|
3/2024
vol. 37
abstract:
Editorial
A clarion call to the addiction science community: It’s time to resist the anti-scientific policies of the US Trump administration
Caravella McCuistian
16
,
- Dept. of Public Health Sciences, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT, USA
- University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center, Aurora, CO, USA
- Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Department of Psychiatry, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada
- Flinders University Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia; Institute of Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
- Disease Elimination Program, Burnet Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia
- Professor, School of Psychoeducation, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada
- School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Addictions Healthcare Research, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College, London, UK
- Psychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
- Centre for Addition and Mental Health, Canada; Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Hepatitis and Drug Use Research Group, Kirby Institute, Australia
- Psychology, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK
- Department of Sociology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; Faculty of Social Sciences; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA
- Department of Addictology, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
- Department of Psychology, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
- Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Warsaw, Poland
- Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse, Uyo, Nigeria
- University of Worcester, Worcester, UK
- SHORE & Whariki Research Centre, College of Health, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
- Department of Science, Technology and Society, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
- Centre for Social Research in Health, University of New South Wales, NSW, Australia
- Institute for Mental Health Policy Research and Campbell Family Mental Health Research, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Institute for Mental Health Policy Research, Centre for Addition and Mental Health, Toronto, ON, Canada; Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, ON, Canada
- Department of Health Systems & Population Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
- Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Alcohol Drug Addict 2024; 37 (3): 133-140
Online publish date: 2025/03/31
PlumX metrics:
As a group of 29 addiction journal editors from 12 countries, we are urgently drawing our readers’ attention to the abrupt and drastic changes in science policy now being enacted by the current US government. We are issuing a clarion call to the addiction science community to reverse the unethical, illegal and unscientific activities of the Trump Administration, and by analogy the activities of other governments that interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge to manage addiction-related problems (Balfe 2023, Hall, et al., 2012;). There are three reasons for this call to action.
First, the Administration is attempting to censor scientific discourse within peer-reviewed publications. Following President Trump’s Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth,” the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mandated that all scientific manuscripts authored by CDC personnel and currently undergoing peer review be withdrawn so that certain “forbidden terms” relating to gender can be removed (Clark & Abbasi, 2025; Heidt, 2025; Mandavilli, 2025). The terms include ‘gender’, ‘transgender’, ‘pregnant person’, ‘transsexual’ or ‘non-binary’. This is clearly unethical (removing authors who contributed to a publication), possibly illegal (changing an article after copyright has been transferred to a journal), and definitely unscientific (editors should not publish articles that fail to accurately describe sample characteristics in terms of sex, gender and sexual minority composition, where relevant). Censorship by the Administration runs counter to long-standing efforts by the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE) to promote accurate and complete reporting of sex and gender information in scientific research (Heidari, et al., 2016) and to improve gender representation across member journals (Babor, et. al., 2023). Even worse, CDC and other
government agencies have removed from public view epidemiological datasets related to a range of health topics, including the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, without explanation or justification (Clark and Abbasi, 2025; Cox, et al., 2025)...
keywords:
Addiction science, Addiction science editors, Autonomous science, Science publication, Scientific integrity
|
|
