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Can individuals' aversion to drug markets curb the benefits of decriminalization? We investigate the effect of two policies on housing demand in the Netherlands: the distance-to-school criterion, which closed some cannabis shops in a few cities; and the zero-tolerance policy, which banned shops within municipal jurisdictions. While a small increase in the distance to retailers raised house prices by 1–5%, a substantial increase reduced them by 1–6%. Both policies reduced property crime, but the zero-tolerance was also related to fewer jobs. Our findings reveal that cities benefit from having cannabis shops, but households' aversion to related nuisances depreciates surrounding areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A widespread sense of a failing criminal justice system and increased feelings of insecurity changed the response to crime into a culture of control, which is characterized by policies that punish and exclude. In the Netherlands, these influences can be witnessed in the war on drugs where local authorities use their administrative power to close homes involved in drug-related crime. Citizens can invoke judicial review over these administrative interferences by claiming that such closure results in an unfair balance between purposes, means and consequences. This paper assesses whether judicial review functions as a safety net against losing one's home due to drug-related crime.Methods: We used doctrinal legal research methods to examine the "law in the books" and empirical legal research methods to analyse the "law in action". We used a survey to investigate how often the drug-related closure power was used in 2015, and we statistically analysed all published case law of Dutch lower courts between 2007 and 2016.Results: The scope of the closure power broadened over the years and our data show that local authorities fiercely make use of this instrument. In 41.4% of the cases, citizens are successful in fighting the closure. While scholarly literature indicates that judicial courts function as safeguards by questioning the proportionality of administrative action, raising a proportionality defence does not necessarily result in a more favourable outcome for citizens. In fact, raising a proportionality defence makes it more likely to result in dismissal of the appeal.Conclusion: The stretched scope of the drug-related closure power together with the relatively low success rate of citizens who fight the loss of their home and a seemingly meaningless proportionality check show no sign of a safety net against the loss of one's home at the suit of a local authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The paper focuses on the problem of adequately coding pathology reports using SNOMED. Both the agreement between pathologists in coding and the quality of a system that supports pathologists in coding pathology reports were evaluated., Methods: Six sets of three pathologists each received a different set of 40 pathology reports. Five different SNOMED code lines accompanied each pathology report. Three pathologists evaluated the correctness of each of these code lines. Kappa values and values for the reliability coefficients were determined to gain insight in the variance observed when coding pathology reports. The system that is evaluated compares a newly entered report, represented as a multi-dimensional word vector, with reports in a library, represented in the same way. The reports in the library are already coded. The system presents the code lines belonging to the five library reports most similar to the newly entered one to the pathologist in this way supporting the pathologist in determining the correct codes. A high similarity between two reports is indicated by a large value of the inproduct of the vector of the newly entered report and the vector of a report in the library., Results: Agreement between pathologists in coding was fair (average kappa of 0.44). The reliability coefficient varied from 0.81 to 0.89 for the six sets of pathology reports. The system gave correct suggestions in 50% of the reports. In another 30% it was helpful for the pathologists., Conclusions: On the basis of the level of the reliability coefficients it could be concluded that three pathologists are indeed sufficient for obtaining a gold standard for evaluating the system. The method used for comparing reports is not strong enough to allow fully automatic coding. It could be shown that the system induces a more uniform coding by pathologists. An evaluation of the incorrect suggestions of the system indicates that the performance of the system can still be improved.