Seeing Addiction: An interview with Thomas F. Babor

Thomas F. Babor is a leading scholar in global addiction research and policy. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, he has advanced global standards for screening, treatment, public health responses to substance use, and scientific integrity. His editorial career includes serving as Regional Editor for the Americas at the journal Addiction and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, the oldest American addiction journal published at Rutgers. He is also actively defending scientific integrity, most recently spearheading Addiction Science Under Siege, a report that highlights threats to research infrastructure, evidence-based policy, and public health systems.

As the editor of Seeing Addiction: A Personal Memoir, Babor preserved the legacy of Griffith Edwards, one of the most influential figures in modern addiction science. This posthumously published memoir traces a career that crossed disciplines, cultures, and continents, revealing how addiction research is shaped by collaboration, lived experience, and history. Edwards’ vision of a field grounded in curiosity, integrity, and openness speaks to a broad audience about how knowledge is created and why it matters in our era of rapid, uncontrollable flows of information and growing concerns about research.

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BWR: Between editing and finding the right open-access publisher, you spent years on Seeing Addiction. What was the main reason for you to take on this demanding editorial responsibility?

TFB: The main reason was my friendship with Griffith Edwards and a request from his wife, Susan Edwards, to take on the task. I had been communicating with him during the months prior to his death, so I was aware that he was working on it. I knew this one was important because he had called me a month before he died to say he was very unhappy because the journal he had managed for 25 years had decided to remove its logistical support for this book project. Seeing Addiction is a story about the emergence of a field of scientific discovery that needed to be told.

BWR: You list several editorial challenges in the introduction of the book, including working from drafts and recordings, as well as making decisions about editing versus preserving Edwards’ original voice. What was the single biggest challenge you faced in shaping Seeing Addiction?

TFB: The biggest challenge was the ordering of the chapters, which had been dictated separately without a table of contents and no apparent chronological order. I conferred with Jean O’Reilly, who worked for the journal Addiction, because she was asked by Griffith to transcribe the chapters as they were dictated.

BWR: With its rich content, Seeing Addiction is a delightful and inspiring read to anyone, a book we both recommend to broader audiences. As the editor, what do you think makes Griffith Edwards’ story meaningful beyond the field of addiction science?

TFB: Griffith was known for his eloquence as a speaker, for his entertaining prose as a writer, and for his creative ideas as a thought leader. His life interests extended far beyond addiction into art, literature, and history. His life is the story of escaping from a troubled childhood in rural Wales to achieve the highest levels of academic respect as a psychiatrist, researcher, educator, forensic expert, and policymaker. He wrote 13 books, including several about the history of addiction policy, and a novel.

BWR: The memoir was intended to speak to a broad audience, including students and early-career professionals. What do you hope they take from it, from an ideological and practical perspective?

TFB: Griffith had great respect for the process of professional development that produces a successful addiction scientist. His career was made possible by his mentors and the institutions that supported his research. His ideas and his collaborations with other scientists. His research projects often involved young scientists interested in the same research questions. The memoir he left us was written not only to describe his professional journey, but also to encourage young scientists to continue the quest. That message can be inspirational when it reaches the right audience. An important part of his recollections as an addictionologist is the moral dilemmas he struggled with. He identified a mistake in the data that his mentor, D. L. Davies, published on alcoholics who claimed they had returned to moderate drinking. He published an article to correct the mistake (Edwards, 1985), despite criticism from colleagues who were more concerned about offending the image of the late D. L. Davies than about the clinical implications of erroneous findings about whether alcoholics could return to normal drinking. Similarly, Edwards found himself at the center of controversy when the initial findings from a two-year follow-up of alcoholics treated with either treatment or advice suggested that patients with more severe alcohol dependence did better with the more intensive treatment, thereby confirming the “matching hypothesis” that treatment could be improved by matching patients to the amount and intensity of therapy that fit their needs. In a strange twist on this line of research, Edwards and his statistical colleague Colin Taylor (Edwards & Taylor, 1994) later analyzed additional data collected from the same patients, reporting that their original treatment-matching findings may have been erroneous because the effect they observed at two years post-treatment was not present in the first year after treatment. The authors’ honest admission of a possible false conclusion was prescient. Many studies subsequent to theirs also failed to find matching effects. Edwards was indeed no stranger to controversy, but the real lesson for future addiction scientists is to appreciate that science is self-correcting and intellectual honesty is an important part of that process.

