February 9-10
Pullman Melbourne on the Park, East Melbourne, Victoria
Tickets Now on Sale

VAADA’s 2023 Conference, Shifting landscapes – Building the holistic treatment mosaic, is our first state-wide sector conference since 2019. It will seek to unpack the many issues impacting the Victorian AOD system and our cross-sectoral colleagues. We are looking to consider the importance of mutually shared problems and approaches, including the sort of collaboration that can make a difference.

The conference will attract delegates from Victoria and the broader Alcohol and Other Drug treatment sector from other states to come together in-person after a long hiatus.

Keynote Speakers

Wim van den Brink
Wim van den Brink is a Professor of Addiction Psychiatry at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre since 1992.  He is a (co)author of more than 600 international peer reviewed scientific papers (HIWoS=80; HIGoogle Scholar=113).

He has been the chair of the Workgroups that developed the Dutch Treatment Guidelines on Alcohol Use Disorders, Opiate Addiction and Drugs other than opioids. He is one of the founders and president of the International Collaboration of ADHD and Substance Abuse (ICASA). His main scientific interests are related to the neurobiology addiction and the pharmacological treatment of substance use disorders and related comorbidities.

Arie Freiberg
Arie Freiberg AM is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University. He was Dean of the Faculty Law at Monash University between 2004 and 2012. Before this, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2003. He was appointed to the Foundation Chair of Criminology at the University of Melbourne in January 1991 where he served as Head of the Department of Criminology between January 1992 and June 2002.

His particular areas of expertise are sentencing, non-adversarial justice and regulation.

In July 2004, he was appointed inaugural Chair of the Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council and served until October 2022. Between 2013 and 2021 he was  Chair of the Tasmanian Sentencing Advisory Council.

He has authored over180 publications in areas such as sentencing, the role of emotion in criminal justice and public policy, drug courts, problem-oriented courts, non-adversarial justice, regulatory theory and trauma-informed regulation.

Alison Ritter
Professor Alison Ritter, AO is an internationally recognised drug policy scholar and the Director of the Drug Policy Modelling Program (DPMP) at the University of New South Wales. She is an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow leading a multi-disciplinary program of research on drug policy.

Her research work has focussed on many aspects of drug policy, including research on drug laws, drug treatment, models and methods of democratic participation in drug policy; and research focussed on policy process.

Professor Ritter worked as a clinical psychologist in the alcohol and drug treatment sector prior to commencing full-time research. She has contributed significant policy and practice developments across alcohol and drug policy over many years. She is past President of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy, and Editor in Chief for the International Journal of Drug Policy.

Call for Abstracts Open	3rd October 2022
Call for Abstracts Close	30th November 2022
Notification to Authors	11th December  2022
Early Bird Registration Closes	30th December 2022
Conference!	9-10th February 2023