At Recovering Justice, we believe we each bring skills, experience and expertise to overlapping areas of our work. We work non-hierarchically and together, leading on various areas of governance, projects, campaigns and activities, together work towards our vision of peaceful solutions to the war on drugs and the policies underpinning these harmful interventions.
Empowered collective voice having the ability to speak and advocate for reform, influence and create future drug policies and treatment services and support groups that work for the benefit of society.
Judith Aldridge
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, drug markets, drug policy, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and statistics PhD supervision: drug markets and drug policy, and applications particularly welcomed in the area of online drug buying and sellingAppointed George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University in Budapest in 2017
Lucy Campbell
Lucy Campbell is a lived experience criminologist, doctoral researcher and the founder and director at Flip of the Coin CIC; a women and lived experience-led organisation based in the Scottish Highlands. Her community work focuses on health inequalities and how connections with arts and nature are integral for healing trauma and encouraging health resilience. She is also the Director for Policy and Advocacy in the Experience for Justice Collective.
Shayla Schlossenberg
Shayla is currently Head of Drugs Services at Release
Release is the UK’s centre of expertise on drugs and drug laws. They provide legal support, representation and drugs advice to people with a history of drug use or who are impacted by drug laws. They campaign for evidence-based drug policies founded on principles of public health and human rights, seeking to reduce the harms faced by people who use drugs Shayla joined Release after spending the last two years at an East London homelessness charity, managing a drug and alcohol outreach team. Originally from Baltimore, Shayla moved to the UK in 2019 to complete an MSc in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, producing a dissertation on harm reduction’s role in drug user subjectification in the UK. Prior to this, Shayla has been working in the harm reduction world since 2015, at centres for people who use drugs and sex worker projects in three cities in the USA (Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City) and in Shanghai, China. Shayla’s particular harm reduction skills are working with people oppressed by patriarchy, people who use methamphetamine, and people who trade sex.