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Georgetown University in Washington, DC, will move to address its history of slavery by offering the same kind of preferential treatment to descendants of slaves seeking admission that it shows toward family members of alumni, the New York Times reports.

In 1838, the Catholic institution sold 272 slaves and used the money to help finance the school. To atone for the shameful past, the Ivy League university is expected to announce that it will offer a formal apology, rename two of its buildings to honor an enslaved man and a prominent African American educator, erect a new memorial, and offer a new institute for the study of slavery, in addition to its new admission policy.

Georgetown president John J DeGioia also plans to give descendants the opportunity to collaborate on the memorial, as well as make genealogical information available from the school's archives.

"It goes farther than just about any institution," Craig Steven Wilder, a slavery historian at MIT, told the Times. "I think it's to Georgetown's credit. It's taking steps that a lot of universities have been reluctant to take."

While many other schools have acknowledged their ties to the slave trade or simply resorted to changing the controversial names on some of their buildings, Wilder believes Georgetown's strides are the most profound of any university in the last ten years.

While it's still unclear what impact the new policies will make for incoming students, it's definitely a step in the right direction. President DeGioia is expected to announce the historic changes Thursday.

"We know we've got work to do, and we're going to take those steps to do so," he told the Times. "It needs to be a part of our living history."

Read: New York City's Surprising Role Funding Slavery and Profiting Off the Civil War

(Photo: David Hudson)

On Sunday, 17-year-old Lewis Haunch collapsed and died after taking drugs at the Leeds Festival. The previous fortnight, the iconic London club fabric was forced to suspend operations after two as yet unnamed 18-year-old boys died there in the space of nine weeks after taking drugs. In July, two 17-year-olds, Megan Bell and Peter McCallum, died from suspected drug overdoses at the T in the Park festival in Scotland. In June, 17-year-old Emily Lyon died after taking ecstasy at Red Bull Culture Clash at the O2.

People dying after taking drugs such as ecstasy at clubs and music festivals – although rare, considering at the very least 25 million pingers are dropped each year in Britain – is nothing new. And they don't only die at dance events; sometimes they collapse in their bedrooms or at house parties. But because most ecstasy deaths are reported in the media, unlike, say, heroin deaths, it's clear to see that most people are dying quite literally on the dance floor.

There were 50 ecstasy-related deaths in 2014. In 2005 there were 58 deaths and in 2001 there were 55. Since 2001, apart from a temporary fall in deaths between 2009 to 2012, due to the fact ecstasy pills contained so little MDMA, between 43 and 58 people have died each year after taking ecstasy. And some of these are young, inexperienced drug users who, through lack of information, have taken huge overdoses of MDMA, or its more potent doppelganger, PMA.

After each suspected drug death, the venue or event in question must defend itself from accusations they somehow colluded in the tragedy; that they are little more than drugs dens. There are the calls, as has happened with fabric, that they should be shut down for good. As if that would stop teenagers dying from drugs.

Don't expect any help from the government on this one. Certainly in terms of putting their money where their mouth is, its strategy is to leave young drug users – and the venues they dance in – to sink or swim in an ocean of unpredictability. Venues such as fabric try their best, providing water and paramedics, but when it comes to people taking drugs before they enter, or even smuggling them past security and using them inside, there's very little they can do.

A worker from The Loop testing drugs at Secret Garden Party (Photo: Steve Rolles)

The problem is that, with the exception of the Warehouse Project and Secret Garden Party – which have both hosted on-site drug testing – most clubs and festivals fear that making too much of a fuss over illegal drug taking on their premises could lead to unwanted attention from police and the licensing authorities. Moreover, getting in the drug testers and welfare staff is not cheap.

Oddly, a path out of this deadly rut may be found in the midst of the Thatcher era glue-sniffing epidemic.

Between 1983 and 1992, more than 1,000 people – mostly under-18s from areas rife with unemployment and bad housing – died from volatile substance abuse in the UK. These "drugs", such as pots of Evo-Stik and aerosol canisters, were obviously available in every high street. Rather than look at why these kids were getting glued up to their eyeballs in the first place, the government put the onus on the glue making industry to sort it all out. In the Glue Abuse Prevention Bill, the government wanted to force them to make their products stink so bad that no one would want to sniff them. Modern parallels with authorities blaming dance venues and demanding increasingly off-putting door policies are not hard to miss here.

Instead, in 1984, the British Adhesives and Sealants Association, with Barrie Liss, a director of Staffordshire glue manufacturer Evode, established a charity to tackle the problem, warning teenagers about the highly lethal nature of glue sniffing. And it wasn't some half-arsed alcohol industry effort like the Portman Group and Drinkaware. Called Re-Solv, the charity, which still exists today, played a key role in getting the message across, and by the 1990s teenage deaths from glue sniffing had plummeted.

It's a precedent that Harry Shapiro, director of the charity DrugWise, says could offer a way out of the double-bind that venues find themselves in today.

"Deaths of young people from drugs in clubs and at festivals appear to be on the rise again. Venues already have a role in trying to reduce drug problems, but could they do more? Yes. But many feel unable to because of cash and for fear of losing their license by identifying themselves as having a problem," he points out. "As happened in the 1980s with the adhesives industry setting up Re-Solv, I think a similar kind of idea could be explored on the dance drug issue. You could call it the Club and Festival Welfare Association.

"The club and festival industry, and maybe the music industry as well, could commit some funding to roll out drug testing, have more drug welfare workers in venues and at events, underwrite conferences and distribute information. You could have a 'responsible venue' kitemark. The charity's board of trustees could have a couple of sympathetic chief constables, the Local Government Association and venue organisers. At the moment, young people are not able to make informed choices about drugs so something more needs to be done."

It's true, as the venue owners and club promoters say, that drugs are a wider problem of society. But the truth is that if they don't deal with it, they will always be an unfortunate death or two away from being shut down. So I spoke to other drug harm reduction experts to see what they thought of the plan.

Michael Linnell has been plugging the safer drug taking message to generations of drug users since the late 1980s. He was there in the clubs in Manchester during acid house and, while the government sat on its hands, designed a series of Viz style booklets aimed at saving drug users' lives. This summer he was at the Secret Garden Party, giving harm reduction advice to festival-goers inside The Loop's groundbreaking drug testing tent.

"Obviously an electro dance event is more likely to see people using powerful stimulant drugs than a Morris dancing festival, but no matter what you do, other than banning dancing unless it's around a maypole, there are always going to be drug-related deaths in clubs and festivals, as that's where people go to take drugs – and drugs are, you know, kinda dangerous," says Linnell.

READ: We Went Drug Testing at Secret Garden Party to See What Weird Shit Ends Up in Your Drugs

Whatever happens, he says, the longer the real issues are avoided, the more people will lose their lives. For him, a new charity would need to focus on expanding drug testing across the UK, as well as the expert advice that comes with it. The scheme would also need to have the support of local authorities, police and politicians, who, Linnell points out, must be willing to stand up to allegations of condoning drug use from "hypocritical journalists".

"The question is, are we doing everything we possibly can to reduce the harm and number of deaths that occur? Penalising those clubs and festivals where drugs are more likely to be taken, even if they are doing their upmost to tackle the issue in a realistic way, will simple drive it somewhere else less equipped to deal with it."

Linnell says that while there are already welfare services at festivals and the bigger dance clubs, they rely on volunteers and are not cheap.

Next, I gave Mike Power a call. He's the author of Drugs 2.0 and a campaigner for better harm reduction for drug users. What does he make of this plan? First of all, he says, before anything else happens, it must be acknowledged that drug use is a normal part of everyday life for young people.

"It's not deviant behaviour," he said. "Clubs and festivals have a responsibility to their shareholders on the dance floor to keep them safe and keep them educated. Dance venues and festivals are social hubs whose entire existence is dependent on them. It seems, to me, good sense for them to fund a charity to circulate around the nightclub scene, providing welfare officers and drug testing facilities. We need an industry-wide doubling down on the health and safety of clubbers. So I think a charity like this is an excellent idea."

Power says the biggest value of a charity being able to expand drug testing facilities is not the drug testing itself. "Drug testing doesn't change people's behaviour," he explained. "If you tell them they've got a weak drug, they'll go and buy more; if you tell them it's strong, they'll go and buy more. What testing does is enable drug workers to reach out to people in the clubs and at festivals, and once you have that you have a dialogue with the clubbers. It frames people's behaviour: to be more considered and cautious about the drugs they are taking."

A wrap of MDMA (Photo: Michael Segalov)

Alan Miller, who owned the Vibe Bar in Brick Lane before shutting it down in 2014 due to intense regulation, is now chairman of the Night Time Industries Association. He believes that police have too much of an influence over how bars and clubs tackle drugs and that venues that shy away from bringing in strict controls such as sniffer dogs and ID scanning are given a rough ride by the law. He also liked a plan along DrugWise lines.

"I think we should have drug testing booths in city centres and local areas during the early evening," he said. "Having an industry-wide sponsored scheme from festivals, clubs, bars and others to prevent harm and underwrite a charity to visit venues, events and festivals to help prevent fatalities is a smart move."

In 1996, Dance Till Dawn Safely, the first official safer clubbing guidelines for club owners, was published by the London Drug Policy Forum. Since then, 670 people, most of whom never reached their 30th birthday, have died in England and Wales after taking ecstasy.

If club owners, festival organisers, police, local authorities and politicians want this to continue for another 20 years, my advice is do nothing, ignore what's been said in this article and keep things exactly as they are.

@Narcomania

More on VICE:

British Police Officers Reveal What They Really Think About the War on Drugs

I Use LSD to Help Me Deal with the Trauma of Being Kidnapped by My Dad

How the Psychoactive Substances Act Has Affected the UK's Drug Landscape

All photos courtesy the author

Go with the flow. Roll with the punches. Go where the road takes you. We've all heard these classic sayings before. On every road trip, there will always be that constant shifting of plans, routes, and schedules and my last trip from Norway to England, was no exception. When you lose your only source of navigation and communication on a solo motorcycle trip through a number of foreign countries you really have no choice but to "go with the flow" and hope that people will be helpful.

I'd already rode a motorcycle 28 hours across from England, via Dirt Quake in King's Lynn, to Malakoff Festival in Nordfjordeid, Norway, where my band, Cancer Bats were playing. Throughout Norway, every highway and side road was filled with some of the craziest riding I had done in my life. Each winding road opened into a postcard view of a valley, and every town was at the base of a giant waterfall, with sets of rapids running right through the centre of town. With no set route other than a festival destination in a few days, I just picked what looked like the most scenic route, assuming that my phone's GPS would lead me back to where I needed to be and I'd managed the entire trip without getting lost once.

Along the trip, I was also shooting photos and writing a couple of pieces for Harley Davidson UK, who'd lent me a 2016 XL Roadster 1200 CX. Heading back from the festival to England, I chose to cross the highest elevation in Norway as I figured that would be the most scenic. What I didn't know was that the first mountaintop I encountered would change the entire rest of my journey.

