Dr Simon Adamson
Senior Lecturer
Simon Adamson is a researcher, teacher and clinician based in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is Deputy Director of the National Addiction Centre, University of Otago, and in 2012, following receiving the Fred Yates prize was promoted to Associate Professor. His academic role involves teaching medical and post-graduate health science students, supervising masters and PhD students and active engagement in several research projects, currently in areas of comorbidity, cannabis misuse, and compulsive overeating. He is a clinical psychologist with 18 years’ experience in the addiction field, currently working in a publicly funded opioid substitution treatment programme and in private practice. Simon’s 2004 PhD examined predictors of treatment outcome for alcohol use disorders and he has published on a wide range of addiction and co-existing disorders topics. When Simon attended the 2011 SSA conference held in York he presented his work on the development of the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test Revised (CUDIT-R). He has subsequently published further work in this area, with international collaborations, including one that arose directly from a link made while attending the 2011 SSA conference to receive the Fred Yates prize.
This paper will describe the development and subsequent revision of the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test-Revised (CUDIT-R). Originally devised as a screening tool for cannabis misuse it has been translated in to several languages and been used in a variety of clinical and research settings. More recent work has included examining the utility of the scale as a measure of treatment outcome and the development of population norms to aid clinical interpretation.