The introduction and fast growing popularity of electronic dance music has strongly influenced the spread of so-called party drugs in Amsterdam. Trends in substances use in Amsterdam's nightlife have been monitored systematically with ‘Antenna’, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Ecstasy remained the most popular stimulant drug, but since the late 1990s it had to compete with cocaine, and to a lesser extent with amphetamine. In the past decade, GHB and ketamine also gained popularity among clubbers and pub-goers. However, the vast majority does not take illicit drugs while going out at night. Alcohol remains by far the most popular substance, and has become even more important in the past decade.

In recent decades the night-time economy has started to play a significant role in city centre regeneration; it has become a vital element of the urban economy, as well as a marketing tool in the competition between cities. Concerns about personal safety and fear of crime determine to a large extent the success of these nightlife districts. Based on an analysis of policy documents, night-time observations and expert interviews with stakeholders in the Safe Nightlife Programmes of Rotterdam and Utrecht, different local safety measures and their legitimizations in different local urban settings will be analysed. The question raised is how surveillance measures in different nightlife districts are legitimized, taking into account the fact that cities' nightlife districts do not only need to be safe, but are also favoured by its visitors for adventure and excitement. What are the social implications of these surveillance measures and what does this mean for the character of cities' nightlife districts?

Not everyone using alcohol turns aggressive. The effect of a substance like alcohol works differently for different individuals. This is not only due to the substance itself, but also to the drinker's attitude, state of mind and personality, as well as the physical, social and cultural settings in which drinking occurs. The relation between alcohol consumption and aggression is therefore a complex one. Moreover alcohol consumption often takes place in settings and situations where other aggression stimulating factors are present. This article explores the relation between alcohol and aggression on the basis of existing literature. Attention goes to the effects of the substance itself, the drinker and the context in which the drinking takes place.

This paper analyses the association between rural youth violence, drinking alcohol in the weekend and going to the pub, as compared to their peers in more urbanized areas. In addition, the paper analyses whether the gender gap in the use of violence is larger for rural youth. Based on self-report data of 5,062 youngsters aged 14-22 years old, two forms of violence were analysed. The first concerns physical violence: fighting, hitting someone resulting in medical treatment and wounding someone with a weapon. The second comprises behaviour that prepares for the use of violence: threatening and carrying a weapon. These two forms of violence were related to two types of rural areas on the basis of population density. It turned out that youngsters living in the least densely populated areas were not less likely to have engaged in physical violence whereas their peers in more densely populated rural areas had somewhat lower chances to do so. Concerning behaviour that prepares for violence, the analyses showed that in both rural areas, youth were slightly less likely to have engaged in such behaviour. Furthermore, the association between drinking alcohol and the use of physical violence was stronger for youth living in both rural areas. The results also indicate that the gender gap in youth violence is not larger for rural youth. The paper concludes that future research should inquire the specific meanings of alcohol and violence in rural youth culture. Such research should take the diversity of rural areas into account, rather than relying on measures of population density only.

The urban population is becoming increasingly diverse and the growing (ethnic) diversity is having a singular effect on nightlife in Dutch cities. This paper examines the motivation behind and the nightlife choices of the young people who participate in ethno-party scenes. By doing so it explores how the changing urban population affects the supply side of the nightlife market. The research findings discussed in this paper are taken from in-depth interviews with consumers and producers of Turkish, Moroccan and Asian parties in the Netherlands, from participant observation in these three scenes and from in-depth interviews with club owners of popular clubs.
In order to analyze and adequately explain the nightlife experiences and choices made by ethnic young people, special attention is placed on the interrelationship between the structural strategies of the producers of nightlife and the personal preferences and agency of the consumers. By highlighting this interrelationship this paper demonstrates that nightlife has changed because of the increasing ethnic diversity of the Dutch population.

Gold and silver coins were money for centuries. Since the early 17th century there was paper. The gold standard linked the value of the world reserve currencies, first the pound sterling and later the dollar, to gold. Both were ‘as good as gold’. In times of crisis, however, the link was broken. The coins dropped in value and gold rose, as the public continues to see gold as the ultimate money. To counteract this, Roosevelt even decided in 1933 and 1934 to nationalise and prohibit the gold held by the Americans. In 2011, amidst the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, we witness the next attack on gold. This time in the Netherlands, where the glass workers' pension fund (SPVG) was ordered by the Dutch central bank to sell the bulk of its gold assets. The DNB argued that gold is a commodity, but SPVG sees gold as a medium of exchange. What will be next?

The Bank of England depleted its open market portfolio by secretly sterilising large gold inflows. Thereafter interest rates were influenced by falsifying reported gold flows. The false reporting was a tightly kept secret, hidden from members of the Bank of England's highest governing bodies. The false reporting obscured the instability of the gold standard and supported monetary policies that degraded British economic performance and increased world financial fragility in the critical early years of the Great Depression. The episode supports the view that the interwar gold standard was not a system guiding policy, but was manipulated to enforce a dysfunctional classical orthodoxy.

