Charlie Brooker has always had a cynical eye on the future. His Black Mirror takes place 20 minutes from now, in a world ten degrees more cynical than our own. And this new season has room to explore this darkness—it's direct to Netflix, with episodes at least an hour long. The season is preoccupied in particular with the parts of our identities we submerge and put in danger in the course of just getting by, and how hard it is to break free of our everyday tech; it's Black Mirror: Terms and Conditions.

But a second thematic thread emerges, particularly through Brooker's darkest visions, and gets to the heart of what this future is, and who it's for. Black Mirror is already certain technology is dangerous—that second question is: Are you?


Every horror story is both a cautionary tale and an empathy experiment—but an empathy experiment works by forcing you to understand something you hadn't previously considered. The most revealing part of Black Mirror might be what the show thinks its audience needs to hear, and what it assumes will be news to them.

At its best, Black Mirror uses technology to frame compelling characters and weighty questions. This season's standout episode, "San Junipero," uses the singularity as a backdrop for two women who fall in love, then have to decide whether their afterlives will be analog or digital. The ending is optimistic, but the episode's success is how the drama integrates the technology. Their virtual reality eternity is a tool, not a dictator, for their issues of identity and faith. The ways technology-as-object operates within the story (rationed out in nursing homes, final registration as a fiddly part of hospice paperwork) suggests a cautious oddness without undercutting the human drama.

"San Junipero" is the only episode this season where technology has any upsides. The show's entire run has been concerned about the ways we lose ourselves in seemingly necessary (or at least convenient) technology, and fall prey to its hidden rules. Because it's Black Mirror, those rules are almost inevitably sadistic. It's the season's weakest, but "Shut Up and Dance" is very clear about our everyday technology being used to control us against our own best interests. "Playtest" brings Fredric Wertham vigor to immersive VR, with a darkly comic stinger that suggests you drop the controller and call your mom. It's fascinating to watch the specifics of each of these brave new worlds, and what their empathy experiments suggest about the intended audience.

The overarching concern is the ways we lose ourselves in necessary technology, and fall prey to its hidden rules

"Men Against Fire," which tackles the military-industrial complex, centers on neural implant technology for soldiers (as reflexive to them as the translators on their armor). In the aftermath of a "roach hunt" to eliminate scavengers, we learn the military's blocked anything that interferes with efficiency: Soldiers don't smell battlefield carnage, and "roaches" appear vampiric so conscience can't interfere. When a soldier objects to his modifications, he gets a stark reminder the government quite literally controls what he sees: They casually turn off his optics, then force him to relive his own kills. This is, they remind him, the case for the rest of his life, so he might as well play along; it's literalized, institutionalized PTSD. It's a clear enough empathy test for those who expect military stories to glorify war—but who among Black Mirror's target audience is so unaware of the military's problems? Does the Black Mirror audience believe dehumanization of the enemy first happens on the battlefield? (And "roaches" are the "inferior-DNA" standbys of a freshman-year eugenics lesson. Was the empathy test—heaven forbid—also here, for those kicked into contemplation by the reveal that the sick are people too? If so, it's fascinating; Brooker is condemning his audience by proxy.)

This creeping lack of faith—in people, in the future—also sucks subtlety out of the satire. "Nosedive" (co-written by Brooker, Mike Schur, and Rashida Jones) is a pastel dystopia ruled by a social network with instant ratings for social interactions, from posting a photo to ordering coffee. People are assiduously polite and vaguely alienated, suppressing their feelings to snag the five-star ratings that determine job security, financial benefits, and social access.

"Nosedive" makes clear that being graded without recourse is bad news and that forced politeness grates, but the episode seems fundamentally unaware of things women and people of color already face daily on social media. This world as posited, in which women aren't subjected to debilitating ratings from catcallers or sexist bosses, and people of color aren't downvoted for, say, blocking traffic with a protest against police violence, seems actually like an improvement on the current status quo. Sure, parables simplify, but Black Mirror's empathy test asks such basic questions (Is social media making us disingenuous? Is it dangerous to be yourself?) that its intended commentary bounces off its own premise—unless you're so new to these ideas that it's the first time you've been asked to think them over.

Perhaps that's the real lesson of Black Mirror. For much of this season, the empathy experiment in each installment is a switch waiting to be flipped; the degree to which you question the missing pieces reflects both your own cynicism and Brooker's. But if you're horrified by Black Mirror, you haven't been paying attention.

The sense that a show doesn't trust its audience can make for tricky viewing. "Hated in the Nation," a Scandinavian-detective homage and 90-minute bee pun, neatly distills the season: It's not as hopeless as its darkest episodes, not as direct as its simpler parables, and it carries several thematic threads. It explores the Twitter hive mind (get it?) with bandwagon hashtags, activists, and trolls, against a setting that's much more interesting than any of that sounds. Black Mirror watchers presumably recognize the precepts being used—certainly the episode expects us to be familiar with social media. But the activist/troll divide the episode hopes to play with still ends up with an impossible task: Introduce Twitter within the show universe as if it's a foreign object, and then parse those internet dynamics with enough nuance to spark empathy from the audience. Sure, the episode suggests, the serial killer passing judgment is terrible, but isn't everyone on social media also terrible?

But the core of "Hated in the Nation" exists outside that social media muddle, in the degree to which nature now relies on technology and the ways the government happily exploits apolitical tech. Unlike the episode's Twitter crusade, this ethical tangle asks what can be done without answering it; it paints a picture that only slowly begins to look like our world, though once it does, it's hard to shake. For the audience, the real horror behind this tech isn't a flame war, or even a troll taken to the darkest endpoint—it's the audience realizing their own powerlessness in a government system that routinely uses third-party tech to betray their privacy. It's Black Mirror's most successful empathy test, and perhaps this vague distrust of its audience's awareness is its real point all along; it's not about knowing what the problem is, but about how little we can trust others to believe us.

Elizabeth Tracey Mae Wettlaufer. Photo via Facebook

A Woodstock, Ontario, registered nurse has been charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, relating to elderly patients under her care, according to information released by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) Tuesday.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

Chances are, if you have been affected by drug addiction or just watched enough reality TV, you've heard something about the concept of "codependency." It's the idea that partners and relatives of addicted people basically have a disease just like their loved ones—leading them to "enable" the problem by preventing addicts from "hitting bottom." After gaining currency in the 1980s, the concept is now infiltrating America's latest national conversation about heroin addiction.

