Current News & Announcements

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.