Addiction Lives is an SSA-funded series, which seeks to preserve the memories and experiences of people who work in the field of addiction. Read edited excerpts from some of the long-form interviews; learn from people like Dr Maggie Brady and Sir Ian Gilmore.
On conflicts of interest…
Robert West: “I draw the line with the tobacco industry! I have some colleagues who think it’s OK to work with the tobacco industry and I respect their decision but I don’t agree with it. I think that the industry has such an irreconcilable conflict of interest that the costs outweigh the benefits, even if they don’t have any direct influence on what you do. I think it gives them a sort of respectability that is worth millions and is very damaging.”
On valuing qualitative methods…
Maggie Brady: “I believe that engaging with the ethnographic method […] is the best way to produce nuanced understandings of the contexts behind peoples’ struggles with alcohol and other drugs. Epidemiological research, clinical studies, short-term survey research that asks direct questions […] all have their place – but they will never pick up on the social meanings of drinking, the cultural barriers to change or action, or conversely the ways in which an understanding of cultural meanings and social organisation can offer avenues for change. […] I hope that […] governments and think tanks engaged in alcohol policy debates and strategies for action will continue to commission and value contributions from the social sciences (particular from sociological and anthropological studies), because these enrich and balance the randomised controlled trials, biomedical studies, and cross-cultural surveys that inform their work.”
On evidence-based information…
Harry Shapiro: “I mean the whole rationale [for the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence] was that the information we should provide should be topical, non-judgemental, and, a term before anyone thought of using it, evidence based. Eventually I dubbed it, in the ‘war against drugs’, […] as the ‘demilitarised zone’. We were that space in between all the polarised views and opinions and myths and prejudices and whatever you want to say about drugs, and we were this. You might argue with the concept of objective truth, but the point being that we were in that middle zone I suppose. […] And I think the evidence base, certainly in an era of fake news and all those other sorts of social media nonsense, it’s now more important than ever really.”
On public health messages…
Betsy Thom: “I think it’s quite healthy to look and say ‘yes everybody has to think about their health and to give the public advice’, I have no problems with that. I have a problem with the standardisation of everything, with the simplification of everything (i.e. the public have to have simple messages). I don’t like that. This is a very personal point of view. I think the public health approach is supposed to be evidence-based, but it isn’t always evidence-based and there is a tension between the messages that they feel they should be giving the public and their desire to be evidence-based. I think there’s a tension there.”
On industry money…
Thomas Babor: “As the alcohol industry has become more globalised and more concentrated into a smaller number of transnational corporations, they have become an engine of expanding alcohol consumption in the developing world. The ‘perfect storm’ of mass marketing, weak alcohol control policies and an emerging youth market will create the equivalent of the tobacco-related disease epidemic of the late 19th century, which will take 20 to 30 years to reverse. Their attempts to neutralise, if not control the science base has followed the example of the tobacco industry, with similar results. Unless our scientific colleagues and research societies eschew funding from the alcohol, gambling and pharmaceutical industries, we are going to see a lot more of the dissention that has characterised the field of late. We know that industry money, whether it comes from tobacco, asbestos, gambling or pharmaceutical companies, can bias the research agenda, create dissention in a field of science, and influence the outcomes of research papers and literature reviews. Competing interest declarations are not sufficient. We need independent funding sources and independent scientists.”
On connecting research with the real word…
Susanne MacGregor: “I worry a bit about the overly academic approach to research in the universities. As you know, all the developments in universities to prove performance in certain ways, publishing in journals, certain kind of journal article counting more than a book or a chapter or a conference paper. […] All the collegiate activities which I think are really important in universities are being squeezed out by these metrics […] And with that you’ve then got the separation of universities from the real world – and the kind of research I’ve always enjoyed has been where you’ve been out in the real world, doing realistic evaluations which have some benefit and use. I think that looks like a missing area for me.”
On working in the field of addiction…
Robin Davidson: “I made a choice to work in addictions when I qualified […] and I kind of lobbied for some help for people with addiction problems and I’ve made a career out of it since then. If I was living life over again, I wouldn’t change it one bit. I think that our speciality has so much to offer in terms of behavioural change, in terms of this motivation, commitment and all of these sorts of things, that it’s a joy as a clinical psychologist to work in addictions and I think that yeah, I don’t think I would change it.”
edited by Natalie Davies
Addiction Lives is an interview series edited by academic historian and public health expert, Professor Virginia Berridge. Addiction Lives was inspired by Addiction Interviews, which ran for 36 years and featured conversations with over 100 people, in particular, scientists and those who had developed links with policy.
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