Following the recent retirements of Professor Suzanne Fraser (former DruGS Program Lead) and Professor David Moore (former DruGS Professorial Fellow), longtime DruGS team member Dr Adrian Farrugia has been announced as the new Program Lead. Aiming to continue their highly influential careers conducting theoretically innovative and empirically robust research on alcohol and other drugs and related social phenomena, Professor Fraser and Professor Moore have stepped down from working full-time in the program and have taken up roles as adjunct professors.

Based in the DruGS program since 2017 (when it was called Social Studies of Addiction Concepts or SSAC), Dr Farrugia is particularly excited to take up this leadership role. An ARC DECRA fellow, Dr Farrugia is a sociologist who specialises in conceptually informed analysis of alcohol and other drug-related issues. He has published on several alcohol and other drug-related topics such as drug education curriculum, young men’s drug consumption, take-home naloxone and opioid overdose, alcohol and violence and, most recently, hepatitis C treatment. Dr Farrugia conducted his PhD under the supervision of Professor Fraser and Professor Moore (2013 – 2017) and is committed to building on the program’s exceptional track record of innovative critical research on alcohol and other drugs and related issues.

Having worked in the DruGS team for so long and benefited from the mentorship of Suzanne and David, it’s great to be able to step into this new role and lead the team into this next phase. We have several projects currently underway, and I am looking forward to continuing and further developing the exceptionally strong research track record established over the last decade.

Professor Fraser established the Social Studies of Addiction Concepts (SSAC) research program in 2013 while based at the National Drug Research Institute (NDRI), Curtin University.  It emerged from her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project on addiction concepts and became a model for demonstrating the capacity for nationally funded fellowships to foster world-class innovation and for leveraging research investment for exponential growth. Upon taking the position of Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS) at La Trobe University in 2019, Professor Fraser reimagined the scope of the program, subsequently renaming it the Drugs, Gender and Sexuality (DruGS) program to reflect a new and more expansive research scope. Several highly influential studies were completed under the DruGS banner, with Professor Fraser and Professor Moore conducting Australian Research Council-funded studies on experiences of addiction, dependence or habit, opioid overdose and take-home naloxone, gender and performance and image-enhancing drug use, approaches to alcohol and violence, and experiences of hepatitis C treatment and cure. At the same time, several sector- and government-funded projects were also completed addressing topics such as men’s alcohol consumption, the impact of stigma on healthcare access for people who consume drugs and improving healthcare for people affected by blood-borne virus and sexually transmissible infections in Victoria. Reflecting a commitment to tackling stigmatising public discourses of alcohol and other drug consumption, these years also saw the production of three highly innovative and influential websites: Livesofsubstance.org; Overdoselifesavers.org and VitalvoicesonhepC.org.

The DruGS team has exciting times ahead, with several projects currently underway such as an ARC-funded project on young people’s drug consumption and drug education, a Commonwealth-funded project developing an ambitious new ways to address stigma in healthcare and a Victorian Department of Health-funded project piloting a new resource to support inclusive healthcare.