Alcoholism and Drug Addiction (Mar 2025)

A clarion call to the addiction science community: It’s time to resist the anti-scientific policies of the US Trump administration

  • Thomas F. Babor,
  • Bryon Adinoff,
  • Luke Clark,
  • David Crockford,
  • Zsolt Demetrovics,
  • Paul Dietze,
  • Jean-Sébastien Fallu,
  • Sally Gainsbury,
  • Gail Gilchrist,
  • David A. Gorelick,
  • Kathryn Graham,
  • Jason Grebely,
  • Derek Heim,
  • Matilda Hellman,
  • Anne-Marie Laslett,
  • Caravella McCuistian,
  • Michal Miovsky,
  • Neo K. Morojele,
  • Jacek Moskalewicz,
  • Isidore Obot,
  • Richard Pates,
  • Robin Room,
  • Marta Rychert,
  • Aysel Sultan,
  • Carla Treloar,
  • Nigel E. Turner,
  • Samantha Wells,
  • Emily C. Williams,
  • Katie Witkiewitz

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5114/ain.2024.149923
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 37, no. 3
pp. 133 – 140

Abstract

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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(CDC) mandated that all scientific manuscripts authored by CDC personnel and currently undergoing peer review be withdrawn so that certain “forbidden terms” relating to gender can be removed (Clark & Abbasi, 2025; Heidt, 2025; Mandavilli, 2025).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)...

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