DPMP Research Symposium

Program Highlights

• This year's keynote presentation will be delivered by Dr Helen Keane and is titled: Critiquing the construction of addiction: Dependence, Disorder and the DSM V.  Helen is a senior lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research interests include the sociology of addiction and drug use. Her presentation will critically examine medical understandings of addiction, focusing on the changes proposed for the forthcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), discuss the implications of these changes and the continued salience of judgements about legitimate and illegitimate drug use.
• Also presenting will be Suzie Matthews on Rethinking Alcohol in the Night Time Economy. Suzie is Manager of the Late Night Economy & Safe City for City of Sydney. She has been working in the crime prevention and public policy field for over a decade. Her presentation will focus on how Sydney has engaged with its business, visitor and resident communities to shape the future nightlife of the City.

Program overview:

Alcohol harms and policy responses:

• Michael Livingston (Uni of Melbourne/Turning Point): Liquor Licensing: research and policy
• Dr Jenny Chalmers (DPMP, UNSW): Pricing and taxation policy reforms to redress excessive alcohol consumption and related harms

Drug treatment:

• Prof Alison Ritter (DPMP, UNSW):Appropriate services for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people: more than just gender sensitive?
• Trevor King (DPMP, Burnet Institute): Pharmacotherapy maintenance services – a reform agenda

Drug markets

• Derick Cullen and Adam Gajewski (ABS): Measuring the Illegal Drug Economy within the National Accounts Framework
• Kari Lancaster, (DPMP, UNSW): Problems, policy and politics: making sense of Australia’s ‘ice epidemic’
• Monica Barratt (NDRI, Curtin Uni):Facing the policy challenges of new drugs and new technologies

Making drug use not criminal; making drug use legal?

• Prof Simon Lenton (NDRI, Curtin Uni):Introduction to law reform options: clarifying terminology
• Dr Caitlin Hughes (DPMP, UNSW): The Portuguese decriminalisation of illicit drug use: What the AOD field should know
• Dr Marian Shanahan(DPMP, UNSW):Exploring some complexities in reforming cannabis laws

As numbers are capped, RSVPs are essential. Please contact Colleen Faes c.faes@unsw.edu.au by Thursday, 1^st March. For those unfamiliar with DPMP, the program aims to improve Australian drug policy through three key activities:

• generating new research evidence;
• providing tools for policy makers to better use research evidence; and
• studying how policy actually gets made.

For more details go to:  www.dpmp.unsw.edu.au

DPMP is funded by the Colonial Foundation Trust.