Raising the bar Meeting Europe’s future challenges

1. Raising the bar Meeting Europe’s future challenges Michael Farrell Chair EMCDDA Scientific Advisory Committee

2. Priorities • Improve access to scientific knowledge • Improving links across the breadth of the scientific field from basic to applied science • Reinforce links between the EMCDDA and the scientific community • Promoting the science of addictions within the broader scientific field • Promoting empirical approaches to broad policy analysis within and across member states • Understanding the ethical and policy implications of new technologies and new drugs in contemporary society

3. Access to scientific knowledge 1 • Important that drug policy can be evidence-based • What evidence is needed? • How to translate evidence into practice? • What are possible ways to bridge the gap between research and practice? • Understanding the limits of evidence and the need for varied sources of information and knowledge

4. Access to scientific knowledge 2 • Cochrane Collaboration • International not-for-profit and independent organization • Up-to-date, accurate information about healthcare • Cochrane reviews are recognised as the gold standard in evidence-based health care • Future challenges: • Maintain high quality standard of updated evidence • Interact with all stakeholders to prioritize questions • The limitations of such methodologies for some of the complex social and individual problems of addiction

5. The EMCDDA. • After 15 years robust evidence about some of the significant and sustained differences between countries require further exploration • Challenge is now to begin to understand these differences • Comparative analysis • Creative use of differences in policy implementation, especially regional differences within countries for comparative differences in policy implementation • The output of the EMCDDA could become more scientifically robust and impactful

6. The EMCDDA and the scientific community • Improving monitoring implies • supporting and developing the focal points and increasing the broader national research infrastructure and research capacity • Keeping and developing the information network • Working more closely with the broad research community • Providing information in a manner which matches the needs of practitioners and policy makers

7. Methodological developments . • More comparable good quality data collection in European member states is necessary • Understanding new trends requires the combined use of quantitative standardized data and more qualitative information. • Use of modelling in policy analysis

8. Research into practice in Europe • Too much reliance on intervention studies conducted in the United States • European implementation substantially more textured and need for better monitoring and evaluation of such differences • Large scale collaborative approach to key questions • Understanding development and resilience in individuals, families and communities • Interventions in novel settings and with new technologies

9. Sustainability • Need for National and International organisations to work closely together to promote future high quality collaborative research • The EMCDDA is potentially in a strong position to promote and support the collaboration between European drug researchers • The EMCDDA should continue to follow and disseminate research developments and findings in Europe