The only problem is that it is inaccurate, unscientific, and harmful.

Even so, the classic text on the subject—the 1986 self-help book Codependent No More—remains on the Amazon best seller list for addictions. A new reality show focused on intervening in so-called codependent relationships premiered this year. And this crazy election season has seen seemingly endless talk of how Hillary Clinton "enabled" her husband Bill's alleged sexual addiction. (Trump's wives somehow get a pass.)

The good news is that the addictions field is slowly coming around to the idea that treatment should be based on evidence, not anecdote. Even so, care for families and the rhetoric around it remains stubbornly trapped in the past. For example, here's one email I received recently from a mom (excerpted with her permission):

The therapist at treatment says I'm an extremely codependent mother and that I need to let him to hit rock bottom. It's been seven years, rock bottom seems ridiculous at this point. Isn't seven years of hell enough rock bottom for anyone?

My son has tried very hard to grasp this type of treatment and says his head is full of recovery knowledge but his craving is stronger then anything he's learned. He says he has no choice to surrender to the fact that he's a piece of shit junkie, (his words). My son is a beautiful, gentle soul, who is very sick, I refuse to abandon him...

They say he's manipulating me and that I shouldn't respond. If I do respond I should tell him his problem is no longer my problem.... I've been told... that is my drug... I have tried to grasp all of this, but in order to do it, I would have to rewire my heart.

Experts say this woman's experience is common—and medically indefensible.

"It's terrible and unethical," says Carrie Wilkens, PhD., co-founder and clinical director for the Center for Motivation and Change, which uses evidence-based therapies. While family members may need to detach if someone with addiction is dangerous to others, doing so in an attempt to help the person hit bottom can backfire. "It really can result in death," Wilkens says. "I hope we can all eradicate in next decade this completely useless phrase that I think has contributed to lots of people dying."

Indeed, there is no reliable research support for codependence and related concepts. Although there have been a few attempts to measure it, they fizzled out as it proved as slippery as a horoscope—and a search of PubMed reveals little further research interest in it since the turn of the century.

"There is no disease of codependence," adds Wilkens. "It's not in the DSM , you can't diagnose and get reimbursed for it. It doesn't exist." She adds, "If you line up ten people who some treatment provider has given the disease of codependence, all ten have something profoundly different going on in terms of how they work, how they see the world, where they are in terms of what's going on with their loved ones, and their compensatory strategies to deal with what is happening in the home."

Worse, tactics dismissed in the past as "enabling" by codependents— such as providing loving support, clean needles, safe housing, overdose reversal drugs, and even (supervised) heroin itself when done appropriately—have been shown capable of significantly helping people with addiction, rather than harming them.

So why did we ever start believing in codependence and why does it persist? The concept seems to have taken off during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the 12-step movement was so popular that the 1991 film The Player showed non-alcoholic movie execs going to AA meetings because that's where the deals were being made.

"Codependence was a fad that caught fire and hasn't burned out," says Carol Tavris, a psychologist and author of The Mismeasure of Women, who critiqued the concept in her book.

Tavris adds, "It's a mush of reasonable ideas—of course people depend on one another and care for one another—that got its own pathological label and, without a shred of data, was turned into a 'diagnosis.' Women have traditionally been the caregivers in this society, and 'codependence' inflated aspects of their normal role as carers into a 'disorder.'"

Codependence is also based on an outmoded definition of addiction: the idea that the root of the problem is depending on something—or someone—to function. But DSM-5, the latest edition, dropped the term "dependence" in 2013 as the label for addiction. This was to emphasize the fact that compulsive behavior in spite of negative outcomes is the real problem, not just needing a drug.

Moreover, the notion of codependence also contains another backward idea about human nature: the belief popularized by many therapists and self-help groups in the 1970s that people are naturally independent and shouldn't need connection to others to be happy. This, too, is contradicted by research. "We're social animals. We're wired to connect and be dependent on one another," says Wilkens. "If you were a loner on the savanna, odds are, you were going to die."

Adds Tavris, "Why isn't 'non-dependence' a disorder, describing, say, men who can't acknowledge their needs for others? How about 'intra-dependence,' describing men like Donald Trump, who depend only on themselves?"

Wilkens points out one other particularly pernicious aspect of the concept. The idea is that the codependent gets psychological benefits from keeping the addicted person sick. "There's an implicit assumption that the codependent is getting something out of it," she says. "Like the desire to be a hero or rescuer or benefactor. But that could not be farther from truth." The real problem, she adds, is that family members don't have the skills needed to help addicted people recover.

In her work, family members are the most highly motivated people Wilkens sees—and they desperately want their loved ones to get better, not worse. "It's tragic because they have got the leverage and the resources, and we underutilize them and make them feel bad," she tells me.

As the country grapples with heroin addiction in big cities and rural communities alike, lawmakers and media outlets would do well to ditch this archaic concept and its attendant rhetorical baggage. Doing so might help us all learn to connect better, whether we're close to addicted people or not. Lives are at stake, and America's dysfunctional relationship with codependence needs to stop.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Mission, BC parents say the man in this Creep Catchers video is a principal. Screenshot via YouTube

A Mission, BC dad said he was shocked and disgusted when he recognized the man featured in a Creep Catchers video as the principal of his children's elementary school.

In the video, recorded October 14, a man who identified himself as a 33-year-old biologist named James was confronted by Fraser Valley Creep Catchers at an Abbotsford shopping mall. The vigilante group, which has multiple chapters across the country that shame suspected predators online, said he was trying to meet two teenage girls to have sex with them.

But the dad, who wants to remain anonymous to protect his children's identity, told VICE as soon as he saw the footage he said, "Fuck, that looks like the kids' elementary school principal."

He said he took a screenshot and showed it to one of his kids, who "identified without hesitation."

"We are heartbroken," he said.

Read More: Edmonton Woman Kills Herself After Being Confronted by Creep Catchers

The clip shows Creep Catchers following "James" and demanding to know why he wanted to meet the two teens. "You want to be my daddy? You want to be my sugar daddy," a female Creep Catcher asks, apparently referring to chat logs the group had with the man. He maintains that he "didn't do anything but talk."

After Creep Catchers posted the video online, parents began commenting that he was a school principal and using his real name.