This article discusses the role of gold in a modern economic system. It starts from the observation that the price of gold has exploded in recent years, due to an increase in economic and inflation uncertainty following the start of the credit crisis, and that some policymakers have argued for a new role of gold in the global monetary system. Following a bird's eye view of the role of gold in monetary history, we next discuss two economic concepts - the ‘trilemma’ and Triffin's dilemma - which in the past have limited gold's usefulness in monetary systems. We finally discuss gold's present role and argue that, while gold undeniably acts as a safe haven in times of crisis, any return to a global fixed exchange rate system based on gold would unduly limit countries' flexibility to adapt to economics shocks. Yet in financial markets, gold will probably continue to serve its purpose as ‘clotted fear’.

In Suriname gold mining has been a source of conflict over the past decades. Conflicts between miners and local populations (Maroons and Indigenous), between large-scale companies and small-scale miners (local and migrant), between the State and the small-scale miners. Different governments have tried to organise the sector, but were never successful. The government Bouterse-Ameraali (since 2010) has established a committee to sort things out. They focus on the economic value of gold, and its potential contribution to the development of the country through tax revenues. In this article the authors argue that the legal informalisation of small-scale mining is the source of the conflicts. This informal status of small-scale mining results from lack of adequate legislation and the non-recognition of land rights. This will not be resolved with the registration for tax paying goals. Formalisation of small-scale mining seems a more efficient step towards the expressed objective of the policy: the development of Suriname.

In the last five years the number of armed robberies on jewelry stores in the Netherlands has increased again and reached an all-time high in 2010. In this article, recent developments are discussed. The absolute number of these robberies is not very large, but in terms of the chance of being robbed, jewelry stores belong to the most threatened in retail. In general, armed robberies on jewelry stores show a pattern very similar to robberies on other retail targets. About two third are hit-and-run robberies, committed by offenders who live nearby and are generally known to the police as repeat offenders. A smaller portion of these robberies is committed by offenders operating more professionally. In the last ten years there were no big changes in the way these crimes were committed. Contrary to other types of robbery this crime is often profitable. The size of the loot is relatively high. In recent years the price of gold has dramatically increased. This might be considered an independent risk factor. Nevertheless, it's too simple to assess the recent increase of armed robberies on jewelry stores as a direct consequence of this development.

The gold industry in the (former) Soviet Union has always been vulnerable to criminality, such as large-scale smuggling from the gold mines in the north of the country, to the sale of fake gold by Russian migrants in Western Europe. Gold and golden jewels are smuggled and counterfeited; corrupt customs and police officials participate directly or indirectly in gold-related criminal activities. Customers in Russia and other former Soviet republics are constantly being warned about the risk of buying counterfeit gold jewellery, which is sold even in legal shops. This article describes the ‘criminal gold market’ in Russia and analyses the motives and modus operandi of the offenders.

Comparing an organized crime group to an ‘enterprise’ or ‘firm’ and its key persons to ‘entrepreneurs’ is only a small step to viewing its illegal activities as a business process. Yet, it took until the early 1990s before criminologists started to study the logistics of specific illegal activities. Since then, the Dutch police have adapted to thinking of organized crime in terms of criminal business processes and to erecting barriers (preferably insurmountable ones) to specific steps in these processes. Firstly, the police analyze logistical processes to find weak spots that can be targeted to hinder illegal activities most effectively, either through investigative action or by means of preventive measures. Secondly, law enforcement agencies consider such an analytical approach an attractive tool to explore the viability of involving other public or private parties in setting up barriers. The Dutch investigation authorities have used this concept successfully in the case of ecstasy production, by aiming at the small number of suppliers of particular chemicals and hardware. As regards large-scale (and indoor) cannabis cultivation, however, the approach is less fruitful, because there are no explicitly ‘vulnerable’ stages in the cultivation process. Furthermore, some of the intended barriers can be deemed rather intrusive, such as a plan to persuade banks to withdraw a mortgage if the police discover a cannabis nursery in a person's private home. This raises the question to what extent the police and the judiciary may call in other parties to help them put up barriers to illegal activities, instead of using the conventional tool of criminal investigation.

This article describes the development of abstract, theoretic vulnerability analysis vis à vis organised crime towards more empirical approaches which take the actual situation in economic sectors as a starting point. Also it incorporates the way workers on the shop floor view vulnerability. The author gathered these data during research among transport and catering companies. He argues that vulnerability should not only be understood in the traditional way (a feeble defense against potential harm/damage/infiltration) but also in terms of resilience. If - despite prevention measures - a company becomes a victim of - and/or is infiltrated by organised crime, the degree of resilience decides whether the company survives or not. Examples are given of factors contributing and undermining resilience.

