Obot, I. S. (1993). Drinking behaviour and attitudes in Nigeria: a general population survey in the middle belt. Jos: Centre for Development Studies, University of Jos, Nigeria.
My first major publication in Nigeria was a monograph based on findings from a population survey on alcohol and drugs sponsored by the University of Jos Senate. This was the first alcohol survey using a randomly selected sample in Nigeria. The middle belt survey, as it is known, continues to be influential today especially among scholars working in the field of descriptive epidemiology.
Obot, I. S. & Anthony, J.C. (1999). Association of educational status with recent and past injecting drug use. Addictive Behaviors: An International Journal, 24, 701-705.
Between 1999 and 2004, as research fellow on drug epidemiology with Dr Jim Anthony at the Johns Hopkins University, I published several papers on the role of education and other variables as risk factors in the onset of substance use problems using large-scale secondary data sets and employing powerful statistical techniques in the data analyses.
Obot, I. S., Hubbard, S., & Anthony, J.C. (1999). Level of education and injecting drug use among African Americans. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 55, 177-182.
Obot, I. S., & Anthony, J. C. (2000). School dropout and injecting drug use in a national sample of white non-Hispanic American adults. Journal of Drug education, 30(2), 145-152.
The two papers above were part of the education series. Both depended on available data on educational achievement; the second showed that dropping out of school was particularly a high-risk behaviour.
Obot, I.S. (2000). The measurement of drinking patterns and alcohol problems in Nigeria. Journal of Substance Abuse, 12, 169-181.
This is one of the most requested papers I have published and that should probably not be a surprise. There are many issues to address in determining the patterns of consumption and problems – e.g., quantity, frequency, types of beverages – in order to make African findings comparable to findings from other places. These issues were discussed in the paper.
Obot, I. S., Wagner, F. A., & Anthony, J. C. (2001). Early onset and recent drug use among children of parents with alcohol problems: data from a national epidemiologic survey. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 65, 1-8.
In this study we used US data from a national survey to test the association of parental alcohol problems with drug use in the children. The findings supported the hypothesized association of substance use problems in parents and drug use in children.
Obot, I.S., & Anthony, J. C. (2004). Mental health problems in adolescent children of alcohol dependent parents: epidemiologic research with a nationally representative sample. Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse, 13(4), 83-96.
This study is related to the one above. Both of them focus on psychological health of children of parents with alcohol problems.
Obot, I.S. (2004). Assessing Nigeria’s drug control policy, 1994-2000. The International Journal of Drug Policy, 15, 17-26.
There was a lot of interest in the response of West African countries to global drug trafficking in the 90s but the literature was sparse. My interest in what was going on in the Nigerian scene at the time led to this historical paper on the topic of drug policy. Since publication the paper has served as a major background material for scholars working on illicit drug control policy in Africa.
Obot, I.S. (2005). Substance use among students and out-of-school youth in an urban area of Nigeria. In I.S. Obot & S. Saxena (eds.), Substance use among young people in urban environments. Pp. 133-146. Geneva: World Health Organization.
In Nigeria in the 1990s most studies of the prevalence of drug use and drug-related problems were descriptive in nature. This was the case in most developing countries and it led the World Health Organization to support research in some of these countries to look at the role of various factors. The Nigerian study looked at education, in particular school dropout, which, as predicted, was shown to be associated with drug use.
Obot, I.S. (2006). Alcohol use and related problems in sub-Saharan Africa. African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies, 5(1), 17-26.
This paper was a comprehensive overview of the alcohol problem in Africa based on available data at the time. It took a look at different sources of information on alcohol, including information on consumption, health and social problems related to heavy drinking, and policy responses to these problems. In my work over the years, several papers on drugs and alcohol were to follow in this vein of addressing issues beyond descriptive epidemiology. (See, for example, Obot, I.S. (2007). Nigeria: alcohol and society today. Addiction, 102, 519-522; Jernigan, D., & Obot, I.S. (2006). Thirsting for the African market. African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies, 5(1), 57-70).
