The International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM): Abstracts from its 2018 annual meeting, Busan, Korea

International scholarship regarding addiction identification, assessment, and treatment is increasingly important. The International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) is an international fellowship of physicians that promotes such dissemination of scholarship. ISAM originated on April 16, 1998, when 25 physician representatives from 11 countries, from North and South America, Europe, and Asia, met in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, to develop an international collaboration to promote the role of addiction medicine in addressing the problems of alcohol and drug abuse internationally. Its mission is to address the credibility of the physician’s role, medical education, international consensus, research, policy, impaired professionals, and prevention.

ISAM’s annual meetings are increasingly popular venue. At ISAM’s 20th annual meeting in Busan, Korea, which occurred on November 3–7, 2018, chaired by Sung-Go Kim, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry, Pusan National University, over 500 scholars and clinical researchers across the globe attended. During the meeting, there were 70 parallel symposia presented at the conference. Herein this Substance Abuse paper, we publish 62 empirically based, selected abstracts that were presented at the annual meeting (see the Web-based appendix to this paper), as the journal has done previously. As with ISAM, Substance Abuse continues to promote and disseminate international scholarship regarding addiction. The journal is excited to disseminate these abstracts from leading clinical investigators across the world.