Newsletters

Happy New Year!!

We hope your 2022 new year is off to a positive start!!

As it has been nearly 18 months since ISSDP membership last met for a general assembly meeting, and there are lots of exciting plans in the works we would like to share with you, ISSDP will hold a virtual general assembly meeting of its members on Tuesday, February 1^st at 1:30 pm Pacific Standard Time, which is 9:30 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and 8:30 am on Wednesday February 2nd in Sydney Australia (AEDT). We recognize this time may not work for everyone, and we do apologize for that, but by holding the meeting at this time we can combine our general meeting with the “Meet the Author” event (which we had to reschedule). After our brief (30 minute) assembly meeting, we will engage in a discussion with Dr. Alison Ritter about her recently released book Drug Policy. We hope our special guest will encourage more of you to join our membership meeting. Please mark your calendars and be on the lookout for the special invite, which will contain the zoom link for the meeting.

We would also like to remind you that the Lisbon Addiction call for abstracts is still open and ISSDP is accepting abstracts for our coproduced thematic track, which can be accessed here:

https://www.lisbonaddictions.eu/lisbon-addictions-2022/tracks/current-andfuture-challenges-global-drug-policy.

Deadline for submissions to the main conference closes Jan 31, 2022.

Finally, be on the lookout in the next week for our own call for abstracts for the ISSDP one-day side event taking place the day preceding the Lisbon Addictions Conference (November 22, 2022). And many thanks to those of you who have offered to help serve on the scientific review committee for the one-day meeting!

Wishing you a very happy, productive, and healthy 2022! And I am also hoping to see many of you in the coming months for our in person and virtual events!

Warm regards,

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula
President of ISSDP

After having to cancel our ISSDP Mexico conference -twice- as well as the 2021 Morocco conference, we are pleased to report that we will be holding an in-person meeting this coming year, building on the Lisbon Addictions Conference, which takes place Nov 23-25, 2022 in Lisbon Portugal. ISSDP will be holding a one-day conference on Tuesday Nov 22, 2022, preceding the main Lisbon Addictions conference. It will be held at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Our one-day conference will be focused on a range of topics not fully considered during Lisbon Addictions, as we hope our members will also consider submitting abstracts to the main Lisbon Addictions conference. ISSDP is once again co-hosting a thematic track at Lisbon Addictions, emphasizing work related to “Current and future challenges in global drug policy”.

The Lisbon Addiction call for abstracts is already open and can be accessed here:
https://www.lisbonaddictions.eu/lisbon-addictions-2022/tracks/current-and-future-challenges-global-drug-policy

Deadline for submissions to the main conference closes Jan 31, 2022.

The call for abstracts for the ISSDP one-day side event will open in January, but seeks to augment topics the Lisbon Addiction conference by focusing on topics not fully addressed within their conference, including:

• Natural experiments, RCTs and other innovative methods for evaluating new drug policy changes
• Supply side strategies for cutting synthetic opioids and addressing the overdose crisis
• Decolonising drug policy and drug policy’s impacts on marginalized communities and/or populations

If you are interested/willing to serve on the scientific review committee for the one-day conference, please contact Rosalie (rmp_302@usc.edu).

Other important items:

1. Alison Ritter’s new book Drug Policy published by Taylor&Francis Group was just recently released. ISSDP will kick off its 2022 Webinar series with a “Meet the Author” webinar taking place Friday, January 28 at 9 am AEDT (UTC + 11). We are in the process of planning out other monthly webinars currently, so if you have any topics/ideas you’d like to propose or new research you want to share, please contact Rosalie at rmp_302@usc.edu.
2. Are you curious about what happens at the annual U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting? Want to know how you might get involved in future meetings? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, stay on the looking for our February 2022 Webinar, which will include a panel of ISSDP members who regularly attend and engage at the conference. Find out how you can become involved!
3. IJDP has put out a call for Expression of Interest in the role of Associate Editor. Applications are due January 31, 2022.
4. The Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA) has started a new monthly podcast entitled “Addictions Edited”, featuring people working in addiction policy, research and treatment settings, including former ISSDP President, Alison Ritter. If you are interested in hearing more, please go to: New SSA podcast: episode 1 with Oliver Standing – SSA (addiction-ssa.org).
5. Be on the lookout for an announcement for an upcoming virtual annual membership meeting in late January. It is a requirement of our charter to have a membership meeting every 18 months, and our last meeting was Sept 1, 2020.

The ISSDP leadership team wishes all of you a very happy holiday season and good health for the New Year!

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula
President of ISSDP

Happy New Year Members, Participants and Friends,

While we all looked forward to seeing 2020 in the rear-view mirror, it seems that 2021 is starting off with its own share of unexpected challenges.  We hope this email finds you all managing the ongoing global situations as well as possible.   We are optimistic that it won’t be too much longer before we are able to meet again in person.  In the meantime, there are a few items we wanted to share with you, as the ISSDP board has remained quite busy planning some virtual opportunities for members.

