Frank Zobel
VITA
Frank Zobel is a sociologist and public health researcher. He is deputy Director at Addiction Switzerland, the largest centre for substance use epidemiology in the country. His former positions were with the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon, as policy analyst and coordinator of the European Drug Report, and with the University Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne, as external evaluator of the Swiss drug strategy. Frank Zobel is a member of the national advisory board for addiction issues of Switzerland and of the scientific board of the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT).
Three key topics for drug policy research
The presentation will briefly review three topics which for diverse reasons have been insufficiently studied in drug policy research and/or are currently on the research agenda: cannabis regulation policies, drug law implementation practices and drug market analysis. While epidemiology and other public health research have contributed to changes in drug policies over the last 30 years it is in my view in the areas of regulation & market analysis and law implementation that knowledge is most needed today to improve drug policies and change some of the stereotypes that support them. I will review some recent work done in my institution to show how this is currently done in Switzerland.