"It's him clearly," said one, while another said she was planning to make an RCMP report on behalf of her child.

Abbotsford police told VICE there is an open investigation, though they would not confirm the man's identity. Angus Wilson, superintendent of the Mission Public Schools told reporters the "individual allegedly identified in the video is not currently working in our schools."

Marie Bullon, president of Fraser Valley Creep Catchers, said interactions with the police have so far been "really good." She noted that the group warned its Facebook followers not to publicly give out the man's personal details until his identity was 100 percent confirmed.

Surrey Creep Catchers recently faced backlash for two instances where men were wrongly identified as creeps.

The father who spoke to VICE said some parents are now threatening to pull their kids out of the school allegedly run by the man in the video. He said both his kids "trusted and loved him."

He also said he supports the Creep Catcher movement because "police do absolutely no prevention on the cyber pedophile front."

Abbotsford police spokesman Ian MacDonald told VICE members of the public should report suspected criminal activity to the cops.

"We completely understand the desire to hold people accountable for their actions," said MacDonald, "but we don't feel that public shaming is the best or only way to do that."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

According to the New York Times, the last interviews Donald Trump did before announcing his bid may offer the best insight into his presidential neuroses. The newspaper has released previously recorded interviews from biographer Michael D'Antonio that shed light on Trump's ultimate insecurity: a fear of failure.

The more than five hours of recorded conversations between D'Antonio and Trump, later used for the biography The Truth About Trump, reveal a Republican presidential nominee who is wholly insecure, obsessed with being in the spotlight, and unable to reflect on his faults and past mistakes.

For example, the former real estate mogul—who has declared bankruptcy multiple times, is currently in his third marriage, and is projected to likely lose the presidential election—believes that he's never failed before.

"I never had a failure, because I always turned a failure into a success," he tells D'Antonio. He also simultaneously holds others to impossible standards, saying, "For the most part, you can't respect people because most people aren't worthy of respect."

Perhaps one of the most jarring moments of the interviews, however, is when D'Antonio asks Trump to reflect on the meaning of life. Trump responds by saying, "No, I don't want to think about it. I don't like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see."

Two years and one disastrous presidential campaign later, most of the country doesn't either.

Read: Trump's Ghostwriter Thinks His Presidency Could Lead to the 'End of Civilization'

Hero politician Irene Mathyssen. Photo via CP.

The NDP is trying to drum up support for a motion that, if adopted by the Liberals, would provide free prescription birth control to women and trans people.

After successfully pushing the Conservative government to remove the federal tax on tampons last year, NDP MP Irene Mathyssen is now setting her sights on the high cost of birth control.

"The onus for birth control is always placed on women, or most often, although some men do take responsibility for their fertility, but it still comes back to women most often," Mathyssen told VICE News. "And just like the tax on tampons, it's not particularly fair that , and the issue is exactly the same. We will have a large chunk of people who are opting for surgical abortion because they do not have access to the drugs."

The NDP will have to convince the Liberals to support Mathyssen's motion, but the MP says that won't be hard.

"He's a feminist isn't he?" she said of Justin Trudeau. "And isn't this 2016? It's time that we caught up with the clinical and medical needs of women."

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

New video appears to show Canadian Special Forces helping set-up anti-tank missiles. Screenshot.

New video released last week shows Canadian special forces setting up a mobile anti-tank rocket atop a Kurdish armoured vehicle, in one of the clearest pictures yet showcasing Canada's role on the frontlines of the war to retake Mosul from the Islamic State.

Department of Defense photo by Marvin Lynchard

Former secretary of state Colin Powell has joined an already long list of prominent Republicans voting for Clinton in November. Powell made the announcement at a luncheon in Long Island on Tuesday, and his chief of staff has since confirmed the announcement, according to CNN.

Powell served under George W. Bush and remains a Republican, but this is the third consecutive election he's backed a Democratic presidential nominee, Politico reports.

The retired four-star general was quoted saying some less-than-flattering comments about the Democratic nominee and her husband in some leaked emails last September, but expressed far more disdain for his own party's nominee, calling Trump a "national disgrace and an international pariah."

" a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home," Powell wrote in an email. He also expressed annoyance that she involved him in the scandal over her private email server by claiming that he told her to use a personal account while secretary of state.

"I would rather not have to vote for her," he said. "Although she is a friend I respect."

It seems like Powell, like many voters this election, is settling for the only major-party alternative to Trump.

Read: The WikiLeaks Emails Show How a Clinton White House Might Operate

Tonight, on the season two premiere of CYBERWAR, VICE reporter Ben Makuch investigates the most significant cyberattacks of our time, from Russia to Ashley Madison, to the Islamic State and the Ukrainian power grid.

Then, check out an all new episode of DESUS & MERO with special guest the Fat Jew.

CYBERWAR airs Tuesdays at 10:30 PM ET/PT followed by DESUS & MERO at 11:30P ET/PT on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

Photo via Facebook

In February, Elizabeth Tracy Mae Wettlaufer posted on her Facebook page a picture of a T-shirt with words printed on it: "Nurses—We can't fix stupid but we can sedate it."

That was seven months after the alleged serial murderer is accused of claiming the life of her eighth elderly victim in a nursing home under her care.

Family, former employers and colleagues of Wettlaufer—charged with eight first-degree murder charges in a Woodstock, Ontario courtroom this morning—have been mostly silent and unwilling to speak to the news media about the accused or the allegations against her.

But the 49-year-old's online presence paints a picture of a single, solitary woman who loved her cats, and was close with her parents.

The accused's Facebook profile—under the name Bethe Wettlaufer—lists her current employer as Lifeguard Homecare and Nursing in Brantford, Ont.

A representative for Lifeguard told CBC News that Wettlaufer was a part-time employee for just over a year, but would not comment further, except to say she has not worked for the company since the summer.

Public records with the College of Nurses of Ontario show Wettlaufer is "not entitled to practice" in the province, where she was first registered as a nurse in 1995. She resigned from the college on Sept. 30 of this year—one day after police launched their probe into the suspicious deaths spanning seven years.

Her alleged crimes are listed on the college's website along with her former name: Elizabeth Tracy Mae Parker.

