Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate
Robin Room grew up in Sydney, Australia and received his higher education in the U.S., with a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. He was the Scientific Director of the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley, a U.S. National Alcohol Research Center, from 1977 to 1991, and then the Vice-President for Research at the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario, Canada, from 1991 to 1998. In 1999 he was appointed as a professor and the founding director of the Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs at Stockholm University. Since March, 2006, he has been a Professor in the School of Population Health of the University of Melbourne and the Director of the A.E.R. Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre. He has worked on social, cultural and epidemiological studies of alcohol, drugs and gambling behaviour and problems, and studies of social responses to alcohol and drug problems and of the effects of policy changes. Benedikt Fischer, Ph.D., obtained his doctorate in Criminology at the University of Toronto (Canada) in 1998. After appointments as a Research Scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (C.A.M.H.) as well as a faculty member in the Department of Public Health Sciences and at the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, he joined the newly established Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, in 2008. There, he is a full professor and holds a C.I.H.R./P.H.A.C. Research Chair in Applied Public Health and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Scholar Award. His research is interdisciplinary in nature, and concentrates mainly on substance use and mental health, infectious diseases, urban/public health, criminal justice, marginalized populations, interventions and policy. He is widely published in these areas. Wayne Hall is an N.H.M.R.C. Australia Fellow and Professor of Public Health Policy in the School of Population Health, University of Queensland. He was formerly Director of the Office of Public Policy and Ethics at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, U.Q. (2001-2005) and Director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at U.N.S.W. (1994-2001). He has advised the World Health Organization on: the health effects of cannabis use; the effectiveness of drug substitution treatment; the scientific quality of the Swiss heroin trials; the contribution of illicit drug use