The International Society for the Study of Drug Policy
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.
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
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:
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:
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:
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
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
For those of you in attendance and who are members, you can access conference papers and presentations here.