Obot, I.S. (2007). Classic text revisited: Alcohol in colonial Africa by Lynn Pan. Addiction, 102, 691-692
I can easily say that this unusual work was an enjoyable activity. I was commissioned by the editor of Addiction to contribute to a series to revisit the contributions of individuals and publications that seemed to have been forgotten. Lyn Pan wrote the seminal little book on the history of alcohol during the colonial era in Africa. She had worked with Kettil Bruun and returned to Asia after her studies. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to locate her and to carry on a conversation which provided interesting background to the material of my review. Alcohol in colonial Africa is indeed a classic text as judged by Griffith Edwards, as editor of Addiction.
Obot, I.S. (2007). Limits of substance-use interventions in developing countries. Lancet, 369(9570), 1323-1325.
This paper addressed some of the wrong assumptions often made in efforts to deal with the increasing prevalence of substance use in developing countries and calls for more attention to country specific factors in the planning of interventions.
Obot, I. S. (2013). Alcohol marketing in Africa: not an ordinary business. African Journal of Drug and Alcohol Studies, 12(1), 63-73.
Following in the footsteps of editors of Alcohol: No ordinary commodity, this paper focused on the different techniques used by the industry to market alcoholic beverages and makes the case that there is a high risk associated with alcohol. Like the title says, alcohol – whether in beer, wine or spirits — should not be treated like any other commodity. The paper was pointedly published in a journal with a large audience of African readers, many of whom might not have been familiar with the debate on alcohol marketing.
Obot, I. S. (2015). Africa faces a growing threat from neo-colonial alcohol marketing. Addiction, 110, 1371-1372.
This brief paper in Addiction was a clear message I tried to send to researchers in the global north with policy interest on the dangers posed by alcohol marketing and the near-total lack of public health policies in the African region to counter the onslaught of the alcohol industry. It was one of several papers I have done over the years to serve as a warning against the lack of control of commercial interests of the industry.
Babor, T., Caulkins, J., Edwards, G., Fischer, B., Foxcroft, D., Humphreys, K., … & Obot, I. S. (2018). Drug policy and the public good (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
This edited book is an award winner. It is a major resource on drug policy and public health, an influential publication around the world on research and drug policy.
Obot, I. S. (2019). Drugs in the Nigerian population: Availability, use, consequences and policy implications. United Nations Bulletin on Narcotics, LXII, 1-8.
Though I have spent most of my time in research on substance use focusing on epidemiological studies, I never forgot the policy implications of my findings. As a guest editor of the Bulletin on Narcotics, I had the opportunity of editing papers by young researchers in Nigeria and making suggestions on drug policy. My summary paper in that volume was an effort in addressing the drug use situation in the country at a time when available data showed very high consumption and related disorders.
Obot, I. S., Ibanga, A., Abikoye, G. Nelson, E. U. Umoh, O. (2019). Adverse effects of other people’s drinking by type of relationship in Nigeria. In A-M. Laslett, R. Room, O. Waleewong, O. Stanesby& S. Callinan (eds), Harm to Others from Drinking: Patterns in nine societies (pp. 45-62). Geneva: World Health Organization.
This paper came from a WHO-funded project on harms to others from alcohol. Little information exists in low- and middle-income countries on harm to others so this project provided the kind of data needed to lauch further studies on the complexity of alcohol harm to the society at large.
Neo K. Morojele, Emeka W. Dumbili, Isidore S. Obot & Charles D. H. Parry (2021). Alcohol consumption, harms and policy developments in sub-Saharan Africa: The case for stronger national and regional responses. Drug and Alcohol Review, DOI: 10.1111/dar.13247.
This review paper was a collaborative work by Morojele, Dumbili, Parry and myself, all of use with years of work on alcohol epidemiology and policy in Africa. The paper clearly captures my interest in alcohol policy in Nigeria and Africa as reflected in other publications in this list. The paper summarizes available knowledge on increasing consumption of alcohol and associated problems in some countries in the continent. Much of what we know here is from data produced by the World Health Organization and originating from researchers in several countries in the region. The main contribution of the paper is on why African countries need to respond to growing consumption with guidance from evidence-based policies in order to curb an increasing burden of health and social problems.