BWR: Edwards worked across research, publishing, and policy. What can that teach people considering career changes?

TFB: Addiction scientists gravitate to the field from a variety of disciplines and personal motives, but at some point, they become so intrigued by the enormity of this disorder that they become addicted to the quest for answers. Someone once said that to know alcoholism is to know medicine, given the more than 200 health conditions that are part of this disorder. Griffith took that dictum one step further by believing that to know addiction is to know public health. Addiction is a sickness that infects individuals, communities, and even the health statistics of populations, including life expectancy. Careers in addiction research provide opportunities for those who like to ask questions, find answers, and learn from patients.

BWR: Edwards believed research often starts with listening, and he also wrote about learning from patients. How does that help reshape traditional ideas of expertise? How can that idea apply outside science?

TFB: Traditional medical practice seems to favor a detached view of the doctor-patient relationship, with the doctor being the expert and the patient being the consumer of the doctor’s knowledge and advice. Griffith’s style was to sit next to the addicted patient, not across from him, to demonstrate that he was interested in the person’s existential suffering as well as the person’s physical illness. So, in addition to providing health care and expert advice, Griffith used friendship and empathy to facilitate long-term recovery and to draw out information that could be used to guide research as well as practice.

BWR: The memoir is a great conversation starter about field-wide ethical guidelines for publishing addiction science, as addiction research often intersects with industry interests. What does ethical publishing mean in today’s environment, and how have the challenges facing editors evolved since Edwards’ era, particularly when it comes to maintaining independence in the face of external pressures?

TFB: In Griffith’s 25-year tenure as editor of the international journal, Addiction, the foundational ethical issues among journal editors were financial conflicts of interest (COI) that affected the objectivity of addiction researchers. In today’s environment, ethical publishing in the US means avoidance of conflicts of interest, dealing honestly with AI, and neutralizing the growing influence of industries that profit from addictive substances and behaviors, including alcohol, cannabis, gambling, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals. Edwards used his influence to create guidelines and institutional structures that protect society from commercial interests that profit from addiction.

BWR: Do you see your work with the International Society of Addiction Journal Editors (ISAJE) and the Farmington consensus as an extension of Edwards’ commitment to scientific integrity?

TFB: Griffith had the vision and influence to marshal resources to issue consensus documents about ethical publishing, build institutions like ISAJE, and expand the reach of the international journal Addiction. I worked with him to progress these projects so that they reflected his vision for what addiction science should be: international, diverse, multidisciplinary, free from financial conflicts of interest, and honest enough to admit mistakes.

BWR: What lessons from Edwards’ editorial philosophy are most relevant for maintaining integrity in today’s changing information landscape, including complications brought on by artificial intelligence and misinformation?

TFB: Griffith believed that journals should be more than vehicles for the transfer of research findings to the scientific community. He wanted the field’s addiction journals to offer opinions, ask questions, and protect scientific integrity. He would have been appalled by the activities of the Trump administration, like the censorship of terminology pertaining to equity and diversity. He was concerned about misinformation communicated by the alcohol industry and would have been fascinated by the potential research applications of artificial intelligence.

BWR: How might the role of editors, scholars, and librarians evolve in protecting the integrity of knowledge under these changing conditions?

TFB: Editors should speak out in their editorial pages about issues of concern to the scientific community, like censorship of scientific terminology.  Scholars should use their research skills to monitor the negative impact of laws, policies, budget cuts, and executive orders on public health and knowledge production. Librarians can play an important role in telling the story of modern addiction science, preserving its legacy, and supporting historical research on the field.

BWR: Seeing Addiction was published under an open-access license. Why was that important to you?

TFB: Griffith wrote this book to tell about his fascination for addiction science, and to encourage younger scientists to pursue careers in clinical, basic, and epidemiological research. By publishing the book under an open-access license, we avoided the paywall and circumvented the publishing industry he was often critical of. All profits from the sale of the softcover book go to the support of public health students, and there is an e-book that can be downloaded for free.

