Dr. Daniel Bear is a policy researcher and consultant with two decades of experience in drug policy, harm reduction, criminal justice reform, and organizational development. He holds a PhD and MSc in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his doctoral research involved a year-long ethnography examining how street-level police officers in London implemented cannabis enforcement policy in practice. That work, grounded in direct fieldwork alongside Metropolitan Police officers, established his reputation as a researcher who studies policy as it is actually implemented, not just as it is written.
Through Responsum Consulting, Dr. Bear advises governments, health organizations, NGOs, and regulated industry clients on evidence-based approaches to drug policy, public health strategy, program evaluation, and criminal justice reform. Recent engagements have included advising government delegations from ten African countries on cannabis regulation through the Eastern and Southern Africa Commission on Drugs, leading the Canadian arm of a seven-country drug policy research consortium funded by the European Research Area Network on Illicit Drugs, and developing cannabis education frameworks for the Canadian Public Health Association and the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Dr. Bear led the development of the Mindful Consumption and Benefit Maximization (MCBM) framework, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, which has reconceptualized drugs education and treatment of adults with cannabis use disorder.
Before establishing Responsum, Dr. Bear spent three years as a consulting researcher for the UK Ministry of Justice, designing and managing a multi-site evaluation of violence reduction techniques across adult and youth correctional facilities. He conducted quantitative and qualitative research on racial disparities in drug policing for Release, the UK's largest drug law legal aid charity, and assessed police training and recruitment practices for the Ideas for Peace Foundation in Colombia. Earlier in his career, he worked with the Drug Law Reform Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in California, contributing to public education campaigns, policy analysis, and litigation support on state and federal drug law issues. He served as a member of the Ontario Parole Board from 2017 to 2019, participating in hearings and developing training materials on systemic discrimination and bias.
From 2023 to 2025, Dr. Bear served as Director of the Centre for Social Innovation at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto, where he built the Centre's research and community engagement capacity, grew its budget by 50 percent, and secured $250,000 in grant funding from the Telus Friendly Future Foundation. During that period he also led an independent academic review and evaluation of in-service training at the Toronto Police College, conducted under a Memorandum of Understanding between Humber and the Toronto Police Service. He has taught criminal justice, drug policy, victimology, and social policy at the post-secondary level for over a decade, supervising undergraduate research, developing new degree-level courses, and leading curriculum redesign across multiple programs. His research has been cited in policy discussions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and internationally.
Responsum engages a network of fractional consultants, drawn from research, practice, and subject matter expertise, to assemble the right team for each project. All engagements are led directly by Dr. Bear. Clients include government ministries, national health organizations, NGOs, municipal police services, regulated cannabis industry organizations, and international policy bodies.