A LinkedIn profile for an Elizabeth Wettlaufer lists positions at the facilities where the alleged murders took place. She worked as a "charge nurse," overseeing staff in a unit at the Caressant Care nursing home from June 2007 to March 2014, and then at London's Meadow Park nursing home in 2014. The profile lists three years at Conestoga College's nursing program (1992 to 1995), and a bachelor's degree in counselling from the now-defunct London Baptist Bible College (1987 to 1991).

Her relationship with her husband ended sometime before September 2010 according to her Facebook posts, and she occasionally reflected on being single and starting to date new people.

In September 2010, Wettlaufer posted that she went for a final time to the church she used to attend with her husband: "Church was interesting. Will definitely not be going back there again but it was nice to have closure."

In November 2010 she announced she'd enrolled in online courses through Athabasca University with plans to become a nurse practitioner. Friends posted messages of support and encouragement.

Wettlaufer's posts were often funny memes and pictures of her cats and her parents' dog. She appears to like Star Trek, the minions from Despicable Me, and the Minnesota Vikings.

She apparently struggled and overcame an alcohol or drug dependency.

On September 28, 2015, she marked one year sober: "My own voice called to me in the darkness. Others hands lifted me when I chose the light. One year ago I woke up not dead. 365 days clean and sober."

It was thirteen months prior to that post that Wettlaufer is accused of murdering Arpad Horvath, 75, of London, Ont.—the last known alleged victim.

Follow Steve Goetz on Twitter.

Abertans are apparently coming for your bikes, Vancouver. Photo via unsplash

You could say Vancouver has a habit of blaming Alberta for its problems. Pipelines and greenhouse gas emissions are one thing, but today one cop added a spike in local crime to the list.

Faced with an uptick in thefts, Vancouver Constable Brian Montague decided to throw some not-so-subtle shade Alberta's way during a Tuesday presser, when asked about Alberta transplants committing crimes.

"I think a lot of it is anecdotal, I don't have any specific numbers to provide you," he began (translation: this is fact-free speculation). "I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the Alberta economy is so poor right now and the BC economy is thriving."

Montague said it used to be that Vancouverites moved to Alberta to get better jobs, but with the crash in oil development and rise of unemployment in the province, those trends have reversed. "We are seeing a lot more people—just in general—move from Alberta to British Columbia and as a result we are likely going to run into individuals who recently moved here who are committing crimes," he said.

To back up his point he cited a recent armed robbery at a pot shop, wherein two of the three dudes arrested and charged were from Medicine Hat and Calgary, respectively. A woman who was also part of the robbery remains at large; she could be back in Lethbridge starting a #NotAllAlbertans hashtag for all we know. Montague also mentioned an 18-year-old who was confronted by police for selling a stolen bike on Craigslist last week.

Read More: As the Alberta Economy Goes Down the Shitter, Bumbling Crime Schemes are Going Up

This isn't the first time police have suggested Alberta's tanking economy is helping people get in touch with their inner criminal masterminds. Back in April, VICE reported that ATM thefts, garage break-ins and other property crimes are on the rise in Calgary, which police say "parallels" the drop in oil prices.

But even if the correlation between layoffs and Trailer Park Boys-style schemes is well established at this point, pretty sure it's the first time a cop has suggested Albertans are coming for Vancouverites' bikes.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.

In a weak moment after a bad breakup, I downloaded Tinder. Soon, I was swiping daily through the never-ending human carousel in an attempt to get over my ex. I'm not exactly proud of it, but ¯\(ツ)/¯.

Most of my experiences on the app have been pretty shallow, albeit sexual. It's par for the course for me to hook up and then block the dude's phone number after. But when the new Tinder Social feature was added, allowing you to match with groups of people if you are also in a group, I was left wondering what it would actually be used for.

I mean, with all those "no hookup" profiles—clearly there's a portion of people out there using Tinder for something other than sex. I couldn't tell you why, but it is what it is.

Tinder Social's identity is confusing. When it first came out, it was hailed as a way for you to finally have orgies using the dating app. But that's not exactly how the company markets it. When you add a friend to your group to start using Tinder Social, you must select a preset answer to the following question: "What are you up to?" That then shows up when people start swiping on your group. Just like regular Tinder, you swipe, and if at least one person from each group says yes, you match and can start talking in a group chat.

All of the 27 options to answer that question appear to be an attempt to masquerade Tinder Social as wholesome, not allowing for any sexually charged or custom labels for your group. Here are some of the possibilities: "We're going out" (the default), "Girl's night out" (mostly see groups of dudes using this in an attempt at irony), and "Swipe right to hang out with us tonight" (the most ambiguous, accompanied by a monkey emoji).

So, in an attempt to better understand the world I unfortunately happen to be living in, I decided I would use Tinder Social until I had gone on three dates. I changed my bio to "just tryna figure out if Tinder Social is hang or gangbang" and got to swiping.

Immediately, people were taking the bait and explaining to me what they thought the feature was for or expressing their own confusion with its purpose:

But I had to figure it out for myself.

Date One

One of my coworkers, Sasha Kalra (aka the tenth worst person in online media according to Gawker), bless his heart, agreed to go with me on my first Tinder group date. What we found was that it is really fucking hard to use the group feature as a male-female duo. We didn't match with any groups with women in them, and Sasha is straight. So, he mostly just watched as groups of men ruthlessly hit on me, including one unfortunate situation wherein a dude spelled my name wrong and then serenaded me with Fetty Wap lyrics.

The actual date we went on wasn't much different. We had matched with a group of two dudes. But, it turns out that Tinder Social groups aren't necessarily consensual—if someone has enabled the feature and has you as a friend on Facebook, you can add them to a group on Tinder without them knowing. (FTR, it happened to me once, and I felt violated.) In a group we matched with, one of the two dudes in it couldn't come out that night since he didn't even realize he had been added to a group.

So, we met with just the one dude. After a few minutes at a bar on Dundas West, I figured out we had the same drug dealer from my rave days, so we connected on that at least. On our walk home, though, the Tinder dude basically dosed us. He pulled out a half-smoked joint, and we all took hits. By this point, we had already decided we were going to part ways and go to our respective homes. After a few minutes, though, I realized I was so high I couldn't feel my face. "What the fuck strain is this?" I asked. "Oh, it has phoenix tears on it," he said. Way more high than I intended to be, I let Tinder man walk me home. When we get to my block, he confessed he only came on the date because he really liked me. I gave him and hug and returned to my apartment alone to green out.