While I filmed a quick selfie clip of crossing the mountain plateau, I started feeling some rain drops and placed my phone back in my jacket pocket. As the rain got heavier I zipped my jacket and started my winding descent. Within the first few turns down the mountain road my jacket started to open itself from the bottom up, due to a broken zipper. With traffic behind me and no spots to stop, I tried my best to keep my flapping jacket together, as I worked my way down the mountain road. Once I made it to the bottom, I pulled off to the side and realized my phone was no longer in my jacket. I laughed to myself: "Did I seriously just lose my phone?" After riding back up the 10 kilometres to where I last used it and then 10 kilometres back down, I was 1,000 percent certain I had.

What also dawned on me was that I had lost my GPS, all of the details of my ferry crossings, trains, flights, and even where I was staying. This will be fine, I thought, calming myself. Those details were only slightly lost: I had already booked a hotel but only knew the name of the town it was in. I just had to be reunited with the internet and I could easily solve this problem.

As I drove down the highway, it was starting to get late and I passed three closed gas stations before I found one that was open. I went inside and asked the teen working behind the cash: "Do you have a computer I could use?" He looked at me like I had arrived from the 1800s.

I quickly explained the broken zipper and lost phone. He shrugged apologetically as he showed me his Nokia flip phone. Turned out, we were both existing in the dark ages. Only knowing the name of the town I needed to get to, my new friend's face lit up: he knew the town I was mispronouncing horribly and was confident he could direct me there. There were no road signs for my destination, however, only ones for the town before it. But it sounded easy enough. Out of fear of the hotel closing before I arrived, I ignored the speed limit and drove as fast as my skills and the new Harley could handle, only slowing down when the curves demanded it and to dodge the sleeping sheep, who were enjoying the heat of the asphalt and didn't even move as I drove by.

I rolled into the small town to the only open hotel to ask for assistance and further directions, and the giant dude at the front desk pointed me towards a mountain lodge at the top of a ski hill I'd apparently booked myself into. Twenty minutes of switchbacks later, I was checking in and again explaining my journey and my new lack of technology to the girl at the front desk. That's when it occurred to her to mention that there were no clocks in the rooms. She said, "I'll set a wake up call, and it'll be the first one I've ever done."

The thing is, I had traveled through Europe many times before with no phone while touring with my band. It wasn't until about 2009 that Canadian cell phones could even get service in Europe. The biggest difference was that I had been prepared for the situation back then. We had an alarm clock to wake us up from the punk squat; there were old PCs in hotel lobbies for the public to log on to their AOL accounts; international phone booths in internet cafes; hell, there were even internet cafes, instead of just cafes with WiFi. I never realized how much all that accessible technology had been replaced by smartphones, until I had mine taken away.

So far, however, just asking for directions was serving me well, and the trip seemed like a pretty straight shot through Denmark and Germany—surely a Norwegian map, and some rough notes would be enough to get me there. Plus, I'd be able to meet more folks like my flip-phone guardian angel, who'd be happy to help.

Norway was a piece of cake, and ripping through Denmark was easy, so my confidence was brimming as I rolled into my late night hotel in Flensburg, Germany. I entered the key code to the robot front door and fell asleep excited for my next day of technology-free travel.

Unfortunately, Germany didn't share the same excitement to help me out as Norway had. Leaving the hotel, I looked at the space where the coin operated internet machine used to be. Just wires sticking out of the wall. I ask someone working if there was a computer there I could use. He looked at me with a blank face and said, "No. Is that OK?"

"Uhhhhh, no. That's not OK for me," I told him. He shrugged and walked out of the building.

I tried my luck at the gas station. Even less helpful. The car wash suggested I "Go ask at casino." I found someone who worked inside the casino, which was full of sleep deprived truck drivers slumped in front of digital slot machines. This woman was friendly but when asked for help, she showed me a Nokia phone even older than the Norwegian teenagers (WTF, Europe). In frustration and disbelief, I just got on my bike and started riding towards Hamburg. At least I could remember that was roughly the direction I wanted.

After asking (unsuccessfully) a few different people en route for access to a computer, I came up with a new plan: I walked up to a woman smoking next to her car and asked if I could look up an address on her car's GPS. She thought about it for a second, and told me I... "should go to downtown Hamburg and someone could help there."

I felt very alone at this moment. My fun adventure was no longer filled with helpful people, excited to be a part of my quest. Instead, I stood in the parking lot of a German service station, by myself. I could feel a dark depression slowly start to wash over me. Then for some reason I looked into the store. There it was, beside the magazine rack of car magazines and pornography. The answer was right there all along: road maps, obviously! Fuck everyone, I was going to use this low tech, old school fucking map. I took my Sharpie out of my pocket and started to write each set of highway directions across my hand. I glared at unhelpful dude behind the register, so he knew full well I wasn't going to pay for this map. I was learning all its secrets and taking them for my own. With a newfound energy, I blasted off down Das Autobahn.

I finally arrived in the Belgian town of Mol. I rolled through the quiet streets, looking for an open hotel I could possibly use a computer in to MapQuest (kidding) the last of my directions. I was coming up short when I noticed a group of teenagers walking around all looking at their phones. POKÉMON GO! These youths had access to the World Wide Web!

They looked at me with disbelief as I told them my tale of no phone in 2016. They couldn't comprehend my journey from far off lands, left to my own cunning and skill. Once they had helped me search the directions to my friend's house, they offered to email it to me or upload the information into my motorcycle's GPS. I smiled at their young faces: "If I had a fucking GPS I wouldn't be talking to you nerds." We all laughed and I said goodbye to my Pokémon saviours.

After arriving at my friend's home, I was able to Google the last of my directions to the Harley Davidson headquarters in England. We chatted about my trip. We had both traveled and navigated the world before the omnipresence of location-based technology and made out just fine. But now that the internet is so portable and readily available, there's an assumption that everyone is similarly connected. But with the increased portability, the public access points have been taken away. In my experience on this trip, it was easier to find a fucking pay phone than a public computer.

When it comes to my own habits, it's more about how this technology simply made things too easy. I didn't pay attention to any of the directions my GPS was telling me on my route to Norway, I was too excited to get there and I was confident in my phone to help me get back. It didn't even occur to me to think of a back-up plan if things went south, I was just focused on making sure I could fake it enough for my photography gig.

Luckily for me the only thing that did go wrong was losing my super computer. My bike worked great and nothing really truly happened. But this has changed my perspective on traveling and especially on planning my next solo motorcycle trip. Packing tools in case your bike breaks down seems so obvious, but packing an extra internet machine is just as handy.

Screencap from "Imbalu: Circumcision Party"

Every two years, the Bugisu region in eastern Uganda goes into a festive mood with celebrations surrounding a ritual called Imbalu. In villages throughout the area, young men will step up to have their foreskins shorn in front of their elders, parents, and peers. If they show no signs of weakness—no flinching or wincing or tears—they are considered to have reached manhood and will be awarded with livestock, money, mobile phones, and other gifts.

The Imbalu season happens every two years on even years, and this year's festivities kicked off over a weekend in early August on the Mutoto cultural grounds in eastern Uganda, outside the town of Mbale. According to Vincent Mugaba, a spokesperson for the Uganda Tourism Board, more than 30,000 people showed up for three days of festivities. Locals and foreign tourists alike camped out to drink home-brewed millet beer, roast bulls, and watch a traditional dance performance called kadodi. It all culminated in the circumcision of 100 young "candidates," who usually range in age between late teens and early 20s.

"The Imbalu festival was a huge success," Eddy Kirya, owner of the local Mbale Tours travel agency, told VICE.

Tourism is one of the biggest industries in Uganda. But the east African nation has also been losing an estimated $1 million a day due to the fighting in neighboring South Sudan. There are high hopes that this biannual circumcision ceremony can help fuel tourism and bring more funds to the region.

"My interest is to ensure that as many people come to visit the grounds as possible," Stephen Asiimwe, CEO of the government-run Uganda Tourism Board, told VICE. "Even some Ugandans, especially the younger generation, it's very interesting. They've never seen someone going under a knife, openly, without making a sound."

According to Asiimwe, tourism currently brings in $1.4 billion per year, a huge rise from the $700,000 in revenues of 2007. There are plenty for visitors to explore—from the white-water rapids at the source of the White Nile to the massive gorillas in the fertile national parks of southwestern Uganda. There's also lots of money to be made for locals and the government; just getting a permit to go gorilla tracking will cost an aspiring adventurer $600.

In the Mbale area, nestled next to the extinct volcano of Mount Elgon near the Kenyan border, Kirya says there have been talks about building a cultural center and circumcision museum, opening up new restaurants, and to spruce up the Mutoto grounds with better grass and landscaping to bring in visitors year-round. Asiimwe says an architect recently sketched out a vision for a modern cultural facility, the latest step in plans that have been in the works for the past couple of years with the support of local leaders.

"We have cherished this ritual for more than 200 years," Omar Njofu, chairperson of the Mbale-based cultural council Inzu Ya Masaaba, told Ugandan newspaper the Daily Monitor this summer. "It's unique and marketable and developing this site into a tourism center is of great importance."

Watch: VICE visits an Imbalu ceremony in Uganda.

The circumcision ceremony is a time-honored rite of passage required of all boys in the Gisu tribe (sometimes called Bagisu) of eastern Uganda. During the ceremony, villagers come together and celebrate for days, slaughtering goats, dressing their young candidates in ceremonial cloth, and smearing them in millet paste to prepare them for the event.

The ceremony comes to a finale as a local "surgeon," equipped with a steel knife, steps up and slices the young men's foreskins. It's got to be an incredibly painful episode, but as the young man is goaded on with cheering, teasing, and applause, he's expected to maintain a stone-faced demeanor, with even his slightest reactions scrutinized. If all goes well, he'll be declared fit for the duties and privileges of Gisu manhood.

As VICE reported during the Imbalu ceremony in 2014, the origins of the ritual are a matter of debate. But it comes with an immense amount of social pressure, which may be reinforced by the recent marketing efforts. The anthropologist Suzette Heald, who's done extensive research among the Gisu tribe, told VICE in 2014 that the ritual is a central part of their culture as well as their definitions of manhood. Young people who get cold feet or leave the community and want nothing to do with the practice run the risk of being tracked down and forcibly circumcised.

Maybe it's not surprising, then, that the ritual has made some tourists squeamish. Still, locals have put out efforts to adapt it to modern times, including adding in safety protocols—like using different blades for each circumcision to prevent the spread of HIV. And while the Ugandan government has cracked down on female genital mutilation, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni himself has given the Imbalu practice his stamp of approval.

According to Asiimwe, there are practical reasons why it's taken so long to promote the circumcision ceremonies as a tourist opportunity. "You're used to it. You were born there, and you don't see it. What would be so Californian that you wouldn't take a second glance?" he says. "Like, 'Oh, I've seen a guy skating!' 'Oh. Yeah.' That kind of thing."

There's also the fact that the ceremonies only happen once every two years. Because the opening festival kicking off the Imbalu season is basically a one-off event, the Mutoto cultural grounds usually stand vacant, giving visitors less of a reason to venture out to the Mbale area to see other things—like the local coffee production industry, the waterfalls that gush from Mount Elgon, the bullfights held every two weeks in Bulucheke village, or the Bayudaya people, a small tribe of indigenous African Jews.

