Welcome back!
Drs. Jan Widerman and Cara Borelli are enthusiastic to announce that the Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Abuse is returning from hiatus to resume publishing again in 2024. We will be taking over as co-editors-in-chief for the journal, and the name will be revised to the Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Use to reflect updated terminology.
Dr. Jan Widerman is a pediatrician with 43 years of experience in Philadelphia, and to meet the needs of his community became board certified in addiction medicine 17 years ago. He works in general addiction medicine private practice 15 minutes from one of the epicenters of the opioid epidemic, Kensington, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dr. Cara Borelli is an emergency medicine physician who trained in San Antonio, Texas, and she completed an addiction medicine fellowship at Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, New York. She works on the inpatient addiction medicine consult service at Yale New Haven Hospital and teaches at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
We believe there is an urgency to address child and adolescent substance use, and the need for prevention, assessment, and evidence-based treatment is paramount to treating these patients. With the return from hiatus, the journal will serve as an interdisciplinary forum on child and adolescent substance use. This journal is uniquely positioned to present evidence-based research that can address systemic issues and influence policy on child and adolescent substance use. We are excited to broaden the scope of the journal, in particular to invite research on the overlap between substance use disorders and obstetrics including perinatal health. We are also expanding to include an emphasis on child and adolescent psychiatry regarding the overlap between mental health and substance use disorders. We would like to invite diverse research from across the world, as addiction medicine has local regulations and substance use patterns that lead to variability in practices in different locations.
The language in discourse and practice in addiction medicine is shifting to avoid perpetuating stigma (AMERSA, Citation2023; Ashford et al., Citation2018a), and many addiction medicine journals have had their names changed to reflect the terminology updates (Kelly and Westerhoff, Citation2010). The name of this journal will be revised to the Journal of Child and Adolescent Substance Use, with an anticipated timeline for completion in 2025. The journal will return to publishing print and online issues in a hybrid open-access format, with an anticipated 6 online issues and 2 print issues per year.
We would again like to welcome all our new and old readers and request submissions of manuscripts, including original investigations including clinical trials, meta-analyses, systematic reviews, case reports and case series, and letters to the editor. If you are considering whether this journal would be the best fit for your manuscript, please reach out to [email protected]. We are also seeking peer reviewers and section editors, and we can be reached at the above email address. We welcome you to follow our social media account on X (formerly Twitter), @JofCASU.
Additional information
Funding
References
- AMERSA. (2023, May 23). Exciting SAJ News! AMERSA. https://amersa.org/exciting-saj-news/.
- Ashford, R., Brown, A., & Curtis, B. (2018a). Substance use, recovery, and linguistics: The impact of word choice on explicit and implicit bias. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 189, 131–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2018.05.005
- Kelly, J. F., & Westerhoff, C. M. (2010). Does it matter how we refer to individuals with substance-related conditions? A randomized study of two commonly used terms. The International Journal on Drug Policy, 21(3), 202–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2009.10.010