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The purpose of this paper is to offer original ideas into a potential future cannabis industry in the UK. This paper presents novel approaches regarding the potential existence of cannabis for the tourism industry. It presents an idea in which the UK Government could produce, distribute and control the industry. The proposed idea presents a scheme in which the UK could encourage regional tourism (inclusive to domestic and international travellers) through a controlled but innovative cannabis market scheme. This paper presents a future scenario aiming to encourage dialogue and critique, at a time when attitudes to cannabis are changing.

This research takes a scenario narrative approach in presenting and exploring a potential future cannabis market in the UK. The importance of narrative writing as a method is recognised by Lindgren and Bandhold (2009), who identify the significance in telling a story to the reader. Taking a pragmatic approach, embracing diverse philosophical methods, this research explores past and current trends via a mixture of secondary data sources to create and present a scenario narrative of the future.

This paper identified that trends in legalising cannabis for cultivation, medical and recreational purposes continue to become more liberal globally. However, cannabis laws mainly focus on the use for residents. Consequently, domestic tourism markets have the potential to grow. However, there is limited consideration regarding the potential for international tourism cannabis markets. Thus, the findings of this research are based on the potential for the UK to implement and promote a cannabis industry for international travellers.

This paper offers original ideas in exploring a future cannabis market in the UK, one where regional tourism is considered. The paper presents a novel approach that encourages domestic and international tourists to engage with the cannabis industry by navigating a well-managed, local approach to supplying cannabis in the UK.

In this paper, after an elucidation of several central concepts of the topic, the author focuses on the sales channels in tourism and clarifies the role retailers play in the market. He shows that the existence of institutional travel retailers is generally based on transaction costs, and that thanks to the automation the level of dependence on transaction costs can be reduced. This thesis induces the question to what extent the retailers' performances can be automated. In answer to this question the author creates a list of criteria including the following aspects; the general and occasional suitability of retail products (e g tickets, travel packages), the availability of technical equipment and information necessary for the automation at the points of sale and in the households (buyers), the level of complexity and acceptance regarding the handling of automated travel services. The paper comes to the conclusion that the automation of travel services will probably be used mainly by business travelers, whereas private customers will more likely keep their affinity for conventional retailers.

Tourism is leisure commodified. As a commodity, the actuality of tourism has been suggested as less important than its expressive representations. What is depicted or not depicted in destination image advertising, and on whose authority it is selected, involves a more complex question of what comprises the destination and who has the power to define its identity. Recently, there has been a shift in the promotional role of destination marketing organizations where it has broadened to include product (attraction) development and industry relations. This role extension enables a matching of authoritative voice and reconstructed reality in order to verify official imaging. The symbolism and meaning of destination image can be interpreted through a deconstructionist analysis of tourist destination advertising. This paper explores significance of tourism promotion on tourist culture as it packages touristic representations.

The chapter addresses the question of how crisis and emergency communicators in the justice (police) and health sector in Norway reflect on their use – or lack of use – of social media during the terror crisis on 22 July 2011. We examine how these communicators in the years following the crisis have developed their use of social media to optimise their and the public’s awareness of similar crises. Our semi-structured interviews with key emergency managers and responders display how the terrorist-induced crisis in 2011 was a wake-up call for communicators in the police and the health sector. They reflect on the significance, strengths and weaknesses of social media in the management of crises such as this one.

Factitious disorder, commonly called Munchhausen's syndrome, is a rare disorder that lacks evidence-based guidelines. Reporting clinical cases is important for sharing clinical experiences and treatment strategies. The symptoms and progression of the following case have not been previously reported in the literature. Here, we report a case involving a 41-year-old Caucasian with a suspected psychosomatic disorder. After intensive multi-professional diagnostics, we concluded that the patient had factitious disorder. The symptoms in this case changed rapidly during treatment, which posed a challenge. For factitious disorder, establishing interdisciplinary exchange is important. Symptoms that are normally treated by internists are most commonly described in the literature. This case demonstrates that psychiatrists are challenged by this diagnosis and should consider the possibility of factitious disorder when seeing patients diagnosed with somatoform disorders. The most important clinical conclusion was the importance of involving the patients' relatives in the treatment of patients with factitious disorder.

In Michael Lipsky’s intriguing analysis of the performance of public bureaucracy – in his classic Street-level Bureaucracy (1980) – he shows, for example, the professional discretion they apply may not only involve adapting policy to the individual case, meet real needs in the population, prevent patients, clients, students or users from getting access, etc., but at the same time both have profound policy implications and take very ‘political’ forms. In this chapter, I argue that it is regrettable that Lipsky did not establish a comparative framework for his study. Based on my own ethnographic research in local politics and bureaucratic practice in the municipal world in Norway, I look more closely at the relative autonomy of street-level bureaucracy within the context of universalism – a hallmark of the Nordic welfare state model (Esping-Andersen 1998, 2009) – and explore how it is utilised. The Nordic welfare states are among the most ‘service intense’ states in the Western world, and the personnel working directly with patients, students, clients, etc., play a major role in linking ‘the state’ to the population (Papakostas, 2001, Vike et al., 2002). Thus, the role of the Nordic welfare state’s street-level bureaucracy as a key interface between the state and the population is hard to overestimate (Leira & Sainsbury, 1994). Moreover, as universalism also tends to stimulate what we may call a culture of strong claims (to services) among the population at large, street-level bureaucrats may be able to form strong alliances with other actors, and thus play an important part of the dynamics of power in local politics – where fundamental policy principles such as universalism is at stake.