"We think that we can couple it up with another activity and experience beyond just the ritual of circumcision and give people a very good excursion toward the eastern part of Uganda," Asiimwe told VICE.

The tourism board has yet to set aside the funds or find investors necessary to help build the tourist center. But if business isn't exactly booming these days, Kirya, the Mbale Tours owner, still has high hopes.

"It's still low," he said, "but we expect it to grow."

Follow Peter Holslin on Twitter.

This piece was published in partnership with the Influence.

Footage of American police officers shooting individuals who are unarmed, or armed only with blades, has sadly become all too common. What adds to the tragedy and anger is the fact that other tried-and-tested approaches are available to deal with many of these situations without loss of life.

The shoot-first instinct that seems so pervasive among many US police is in stark contrast to law enforcement tactics in other countries. British police, for example, deal with a large number of edged-weapons attacks but almost never open fire (they don't generally carry guns). Just as there are countless online videos of trigger-happy US police, there are numerous recorded examples of UK cops intervening in violent situations without firing a shot.

In one 2014 incident, for example, Albuquerque police attempting to arrest a mentally ill man for "illegal camping" opened fire on him with assault weapons when he drew a tiny blade at a great distance from the heavily armed officers. Their approach is summed up by the fact that they then handcuffed him as he lay dying on the ground. A good contrast is a 2015 video of officers in Corby, England, wresting a knife from an attacker using only pepper spray and batons at close range.

This discrepancy points to both a culture of impunity and a lack of de-escalation training among US law enforcement. I wanted to learn more about specific, practical measures that can be taken to enable US police to emulate the non-lethal approaches of their UK counterparts, so I asked three real experts.

Retired lieutenant commander Diane Goldstein is a 20-year veteran of California law enforcement, who is now a speaker for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Goldstein thinks the problem is systemic, reflecting a lack of political will to implement proper de-escalation training across the country. She also points out some major geographical discrepancies within the US.

"If you are looking at a particular state, what you need to do is go do some research for what's called 'peace officer standards and training,'" she says. "Every state will have different types of training on use of force and what kinds of tactics they use to deal with people who are mentally ill."

Often the measures in place prove inadequate. "For example," Goldstein says, "in North Miami Beach, there was an autistic kid who left the group home, and he had like a silver toy truck or train in his hand. Someone in the community called the cops and said he was threatening suicide and had a gun." In that incident earlier this year, police shot a 47-year-old social worker from a distance as he tried to calm down the autistic man.

Goldstein believes that more thorough training in crisis intervention and working with mentally ill and developmentally disabled people would be useful. "There are a lot of models out there that other law enforcement agencies employ, ." The letter simply stated: "We are aware of these types of behaviors."

"They handed the letter off, and the problem went away," says Nolan. "The goal was to make the problem go away, while building relationships with people."

This article was originally published by the Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow the Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

Patrick Hilsman is an associate editor at the Influence. Follow him on Twitter.

Surveillance tapes viewed in a sex assault trial show the complainant appearing to be visibly drunk. Screenshot via CityNews.

The footage, viewed in a Toronto courtroom this week and obtained by CityNews, paints a picture of a woman who appears to be very drunk.

She starts the night off at a club called Lost and Found and moves onto the Everleigh, where a man grabs her, and pours vodka down her throat, slaps her ass. Later he helps her down the stairs, which is clearly a struggle for her. They go into the Thompson hotel—where her friends were—but instead of meeting them, the man checks them into a room. More surveillance tapes show that she "is practically asleep" during an elevator ride, in Crown Jill Witkin's words.

The complainant, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, wakes up in the morning and "when she realizes where she is, she says she feels violated, feels like someone penetrated her. She is emotional and upset and goes to the police that same day," Witkin told a judge in her closing statement.

While alcohol is a factor in many sex assault trials, this case is unique in that the footage, taken throughout the night on July 18, 2015, seems to clearly document that the complainant was intoxicated—something the judge even noted at trial. Her alleged attacker, Moazzam Tariq, 31, a man she literally met a half hour before he checked them into a hotel room, at least seems to be much more sober.

Watch the video here:

The complainant said she didn't remember anything about the night, save for a "flash" where she recalled him being on top of her and her saying 'no,' according to CityNews.

Defence attorney Danielle Robitaille—who helped defend Jian Ghomeshi—argued that because the woman displayed other signs of cognitive function, including holding onto her purse and phone and pulling up her pants, it's entirely possible she was able to give consent.

"There could be a number of explanations for why she looks so sleepy in that elevator," Robitaille told the court. "Conscious, capable adults are allowed to look a little sleepy, before they engage in sex." She also said the complainant's inability to produce details in the "flash memory" calls the entire memory into question.

Louis Francescutti, a professor at the University of Alberta's School of Public Health and emergency room doctor, said it's not uncommon for patients to come in after having been blacked out and report that they've been sexually assaulted.

"A lot of these victims wake up and things hurt where they're not supposed to hurt."

A blackout, he told VICE, is different from passing out due to drinking too much. A person can be blacked out and still be walking and talking, but be cognitively impaired to the point where the part of the brain that forms short term memories shuts down.

"Some people become very quiet and withdrawn. Some people become an exhibitionist or really crazy—and those are the people you see urinating in memorials or stripping and going into a water fountain at night," Francescutti told VICE. "When you hear those stories you're going 'What the fuck were they thinking?' Well they weren't thinking, they were in a different world."

He said the patients who wake up in the emergency room typically "don't know what the hell happened."

"They have no clue why they're in the hospital."

Legally speaking, there are different opinions on the laws around drinking and consent.

Barb MacQuarrie, community director for Western University's Centre for Research & Education on Violence against Women & Children, said under Canadian law, one cannot consent to sex if they are drunk. In Tariq's case, "this is such a clear cut and dry case of obviously she was intoxicated and incapable of giving consent," she said.

MacQuarrie noted the complainant's behaviour in the video doesn't prove she was functioning cognitively. "Most people when they're intoxicated can still pull up their pants and hold up their phone," she said.

As for Robitaille's arguments—that the complainant might have been alert enough to consent and that her memory shouldn't be trusted—MacQuarrie said they seem contradictory.

"If she doesn't have a clear enough memory to know if she gave consent that means she was too intoxicated."

Ottawa-based criminal lawyer Michael Spratt told VICE that in fact you can give consent after you've been drinking.

"You consent to many things when intoxicated. That doesn't preclude you from making decisions," he said.

"The real analysis that comes out in court is: Is the person so intoxicated that they are unable to consent to certain actions? Because we do recognize that if you are still intoxicated you are unable to make rational decisions."

That line can be tough to prove, but that's where the video evidence in this trial will come into play, he said.

"There is evidence of her displaying very obvious signs of extreme drunkenness," he said, citing factors like woman's difficulty walking, the fact that she blew off friends, the fact that she was with a man she'd never met before, and her inability to remember most of the night, except for saying 'no' at one point.

He also pointed out that Tariq appears to be more sober than the woman—and even pours booze down her throat, suggesting that he knew how drunk she was.

"If your argument is she may well have consented and just been too drunk to remember consenting that seems to be a pretty powerful indicator that... she may have been too drunk to consent."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo by CP/Adrian Wyld

Just before he was slated to head off to China to talk trade with then-President of China, Jiang Zemin, Jean Chretien made a morally bankrupt, but painfully honest, comment.

"I'm the prime minister of a country of 28 million people," Chretien said, according to Iron Man, Lawrence Martin's biography of our occasionally unhinged former leader. "He's the president of a country with 1.2 billion. I'm not allowed to tell the premier of Saskatchewan or Quebec what to do. Am I supposed to tell the president of China what to do?"

Fast forward more than a decade and we've got Prime Minister Sunshine in China this week to make some new friends. And to make us fistfulls of fuckmoney.

Since landing in Beijing, Trudeau has met with various Chinese officials and business leaders, signing various economic agreements that are forging the way towards a full-on free trade agreement. Even before the trip is over, the Trudeau government has bragged that it's inked $1.2 billion in new contracts between Canadian and Chinese companies.

But lest you think Trudeau is just there to butter up the Politburo into buying more maple syrup, the Liberal government wants you to know that Chretien was wrong—and Canada is totally getting shit done on human rights.

READ MORE: Chinese TV Star Accuses Canadian Tourism Officials of Trying to Censor Show About First Nations

And that, supposedly, was a big theme in Trudeau's speech to the Canada China Business Council today.

Clocking in at just over 2,300 words, it's undoubtedly supposed to be the high-level sketch of how Ottawa and Beijing are going to be cozying up to each other in the future. And while news headlines around Canada billed the speech was a verbal smackdown—"Trudeau offers public critique of China's human rights record in Shanghai," "Trudeau delivers blunt message on human rights in China," "Justin Trudeau uses business speech in China to focus on human rights"—it wasn't exactly a barn burner.

In fact, the vast majority of the speech was about business ties and tourism, not about human rights at all.

By far the most full-throated part of the speech was the following:

"I think there are ways in which a stronger relationship makes it easier for our two countries to have regular, frank discussions on issues like good governance, human rights, and the rule of law. Freedom of expression is a true Canadian value, one protected by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You see, Canada has succeeded, culturally, politically, economically because of our diversity, not in spite of it," Trudeau said.

He followed up that humblebrag with an insistence that he told all of this to President Xi Jinping when they sat down earlier in the visit.

"I shared with them my strong conviction that acceptance of diverse perspectives will strengthen China, just as it has Canada. In a world of rapid change, it is a diversity of ideas, and the free ability to express them, that drives positive change," he said.

But wait, here comes the coup de grâce: "Canada encourages China to do more to promote and protect human rights."

And with that, President Xi broke into tears, released the 40 human rights lawyers that are currently being held in secret prisons across the country, agreed to stop executing thousands of people per year, and ended the violent occupation of Tibet, for his heart grew three sizes that day.

Obviously, that didn't actually happen.

Trudeau is unquestionably pulling punches on Beijing's human rights record for the same reason that Chretien did—ditto for Harper, Mulroney, and Martin. Because, as with all of his predecessors, cash rules everything around him.

That's why his cornerstone speech of his big China trip wasn't human rights, it was a travelling salesman routine cut with that old refrain: "when Canadian companies partner with Chinese companies, it means more and better-paying jobs here in China as well."

Trudeau mentioned the words "human rights" twice. "Middle class" four times. "Jobs" seven. "Economy," "Economies," and in a less grammatically dazzling sentence, "Economically" 14 times. "The" clocked it at a whopping 84 appearances.

Ok, I'm just abusing my ctrl+f at this point.

Point is: Trudeau didn't visit China to promote human rights. He's not there to enlist Beijing to fight climate change. He's not an altruistic do-gooder: he's there to sell shit.

And maybe that's OK. But he should at least be honest about it.

Look at Stephen Harper. In 2006, the steel-haired cowboy, then a touch slimmer and with some of his natural hair colour, apparently bit into then-President Hu Jintao. So much so that Hu refused to meet with Harper at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation conference.

"I think Canadians want us to promote our trade relations worldwide, and we do that, but I don't think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values," Harper said at the time. "They don't want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar."

