Griffith Edwards

rdf:langString Griffith Edwards

rdf:langString James Griffith Edwards CBE (3 October 1928 – 13 September 2012) was a British psychiatrist. Edwards was born on 3 October 1928 in India and received his M.D. from Balliol College, Oxford. His research focused on the study and treatment of alcohol and other drug dependence and related aspects of addictions. He was a major international figure influencing the development of the discipline of alcohol and drug studies, and promoted rigorous scientific and clinical standards in approaching the broader aspects of these problems. He was director of the Medical Research Council-funded Addiction Research Unit from 1968 until his retirement from King's College London. He also established the UK National Addiction Centre in London and was its first Chair and Director. His 25 years of service as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Addiction transformed it from a small British journal to the most widely-read and cited substance use-related journal in the world. In 1971 he delivered the Edwin Stevens Lecture. Among the many prizes he received in his career was the E.M. Jellinek Memorial Award in 1979 for his research on alcohol use disorders, and, being made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987 for his services to social science and medicine. Edwards wrote extensively on policy aspects of alcohol and other drug problems and promoted a balanced public health population-based approached to the tackling of alcohol and other drug problems. He wrote the original description of alcohol dependence and the terminology of dependence has become the global term adopted in international disease classification systems including the DSM and ICD classifications. Edwards published a wide range of original scientific studies on alcohol and other drugs and also wrote several popular science books including Alcohol, The Worlds Favourite Drug, Matters of Substance: Drugs, and Why Everyone is a User. He also sole-authored in 1982 the first edition of the influential book The Treatment of Drinking Problems and contributed as an author, co-author, and ultimately advisor to its subsequent editions over the ensuing decades. After his death, the authors of the sixth edition, Keith Humphreys and Anne Lingford-Hughes, renamed the book in his honour as Edwards' Treatment of Drinking Problems.