Prof Judith Aldridge

Biography

Judith Aldridge is originally from Toronto Canada, but has lived and worked in Manchester since 1989. Judith’s research is focused on drug markets, policy and use. She has pioneered research in the area of ‘virtual drug markets’, culminating in the first publication connected to drug sales on ‘Silk Road’. She co-edited two special issues of the International Journal of Drug Policy on cryptomarkets and on online data and methods (2016 & 2019). She has acted in advisory/expert capacity to agencies including the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Abuse (EMCDDA), and the European Commission. In 2020 she was appointed to the UK government Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). Research established earlier in her career had a particular focus on recreational drug use among adolescents and adults, culminating in the development of the ‘normalisation thesis’ as applied to adolescent recreational drug use, first given serious treatment in the 1998 book Illegal Leisure and later extended theoretically in Illegal Leisure Revisited (2011). The research on which the thesis is based employed the longest longitudinal study of its kind, tracking a cohort (starting in 1991) from age 14 with the concept since being tested, contested, honed and extended by drug researchers across the globe. Judith also conducted with Manchester colleagues the first ever ‘in situ’ academic study of dance drug use in clubs (published in the book ‘Dancing on Drugs’), innovating the methodology for research of this kind now taking place across the globe focused on both indoor venues and outdoor festivals, alongside guidelines for obtaining informed consent with intoxicated research participants in 'in situ' drug research. 

Teaching: in the areas of drugs, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and statistics

Appointed George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University in Budapest in 2017

Head of the Department of Criminology from 2020