Well, obviously, he did sell out to that almighty dollar—C.R.E.A.M, motherfucker—and he ended up signing a trade agreement (albeit not a full free trade deal) and the criticism went much quieter around then.

But even he, Stephen Harper of clan Asshole, twisted the Communist Party's collective tit in a speech to the Canada-China Business Council (the same one Trudeau sucked up to today) in 2012.

"Canada does not—and cannot—disconnect our trading relationship from fundamental national values," Harper said. Unlike Trudeau's waffling on the matter, Harper specifically called on China to respect "freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of belief and worship."

But even in Harper's patented slap and tickle approach to working with nihilist governments, little got done. China didn't hold itself back from conquering the South China Sea—or as China's neighbours call it, the Everybody Except for China Sea—or arresting Ai Weiwei.

Hell, Harper's government couldn't even get Canadians released from Chinese jail, or stop Beijing from coming at our government systems.

And so we return to the elder philosopher, the man atop the mountain, the Shawinigan sage: Jean Chretien.

Maybe Canada should just let China do China, and make a few bucks in the process. If the same number of Uighurs are going to get arrested and tortured if we trade or not, maybe it's not wrong for Ottawa to sell a few Alanis Morissette tapes or Hudson Bay blankets.

But, counterpoint, perhaps there's moral folly to establishing our foreign policy as: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Global trade is not zero sum. It is, yes, generally a good thing, but it is not altruistic. Good trade deals—stay with me here—need to be written good. And I'm not sure many money scientists, or whatever they're called, trust China to negotiate in good faith.

And not trading with China doesn't, necessarily, make us poorer. And, generally speaking, we've already come to a general agreement that we don't want China running all of our mines, technology companies, and oil fields—preventing that would become infinitely harder in a free trade relationship.

So, ultimately, it is worth asking why we are collectively curtseying to one of the world's most morally bankrupt regimes for the sake of a trade deal that may never happen, might not be good for us, and which we can probably get along without.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Stay safe, fam. Photo by Jake Kivanç

Nine people overdosed and one person went into full cardiac arrest late last night after doing a few lines of what they thought was coke in a suburb south of Vancouver. Police say they believe the drugs were laced with fentanyl, raising alarms that more party drugs in the area could be tainted.

Thankfully nobody died, but the ODs, which happened in the span of 20 minutes at four separate homes, are a horrible reminder that the super-potent opioid fentanyl is not only showing up in street drugs like heroin. It also highlights how difficult it is for casual drug users to know exactly what they're putting into their bodies.

Emergency crews arrived within minutes, and used the opiate-blocking antidote naloxone in eight of the nine cases. Sergeant Sarah Swallow of the Delta Police told VICE all of the patients who were treated knew each other, were friends, and likely got their stash from the same batch and dealer. Police are now testing the drugs in an attempt to determine the source.

When responding to one of the incidents, police were told one of their friends had gone home alone. When emergency services located the person, he was already receiving CPR from a friend or family member, Delta Police told VICE.

This is the latest turn in British Columbia's growing opioid crisis, which has killed 433 people this year as of July 31. That's up 73.3 percent over this time last year, with fentanyl detected in more than half of the cases.

Fentanyl, which is many times stronger than heroin and about 100 times stronger than morphine, is much cheaper to make than coke and many other drugs. Even tiny grains of it can cause breathing problems, loss of consciousness and even cardiac arrest.

Health Canada announced yesterday that it's cracking down on the production of six chemicals that are used to make fentanyl. Vancouver's safe injection site released a study that showed 86 percent of drugs tested over four weeks were laced with fentanyl.

Swallow said the overdoses put a serious strain on Delta's small fire and ambulance resources, and could take other neighbourhoods and suburbs by surprise. "Our concern is that this could be the start of a wave. We're sure more people bought from that dealer."

Police warned that most of us still don't know the risks of fentanyl overdose—or how to deal with it once it happens. "People who use cocaine recreationally don't have any sort of tolerance for opiates," Swallow told VICE. "If someone is a heroin user you might not see as severe a reaction, but if somebody isn't used to it at all—boom—it's instantaneous."

Swallow added that fentanyl can't be detected by looking, smelling or tasting, and is deliberately being misrepresented as other drugs. "A dealer might look you right in the eye and say it's cocaine, but it's not," she said.

Swallow recommended that recreational users take some party drug precautions:

1. Don't take anything by yourself
2. Start with a small amount, assess how you feel before others join
3. If you're worried, call your pharmacy and get yourself a naloxone kit
4. Know where help is easily available and definitely call 911 if you see signs of overdose

"We're not conducting a criminal investigation into these users," she told VICE.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Craig Jungwirth. Photo via Broward County Sheriff's Office

Jeff Black says he and other LGBTQ activists in south Florida have been complaining to police officials for six months about relentless harassment endured at the hands of a local event promoter named Craig Jungwirth. Now that man is under criminal investigation for allegedly threatening to commit a massacre somehow even more horrible than the Orlando Pulse nightclub mass shooting that stunned America in June.

"He has posted thousands and thousands of comments threatening me, my family, and my partner," Black told VICE. "He has been invasive in every level of my life. But even though we have some very credible evidence of his threats, the police just pushed us away."

It wasn't until Jungwirth recently went on a foul-mouthed Facebook rant promising to wipe out Wilton Manors, an affluent suburban city with a prominent gay population, that law enforcement agencies took notice, Black said.

"None of you deserve to live," Jungwirth appears to have written in one post. "If you losers thought the Pulse nightclub shooting was bad, wait till you see what I'm planning for Labor Day."

Another post is said to have proclaimed, "I'm gonna be killing you fags faster than cops kill niggers. It's time to clean up Wilton Manors from all you AIDS infested losers."

Jungwith's Facebook has since been deleted by the company, according to a local NBC affiliate. But given less than three months have passed since Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and injured 53 more in the Pulse attack, residents and business owners in the area's LGBTQ community are experiencing a new kind of terror.

"The posts he made about coming to do an Orlando-type attack has struck a fear in the community like nothing I have ever seen," Fort Lauderdale–based attorney and South Florida Gay News founder Norman Kent told VICE. "Every nightclub in town is increasing its security this weekend."

Wilton Manors Police spokeswoman Jennifer Bickhardt confirmed the department is part of a local, state, and federal investigation into Jungwirth's alleged threats and that he has been questioned by law enforcement personnel, but he has not been arrested. "We firmly believe these are threatening statements," Bickhardt told VICE. "We do take it seriously. That is why there is an ongoing investigation."

In another press statement issued Wednesday evening, Wilton Manors police chief Paul O'Connell assured the public his department was being vigilant. "WMPD will have increased patrol and visibility throughout the holiday weekend, working with local bars and restaurants in an effort to beef up private security," he said. "In addition, we have reached out to our local law enforcement partners and asked that they consider providing additional assistance."

Efforts by VICE to reach Jungwirth directly were unsuccessful. According to court records, he was evicted from his last known address in Wilton Manors in March. Black and Kent believe the man is living in with his mother in her home in Orlando. Messages left on her phone number and another number associated with Jungwirth were not returned.

Meanwhile, Black and Kent maintain that local police failed to follow up on previous complaints they made about Jungwirth, a 50-year-old North Dakota native who came under intense scrutiny by the South Florida Gay News and other gay news sites shortly after he signed an agreement this winter to purchase the rights to Bear Beach Weekend, an annual gathering of gay men with events in Wilton Manors and Fort Lauderdale.

For instance, the South Florida Gay News broke the story about Jungwirth's past criminal conduct in January, a piece that includes four separate allegations in Broward County of stalking with violence between 2013 and 2014. In one case, Jungwirth allegedly showed up at the Fort Lauderale Boat Show in November 2014 to harass a former employer three years after she had fired him and had obtained a restraining order against him that had expired. She claimed he was making comments about her and her father to other vendors and creeping around her booth.

" behavior causes victim to be in fear for her safety," the arrest report states. "She feels harassed and afraid to maintain her normal routine."

Kent told me that a few weeks ago he called local cops after Jungwirth showed up at the Gay News Fort Lauderdale office and cornered his front desk receptionist. "I think he could have been charged with false imprisonment if the police wanted to get creative," Kent said. "Tragically, law enforcement is only starting to respond to a series of ongoing criminal acts by this person. It took this latest incident for anyone to pay attention.

Bickhardt, the Wilton Manors PD spokesperson, said she could not comment on past complaints because she did not know the specifics surrounding those incidents. However, she said police need to establish probable cause to make an arrest. For example, she said, detectives need to show that Jungwirth was actually the person who typed and posted the comments on Facebook. A spokesperson for Fort Lauderdale police did not immediately return a request for comment.

Black, a 53-year-old graphic design company owner, believes he incurred Jungwirth's wrath because he helped expose a scheme of bogus vacation and event packages by contacting gay media outlets and government officials about false advertising on the Beach Bear Weekend website. As a result of that activism, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitor's Bureau canceled a meeting with Jungwirth and pulled a listing for Beach Bear Weekend off its website, Black told me.

In July, Black filed for a restraining order and reported Jungwirth to the Wilton Manors Police Department because of harassment via Facebook, text messages, and phone calls that would not stop, he said. "He uses a plethora of fake profiles," Black added. "He's even made one using my image and my name and harassed me with it.

Over the last week, Jungwirth's attacks on Facebook have increased in severity, according to Black. "He started using the word 'nigger' about 48 hours before he made the domestic terrorist type threats," Black said. "There are about 30 to 40 people who are in the same boat. I just happen to be in his top five."

The fact Jungwirth is not in jail bothers him a lot, Black continued. "It still unnerving to know he is still at-large," he opined. "He has the potential to show up at a bar in Wilton Manors and hurt people."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Illustration by Brandon Bird

About three years ago, after a string of horrible relationships and even worse decisions, I got sober and quit dating for a while. Now, without the liquid courage I used to rely upon, I'm all in my head when it comes to sex. I get nervous. The girl who once had drunk sex in a public park now just picnics in them.

So instead of drinking, I've decided to explore fetishes. And it seems that when you embrace kink, amazing things start to happen. It only took one BDSM workshop (and writing about it online) before an ex-boyfriend asked me on a date, a stranger emailed me saying it would be his pleasure to be my human toilet, and a professional mistress messaged me on Twitter to offer me a private BDSM lesson for free.

Unfortunately, that wasn't exactly my cup of tea; I don't want to use anyone as a human toilet, at least not yet. So I decided to try something new, which I was introduced to at that BDSM workshop: macrophilia.

Macrophilia, or a giantess fetish, is a sexual fantasy that mostly involves submissive men getting off to the idea of being crushed or eaten alive by destructive, sky-scraper sized women.

In it's infancy, the kink was controversial. Some giantesses would "crush" live animals: bugs, worms, lobsters, worse. This is now illegal for live vertebrates. Now, macrophiles get off mostly on internet videos and photo collages, distorting sizes with the help of Photoshop and heavy editing. Imagine, as one Reddit user explained, a "500-foot-tall Christina Hendricks rampaging through a crowded downtown city, pursuing any sexual activity her little giant heart desires."

