The potential perils of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) have been a subject for discussion since the 1950s. Nevertheless it seems that society is still not prepared for the great impact of the rapid advancement of AI in the last decennium and the many ethical dilemmas involved. How can moral, social and legal values be integrated in the designing process of AI technologies? Is it imaginable that these AI systems would ever be considered as ethical entities? How to control these systems? The authors argue that we should not only analyze these problems, but also reflect on ethics itself. AI has the potential to change the way we live and work. But it is important to introduce restrictions and controls to guarantee our freedom, autonomy and fundamental human rights.

Despite the fact that Peter Cohen has not written about drugs for the past 10 years, he remains one of the most influential and radical thinkers and researchers in the Netherlands in the field of drug use and drug policy. The former director of the CEDRO (Centrum voor Drugsonderzoek) at the University of Amsterdam is certainly a ‘significant other’ in the European drug landscape as he challenged, in the 1980s and 1990s, mainstream views and discourses on drugs held by the political, academic and health service establishments. In this interview we first discuss with him some of the key life events and intellectual sources that shaped his early choices first as student and later as young researcher, illustrating why and how he came to study drugs and remained at the university. Further, we focus on Cohen’s particular relation with the Amsterdam political elite in the 80s, which allowed him to develop the first large-scale studies in the Netherlands on different types of drug users. He further expands on his critique to the way in which drug use was at the time socially constructed in discourse and practice. During the second part of the 1990s, a new generation of politicians and managers (local and national government, but also at universities), changed on the one hand the political agenda about drugs, and imposed on the other serious limitations to conduct innovative research within the university. He finally explains some of his key ideas about the ways in which drug policies and interventions resemble religious wars and crusades, his growing disenchantment with present developments at European level, and he reflects on the future of drugs commenting on the present attempts to regulate cannabis.

GHB is an anaesthetic that in Netherlands since the 1990s is used as a drug by various groups. Although GHB is often defined as a ‘party drug’, particularly in rural areas it is also used in street cultures. GHB is mainly used recreationally, but a minority uses the drug frequently and/or becomes addicted. GHB use and associated problems are disproportionately spread across the Netherlands and are concentrated in certain rural areas (‘trouble spots’), especially in low SES villages or neighbourhoods. Predominantly based on qualitative research, this article describes supply and use of GHB in rural ‘trouble spots’. The profile of experienced current GHB users in rural areas is characterized by a wide age range, a low level of education, often multiple psychosocial problems and poly drug use. They are almost exclusively ‘white’, in majority male users, of whom a large part has been arrested on several occasions. From a supply perspective, GHB could spread quickly because of the short distribution chain, the limited social distance between dealers and users, as well as the closeness an reticence of user groups. Even though as a drug GHB is very different from methamphetamine, there are striking similarities in set and setting characteristics between rural GHB use in the Netherlands and rural methamphetamine use in the US.

Since the nineties, the ‘Moroccan community’ experiences a negative group-image based on a small group of male youths who ‘stand out’ in social problems such as nuisance, crime and Islamic radicalisation. This negative group image is largely constructed through negative societal reactions in the media on incidents in which Moroccan Dutch youngsters play a prominent role. This article examines such negative societal reactions in the media on three recent incidents: the 2007 Slotervaart riots, the 2008 Gouda ‘bus incident’ and the 2010 Culemborg riots. It concludes that the societal reactions to these incidents in the media, are exaggerated, symbolise ‘the Moroccans’ as folk devils and construct them as moral and cultural Others. Finally, it concludes that these negative societal reactions to ‘Moroccans’ in Dutch media can be seen as a disproportional and misplaced, but natural reaction of a dominant cultural majority to a threat to their cultural and moral hegemony, by ‘the Moroccans’ as a social deviant minor­ity.