1. News about ISSDP Conference in Aquascalientes, Mexico

As the vaccination distribution has not gone quite as planned and many countries remain in severe lock downs through at least the summer, we have decided to push back the ISSDP Mexico conference to November 17-19, 2021.  It is our sincere hope that by waiting until the Fall many of us will be able to meet in person, although we recognize that several of our colleagues may remain unable to travel.  Some revisions to the program may be necessary in light of the inability of some speakers to attend.  We will be checking in with members and planned speakers in the spring to try to manage these changes, most likely through a message board inside Memberclicks (the most expeditious way to connect to everyone).   In the meantime, IJDP has agreed to publish a special section on Drug Policy in Latin America drawing on papers/themes of our original 2020 conference.   We will be working with the Mexican host committee in efforts to reach out to authors of accepted abstracts related to key themes from the conference for consideration in the special issue in the next two months.  Other updates about the conference will be provided on our external webpage for those who are not members https://www.conference.issdp.org/.

2. New ISSDP Webinar Series, Asian Criminology Society pre-conference event, and ICARA webinar series.

We are developing a webinar series for 2021 to provide opportunities for our members to stay on top of the latest drug policy research as well as some mentoring opportunities.  These events will take place at different times of the day to facilitate involvement of members from various regions of the world.  As not all webinars will be assessable to everyone live, we will record them and post them to a membership only part of the web – or in Memberclicks.   The full schedule is still being developed, and we welcome your ideas (particularly if you want to host the event), but we do have some upcoming items in February and March we are excited to share with you:

Month	Topic
Feb 3, 2021	“Tales from the Field: An Invitation to Criminological Research in Asia” https://www.ryukoku.ac.jp/nc/event/entry-7193.html
March 31, 2021	Research Webinar: Laura Atuesta, Title: TBD (about drug kidnapping in Mexico)  5 pm GMT, 10 am CST.

3. European Society of Criminology online conference collaboration

The ISSDP is continuing its long-term engagement with the European Society of Criminology (ESC), and will once again be planning panels for their conference in September 2021.  If you have an idea for a paper/ panel at the conference, please connect with Rebecca Askew, Alex Stevens and Caitlin Hughes.

4. New Open Access Journal entitled Drug Policy

We are very pleased to announce that ISSDP member Eric Sevigny (Georgia State University) has become the first Editor-in-Chief of a brand-new open access journal entitled Drug Policy.  ISSDP is working to establish a formal agreement with the new journal, so that it can become the second official affiliated journal of ISSDP (the first such journal is the International Journal of Drug Policy (IJDP)).   We will keep you updated on how this engagement develops, but in the mean time we hope you will consider submissions to this brand new journal as you develop your work.

5. Glitches in Transfer of Accounts and Administration

We want to apologize for not sending acknowledgements to many of you who may have recently become a member and/or renewed your membership fees.  We have encountered some bumps in the transition of financial account authority and administrative support as we transition ISSDP secretary and financial officer, which we hope will be finally rectified in the coming month.  In the meantime, please know we are very excited to have you join (or recommit) to our organization.  Your membership will provide you free access to the research/mentoring webinar series being developed for the coming year.

Warmest regards,

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, President ISSDP

Caitlin Hughes, Vice-President ISSDP

John Collins, Secretary and Finance, ISSDP

Dear Members, Participants and Friends

We hope you and your families are safe and managing the global situation as best as you can. Between the continued spread and progression of the global novel coronavirus –with its impacts on our daily lives due to social distancing requirements and economic factors–as well as the social unrest and activism sparked by racism and injustice in the U.S.that has now spread globally, it is clear that we are all living through an important moment in history that will likely have profound impacts on all of us and our communities. Many of you are using this moment to engage in new research and activism, and as a society we look forward to seeing the fruits of those laborsas they pertain to the study of drug policy. We have been very saddened to have to cancel the ISSDP conference this year (details below) and miss the opportunityto connect and catch up face to face. To help fill that gapthe ISSDP board has come up with a few opportunities for us of us to re-engage, albeit virtually, in the coming months. Below we discuss some of those opportunities as well as provide you with other important updates. We apologize in advance for the length of this note, but we hope that we can reduce the number of emails by sending this altogether.

1. Postponement of Annual ISSDP Conference until June 2021 and June 2022 conference plans

The changing situation with respect to Coronavirus (COVID-19) coupled with its anticipated resurgence in late 2020 led the ISSDP board to decide to postpone the 2020 annual meeting in Aquascalientes to next year. Trying to do a 3-day meeting virtually with members from across the globe given all the different time zones just would not enable the type of exchange we all value out of our face-to-facemeetings. Our host organization, CIDE in Mexico, has agreed to host the meeting for us next year, so please save the dates of June 2-4, 2021. We have pushed the meeting back into early June in hopes that doing so will reduce the risk of us being impacted by COVID-19 again next year. The host committee is already ascertaining what amount of the existing program will be retained and how much room there is for new abstract submissions on key themes. We appreciate everyone’s patience with us, and advice, as we worked through the various scenarios and assessed the impacts of the various options. Updates about the conference will be provided here: https://www.conference.issdp.org/.