The whole thing is a complete 180 from my relationship history, and maybe that's why it intrigued me. In my past, I've always dated aggressive, dominant men. I've been in relationships that were both emotionally and physically abusive. I've made myself small to make the big, powerful men in my life happy. If a kink kingdom exists where women are large and in charge—well, I figured it was worth a try.

In 2015, porn searches for "giantess" had grown more than any other term, according to Pornhub, up 1,091 percent from the year before. It might not be as mainstream as, say, bondage, but macrophilia is catching on.

It plays off familiar tenets of BDSM—female in control and woman as goddess. In a Reddit AMA thread, one man described the allure of macrophilia as "the ultimate expression of dominance, being reduced to nothing before the woman. Sometimes you're just a sex toy. Sometimes you're as much as nothing and just think about being crushed."

Sometimes we sexualize our personal pain, trauma, and frustrations in order to feel in control of them.

Another macrophile, who asked that I not use his name, told me, "I like to feel insignificant. I like the idea of a woman so powerful she could crush me and not realize. Being small makes that real."

Even though it's all fantasy—as in, this dude is never going to meet a 500-foot-tall woman—he said the internet allows him to indulge.

I reached out to a friend of mine who used to be a dominatrix in New York. She explained to me that most macrophiles she knows are "powerful guys—lawyers, Wall Street dudes. It's because their jobs are all about power and control so when they want an escape they want to feel the complete opposite of that." She concluded that sometimes we sexualize our personal pain, trauma, and frustrations in order to feel in control of them.

And I get that. I've always had issues with my self-esteem. I once sexted a guy and his response was "you have a unique face," as if a Picasso painting had just sexted him. My poor self-image led me to that string of bad relationships where I tried to shrink away. Could sexualizing those insecurities put me back in control of them?

I decided to test the waters by uploading a few giantess videos to my Instagram and Snapchat. I went to a toy store to buy some miniature soldiers and plastic animals to step on for the videos. The old man at the register nodded at me. "Schools back in session, huh?" I wondered if he thought I was a teacher or a parent helping her child with a diorama. I decided to live in that fantasy, as opposed to the one where I'm 30 and filming myself crushing toy soldiers for the internet.

I uploaded a few videos of myself crushing the soldiers, using the hashtag #giantess. Collectively, the videos garnered a few thousand views and a few comments.

One female begged: "Please crush me with your feet!"

A guy wrote: "I would love to be at your mercy."

A woman, whose bio reads that she's the property/slave of another giantess, direct messaged me: "You're gorgeous." Another direct message: "Do more giantess."

One person offered some advice on how to improve future videos: "Change the camera angle to more of a POV view from the tiny men perspective."

I didn't feel much from stepping on plastic toys, but the attention was a turn on. I soon found myself poring over giantess-related forums on Reddit. I started responding to some of the macrophiles who had commented on my Instagram, asking them, "Did you like my video? Would you watch more if I posted them?" I keep telling myself I was doing it for an article, but was I? I'd found a group of people who wanted to worship me for doing something as small as stepping on a toy—and it felt amazing.

That same day, a promotional video (that was not giantess-related) I'd recorded months earlier for a company was released on Facebook. The comment section was scathing. Trolls called me an "ugly bitch." Others chimed in to say I am so dumb I should never be a mother. There was even a debate as to whether or not I was actually a man—though if I were, I expect they wouldn't be commenting on my appearance in the first place.

The real world can be harsh and judgmental, but as a giantess, I could escape all that. Here was a corner of the internet where I could be big, unabashed, and unapologetic. I could take up space, demand my own desires. And if someone else gets a good wank out of it, even better.

Follow Alison Segel on Twitter.

Somewhere near Akron, Ohio, pro skateboarder Rick McCrank follows two young men into what was once the largest shopping mall in town. Once they're inside the dark, dank, mold-filled walls, the trio sets out on a ghost-hunting mission. "We're the only ones here, but we're not the only ones here," one man explains. "Whenever you feel like you're being watched or you're seeing movement, most likely you are."

The ever-affable McCrank takes this revelation in stride, and then follows the man and his friend out to the parking lot for a quick lesson in demon blasting. Later, McCrank throws on a white sheet, hops on his board, and glides through the mall's empty hallways, looking like the afterlife's most graceful skate ghost.

This, in a nutshell, is Abandoned. Part travel log, part epic skate vid, and part in-depth documentary series, the VICELAND show follows McCrank as he explores North America's strangest deserted spaces and talks to the people closest to them. He also infiltrates local skate scenes to show how these empty lots and cast-off buildings can become vibrant, sustainable playgrounds for the next generation.

"I guess you would call me the reluctant host," McCrank laughs. "I'm an introvert, so it's hard for me to talk to people I don't know. But my best friends were making the show, and I liked the idea of getting to work and travel and learn things with my friends."

At 40, the soft-spoken street, park, and vert legend is no stranger to the camera. Since turning pro in the mid 90s, Crankers has starred in well over a dozen skate videos, dabbled in photography, and even tried his hand at acting. As a longtime member of Girl's pro team, he's also made a name for himself as one of skating's most versatile, humble, and down-to-earth dudes, making him the ideal ambassador for the sport—both within and beyond the haunted mall scene.

Leading up to Friday's 9 PM premiere of Abandoned on VICELAND, we spoke to McCrank from his home in Vancouver.

VICE: In the pilot for Abandoned you talk about how you hated malls growing up. Why?
Rick McCrank: They were like factories of shame. I'm one of three siblings raised by a single mom, and we grew up on welfare. We didn't have anything, so when I would go to the mall I'd be like, "I can't have any of this stuff at all." I felt like I wasn't even allowed to be in there. Even now, I don't really dress fancy, so when I go to a mall I feel like a frump intruding on this other world.

When did you start skating?
I was 11. My eldest brother was getting into a lot of trouble, so social workers suggested he go and live with my dad to have more stability. He ended up moving to another city, and when he left he gave me his skateboard as a goodbye present. When he came back to visit, he was like, "Whoa, I don't like skateboarding with you anymore because you got way better than me."

Was there ever a point where you thought, "Skateboarding is going to be my career?"
I've claimed that I never said I wanted to be a pro, but my brother swears I always talked about it. For most skaters, it's just what they love to do—it becomes them. I got sponsored by a local skate shop in Ottawa, and then I ended up moving to the West Coast to snowboard. When I was in the Vancouver area, I met the local skate pros and they thought I was good and helped me out from there. It sort of just happened for me. Pretty much my whole life just happened for me. This show just happened for me.

How did filming Abandoned compare to skate trips?
Sometimes we spent ten days in one town, which never happens on a skate trip. The skating wasn't as intense, too. It was more about connecting with skaters at the skateparks and skate spots to get a taste of the local scenes. In St. Louis, we went there and we all like fell in love with that city. It's such a great place. I don't know if I would have felt that way if I was only there for a day or two.

Did working on the show change your perspective on the skate community at large?
It reminded me that the scene is really strong and connected. We'd hook up with these local skate shop crews, and I was blown away at how talented and dedicated they were. When we were in Charlotte, North Carolina, the skate shop team there was filming a video and they were taking it as seriously as all the pros take it. It was crazy. They were basically killing themselves to get these tricks so they could put out the best product possible. We talk a lot about the skateboarding DIY ethic, which states that if you don't have it you build it, you make it. You don't care if the police or the city is going to tear it down in a month—if the community needs it, you make it happen for your community. I saw a lot of people doing things out of love, and not for anything other than that. We like to talk about how skateboarders see negative spaces as positive things—they see a lot of opportunity in them, and they don't like places to go to waste.

The show talks a lot about nostalgia and you interview a lot of people who romanticize about the past. On a personal level, how did those conversations resonate?
I live in Vancouver, which is a boom town, so it gets rebranded every decade. New buildings get knocked down and rebuilt all the time—it's almost like the town doesn't have an identity because it doesn't stay around long enough to make one. Where I've been in my life, the change has come from progress—not from loss. But there's also loss in progress. I lived in Whistler when it was a small ski town, and now it's this giant place with a big outdoor mall.

How do you see loss in progress?
In Vancouver, there's a lot of money and the property is worth a lot. So much money is coming in that people who don't have money are getting pushed out. The affordable places are being torn down and replaced by more, bigger, fancier places, where bigger, fancier people are moving in. The underprivileged and the youth are getting pushed out of a town they love. Most of my friends can't afford to buy a house now, and if they want to buy a house they're gonna move away, which is heartbreaking for me. That's the loss—with progress, especially in a boom town, you're gonna lose a certain demographic that is vital. Artists who don't make a shit ton of money need studio space, and if they can't afford it here they are gonna go to the town that they can afford it. Money ends up pushing out the regular people.

What do you hope to accomplish with Abandoned?
We tried to show the places that people think are bad and tarnished—the places people call "the wrong side of the tracks." In St. Louis, the city is divided by a street, and you don't go on the other side of the street because it's "the bad side of town." But the people that were telling us this were also telling us that they'd never been there. The nature of the show is to go to places that are affected by all kinds of things—including economic downturn and socioeconomic problems, which meant going to where the poor people are. Every single time we did, we met the best, most sincere people and felt completely at home and welcomed. That's what we're trying to show with Abandoned; we need to stop putting up all these barriers around our neighbors and start realizing that we're all the same because these barriers are affecting our neighborhoods more than anyone understands.

Watch Abandoned Friday nights at 9 PM EST on VICELAND

Jeremy McLellan. Photo by Tyler Sawyer

Muslims love him, Trump supporters want to kill him. That's South Carolina comic Jeremy McLellan's schtick.

With over 100,000 followers on Facebook, McLellan has become a staple at Muslim festivals and events around North America. In the upcoming months, McLellan's gigs include Muslim Student Association events at universities across the US, a non-profit for Syrian refugees in Boston, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations annual banquet for Oklahoma and Los Angeles.

McLellan says he never set out to gain a Muslim following. "As a comedian, you just tell jokes that you think are funny and talk about issues you think are important."

McLellan, 30, grew up in Charleston in a conservative Christian household but his comedy has always been focused on liberal-minded takes on immigration, race, religion, Islamophobia, politics and disabilities.

"One of the reasons I'm so passionate about the rights of Muslims is because my wife is Catholic. It's hard to imagine now, but years ago politicians would have called her disloyal, hateful, intemperate, angry, un-American barbarian. And you know what? They would have been right. But NOT because she's Catholic," is a typical joke from a McLellan set.

He started about three years ago, trying his luck at some open mic nights around Charleston. He won the 2015 and 2016 Charleston Standup Comedy Competition and was named Best Local Comic in the Charleston City Paper. Comedy is now his full-time gig.

McLellan, however, doesn't like labels, well, some labels. "I try to correct people when they label me a libertarian comedian or a Christian comedian. But I guess you could call me a political comedian because I do that a lot."

By now, McLellan is a pro at navigating Muslim events understanding the unspoken do's and don'ts: do not shake hands with the women (unless they initiate the gesture); do tell jokes about how diverse the Muslim community is; do not say "Moslem."

I recently met up with him at Muslimfest in Mississauga, Ontario where we talked about Trump, death threats, and Desis (a person of Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi descent).