BWR: The memoir highlights collaboration. Given your experience, what do you think makes a team effective across disciplines?

TFB: Addiction is a complex disorder that requires multidisciplinary collaboration to understand its causes, prevent its development, and treat those who suffer from it. Collaboration across disciplines and national boundaries prevents the intellectual trap described in the parable of the elephant and the blind men. As the story goes, seven blind men come across an elephant, and each one of them feels a different part of the animal’s body to understand what it is. Because they each describe the animal from their own limited perspectives, their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other and only partially correct. Interdisciplinary teams are more effective because they are more likely to perceive multiple relevant aspects of the same phenomenon.

BWR: We loved reading Edwards’ travelogues, which span diverse countries with varying levels of research and treatment opportunities. How did Edwards’ international experiences shape his understanding of addiction in people affected by its impact, as well as research needs?

TFB: Griffith was definitely a champion of international and interdisciplinary collaboration, which made him a perfect match with the World Health Organization. He encouraged research on the core dependence syndrome to find out that it was similar across cultures and also recognized that cultural and gender influences shaped the manifestation of the problems associated with the core syndrome. His travels to India, the USA, Latin America, Europe, and Africa gave him insights into addiction and recovery that few people have had. His travels also provided opportunities for cross-national collaborations and lifelong friendships that are described in the book.

BWR: How do you see the relationship between science, policy, and society reflected in Edwards’ life?

TFB: Griffith was convinced that public health should be a priority in addiction science and policy. He realized that policy research at the population level provided enormous opportunities for improving the health of individuals and societies.

BWR: Edwards valued history deeply. Why do you think modern fields sometimes overlook their past, and what are the risks when we forget the history behind today’s knowledge? Your recent work on The Addiction Science Under Siege report highlights threats to research infrastructure. How do these concerns echo themes in Griffith Edwards’ life and work?

TFB: Griffith studied the history of addiction and wrote eloquently about people like Thomas Trotter (1760-1832) and Norman Kerr (1834-1899), who contributed to treatment, research, and theory. The rich history that forms the basis of modern addiction science consists of social movements like Temperance, policy experiments like Prohibition, and federal initiatives to apply science to the improvement of treatment and prevention. Individuals who work in fields like addiction ignore at their peril the remarkable growth of knowledge during the past 50 years, and the prior history of ignorance that preceded it.  Even as the Trump administration and authoritarian governments seem to have disdain for health science, we can see how limited that view is when scientific research is brought under political control, as it was in the former Soviet Union and Germany during the 1930s.

BWR: The report calls for safeguarding evidence-based policymaking. How does Edwards’ work help us understand why that matters?

TFB: Edwards’ work with the World Health Organization and with numerous governments around the world shows that addiction science will not be censored, defunded, or removed from the policymaking process. Policymaking is most effective when it is guided by scientific research and public health values. If that is not done, the consequences are epidemics of substance use and the high costs of endemic use. The current debate about problematic use of the internet calls for an expansion of international collaboration so that no society can ignore the harm their unscientific policies are causing.

BWR: If Edwards were alive today, what issues do you think he would be most concerned about?

TFB: He would probably be writing about Human Rights violations in the War on Drugs in the USA and the threats to public health coming from commercial entities like the alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutical, gambling, and cannabis industries, plus the digital platforms that are using the internet as a vehicle to promote addictive substances and behaviors for profit.

BWR: Thank you for your time.

[On behalf of Books We Read, this interview was conducted by Judit H. Ward and William Bejarano in June 2026, in preparation for the publication of a series of eight open-access commentaries on Seeing Addiction in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Click on the image to read them.]

References

• Addiction Science Defense Network & National Prevention Science Coalition. (2025). Addiction Science Under Siege: The 2025 impact report of federal actions on research, prevention, treatment, and recovery.
• Edwards, G. (1985). A later follow-up of a classic case series: D.L. Davies’s 1962 report and its significance for the present. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 46(3), 181-190.
• Edwards, G. (2026). Seeing Addiction: A Personal Memoir. Ed. T. F. Babor (Ed.), Ubiquity Press eBooks. Ubiquity Press.
• Edwards, G., & Taylor, C. (1994). Drinking problems, the matching hypothesis and a conclusion revised. Addiction, 89(5), 609-611.