Abstract
David Moore
After 10 years as Editor of Contemporary Drug Problems, this is my final issue in the role. When I took on the position in 2010, I was honoured to follow Robin Room’s distinguished leadership and wanted to continue two of the features that had characterised the journal under his editorship: its openness to the longer papers typical of ethnographic and other qualitative studies, historical work, legal articles, and some policy studies, and its international orientation. In keeping with these aims, Contemporary Drug Problems has encouraged theoretically informed qualitative research as well as publishing an impressive range of international work employing diverse perspectives and methods. These include influential special issues on alcohol and violence, hepatitis C, tobacco, harm reduction “from below”, alcohol policy, and gender and critical drug studies, as well as selections of papers originally presented at the journal’s very successful biennial conferences (on which more below). The articles it has published have covered a wide range of significant issues, including research methods, supervised injecting facilities, the politics of drug policy, gender, social networks, drug treatment, new ways of conceptualizing “context”, needle and syringe programs, alcohol and other drug use among young people, addiction autobiographies, drug courts, news and social media, steroid use, decriminalization and legalization, law enforcement, and stigmatization. The journal has also instituted two new commissioned submission types: book review essays, which set recent published works in their wider intellectual and policy contexts, and the “Contemporary Issues” pieces, which address current issues in theory and/or method, or those relating to a specific subfield or topic, in provocative but academically rigorous ways.
Over my decade as Editor, several structural changes have been made to the journal. A senior editorial team and an international advisory board, comprising researchers with established or growing research reputations, were established to help oversee and support the running, strategic direction and promotion of the journal. The original publisher, Federal Legal Publications, which had published the journal since its inception in 1971, set up a website that allowed the journal to move into the online era (e.g., access to articles and online submission), and, in late 2014, the journal moved to a new publisher, SAGE. The SAGE website (https://journals-sagepub-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/home/cdx) included features not previously available to the journal, such as information on and easy access to current and past issues, early online publication, online submission via ScholarOne, content alerts, subscription information, editorial staff and board listings, and a submission guide for authors. Throughout these changes and since, the journal continued to publish innovative, rigorous research, emphasizing the innovative use of contemporary theory in analyzing empirical materials, whether they derived from epidemiological, ethnographic, historical, interview-based, modeling, or textual methodologies. It also encouraged authors to consider carefully the political implications and potential effects of their analyses, and any policy recommendations that might derive from them, in order to avoid the stigmatization, marginalization, or pathologization of those engaging in alcohol and other drug use or experiencing problems associated with this use.
Another key development during my editorship was the holding of the inaugural, now biennial, Contemporary Drug Problems conference. Originally suggested by Associate Editor Suzanne Fraser, the first conference was held in Prato (2011, with Monash University) and, though relatively small, the extremely positive feedback we received prompted the senior editorial team to plan further conferences. These were held in Aarhus (2013, with the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University), Lisbon (2015, with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction), Helsinki (2017, with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare) and Prato (2019, with Monash University’s Law School). Now an established feature of the international alcohol and other drug conference calendar, the conference has helped to create and support an international community of critical drug researchers, and provided a forum for the presentation of innovative, theoretically informed, social research on drugs.
Over the past decade, I’ve been very fortunate to have the support of an outstanding and committed team of associate editors: Kim Bloomfield, Nancy Campbell, Suzanne Fraser (now Strategic Advisory Editor) and Mark Stoové, and more recently Kate Seear and kylie valentine. I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to them for their excellent service to the journal, as well as to the international editorial board members, who’ve taken on the unsung but very important contribution to scholarship of peer review, and to Sarah Shinkle, Ankur Paul and Mansi Agrawal at SAGE. The dedicated work of all of these people helped the journal increase its CiteScore from 2.3 in 2018 to 3.0 in 2019.
In saying goodbye, I’m also really delighted to welcome two highly respected research leaders as the new Co-Editors of the journal: Associate Professor Kate Seear from the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and Associate Professor kylie valentine, Deputy Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. I’m confident that Kate’s unique expertise in both law and sociology, and kylie’s impressive social policy and conceptual skills, will help advance the journal’s critical mission in many ways. I’d like to thank them for their enthusiasm and energy in taking on this new phase in the journal’s life, and am excited to see what comes next. No doubt I’ll miss my role, but I know the incoming editors possess the vision and talent to lead Contemporary Drug Problems into inspiring new territory.
Kate Seear and Kylie Valentine
We are delighted to be taking on this role as the new Co-Editors of Contemporary Drug Problems. Over the last decade, David has provided outstanding leadership of the journal, guiding it through a period of significant change and growth, supported by a stellar cast of colleagues, including the associate editors.
Contemporary Drug Problems is a truly unique journal. For many years, under David’s leadership, it has fostered ground-breaking critical scholarship, challenging and destabilising taken-for-granted assumptions about the effects and ostensible forms of harm associated with alcohol and other drugs. The biennial conference, led by David, Suzanne Fraser, and the conference committee, has been an especially valuable and novel contribution to the international academic calendar, fostering new friendships and collaborations. The journal should be particularly proud of the work done to nurture early and mid-career researchers through these conferences. One way this has happened is through the establishment of the early career researcher keynote. These sorts of initiatives have helped to ensure that critical drug scholarship has both established international leaders in the field and emerging generations of scholars. This is a testament to David and all those associated with the journal.
This work has both unfolded within and contributed to a growing global movement for drug policy reform. In many (although not all) parts of the world, ideas about drugs – including their effects and the forms of harm associated with them – have been breaking down. Contributors to Contemporary Drug Problems have played a vital role in this, although there is still much more work to be done. In many parts of the world, the problems associated with drugs and shaped by prohibition are on the rise. There is an urgent need, in this sense, for courageous and critical scholarship that seeks to tackle these problems in new ways.
Under our leadership, Contemporary Drug Problems will continue to be a home for empirical and theoretically sophisticated work, from numerous disciplines. We are especially keen to publish contributions that question taken-for-granted ideas about drugs and the problems attributed to them, wherever those ideas manifest. We remain open to contributions from authors around the world, and to scholarship from different disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, epidemiology, history, public policy, gender studies, sociology, law and Indigenous studies. We strongly encourage the innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical tools.
To mark David’s retirement as Editor, we will soon be publishing a call for papers for a special issue. This special issue will be both a celebration of David’s contribution to the journal and the focus of the journal itself, and aims to push critical drug scholarship in new and exciting directions.
In closing, we want to thank David, once again, for the invitation to co-edit the journal. It is a great honour for us both. He has left the journal in excellent shape. We look forward to working with both David and Suzanne Fraser in their new roles with the journal, and with our associate editors, valued peer reviewers and contributors, over the months and years to come.