Do you change your routine when you are playing to a Muslim audience?
No. That is a big misconception. I don't do two separate acts. I perform for non-Muslims all the time and I will use those jokes for Muslim audiences. I do change up the routine if the organizers have told me it has to be "family friendly." I would tailor the jokes to the audience of course, like there are some jokes that maybe only Muslim audiences would get, but it's not like I have a joke that I tell elsewhere and it might offend Muslims so I won't tell it. Like, you wouldn't tell a joke about sex at any family friendly event. But you might tell an alcohol joke. And I've told alcohol jokes to both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences and it's been fine. There was one time that a contract had a clause not to tell any jokes about the difference between Sunni and Shia. As if I would have a lot of material about that.

What have you learned about the Muslim community?
It is diverse. I think non-Muslims, both on the right and the left, treat Muslims as just one thing. You see it even with the hijab debate. People on the right will be like "oh all Muslim women are being subjugated and being dominated by their husbands, and we need to ban the hijab." Then on the left you have people who are well intentioned who support the hijab, but the way they talk they make it sound like every single Muslim woman wears it. They will make it sound like a Saudi is the same as a Pakistani or a Malaysian. And they just aren't, and I wouldn't want someone generalizing like that about Christians.

What has the response to your comedy been from right-wing conservatives?
The actual Christians that I know are great, and very supportive, like my parents. The backlash varies. It ranges from friends who tease me to people who kind of know me and hate me to people who just want me to die.

So you've actually received death threats?
I have, yeah. Whenever I do get one, I screenshot it and report it to Facebook. I get a lot of "I hope you die." The stuff that bothers me though is people wishing ill on my wife. It's just people saying really harsh things that want me to have a rude awakening, they are hoping I get killed by a Muslim or things like that.

Have you ever feared for your life?
No, most of the time I know they are trolling. It's not credible. And as long as they don't kill me, whatever they did would help me. If someone beat me up, I would be in the news and that's just how I have to think as an entertainer.

Many people outside of the United States are fascinated by how far Trump has managed to get in the election. What are your thoughts of his campaign?
I think he is an opportunist. I think he is an entertainer and he is using whatever to gain popularity. Let's say 99 percent of the country hated me, and 1 percent loved me enough to send me 10 bucks a year. I would make 32 million a year. As an entertainer, you don't care about the 99 percent, you want to hit your demographic and go on. Right now, Trump is not doing well. I don't think Trump cares, he just sees people who support him and come to his rallies, because he is an entertainer. And like an entertainer, he counts his fans. The others aren't costing him anything.

What is the end goal of comedy for you?
There are some people who are like "I just want to make people laugh." Comedy for me is the healthiest way to wrestle with important issues; it is a part of my intellectual life.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between the Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

I sat in my prison's stark visiting room waiting anxiously. My eyes kept drifting away from me, toward the room's battered steel door. My fingers tapped out some unremembered tune on the armrest of my chair. I couldn't seem to stop fidgeting.

"What's taking them so long?" my cellmate, Steven, whispered. His knee bounced like a jackhammer.

Steven is 21, and I'm 41. Surprisingly, we have a lot in common, mostly because I landed in prison at the same age he is now. In here, it's not possible to grow up, to mature—time freezes for us. I know that's difficult for a free person to grasp, but it's true. We're all a bunch of Peter Pans.

"I don't know," I replied.

I glanced around the visiting room at all the other convicts. Very few spoke. Some smiled nervously. Almost all of them eyed the door in anticipation of what was coming.

Outside, mechanical gates clanged open and shut; announcements blared from loudspeakers; officers shouted back and forth through the thick, bulletproof glass surrounding the control center.

But where we were, all was quiet. A cough here. A grunt there. Some random tapping of fingers and toes. The soft hum of the (extremely overpriced) vending machines.

Then, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement through one of the windows facing a hallway. I took a deep breath and nudged Steven's foot with my own.

It was time.

The door opened, and a massive, slobbering dog leapt in, dragging an officer by its leash. Three more dogs followed, two of them yellow and one black, each also dragging an officer—including the warden and the deputy warden. Then came a smaller, brown labrador that seemed both scared and curious.

I stood up, pointing, "May I have that one?"

The dog reminded me of my first day in Michigan's most notorious prison. I'll never forget the moment I stepped into a cellblock—I could practically feel all the convicts staring at me.

The assistant deputy warden handed me the leash, and Steven and I both began petting the nervous little creature.

This was the launch of our prison's new service-dog program, where we train dogs to help veterans and people with PTSD, and we were all embarrassingly excited. I'd already trudged my way through 20 years of my long prison sentence, with each day identical to the next. Family members had slowly passed away or forgotten about me. Friends I'd come to care about had been transferred to other facilities. But here was this dog, smelling like something real and living—something I hadn't smelled in two decades.

An older woman dressed in civilian clothes knelt before us, smiling. "Her name is Maui," the woman said. "Try to keep this collar as high as you can on her neck. You'll be able to control her better."

The woman quickly moved on to other convicts.

Speeches were given. Rules set. Questions asked and answered. Then we were let loose on the yard with our dogs in tow. Maui soon took over, dragging me forward, wanting to bury her nose in everything, to taste everything, to see everything in a place that had long since become lifeless to me.

Back in the unit, I led her toward her new home. She'd been frightened by the metal grating between the building's outer and inner doors, the hard steps leading to our subterranean floor. I was forced to carry her during the final stretch.

That afternoon, we all chatted and examined our new dogs:

"What's your dog's name?"

"You got a boy or a girl?"

"Feel how soft mine is."

"Mine too!"

"Mine smells funny."

"They're supposed to smell funny."

"Sit, Niko, sit," commanded Rodriguez, my neighbor. His eyes went wide. "Hey, look, mine knows how to sit!

The rest of us spent the next five minutes trying to discover what our dogs could do—until the cops made us lock down for count. So goes life in prison: Head count, head count, head count.

"Doesn't this feel strange to you?" Steven asked a few minutes later. "Almost like a dream?"

It did feel strange. For two decades, I'd lived life around nothing but angry inmates and vindictive corrections officers. Up until that point, touching another living thing took place in the context of bloody fights, degrading pat-downs, and dignity-crushing strip searches.

Here I stood now with that little creature nuzzling up against me. Her bright, golden eyes seemed to say, "If you'll let me, I'll love you. I promise."

Jerry Metcalf, 41, is incarcerated at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer, Michigan, where he is serving 40-60 years for second-degree murder and two years for a weapons felony, both of which he was convicted of in 1996.

VICE embeds with the London branch of the Neturei Karta, a group of controversial ultra-Orthodox Jews who campaign against Zionism and for the immediate dismantling of the State of Israel.

Because of their unusual views, and support of politicians like ex-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and groups like the Hungarian far-right Jobbik Party, other Jewish people often label them as extremists.

Reporter Milène Larsson goes inside this secretive community to understand why the Jewish group openly burns Israeli flags and joins Palestinians protesting Israeli occupation.

Donald Trump: a Bad Thing about 2016 (Photo: Gage Skidmore, via)

Fuck 2016. Worst year ever, right? From Trump to Syria, Bowie to Brexit—all you have to do is flip on your Twitter feed to see we live in a time of unprecedented war, insecurity, fear, and misery.

Or not.

Maybe that's totally wrong? Maybe, as Swedish writer Johan Norberg argues in his new book Progress, this doom and gloom is not just incorrect, but the diametric opposite of what is actually happening in the world?

Norberg's premise is that by any measure of human development—life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty, literacy, freedom, exposure to violence and disease, etc—we are living in a golden age that is completely unprecedented in the history of humanity. The data presented in the book is staggering. In 1900, average world life expectancy was 31 years old; it is now 71. In 1981, nine in ten Chinese lived in extreme poverty; it is now one in ten. For the last 25 years, 285,000 new people have gained access to safe water every day. One of the book's most striking claims comes in the section on poverty: "If it takes you 20 minutes to read this chapter, almost another 2,000 people will have risen out of poverty."

The case is compelling. For the 200,000 years or so since Homo sapiens first evolved, if we even survived infancy we would have lived very short lives, in what we now class as extreme poverty, beset by diseases we didn't understand, unable to read, at the mercy of arbitrary rulers, and very likely to die in various horrifically painful ways. In the last 25 years, however—for the first time in human history—extreme poverty has dipped below ten percent of the population, mass famine has been virtually eliminated, and mass literacy has become the rule rather than the exception. Anyone alive right now is far less likely to die violently (from either war or homicide) than in any previous era.

So given all this good stuff, why is everyone so anxious, depressed, and angry all the time? Obviously it's partly because of increased access to information—we can now see disasters unfolding in real time. But it's also evolutionary; we evolved to constantly scan the horizon for threats. Only bad news catches our eye.

And this has political implications. Norberg is clear that he has written this book partially as a warning. The sense that "everything is going downhill" is exactly what feeds populist politics like Trump and Brexit. And these are precisely movements that threaten the very progress we're talking about.

So, being as prone to pessimistic online bitching as anyone else, I caught up with Norberg to talk through some of his ideas.

Johan Norberg

VICE: Was there a trigger for this project?
Johan Norberg: Well, like everyone, I get worried and scared when I read the news—apparently the world is populated by serial murderers, terrorists, warmongers, and environmental polluters. So, as a kind of a corrective, I had to look at history and statistics and data, to see what is really happening. Are things really getting worse, or is it that we're now paying attention?

That narrative can become self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling; if people think the world is crazy, they will turn to demagogues who say, "We can keep you safe... in exchange for you liberties." The Trumps, the Marine le Pens, they have a strong agenda to trigger people's fight or flight instincts. In the surveys, you can see the common denominator for those who voted for Brexit was that they were gloomy and thought things were going in the wrong direction.

The book is full of seriously impressive statistics. What are a few that particularly struck you?
The poverty statistics over the last few decades are some of the most wonderful news the world has ever seen. We've reduced extreme poverty from 37 percent to less than ten percent in 25 years. Every minute that we are speaking, another 100 people rise out of extreme poverty. And this tells you something about how powerful this development is. The fact that we've increased life expectancy so much—almost entirely removing early death from the equation—is incredibly powerful. The chance of someone born today reaching retirement age is greater than the chance of anyone throughout history reaching their fifth birthday.

Even sub-Saharan African countries that are a bit behind on health and development are now showing dramatic progress. In Kenya, over one decade, they increased life expectancy by ten years. That meant that people aged ten years, but were actually further from death than they were at the start. That is monumental. Of course there are still major problems, but for the first time in history they are the exception rather than the rule.

Photo: Oast House Archive, via

This "25 year" thing comes up a lot. In the book it almost seems like 1990 was some kind of magic year. That can't just be because Public Enemy released Fear of a Black Planet. Was it the end of the Cold War, or what?
Well, I believe in liberalization and free trade, so it does fit my political prejudices. But it's important to say that while 1990 saw an acceleration, this is really a 200-year story. For about 5,000 years of human development nothing really happens, then there's an explosion. The acceleration in 1990 is impressive because the development that took the western world 180 years is being replicated in the developing world in 25. This has a lot to do with the fall of wars, the fall of communism, the fall of dictatorships in Latin America, and the opening up of the Chinese and Indian economies. The world began to reduce obstacles to trade, but also to communication, information, and technology. More people were liberated and educated in those countries, so they could put their knowledge and creativity at the disposal of the world.

