manage the property and business of the Society, which involves discussions on conferences/seminars, meetings, relations with other associations, and the principles/policies of ISSDP. Board members are also actively involved in ISSDP business through sub-committees which advance ISSDP interests and priorities. In addition to sub-committee meetings, Board meetings are held at least four times per year; in-person at the annual conference and online thereafter. Board members serve a four-year term; the newly elected trustee will start in January 2026.

Nominees: The Board is elected from and by the membership. ISSDP by-laws state that Board members must represent at least four different countries. Each member of the Board is considered to represent the country of their primary institutional affiliation, regardless of country of birth or citizenship. We particularly encourage nominations from the Global South.

Nomination Process: Members may nominate themselves or other members. Nominees require support by a proposer and seconder who must also be ISSDP members. The proposer and seconder should ensure that the nominee is an ISSDP member and willing to serve. Please copy the nominee, proposer and seconder into the nomination email to indicate their support.

The nomination should include a one-page statement and photograph with the following details:

• A short biography of the nominee
• A note on the skills they offer as a Board member
• Why they wish to stand and what they hope to accomplish as a Board member.

The closing date for nominations is November 24, 2025 11:59pm (PST).

Please email nominations in a Word document with photograph included to the ISSDP Elections Chair, Alissa Greer: Alissa_greer@sfu.ca.

Current ISSDP Board: President (Caitlin Hughes, AU), Vice-President (Aileen O’Gorman, SCO/UK) and Trustees: Rebecca Askew, UK; Yatan Pal Singh Balhara, IN; Alissa Greer, CA; Marie Jauffret-Roustide, FR; Gideon Lasco, PH; Bronwyn Myers, AU; Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, USA (immediate past President); Jessica Storbjörk, SW; Liesbeth Vandam, PT. The Founding President (Peter Reuter, USA) is an ex-officio Board member. Lucy Strang (Treasurer) and Elle Wadsworth (Secretary) are Board attendees.

ISSDP Electoral Committee: Alissa Greer (Chair) (Alissa_greer@sfu.ca), Nicola Singleton (Nicola.Singleton@kcl.ac.uk), Karen Laidler (kjoe@hku.hk), Naomi Zakimi (nzakimi@sfu.ca).

The ISSDP Board is delighted to introduce two new initiatives to increase global south engagement in the Society. These were announced at the 2025 ISSDP Annual General Meeting and received strong support.

The new initiatives are motivated by the Society’s recognition that 1) the traditional focus of most drug policy scholarship is on the global north, and 2) the vital importance of supporting and building more global south scholarship and research leaders to create more effective and just drug policy.

Our first initiative is the creation of an ISSDP subcommittee for Global South Engagement. It will be led by ISSDP Board Member Gideon Lasco (Philippines) and supported by Rosario Queirolo (Uruguay) and Bisi Akintoye (UK). If you would like to be involved, please contact Gideon at pdlasco@up.edu.ph.

Our second initiative is to provide 25 one-year free ISSDP memberships to Early Career Researchers (ECR) from the global south. We define ECR as someone who is studying or within five years of their last degree (e.g. PhD). We define Global South as anyone who lives in or was born in Africa, Asia or Latin America (including all Caribbean countries).

The EOI phase has now ended. Thanks so much to everyone who joined. Stay tuned for updates and initiatives with our new ISSDP Global South members.

ISSDP and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime are running two webinars that will provide a scientific look at the 2025 World Drug Report. Specifically, the webinars will feature:

1. An overview of the 2025 World Drug Report from Angela Me, Chief of the UNODC Research and Trend Analysis Branch

2. A panel of experts discussing three hot drug policy topics from the latest world drug report:

• The impact of drug use on health
• The nexus between organized crime and drug trafficking
• The impact of drugs on the environment in Europe

3 . Question and answer session

Both webinars will occur on 10 July 2025 but there are two sessions to cater for different time zones.

Webinar 1: 10am-11am CET – To register go to: https://tinyurl.com/3xnjtpy4

Webinar 2: 10am-11am Pacific Time – To register go to: https://tinyurl.com/yshxwstf

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.

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

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.