The journal Addiction used to publish a long running interview series ‘Addiction Interviews’. This was reintroduced in 2017 as ‘Addiction Lives’, a joint print/web collaboration  with the Society for the Study of Addiction, (SSA) the leading professional organisation in the field, in existence since the 1880s. The new series is under the editorship of Virginia Berridge.

Addiction Interviews ran for 36 years under the editorship of the late Professor Griffith Edwards, a leading psychiatrist in the addiction field. The series provided wide ranging conversations with over 100 people who had contributed to the field of addiction at local, national and international levels. It focussed on scientists of all types but also on those who had linked with policy or were policy makers themselves. The full series of 111 interviews is available as a virtual issue on the Wiley online library.[1] [2]

The new series is building on the original series but with some significant changes in the way the interviews are structured, deposited and how permissions are given. The interview is transcribed and appears online on the SSA website; a summary is published in Addiction. The online platform allows enhanced content such as audio and video recordings and a hyperlinked short bibliography of the interviewee’s work. The material surrounding the interview, including the full transcript, is deposited, with permission, in the SSA archive held at the Wellcome Library.[3]

So far six interviews have been completed in the new series.[4] There has been a move to remedy the underrepresentation of women in the previous series and also to acknowledge the role of social science in the field.  Addiction commissions the series and suggestions for interviews are welcome. Please email [email protected] or Virginia Berridge [email protected]

[1] Babor, T.F. (2012) Addictionology as biography: one hundred ways to have a successful career in addiction science. Addiction, 107: 464-466. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2012.03788.x

[2] Addiction Interview Series virtual issue: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/13600443/homepage/addiction_interview_series.htm   

[3] http://archives.wellcomelibrary.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=NaviTree.tcl&dsqField=RefNo&dsqItem=SASSA#HERE

[4] https://www.addiction-ssa.org/hot-topic/addiction-lives/