Up until the 1970s, 90 percent of the Chinese population lived in extreme poverty, the worst statistics you could have at the time—then what you had is this amazing growth. In terms of brute numbers, it's China and India and places like that that explain how a billion people were lifted out of poverty in such a short time.

There's quite a dominant narrative in the west right now that this generation doesn't have it as good as the last—that millennials are getting screwed by the baby boomers. Does this contradict your theory at all?
There is definitely an argument that the baby boomers made things quite convenient for themselves, and in some ways this generation is not as lucky when it comes to things like pensions, where public money ends up, housing policy, and so on. And those are problems that we need to deal with in the political debate. But that mustn't blind us to the economic, social, and technological progress that the present generation is experiencing to a larger degree than any other in history. Simply in terms of medicine and life expectancy—dealing with infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, and making progress against cancer, but also cell regeneration and biotechnology—this generation will live longer and better than any in history.

Then there's technology—communication and the internet. In their parents' generation, for someone from a poor background who wanted to learn, just to find the books was a struggle. Families would save for months to buy an encyclopedia—now it's all free. In that way, this will be the happiest and luckiest generation ever.

Another narrative is that we live in an age of rising economic inequality.
In a way we do; since the 1980s in Europe and the US, inequality has increased. If two billion people from the developing world are suddenly able to put their brains and hard work into the market, then it's more difficult to work in the same type of businesses and factories. On the other hand, this process has also meant a reduction in price in almost everything—it's cheaper than ever before to get your life's needs met.

And inequality isn't actually a problem in itself—only when it leads to less social mobility, but that's more a problem of education. To me, the interesting thing is absolute living standards, not where you are relative to others. If you think about the life you may lead as compared to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, yes there are differences—they have private jets, better housing, and buy more expensive wine. But their everyday experiences are actually probably not that different. They use the same computer, the same cell phone—they don't have access to that much better information or food intake.

Compare that to 200 years ago, when wealth differences were life and death. If you were poor you died young, you were illiterate—no travel, no technology. Warren Buffet doesn't get 30 extra years of life because he had better access to food and nourishment when his brain was evolving.

You even argue that we're doing better than ever on the environment. That might surprise a lot of people.
This is where some of the greatest challenges remain, particularly in terms of issues like global warming and the health of the oceans. But when you look at the environmental damage that immediately affects people's health, we've actually made enormous accomplishments in a very short time. Even in the late 1970s we just didn't care much about the environment. But then wealth and knowledge increased and things improved. In Britain, for instance, the six leading pollutants have been reduced by 60 percent. The air is cleaner, rivers are cleaner—in the west, forests are growing back, and the rate of decline is slowing in emerging markets like China and India. We've reduced the number oil spills in the ocean by 99 percent.

The reason I am an optimist with regard to the outstanding problems is that increasing wealth and knowledge have solved problems before—we haven't had to dismantle industrialized society. On the contrary, it was technological developments that saved us. We have the energy sources that will help us deal with global warming. Right now, they are a bit too expensive—so what do you do? You reduce the price with technological development—and you get richer! As China and India get richer, they will deal with these problems at a much faster rate than we did in the west.

Okay, so if everything is so great, why doesn't anyone seem to realize it?
I think our evolutionary pre-history is part of it. We're a problem solving species—but that means we look for problems and risks constantly. And now we have global media 24/7 and social media, so all risks and threats are reported. The new phenomenon in the world is not human suffering; it's that everyone has a cell phone so they can document it, and send it around the world. It becomes a self-fulfilling narrative.

And we know from psychology how difficult it is to change people's opinions and perceptions. If they've already decided that everything is out of control, they say, "Look, I can see there's a military coup going on in Turkey—I can see the pictures on Twitter right now." Then you tell them, "Yeah, but when you were growing up in the 1960s there were about 15 military coups a year. That declined to about four per year in the early 21st century, and in 2016 we've had one... and it failed!" But strangely, in psychology, often when you show people contradictory data and statistics, it can sometimes actually serve to reinforce their prejudices.

Yeah, humans do seem quite good at screwing things up. What are the main risks to all this amazing progress?
This is where I am not a chronic optimist, as some people expect me to be. I have tremendous hope and belief in mankind's ability to produce and accumulate knowledge and creativity, but am almost as pessimistic about what happens when mankind gains power over other people, particularly with governmental efforts to block certain technologies and put up barriers to trade and education.

The rise of populism in the west, which plays on anxiety and nostalgia—and the lack of understanding of the progress we have made—I think could wreak havoc. It is a threat to the openness that all this is dependent on. There could also be external shocks, such as geopolitical issues with Russia or China, or another financial crisis. We are building up problems in the financial sector right now.

These wouldn't necessarily stop progress—in the 20th century we dealt with protectionism, the Great Depression, and two World Wars, and still more than doubled life expectancy and reduced poverty more than ever before. But if we began to dismantle our openness, then we would definitely impede the pace of progress.

Progress is available now.

Photo: ullstein bild/Getty Images

America's war on porn has really picked up steam this year. In March, the State of Utah became the first to formally declare pornography a "public-health hazard." Over the summer, the Republican National Committee used its party platform to amp up the rhetoric by declaring porn a "menace" and a "public-health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions."

The Wall Street Journal echoed these claims this week in an editorial warning against the "addictive dangers of pornography." This editorial, co-authored by rabbi Shmuley Boteach and, interestingly, former Playboy model Pamela Anderson, argues that porn is tearing apart Americans' marriages and families and that we must therefore give it up altogether. But is porn really as damaging as they claim?

As the director of the social psychology program at Ball State University, I study the science of sex for a living, and I can assure you that it's not. Research has consistently shown that porn actually has far more positive than negative effects and, further, that it's only problematic for a minority of users. If the anti-porn advocates were serious about helping this minority, they'd stop pretending that porn is the boogeyman and start paying attention to the very limited circumstances under which porn can be problematic.

Anti-porn activists have argued that pornography is responsible for a wide range of ill health effects. Among other things, they claim that it has created an epidemic of erectile dysfunction among young men and that it's causing them to commit rape and sexual assault.

When you look at the research, these health claims have failed to garner empirical support. For instance, studies haven't found that men who use more porn have more erectile difficulties (see here and here for summaries of two recent studies on this topic).

Likewise, there's no evidence that greater usage of porn is contributing to more sexual violence. In fact, what the accumulated research shows is that as US porn consumption has increased, the rate of rape has actually declined.

Another big health claim associated with porn is that it is destructive to our relationships. This is the central message of this week's WSJ editorial by Boteach and Anderson, in fact. They argue that men who use porn in particular tend to have "less satisfactory intimate lives" and that porn use leads people to become "inured to intimacy."

In support of these claims, Boteach and Anderson point to a research summary published on the American Psychological Association's website suggesting that porn use is linked to lower quality sex and relationships. What they don't acknowledge is that the studies aren't drawing a causal link between porn and lower relationship quality, but rather an associative one: They don't take into account the possibility that people's relationships and sex lives may have been on the decline first, prompting an increase in porn use. Put another way, these studies don't tell us whether porn use is the cause or symptom of relationship problems.

Further, consider that two studies have emerged this year alone finding that porn helps far more relationships than it harms. A national study of nearly 40,000 cohabiting and married men and women in America found that those who watched porn with their partners had an easier time keeping passion alive in their relationships. That's right—couples who watch porn together tend to feel more, not less, passion and desire for each other.

Likewise, in a smaller study of men and women in relationships who were asked to write about the effects of their own personal use of porn, the single most common thing participants said was that there were "no negative effects" on themselves or on their relationships. Among those who said that their porn use did impact their relationships, positive effects (eg, better communication and more sexual experimentation) were mentioned with far greater frequency than were negative effects (eg, feelings of insecurity and reduced desire).

Suffice it to say, the weight of the evidence doesn't support political claims about the negative health effects of porn. However, one thing that's clear from the research is that porn doesn't seem to affect everyone the same way, and there is a small minority of folks who report that porn has negative effects on them.

For instance, in a recent nationally representative survey of Australians , 13 percent of men and 10 percent of women agreed with the statement that "pornography has had a bad effect on you." Likewise, this week's WSJ editorial cites an American study in which 9 percent of respondents said they were unsuccessful in trying to give up porn. This suggests that perhaps as many as 1 in 10 adults feel that porn is personally harmful or have trouble regulating their use of it.

It's worth noting that research suggests that for many of the people who report these negative effects of porn, the real problem isn't porn per se—it's that they have hang-ups about using pornography in the first place. For example, studies have found that being more religious is linked to feeling more distressed about one's own porn use, as well as feeling that one is "addicted" to porn.

By the way, neuroscience research has found that porn isn't addictive in the same way that, say, drugs and alcohol are. In fact, the brains of people who consider themselves to be "addicted" to porn don't respond in the way you would expect if these people truly had an addiction (see here for a summary of the research). "Porn addiction," therefore, isn't a scientific term, let alone an official diagnosis. Labels like this are problematic in other ways, too. For instance, as psychologist David Ley argues in his book The Myth of Sex Addiction , when we incorrectly use the "addiction" label for behaviors like this, it effectively absolves people of personal responsibility.

I'm not trying to suggest that porn can only be problematic for people who feel religious guilt. In order to really understand the circumstances under which porn is likely to be harmful, one must be open to having a very nuanced discussion about how specific types of porn might affect specific types of people.

For example, although national-level data do not find a link between porn consumption and sexual violence, there are specific cases in which porn could potentially predispose certain viewers to committing sexual assault, such as when men who are already at high risk for engaging in sexual violence watch very violent pornography. Indeed, studies suggest that it's really the confluence of certain personality traits with really hardcore porn that's likely to result in problems.

In discussions about the effects of pornography on health, it is therefore important to acknowledge that not all porn is created equal and, moreover, that not everyone responds to porn the same exact way. As such, declaring war on porn in general is neither helpful nor realistic.

The vast majority of Americans are at least occasional viewers of porn, and most of them are not harmed by what they watch. In fact, the research is pretty clear that they're more likely to experience porn as a positive rather than negative force in their lives. However, a minority of viewers is clearly and negatively impacted by some kinds of porn, and they are deserving of our attention.

If we're serious about helping them, though, we need to let the research—not political rhetoric—be our guide.

Justin Lehmiller, PhD, is the director of the social psychology program at Ball State University and author of the blog Sex and Psychology. Follow him on Twitter.

Image by Flickr user tinanwang

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

It's not uncommon that, at some point in your life, you've been sitting and talking to someone when you flash on the image of doing something horrible to him or her. It could be a friend, a lover, or someone else you didn't necessarily want to see drowning in a pool of his or her own blood, but usually it's a flash—a thought that immediately vanishes. These violent thoughts might persist a bit longer when you're stuck in traffic with a bunch of dicks or sitting across from a colleague who is audibly enjoying some noodle soup for lunch, but mostly you'll forget the daydream right after it came to you. And if you do remember, it won't worry you too much—you know you wouldn't actually kill someone.