Conclusion: Hang but maybe wanted to bang

Date Two

Deciding that it would probably make my life easier if I used Tinder Social with a female friend instead, I convinced another friend to join me in a hell of my own creation. And wow, is it ever easier to use Tinder Social as a group of women. Within five minutes, we had somewhere north of ten options. Unfortunately, we chose a group with two finance bros who wanted to go to a Top 40 club.

"How much is cover tn?" I asked. "We put us four on the guestlist" he said. We get there, guestlist is over, and cover is $20. Great start.

This is us after we waited in a 15-minute line at coat check. You might not be able to tell here, but we wanted to die. Photo by the author

They then started buying us drinks, which is something finance bros tend to be good for, and then asked if we want to dance. "Sure," I said. "I love dancing." But apparently, to these dudes at least, dancing actually means dry-humping on the dancefloor to Travis Scott. I made out with the dude I was paired up with—by the way, it seems they had already chosen which woman was for each of them before we arrived. It was OK. But they would keep trying to grind on us after our multiple attempts at shimmying away to actually dance.

At several points in time, my friend and I were split up; the guys were intentionally separating us in the club for whatever reason. And then, my dude was screaming along to every generic hip-hop track that was played, including that word (and no, he was not black). After I got into an argument with him about how "Blasé" is not Future's song, just one he is featured in, I booked it to the bathroom. There, I ran into my friend. We locked eyes and said simultaneously, "Let's leave." The dudes were waiting for us outside of the door. The dude I had been paired with asked if all four of us could go back to one of their places. I said no, and in a classic escape technique, I gave the dude my number and never returned his text.

Conclusion: Gangbang (attempted)

Date Three

After a number of failed meet-ups, ghosting, and a bunch of glitches, I was ready to delete this damn app.

Finally, in the early afterparty hours of a Sunday, three dudes who had just been at a wedding reception hit us up. Call me old fashioned, but it really turns me on when a dude asks me multiple times if I live in Mississauga even though I don't.

It turns out only two of the three dudes could come over, but my hypothesis was finally able to be confirmed.

Conclusion: Gangbang

Follow Allison Tierney on Twitter.

On Saturday The Sun published a story on its website that details the trials and tribulations of a refugee foster carer called "Rosie" (full name protected for "fear of reprisals"), who was shocked to discover that a supposed 12-year-old refugee child from Afghanistan actually turned out to be a 21-year-old jihadist, which was made evident by his striking ability to "strip" a rifle and his aptitude for climbing ropes, as if he had been trained by a terrorist cell of sorts.

A dentist apparently "rumbled" the boy, whose name is Jamal, by discerning his age via his teeth. The article also states that "Taliban material and child abuse images were later found on his mobile." He has been arrested for alleged assault and has had his asylum turned down, but is reportedly appealing this.

This is very similar to a story the Mail Online ran in February of this year, in which another 12-year-old refugee child, again from Afghanistan, was, again, foiled by dental checks and, once again, found to have "indecent images of children" and evidence that he had visited "Jihadi websites" on his phone.

But these aren't the only common threads in the two stories. Looming large in both versions is Conservative MP for Monmouth David Davies (not to be confused with David Davis). He's the source for the Mail story and put The Sun in touch with Rosie, as well as giving comments to both. He told the Mail: " encouraged to lie because if they say they are 12 they are allowed to stay in the country for six years until they face being kicked out. But when their six years is over and they're being forced to leave they just turn around and say it's a breach of their human rights. It's all a complete ruse."

John Madden, who runs the Twitter account The Sun Apologies, was the first to notice the similarities between the two stories and their link to David Davies.

"It'd appear that The Sun is either guilty of rehashing an old story (true or not) and erroneously calling it an exclusive, or have gone to David Davies for their exclusive and he's given them the same story he gave the Daily Mail," he said in an email. "It almost looks as if there's this modern folk tale of the 12-year-old Afghan refugee with the incriminating phone who gets found out by the local dentist. The tale just gets embellished and modified with each retelling to the point we're currently at, where he now shows his adeptness with a rifle at the local shooting range – a strange place to take a child traumatised by war."

It is a strange telling in both instances, and the story begs many questions that have yet to be answered. Here are some of those questions:

– If a 21-year-old Jihadist was really moonlighting as a schoolboy in order to sneak into the country and terrorise its citizens, surely he would be a little bit more incognito than to deconstruct and reassemble a rifle in front of his new foster family?

– "Rosie" the foster mum wanted her identity protected for fear of reprisals, and has apparently been receiving death threats. But who is sending death threats to a woman who turned in a supposed terrorist with child porn on their phone? It certainly won't be the right, alt or not, or even the left. Could it be other Jihadists? Would they not be exposing themselves by doing this?

– What is the timeframe of this boy / man entering the care of this woman, and her taking him to a rifle range and a climbing facility in which he can show off his skills? Why did she think the former was an even vaguely appropriate activity for someone she has taken in after fleeing a war zone?

– Why are these refugees subject to seemingly almost immediate dental examinations?

– Why is the image of Jamal's face blocked out to protect his identity on The Sun's website, when, as John Madden says, "It's had no hesitation in printing pictures of refugees arriving in the UK from Calais this week, even though it may well put them at risk from attacks."

– Is it normal for a rifle range to allow customers to "strip" rifles on their premises, especially after they've been told the age of the child? What rifle range did this take place at? Rosie apparently lives in the south east, where we're reliably informed there aren't a great many rifle ranges.

The Sun has declined to comment. We reached out to David Davies MP to ask him some of these questions, but did not receive a reply.

@joe_bish

More from VICE:

Total Eclipse of The Sun: How Liverpudlians Are Kicking the Tabloid Out of Their City

I Conducted The Sun's '1 in 5 Muslims' Poll and Was Shocked By How It Was Used

'The Sun' Has Trolled Us All

(Photo: Chris Pizzello AP / Press Association Images)

It's a Sisyphean task, reflecting on something as fleeting as "the present". Yet it's striking how different the planet is compared to 2011 – just five years ago – when Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror first aired on British TV. Comprised of three one-off stories – each posing menacing "what-if" scenarios sprung from the interplay between technology and society – the series painted a near-future that was both darkly entertaining and disconcertingly plausible.

Yet now, in the strange, lurid nightmare that is 2016, it's hard to tell if Black Mirror is more necessary than ever, or has been rendered completely redundant. Why bother scripting the nightmare when reality is just as bad?

