Agenda

Special Seminar "Drug policy in the 21st Century"

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, drug policies around the world have undergone significant change. This special seminar will examine drug policy in contemporary twenty-first-century societies. In particular, it will explore key issues currently under debate in the drug policies of countries such as Japan, Italy, and Canada through a comparative perspective. By doing so, the seminar aims to consider the significance of drug policy in modern society.

March 18, 2026, 3:45–5:15 PM
Sala della Terrazza, San Sebastiano

Akihiko Sato (School of Sociology, Kwansei Gakuin University)
Japanese drug policy and Italian harm reduction

This section explains the distinctive historical development of Japan’s drug policy and, from that perspective, examines drug policy in Italy. Although Italy has operated its drug policy primarily through a similar framework of criminalization as Japan, the emergence of citizen-led harm reduction initiatives in the 1990s brought about significant change. By tracing a process that has received little attention in the existing literature, this section highlights the characteristics of Italian drug policy and the aspects that make it distinctly Italian.

Kanna Hayashi (St. Paul's Hospital Chair in Substance Use Research and Associate Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University)
Impacts of drug prohibition: substance displacement in Japan and toxic drug crisis in Canada

This section will present two recent examples of negative impacts of drug prohibitionist policies in two different countries. In response to concerns regarding increasing use of new psychoactive substances (NPS), in 2014, Japan banned a range of NPS through aggressive law enforcement. As a result, substance displacement seems to have occurred among men who have sex with men in Japan. Over the last decade, Canada has been suffering from a toxic drug/overdose crisis driven by volatile adulterants in the unregulated drug supply, which is a result of the current drug prohibitionist policies. In this context, some innovative harm reduction interventions have been introduced while facing challenges associated with the current drug regulation schemes.