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The Society for the Study of Addiction kindly awarded £7,000
in 2008 and another £7,000 in 2009 to fund the activities
of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy.
This report gives information on the Society's activity in
the year 2009.
We would like to record our grateful thanks
for the support of the SSA in helping us to establish the
Society, which is now established as a prominent and sustainable
forum for the development and dissemination of knowledge on
drug policy.
Vienna conference 2009
The main activity of the Society is its annual
conference. In 2009, it took place at the offices of the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. It was jointly
organised by ISSDP and UNODC.
The conference was opened by Peter Reuter (President,
ISSDP), Sandeep Chawla (UNODC Chief of Policy and Analysis)
and Micheal Dressel (Drug Coordinator, City of Vienna). There
were 50 papers presented, with four plenary sessions. Robin
Room spoke on the possibility of moving to a common, global
frame for regulation of alcohol, drugs and tobacco. Azaraksh
Mokri spoke on the introduction of treatment and harm reduction
measures in Iran. Jonathan Caulkins stepped into the breach
left by the late withdrawal of Thomas McLellan to speak about
how regulation of drug markets can reduce drug-related harms.
David Nutt spoke on the relations between drug harms and their
classification, in a foretaste of the lecture that was to
lead to him leaving the ACMD later in the year.
Immediately following the conference, there
were two special half-day workshops. One was on the development
of drug harm indices. The other was on drug policy modelling.
Selected conference papers have been edited
for publication in the UN Bulletin on Narcotics by Martin
Bouchard.
Total attendance was about very similar to 2008's
attendance of 110 in Lisbon, compared to 75 at the first conference
in Oslo. The conference reception was hosted by the Ludwig-Boltzmann
Institute for Addiction Research in the Main Library of Vienna,
with a fine young jazz band providing the soundtrack.
We used some of the grant received from SSA
to award scholarships to attend the conference, by open competition,
to three postgraduate students. They were:
- Alisher Latypov, Wellcome Institute, London
(Mr Latypov is a citizen of Tajikistan).
- Holly Nguyen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
- Kim Moeller, Aarhus University, Denmark
We also awarded scholarships, by open competition,
to scholars from developing countries. The selected scholars
are:
- Daniel Mejia, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
- David Otiashvilli, Addiction Research Centre,
Tblisi, Georgia
Digest
Jim Young continues his exhaustive work in updating
the bibliography of grey literature, which is run in collaboration
with the Australian Drug Policy Modelling Project. This is
available to use on the ISSDP website.
We are still working to improve the search function
on the bibliography after encountering technical difficulties
with our first few attempts.
Charity registration
We had applied in 2008 to register the ISSDP
as a charity in England. Following advice received from the
Charity Commission, we held an election over the summer of
2009 to make suggested changes to the Society's by-laws. These
were unanimously approved. The ISSDP is now registered as
a charity (number 1132454).
Conference 2010 - Santa Monica
The fourth annual conference
will take place at the offices of RAND in Santa Monica, California
on 15-17 March 2010.
Invitations to act as plenary
speakers have been accepted by:
- Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director,
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime
- Keith Humphreys, Senior Policy Advisor to
the Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, USA
- María Elena Medina-Mora, General Director,
National Institute of Psychiatry, Mexico; and former member,
International Narcotics Control Board
- Zunyou Wu, Director, National Center for
AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease
Control and Prevention
Immediately after the conference on 17th March,
there will be an ISSDP workshop on sociological and anthropological
contributions to drug policy studies, under the title Drug
Policy, Culture and Society. On the afternoon of 17th March,
there will also be a workshop on Developments in Longitudinal
Modeling of Drug Use and Associated Outcomes.
SSA funds have again been used to award scholarships to postgraduate
and developing country scholars. They are:
- Jelica Grbic, Edith Cowan University, Australia
- Owen Gallupe, Simon Fraser University, Canada
- Bohdan Nosyk, University of British Columbia,
Canada
- Asmin Fransiska, Atma Jaya University, Indonesia
- Sudirman Nasir, University of Melbourne,
Australia (presenting research from Indonesia)
Membership
The ISSDP now has 62 members, up from 43 in
2008.
Future plans
The ISSDP is considering venues for its 2011
and 2012 conferences, with Paris and London among the leading
candidate cities.
We are also considering establishing a partnership
with an academic journal to provide a space for dissemination
of research that is specific to drug policy issues.
These are items for discussion at the ISSDP
annual board meeting and AGM, to be held this year in Santa
Monica.
Alex Stevens, ISSDP Secretary/Treasurer
February 2010
Back To Top
The Society for the Study of Addiction has agreed
to provide £7,000 in 2008 and another £7,000 in
2009 to fund the activities of the International Society for
the Study of Drug Policy. This report gives information on
the Society's activity in the year 2008 and on plans for 2009.