As I sit down to meet Brooker in the corner of a Soho restaurant, I'm unsure whether to expect someone entertaining and inviting, or cynical and incredulous. To anticipate the latter doesn't seem unreasonable. One possible critique of Black Mirror, particularly from the audience of "self-obsessed millennials" who make up a substantial portion of its viewership, is the potential for it to get a bit "old man yells at cloud". Is it cultural criticism, or just a bloke in his mid-forties complaining about how often we all check Instagram?

"I'm certainly of the generation that is inherently suspicious of the level of performance required on social media," Brooker concedes. "I'm old enough to feel like selfies are a bit weird, but I can understand it's probably more interesting to look back on – how you've changed across the years – rather than the crappy photos I tried to take of a sunset in 2006."

That said, he doesn't see the show as a vehicle for judgement, or damning of our relationship with screens. "I'm generally not anti-technology – I just worry about everything. I could worry about this tea scolding me, or gouging my eye out with this spoon," he says, raising a small silver teaspoon to eye-level at an alarming speed.

If there is more at play than dystopian-cynicism, is Black Mirror a misunderstood project? Does he mind, for instance, the extent to which its title has become a byword for any remotely sinister event involving technology? "I don't mind in that it's free publicity – any time anything fucked happens people mention the show," he says. "If Samsung bring out a phone that explodes, people say, 'Oh, that's quite Black Mirror.' So if it's bad for the world it's probably good for the brand!"

He laughs, but it's impossible not to recognise a hint of frustration in his voice when I mention the binary "technology goes wrong" view of the show some people have. "I think sometimes, when people are parodying it, they miss how self-aware it is," he says. "I know when it's being a bit silly."

A still from 'Black Mirror' season three

It's an important distinction, given the 21st century's unstoppable, almost unknowable rate of progress. The idea of being lectured or chastised for behaving in a certain way feels alienating and reductive. Yet, crucially, Black Mirror has never really set out to make people look stupid; rather, its intention has always been to make people look like people. Flawed, bruised and lacking the requisite software to cope with the threats and promises of the digital age.

Take "Be Right Back", surely the best episode of the second series – if not the entire show. It's a harrowing hour of television, in which a young woman clones her recently-deceased husband using the blueprint of his identity, as spread across his social-media activity. The episode isn't a lecture: the characters are left confused and morally conflicted, much like the viewers. Is this where satire has to turn in an increasingly extreme world? To the intimate and the personal?

"Possibly," Brooker nods. "I hadn't thought about it like that, but quite possibly, that's where you have to go if reality starts outpacing the grotesqueness of the fictional world."

This outpacing, of course, specifically alludes to the two starkly prophetic instances in earlier episodes of Black Mirror – series one's "The National Anthem" and series two's "Waldo Moment", both of which depict events with eerie similarities to real political events: Cameron's pig-fucking debacle and the rise of Donald Trump, respectively. Yet, while the parallels do bear striking resemblances, the episodes show more the mind of a writer who is fearful of ochlocracy and the corrosion of democracy. I ask him when this fear was born.

"How old are you?" he asks.

"25," I respond.

"I'm 45, literally 20 years older than you, you young fuck," he exclaims. "Look, one of the most formative things I can remember was when it looked like nuclear war was a real, likely thing. In the early 1980s, it looked like we were preparing, quite literally, to have a nuclear war. There were documentaries about it, dramas about it, and that's where I expected to die, as a result of technology and progress. I believed I would die in burning fireball. That's quite a traumatic thought – that stays with you – and I think that comes out in Black Mirror."

Brooker delivers this point with exactly the sort of flamboyant disdain he's perfected across years of Screenwipes and panel show appearances. It's a sort of elaborately-worded shoulder-shrug that makes the oncoming apocalypse sound like he's just spilt coffee on his shirt.

"That's what worries me about my kids," he laughs, as though giddy at how terrifying the world may become for his children, aged two and four. "I don't worry about them losing all sense of reality in the year 2030 by putting on a VR headset that allows them to eat holograms, or whatever. It's more the big nuclear missiles sitting around in silos waiting for people to launch them."

For someone so politically fearful, or at least deeply distrustful, I'm curious as to whether or not he's been politically engaged. "Like anyone I have my traditions – I grew up in a Labour household, and I definitely lean on the left side of things," he says. "But I think, as I've got older, I've gotten less sure of my convictions, or less sure of my opinions."

Britain's current political climate, he tells me, has him pining for the simpler days of Cameron and Clegg. "I miss the time, a few years ago, when everything was bland and 'meh' – when all politicians were the same and everyone was boring and safe and stale," he muses. "I emailed Chris Morris after the referendum, actually, and said, 'You should do a one-off Brexit Brasseye' – you know, a bit of fan-mail – and he said, 'Well, the problem is it requires a form of authority to subvert for it to work, without that new tools are required.'"

He gets more animated the more he thinks about it all. "It does feel like we're at a really fevered time now," he continues. "You've got charismatic figures popping up on all sides, or monsters – depending on your angle. Then someone like Corbyn, who is kind of like an indie music act – like Arab Strap, with passionate followers, and you've got to admire that, but you just can't ever imagine them cracking the mainstream. I do admire that, but my pragmatic boring side says, 'Really? Do you really think that's going to work?'"

A still from 'Black Mirror' season three

Has work started on the 2016 wipe, then? "Put it this way," he says. "Normally we'd have our first writers meeting about the end of year show about now. This year, we had it in July."

Our time is nearly up, so my last question relates to the one Charlie Brooker project that, if you work at VICE, you are reminded of almost every waking day by tweeters and below-the-line commenters: Nathan Barley.

"The first thing to clear up," he interjects, as the words are leaving my mouth. "There is an episode of Nathan Barley where they produce an issue of Sugar Ape magazine called 'The VICE Issue', which wasn't meant to be a direct comparison – it was a coincidence, literally just a coincidence. After it came out and people said, 'Ah taking the piss out of VICE magazine,' I thought, 'No! Of course people are going to think that!' I think it weirdly even looked a bit like the old VICE logo. We had looked at VICE, of course, but it was never a direct piss-take."

"It's odd looking at that show now," he continues, now the air is clear. "We worked out the storylines for a second series that moved away from the style magazine and was about his financial support being cut off, and he was facing cold, hard reality, which – had we known the term – would have been far more 'millennial'. He was left adrift in a world where things were crumbling, and he was less certain of things."

