This webinar will focus on three studies in Victoria that collect data on alcohol consumption, drug use and driving:

1. The Vanessa study explores alcohol consumption, drug use and drink/drug driving beliefs among young people recruited from music festivals in Victoria.
2. The Victorian Methamphetamine Cohort Study, VMAX is an ongoing prospective cohort study of people who use methamphetamine in metropolitan and rural Victoria, focusing on patterns of drug use and related harms and the impacts of service delivery on these.
3. The Illicit Drug Reporting System is a drug trend monitoring system that has been operating since the late 1990s.It focuses on trends in price, purity and availability of illicit drugs in Australian capital cities as reported in serial cross-sectional surveys of people who inject drugs.

The webinar will detail recent findings from the three studies, including emerging trends and their implications for intervention, policy and practice.

Professor Paul Dietze is one of Australia’s leading alcohol and other drug epidemiologists. He is a past NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and an ARC Future Fellow. Over more than 25 years’ he has worked to establish internationally innovative surveillance systems and applied research designs, that break new ground in the public health research into alcohol and other drug use and related harms in Australia and internationally.

Dr Caitlin Douglass is a senior research officer at the Burnet Institute in the Implementation Science working group. She was awarded her PhD in 2022 from the University of Melbourne. She currently works on the design of interventions to reduce stigma in healthcare settings. She also has experience conducting surveys on sexual health and substance use with young people.