You might also be interested in knowing that we plan to hold the 2022 Annual ISSDP conference in Marrakesh, Morocco in early June 2022 as well. We are very excited to be holding our first meeting on the African continent, and will provide updates for you regarding themes and conference details as we get closer.

2. ISSDP-UNODC Webinar: A Scientific Look at the 2020 World Drug Report – Thursday, July 2, 2020

As hinted at above, in an effort to provide an opportunity for the ISSDP group to gather and building on efforts from a meeting between ISSDP and UNODC at the 2020 CND meeting, we have decided to hold a Webinar (well actually two) on Thursday, July 2nd around the release of the 2020 World Drug Report (WDR). The goal will provide UNODC (a.k.a. AngelaMe) the opportunity to present a summary of the key findings of the WDR to academics and scholars, and then allow us to engage in a construction conversation regarding the limits and strengths of the data, methods, and findings included inthe report. Given we hope to engage the global membership, as well as colleagues who may be interested, we will hold two versions of the webinar to facilitate a discussion with members in different partsof the globe. The first will take place on Thursday July 2nd at 10:00 am CEST (Geneva time) and the second will take place at 10:00 am PDT (Los Angeles, USA time). We will be sending out an email with a link to register for the webinar in the next two weeks, so please be on the lookout for it.

3. Annual General Membership (AGM) Meeting –Tuesday, September 1st and Wednesday September 2nd, 2020.

Due to the postponement of the annual conference and our requirement to hold a general meeting of our members every 18 months, we will be holding our next AGM via video (zoom) meeting. In order to facilitate participation from everyone given the different time zones, the AGM meeting will take place twice, and members will be asked to choose to participate at a date/time.

The same content will be discussed in both meetings, as our goal is to share the latest information with a broadreach of our membership, including:

• The development of a new ISSDP prizefor scholarship (including a financial gift)
• New MEMBERCLICKS membership software (more on that below)
• Forthcoming website additions
• ISSDP collaborative opportunities with the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime
• Mentoring opportunities

Members will be asked to register for a specific meeting in a separate email. Any items requiring voting of the membership will be announced during the meeting and then voted on via our new membership system. More details to come, but please hold a date!

4. European Society of Criminology online conference collaboration

The ISSDP has a joint working group on European drug policy with the European Society of Criminology (ESC). The ESC is planning an online conference for September 10-11, 2020. They have invited the joint working group to collaborate on creating panels for this conference. There is no cost to attend the conference but presenters will need to join the ESC to take part, if they are not already members (https://www.esc-eurocrim.org/index.php/membership).

Potential topics for panels include:impacts of COVID-19 on drug policy, use and supply; alternatives to criminalisation for drug possession; drug law enforcement; online drug supply; changing patterns of drug use and supply; comparative policy analysis. We welcome other suggestions.

Please email Caitlin (caitlin.hughes@flinders.edu.au) if you would be interested in presenting in this online conference. The process will then be that you submit an abstract to the ESC. The deadline for that is 1 July 2020.

5. Trustee nominations for Summer 2020

Due to a number of things hitting simultaneously, we somehow missed that we were due to elect two new board members in May 2020 (last month). Both Nicola Singleton and Rebecca Askew’s (Treasure & Secretary) completed their 4-year terms this May. We have asked Rebecca to stay on for at least a year to help transition some of her duties to a new board member, but we still need to elect two new officials to the board. One will be an ordinary trustee and the other will fill the role of treasurer, and hence must be from the UK (as that is where the ISSDP bank account is). Vibeke Asmussen Frank has kindly agreed to organize and manage the election process, which we hope can take place in the next 2 months. She will be sending out additional information soon, but nominations – including self-nominations – can be sent to Vibeke at (vaf.crf@psy.au.dk). Once the nominees are identified, we will be requesting a brief biographical paragraphand statement of interest that we can share with the membership for voting purposes.

6. New membership system

ISSDP is currently implementing a new administration software (MemberClicks), that will provide the society with a number of new communication and administration tools including:

• Automated system to remind members when their membership fees are due.
• A searchable database providing more comprehensive information about our membership by region, including field of expertise, languages spoken, areas of interest, and prior attendance at ISSDP-sponsored events. Such features will enable the development of communication boards on particular topics, identifying those who are likely to be interested, as well as target emails when local or regional opportunities emerge in an area.
• Improved integration of conference registration and membership information.
• A forward-looking database, that can be used to survey the membership on issues that come up quickly.

Please expect to see an email from the system soon. We would really appreciate you responding and setting up your new member profile in the system as soon as you get it.

Warmest regards,

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, President ISSDP

Caitlin Hughes, Vice-President ISSDP