As we part ways, I'm struck by his hypothetical Nathan Barley – floundering beneath his failing ironic veneer. It says a lot for Brooker himself – not the failing part, but a writer often misread as a cynic, who is in fact simply trying to communicate an ounce of the bewilderment we surely all feel. Not that he'd say that himself, of course.

As he puts it: "I think it would be arrogant for me to assume I can change people's minds with a piece of fiction. I'm sure that has happened, but I don't know if I'm the person to do it."

@a_n_g_u_s

More on VICE:

The VICE Interview: Louis Theroux

'Fleabag' Star Phoebe Waller-Bridge on 'Unlikable' Women and Sexual Validation

A Full Breakdown of 'Naked Attraction', the Dating Show Where People Judge Each Other's Naked Bodies

Graffiti in the Calais Jungle. Source Malachy Browne

Two weeks ago I was talking to a 13-year-old boy in the Calais migrant camp. He told me he had left Afghanistan, escaping the threat of IS and the Taliban, travelling alone for six months to try and get to his father, who was living in Birmingham.

For weeks Shamsher had been trying to jump on the back of lorries to enter the UK, an incredibly dangerous way into Britain that has claimed many lives. When he was caught, he said he was kicked and slapped by French police, who forced him to return to the camp. This is a child. If he was in British school he'd be in year 8.

His story was, of course, upsetting, but it was also infuriating. Shamsher has family in the UK and, under the Dublin amendment, that means he has a legal right to be here. The only thing that's stopping him is the bureaucracy of the British government, which wasn't processing him fast enough.

In January we promised to take thousands of child refugees – children like Shamsher, with family and somewhere to go in the UK, as well as 3,000 unaccompanied children – under the Dubs amendment. On Sunday, it was revealed that the Home Office ignored a plan agreed by local councils to ensure vulnerable child refugees had a place to stay when they arrived in Britain and instead did nothing to prepare for when the Calais camp closed. They are now said to be panicking.

Heartbreakingly, Shamsher told me he had a better chance of getting into the UK on the back of a lorry than waiting for the government to let him in. "I apologise on behalf of my country," I said. "I'm sorry for what we put you through."

I suppose I could have said, "I feel guilty about the part that my country has played in your situation," or, "We just had a vote, and 52 percent of people voted to leave to the European Union because of immigration, and I really can't speak for them, but let me apologise on behalf of the other 48 percent who, I think, roughly feel the same as me." But I was speaking to him through an interpreter in a tiny room with a camera crew. I was trying to get a point across in as few words as possible; there wasn't much time for clarifications.

I went to Calais because I wanted to do what I can to help. I wanted to try to remind people of the humanity at the heart of the crisis, at a time when refugees were being demonised in the press.

But after the film of my trip aired I found myself caught in a familiar constellation of tabloid and social media aggressors. It began on Twitter, with near-universal negative comments, from people like Andre Walker, who said: "I think Lily Allen ought to apologise to the country for backing an Islamist terrorist," or another, who said, "I wonder who would Lily Allen would feel sorry for if there was a war, would she care for a English kid soldiers or Muslim Isis."

By the following day Jan Moir was writing in the Mail that I was "another indulged idiot". I was on the front page of the Star, a "sobbing luvvie". There was a real hate in the things people wrote, as if me going to Calais was a vindictive attack on our country.

Things escalated throughout last week, Gary Lineker supported me on Twitter and called on people to be more compassionate. The Sun ran a front page calling for him to be fired for "peddling migrant lies".

I didn't think going to Calais was particularly controversial, but it turns out that saying we need to help vulnerable children is now dodgy territory.

Some of the anger felt familiar. People thought it was wrong for someone who has money to moralise on behalf of everyone else. In The Sun, they ran the headline, "Maybe they could stay in your lovely £2m pad, Lily?" – "they" presumably being thousands of child refugees in Calais and tens of thousands more in Greece.

It's true: I live in a bubble. I have a lovely house, my kids go to a good school and I sort of have an idea of what I'm working towards in terms of my future. But that's what I was struck by in Calais – people are in a holding pen. They have no idea what comes next. There is no life plan. There is nothing to work towards except for getting across the channel. If you're a 13-year-old boy jumping on top of a lorry moving at 60mph every night – if that's your goal – then what further proof could there be that people like me, with the chances life has afforded me, have a responsibility to help in any way we can?

I don't really believe the tabloid journalists are worried about 14 refugees coming to the country. I don't think it's conspiratorial to say there are other motives at play. Refugees have become a representation of a lot of other factors. They're being used to push several other agendas.

Some are obvious: The Sun isn't really calling for Gary Lineker to be fired because of a tweet; he's being attacked because Murdoch hates the BBC. It's using refugees to have a proxy war with the most successful sports presenter who isn't on Sky.

Others are more subtle: the furore about whether or not some refugees may have lied about their ages is not really about whether these refugees can enter the country; it's about creating the narrative that people trying to come here aren't asking for our help, but trying to dupe us, take advantage of the system. The hope is that this will make us less trusting of them next time round.

The tabloids have been aided by the Home Office. There are much younger unaccompanied children who still haven't been processed – so why did the UK take in a tiny group of older male teenagers first? Doing that doesn't really help the plight of the refugees, but it does push the agenda of the tabloids.

The press are willing to slur the reputation of refugees, to "monster" celebrities who disagree with them by bringing up negative stories from their past until they back down. The Sun sent a message this week: if another public figure was thinking about becoming more involved in the migrant crisis they might take a look at what happened to me and Gary and think it's not worth it.

All of this has a corrosive effect on the way we think about vulnerable people. If you're worried about becoming homeless, if you're having to wait three weeks to get an appointment with a doctor, if you're at food banks and you see migrant families in the queue ahead of you, it plays into the idea that your problems are caused by migrants.

That distrust is misplaced. It's not the fault of refugees, it's about the lack of services available in this country. The government have found a group of vulnerable people they can blame their own failures on, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the problems in this country are the fault of a self-interested Conservative party and people and companies who aren't paying their share of tax. They're the ones cheating the system, not a child trying to come here because they have been driven away from everywhere else.