2008
Lisbon conference
The main activity of the Society is its annual
conference. This year it took place at INFARMED Lisbon, and
was jointly hosted by IDT and EMCDDA.
There were 42 papers presented, with four plenary
sessions. David Courtwright gave a talk on the global history
of drug regulation since the 15th century, in five stages,
starting with sporadic, but fierce opposition to novel psychoactive
substances (including the mutilation and beheading of tobacco
users in Russia and China). Wayne Hall spoke on how the increasing
evidence of the various harms of cannabis means that the debate
over its regulation must move on from whether it is harmful
to how these harms can best be reduced. Sandro Cattacin used
social theory as a lens to look at moves to pragmatism in
Swiss drug policy. John Strang discussed progress on the English
trial of heroin-assisted treatment, which - having learnt
from the Swiss way of doing things - is showing promising
results.
The conference papers are available at the ISSDP
website (www.issdp.org), although some are password protected
(the password is available from the ISSDP Secretary). Selected
papers will be published in a special issue of International
Journal of Drug Policy.
Total attendance was about 110, compared to
75 at the first conference in Oslo. The conference reception
was hosted in the Museum of the City of Lisbon.
We received many positive comments on the conference,
along with useful suggestions for the next conference.
Digest
Jim Young continues his exhaustive work in updating
the bibliography of grey literature, which is now run in collaboration
with the Australian Drug Policy Modelling Project. This is
available to use on the ISSDP website.
We are currently working to improve the search
function on the bibliography.
Board elections
In accordance with our by-laws, we held elections
in Summer 2008 for 4 members of the coordinating committee
from 2009, including the President and Vice-President. The
successful candidates were:
- Peter Reuter (USA, President, 2 year term)
- Alison Ritter (Australia, Vice-President,
2 year term)
- Borje Olsson (Sweden, member, 4 year term)
- Tomas Zabransky (Czech Republic, member,
4 year term)
The other members of the coordinating committee
from 2009 are:
- Alex Stevens (UK, Secretary/Treasurer)
- Henri Bergeron (France)
- Sandeep Chawla (Austria)
The outgoing members of the board are:
- Pia Rosenqvist (Finland)
- Christine Godfrey (UK)
Other activities
David Bewley-Taylor, Martin Elvins and Peter
Reuter edited a special issue of Contemporary Drug Problems,
based on selected papers from the 2007 ISSDP conference in
Oslo.
We applied for charitable status under English
law. The Charity Commission have now told us that we would
need to change the Society's by-laws in order to register
in the UK. We are currently considering whether to do this.
Plans for 2009
Conference
Again, our focus is on the third annual conference,
which will take place at the UNODC, Vienna on 2nd and 3rd
March 2009.
A conference committee, under the chairmanship
of Peter Reuter, has selected 46 papers to be presented, from
the 77 abstracts we received. In addition, invitations to
act as plenary speakers have also been accepted by:
- Tom McLellan (Treatment Research Institute,
Philadelphia).
- Azarakhsh Mokri (Iranian National Center
for Addiction Studies)
- David Nutt (University of Bristol)
- Robin Room (University of Melbourne)
An innovation this year is that special half-day
workshops (on drug policy modelling and on developing drug
harm indices) are also planned for 4th March. These have attracted
a lot of interest.
With the agreement of SSA, we have used some
of the grant received from SSA to award scholarships to attend
the conference, by open competition, to 3 postgraduate students.
These scholars have now been selected by the conference committee.
They are:
- Alisher Latypov, Wellcome Institute, London
(Mr Latypov is a citizen of Tajikistan).
- Holly Nguyen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
- Kim Moeller, Aarhus University, Denmark
We have also awarded scholarships, by open competition,
to scholars from developing countries. The selected scholars
are:
- Daniel Mejia, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
- David Otiashvilli, Addiction Research Centre,
Tblisi, Georgia
We plan to publish selected papers from the
conference in the United Nations Bulletin on Narcotics.
Membership
The ISSDP now has 43 members.
Financial
In the accounts presented to the coordinating
committee for the financial year April 2007 to March 2008,
the ISSDP made an operating profit of £7,776.58 on a
turnover of £8,721.08. The balance sheet showed total
assets of £10,395.02. Liabilities (excluding retained
profit) were £4,194.50
There are two main reasons for these surpluses.
The first is the grant received from the SSA in early 2008.
The second is that the costs of the conference in Lisbon were
paid by the EMCDDA and the Portuguese IDT.
This year, we have a budget to run the conference
for a total of €12,250 (including the costs of the scholarship
programmes). We anticipate that ISSDP will contribute approximately
€3,200 towards these costs, with the remainder to come
from participants' fees. This budget does not include the
costs of venue or local administration (which are being provided
free of charge by UNODC) or of the conference reception (for
which we have found a local sponsor).
Alex Stevens, ISSDP Secretary/Treasurer
December 2008
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