The central question of this article is how situational crime prevention (SCP) might be of help in preventing terrorism. Newman and Clarke's Policing Terrorism is confronted with investigations by the Dutch National Crime Squad, leading to the conclusion that Newman and Clarke have too narrow a scope on policing and preventing terrorism, in particular where it comes to the role of criminal investigation, which they narrow down to the phases immediately before and after a terrorist attack. Case files show that offender-oriented criminal investigation has a central role in the prevention of terrorism in several respects. First, criminal investigators intervene in earlier phases of terrorist preparation. Second, counter-terrorism targets a wide range of terrorist offences (e.g. terrorist financing and jihad travel) which often have no direct link to a terrorist assault plan. ‘Proactive repression’ seems an adequate term to characterise the preventive work of criminal investigators in this field. In turn, this work offers insights that might be of help in developing an SCP-approach to terrorism. Such an approach should start with recognizing that there is a diversity of terrorist offences and that each offence demands a crime specific script.

The main difference between various forms of prevention of organised crime is between primary and secondary prevention on the one hand and tertiary prevention on the other. The latter is directed at diminishing an already existing problem. This article deals with social conditions which promote the arising of organised crime and with relevant specifically vulnerable factors and sectors (primary and secondary prevention). The authors argue that in a way every society gets the organised crime it deserves. Organising and regulating society often has the side effect of creating opportunities for individuals and groups which gain profit by exploiting the illegal markets that arise as a consequence of regulations. Whether the desire for regulation or the prevention of (organised) crime should prevail is a topic for political and social debate.

The recent approach to combating organised crime in the Netherlands emphasizes the importance of interventions aimed at the underlying ‘facilitating structure’ of crime. A great deal of attention is being devoted to professions, companies and services that - consciously or unconsciously - facilitate crime in a structural manner. In addition to a repressive approach to this type of crime, structural hindrances should also be created to aid in combating organised crime. This means that investigative services have to work closely together with each other and other relevant agencies. On the basis of this perspective, the Public Prosecution Service developed the ‘programmatic approach’. The programma-based approach was first tried out as a pilote in 2006 in the field of Human trafficking (trafficking for sexual exploitation). This article investigates what kind of problems have occurred in practice during the pilote, and focuses on an explanation of why cooperation fails.

After a quiet and fluent start, the EU wide environmental policy instrument CO₂ emissions trading has now become a target of hackers and other criminals. The Dutch Emissions Authority (NEa) published a report regarding the fraud. Several fraud types occur, like VAT fraud, hacking and identity fraud. The author analyses the vulnerabilities of the emissions trading system and describes the measures that have been taken to prevent abuse. The emissions trading is in the middle of a transition from a paradise for fraudsters to a safe and secured fortress. It has appeared that cooperation between several expert fields is crucial in order to prevent and solve fraud.

Criminals sometimes use so-called financial facilitators to invest their ill-gotten gains without drawing attention to themselves. These facilitators are experts at getting round anti-money laundering procedures. Because of their expertise and unique capabilities they play an important role in criminal networks. It therefore stands to reason that law enforcement focuses on them. That focus often translates in prosecution when laws are broken. However, what can we do to prevent financial experts in breaking the law? In this article the focus lies on the method of removing excuses. This technique is employed in every day crimes but has not been put to the test in the context of organized crime. Interviews with police officers show that the technique of removing excuses could work under certain conditions. However, it turns out that an important differentiation lies in the sort of activities financial facilitators undertake. Not all financial activities take place in the legal financial-economic system. Instead of distinguishing between the three classical phases of money laundering (placement, layering, integration), a two-pronged focus is proposed on those who are involved in cash based transactions and those who construct smokescreens on paper.

Using the script approach, this article analyses the different stages that characterise the infiltration of organised crime groups in the public construction industry. Three different Italian local contexts with a high presence of organised crime groups (Sicily, Calabria and Campania) are considered. The Sicilian case is analysed by detail using the script approach and following the dynamic of organised crime action: preparation, enabling conditions, target selection, the acts (of violence and corruption) or ‘the doing’, and the post-conditions or aftermath. The script approach helps in a micro-analysis of organised crime that draws on general knowledge on the topic deriving from the macro-analysis currently undertaken in the literature. Because to date this analysis has mainly produced crime control remedies, the author hopes that the microapproach may help in developing more concrete situational crime prevention measures.

The fact that the Netherlands have abolished the death penalty in 1870 does not imply that this criminal sanction doesn't affect the Dutch legal order anymore. As a member of the international ‘legal family’ The Netherlands are confronted regularly with the continuing existence of capital punishment abroad, for instance when a Dutch national is sentenced to death in a foreign country. The (threat of a) death penalty is an important factor when Dutch administrative or judicial authorities have to decide on matters concerning the admission or expulsion of foreign citizens or the extradition of suspects to countries where they run the risk of being sentenced to death. In the Netherlands the enforcement of life sentences can get the character of a suspended death sentence when time and again pardon is denied and the convict will die a prisoner. Long-term prisoners suffer a kind of civil death, being cut off from their families, friends and other social contacts. In sum: enough reasons to focus once more on the ultimate criminal sanction.