But these kind of visions aren't that fleeting for everybody. For people like me, for example. I've suffered from Harm OCD for more than six years. Harm OCD is a psychological disorder characterized by an obsessive fear of doing something you know is wrong—something gruesome, criminal, or transgressive. You're obsessively afraid of turning out to be a pedophile, of committing murder or rape, of having an uncontrollable violent fit that would prove to yourself you're a monster.

The key here is that the obsessive fear of not being able to stop yourself doing something gruesome isn't the same as the desire to actually do it. People with Harm OCD aren't more at risk of acting on their impulses than any other person. They just live in a constant obsessive fear of that risk.

For me, it started with an anxiety attack when I was 17, and generally carefree and happy. One day, I just started freaking out—a feeling that stayed with me day or night. I felt the kind of fear you'd feel right before going into the most important job interview of your life, but in my case, there wasn't any job interview. I was terrified, and I had no idea why. Those times are a daze for me now. I spent most of my free time asleep if I could, annoyed with my friends and unable to focus on anything but my anxiety.

Then one night, while I was trying to sleep, a thought slipped in my mind. For a split second, I imagined going into the kitchen, getting ahold of a sharp knife, and making my way into my parents' room to savagely kill them in their sleep. That thought convinced me that I was going officially mad. My anxiety suddenly had a focus.

From this moment onward, I was obsessively afraid that I would kill my parents. I'd have some rational moments telling myself that I knew I'd never be able to do that, but those moments would always lose to the question: What if? What if tonight I went crazy, lost control, and really did grab a knife? It was all I thought about—at school, sweating and panicking through my classes, and at home, eating dinner with my parents, afraid to touch any sharp knives.

What if my therapist was wrong? What if I was really sick, and he just hadn't noticed?

Looking back I see how my anxiety worked kind of like the way an autoimmune disease works—when the immune system that usually protects you starts attacking your body. The part of my subconscious responsible for knowing what is right and wrong overpowered the rest of me and affected my mental health and happiness. I couldn't see it like that at the time. I was convinced I was going crazy. After a few years, I was at my wit's end, and I made an appointment with a psychologist.

When I came in for that first appointment, I fully expected to leave there in a straightjacket, thrown in an ambulance to be locked away in some institution. The first thing I told my psychologist was that I thought I was schizophrenic. But after rambling away for about ten minutes, I noticed he wasn't looking very impressed. He assured me that I wouldn't have made an appointment with him if I had actually been psychotic or a psychopath, which was a relief. He explained to me what Harm OCD was, and that it is actually a relatively common disorder—a study from 2007 found that 78 percent of people with OCD have what is called "intrusive thoughts." And many people suffering from actual Harm OCD won't be diagnosed because they don't recognize their thoughts as OCD. Twenty minutes after my psychologist had reassured me a bit, we had a plan to treat me and an appointment for the following week.

I was finally diagnosed, but the relief didn't last very long. I never again thought of killing my parents, but new chilling thoughts popped up: fear that I was a serial killer, that I'd have sex with animals, that I was a repressed pedophile. It all went through my mind. Despite the help from my psychologist, I could never entirely control the thoughts and subsequent fears that overtook me. What if he was wrong? What if I was really sick, and he just hadn't noticed? Whenever one vision left me, a more terrifying one took its place.

Right now, I'm mostly afraid of subconsciously being a pedophile. When I see a child in the street, I'm flooded by questions like: Why did I look at him? What am I thinking? Is this a repressed desire? I have a little sister, and being around her is incredibly stressful—not because of an actual desire, I know that, but because of the fear I might have one.

Through therapy, I've learned some ways to deal with the fear, to not be completely paralyzed by it. When a thought comes to me, instead of trying to run from it, I try to accept it for what it is. I won't repress the thought, but try to be detached from it and see where the thought goes. If I'm not repressing it, generally the vision is neutralized—I'm assured I don't actually have the desire and the panic subsides.

Talking about it to other people helps, too. On one online forum about Harm OCD, I met 27-year-old Lola, who told me about her disorder. Like me, she suffers mainly from the fear of being or becoming a pedophile, but it's particularly hard for her because she's the mother of a two-year-old. While taking care of her son, she lives in constant terror of harming him and not being able to stop herself. "It's very difficult to live with, but I know it won't happen, and I try to manage it day to day. In recent months, I've started suffering from another intrusive thought: I'm obsessively scared that I no longer love my husband. When I see him, I constantly observe his movements and analyze how I feel about them to determine whether I still love him or not. All day I replay the moments we last saw each other in my mind, dissecting every moment. Why didn't I laugh when he made that joke? Why didn't I sleep with him last night? I know I love him deeply, but I can't stop questioning it."

That struck a chord with me, because I've obsessively asked myself the same question while being in relationships and drove myself nuts. But I'm not married, and I don't have a child—my OCD so far hasn't ruined any family bonds. Talking to Lola about her ordeal has helped me to put my situation into perspective.

After having seen a number of therapists, I had more or less given up the idea that I'd ever truly be rid of my OCD. I've always been very skeptical when it came to psychotherapy and refused any medication, so I felt stalled in my condition. Recently a new therapist suggested to me cognitive behavioral therapies to treat OCD and anxiety disorders. The treatment involves exposing someone gradually and in phases to the source of their fears. Meanwhile, you learn to do relaxation exercises to control the physiological effects of the fear. Additionally, you'll do exercises at home in between therapy sessions that confront you with the object of your fear, like holding a sharp knife or hanging out with your little sister instead of avoiding her. I am currently in an early stage of this therapy.

The one thing I have learned is that the more you try to fight intrusive thoughts, the more frequently they'll come to you and the more violent they become. I know that the first step for me is to take a deep breath and accept the thoughts forming in my head. My fear and disgust are actually proof that there's nothing wrong with my morality.

Donald Trump in Cincinnati on Thursday. Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Wednesday night at the Phoenix Convention Center, Donald Trump served up a hot plate of the same anti-immigrant fervor his base has been scarfing down since the start of his campaign. White nationalists loved the message, liberals loathed it, and some of Trump's Hispanic supporters—yeah, he has quite a few—found themselves reconsidering their positions.

During his speech, Trump renewed his commitment to some of his most famous, most controversial immigration proposals: building a big wall on the Mexican border, getting Mexico to pay for it "100 percent," and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, all massive undertakings that have been criticized as being massively expensive and also bad ideas in the first place.

But among the ten bullet points in his immigration plan, Trump also included the promise to "block funding for sanctuary cities."

In case you need a refresher on right-wing talking points, a "sanctuary city" is a jurisdiction where the local government hinders or just refuses to assist in the federal government's efforts to deport people. This can take the form of written statutes, or just unofficial policy. For Trump and many other conservatives, this is tantamount to letting lawbreakers go free, and the Republican presidential nominee often highlights horrific crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. This includes the 2015 murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco—a bill that would punish migrants illegally reentering the US after being deported with at least five years in prison, which Trump supports, is nicknamed Kate's Law.

Trump's reasoning goes that violent crime will be reduced if we deport undocumented immigrants, and sanctuary cities are standing in the way of his brand of law and order. To encourage these towns to change their ways, Trump wants to stop them from receiving federal funds, a policy other Republicans have been fighting for in Congress.

But not all sanctuary cities are alike. According to Faye Hipsman, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, there's not one answer to the question of what a sanctuary city even is. "It can mean a whole range of different things," she told VICE.

Los Angeles—often cited as the first sanctuary city—is one of the most immigration-friendly areas in the country. Currently, the county keeps Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out of its jails, and the local school board remains committed to stop the ICE from sniffing around public school classrooms. But there are more moderate policies in place in relatively conservative jurisdictions that could also be called sanctuary cities. A policy in Gaston County, North Carolina, to name just one example, simply mandates that police not ask anyone about his or her immigration status.

As for the motivations behind the laws, it's hardly just bleeding-heart liberalism, or "political correctness," the bogeyman Trump loves to invoke. Many of these municipalities are actually worried about their bottom lines. For instance, California's very conservative Orange County decided a year ago that even if the ICE wanted the county to detain undocumented immigrants past their release date the county would refuse for fear that inmates would have grounds to sue the country for violating their rights.

Apart from legal liability, according to Hipsman, "the reason why think these noncompliance policies are a good idea is that they're actually safer." Sure, pundits like Bill O'Reilly claim that Obama administration policies like his Priority Enforcement Program make him "complicit" in the murder of Kate Steinle, but focusing on individual atrocities obscures the larger picture.

To use Los Angeles as an example again, one in ten residents in that county is undocumented. Policies that might result in residents being deported for minor infractions could breed widespread distrust of law enforcement, the thinking goes. Consequently, Hipsman said, local policymakers "argue that when the threat of deportation is there, it really undermines their ability to do their jobs, and do community policing and solve crimes."

If the term "sanctuary city" is more complicated than it appears on first glance, so too is the proposal to stop federal money from going to these places. When Trump ad-libbed,"We block the funding. No more funds," during his Wednesday speech, it may have given the impression that he'll really be pinching the money hose and putting a strain on these jurisdictions. That's not likely, according to Hipsman: "It's not like they're defunding an entire city's law enforcement department." Instead, she pointed to a small number of relevant funding programs the Obama administration has already looked into suspending, like the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which provides money to jails that hold undocumented immigrants, and another called Justice Assistance Grants. Those are the programs that would likely be cut off for sanctuary cities during a Trump presidency, if he could get the requisite bills through Congress.

And let's not forget that Obama spent most of his administration cracking down on immigration, deporting a record number of people during his eight years in office. Obama's Department of Justice even looked into defunding sanctuary cities in July, but it looks like he has abandoned that strategy. Far from opening the borders, according to Hipsman, that's really just a negotiating strategy.

ICE negotiates with uncooperative municipalities and often arrives at compromises, like when LA County agreed last year to give the federal agency access to some immigrant inmates. You could call that negotiation tolerating non-compliance. But, Hipsman argued, you could "also see it as a give and take, so they can get as much cooperation as possible."

Because even if you cut their funding, she said, "some jurisdictions aren't going to comply no matter what."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Original images via Flickr users Matt B and The All-Nite Images

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After speaking at Austin's SXSW festival last spring with Michelle, President Obama has decided to throw the coolest house party of all time and have a mini festival right on the White House lawn, NPR reports.

The Obama administration announced Friday that it plans to partner with the Austin festival to hold South by South Lawn, a special one-day SXSW festival at the White House on October 3. The event will feature interactive, film, and music panels and performances and is asking the public to nominate creators and innovators they think should have a showcase.

There's not a schedule yet, but we can only pray he books Virginia senator Tim Kaine and his wife to shred the harmonica and perform a bit of soft shoe. There almost certainly won't be any punk rock, though, according to a VICE investigation.

According to the website, the festival "is a call to arms for every American to roll up their sleeves and make a positive mark on our country—and a celebration of the great work so many of us have already accomplished," a fitting send-off party for the playlist-making guacamole purist of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Plus, after seeing how much fun Malia had at Lollapalooza, how could Barry resist?

Read: Has Obama Ever Listened to Punk? An Investigation