Even I've found myself thinking like this. After the interview with Shamsher I said to Catrin Nye, who made the documentary: "Did you believe him, that his dad was in Birmingham?" I was wondering why his dad didn't go to Calais to be with him. I found myself being suspicious of him, because of the sorts of stuff I was reading in the press. Then I caught myself asking these questions. And I thought: 'Who gives a fuck where his dad is? Why am I even asking that question? Whatever his age is, wherever his parents live, it shouldn't matter. I can see the environment he's living in. He's someone who has found himself, as a young person, alone. I, as a human being, can't stand by and say that's his problem. Nobody chooses to live there; they have been forced there by what they're running from.'

From a very early age we were taught about the Second World War and how evil Hitler was. You always wonder how he managed to get the whole country to go along with that. Now we're seeing it. But I don't want to be a good German. I want to be on the right side of history.

Some people will say, "You're just a pop star – you should just make music." But 40 years ago, even 25 years ago, you couldn't really be taken seriously as a musician unless you had a political stance. The mainstream media saw that threat coming – that stars could wield a lot of power – so they monster people like me to put them off getting involved.

Here's what I know: last week the UK government took in the first 14 kids from the camp, including Shamsher. Over the weekend they started to take children in much bigger numbers. I'm absolutely not taking credit, but who knows – if the backlash against me and Gary Lineker hadn't been all over the front pages last week, would the government have taken those first 14 kids in, and all those who followed? The government has been dragging its feet for months, and now it's finally started to act.

Whether that's because it was announced that the Calais jungle was going to be demolished or because I pushed the issue back up the news agenda, I don't know. But I'd like to think that what I did will help in some small way. That was the purpose of me going. There was a bill passed. Three-thousand children have a right to be here. But they're there. They're waiting.

@lilyallen
@helprefugeesuk

More on VICE:

A Myth-Busting Guide to Migration to the UK

Teenage Refugees Tell Us the Horrors They've Been Through to Get to Europe

VIDEO: The Migrant Crisis in Calais: Britain's Border War

Photo via Netflix

In season two of Netflix's Narcos, drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's world is closing in on him. On the run from police and competing cartels, the real life Escobar met his gruesome demise in a rooftop shootout, bloated and bled out. In this exclusive feature from the show, the cast talks about filming Escobar's final scenes on a rooftop in Medellin, Colombia.

Both seasons of Narcos are streaming now on Netflix.

Follow Amil on Twitter.

Post-rap group Dead Obies grew up in French, in Montreal and its suburbs, but they unapologetically blend in a lot of English in their lyrics. Much like their fans, they have only vague memories of the last referendum, if any at all. They are part of a generation that doesn't have any hang-ups about the national language.

In the debut of VICE Dossiers Quebec, Simon Coutu meets with Dead Obies, who put the Frenglish movement in Quebec on the map. VICE follows them in studio, on the road, and backstage to get a sense of what the movement really looks like. They discuss the music industry's refusal to fund them, the Quebec media's misguided attempts to blame them for a "decline of French," and the new aesthetic avenues "franglais" opens to rappers.

Looks like science has thrown us another curveball. Researchers at an American university have discovered that drinking lots of vodka-Red Bull – or, really, any vodka-energy drink combo – could have a similar effect on young people's brains as doing cocaine.

In an experiment, Professor Richard Van Rijn of Purdue University, Indiana found that adolescent mice who'd been given a mixture of alcohol and caffeine exhibited similar physical and neurological traits to mice given cocaine. "It seems the two substances together push them over a limit that causes changes in their behaviour and changes the neurochemistry in their brains," he said.

Anyway, on hearing this news my first thoughts were with cocaine dealers. Think about it: why would I – hypothetically – want to splash out £80 on some 4 percent gear when I could get the same hit off a mix of Glen's and Monster?

To see if coke sellers are fearful about all the business they're about to lose, I called a load of them up to ask. Below are the exchanges I had with people who didn't immediately hang up or tell me to fuck off, with names changed for obvious reasons.

VICE: Hi there. This isn't about buying drugs.
Kevin: Really?

Yeah, I just need to ask you if you've heard that drinking vodka with an energy drink has the same effect on your brain as cocaine?
Does it? I haven't heard that one.

Do you think that news is going to fuck your business up?
Of course not. That's the most silly thing I've ever heard – vodka-Red Bull has been around for ages.

Do you think it's true, though, that the two are basically one and the same?
Depends on the science behind it, but I don't think it could be 'cos they are massively different substances. Sounds to me like a Red Bull publicity stunt.

I'm almost certain it's not. But say they do have the same effect, why is one legal and the other's not?
Well, coke isn't legal for many reasons...

Like what?
Well, fucking hell, I don't know why not. Why is Red Bull legal? Doesn't it contain bull semen or something? Never mind what your coke is cut with, Red Bull is cut with fucking bull semen.

Thanks, Kev.

(Photo: Giorgi Nieberidze)

Hi Fred. Have you heard that vodka and energy drinks mixed together could supposedly have the same effect on you as coke?
Fred: You mean in the sense that it quickens your heart rate and keeps you awake? Yes.

Are you worried it will take away your customers?
I don't think people are ready to stop putting things up their noses just yet.

So you think coke still has more to offer?
Well, of course – I think the ritual of it is more poetic than mixing vodka with a Red Bull.

Right. So why isn't cocaine legal if it's so much more poetic than vodka-Red Bull?
For all intents and purposes, it is legal – well, in terms of personal usage.

Fair enough. Thanks, Fred.

(Photo: Chris Bethell)

Hi Sheila, are you aware that drinking vodka mixed with an energy drink supposedly does the same things to your brain as doing a line of coke?
Sheila: Nah, I had no idea. I doubt it, though.

Why?
I just assumed that packet would be worse for you.

Do you think these kind of drinks supposedly having the same effect as coke will dent your business?
No way – people like smashing packet. If you sold vodka-Red Bull in wraps and cocaine in cans, people would still pay for whatever is in the wrap.

That's an interesting theory. But do you think coke has more to offer?
In a placebo sense, yes. If they both have the same effect, packet will always offer more.

Why?
Obviously people love the effect that drugs have, but there is also a sense of romanticism in the rebelliousness of taking them.

That's deep. So why isn't coke legal if they have the same effect?
Because there's a war on drugs.

Do you agree with the war on drugs?
Not one bit.

But if there wasn't one you'd be out of business.
Oh yeah, that's true. No wait, yeah, I would still be in business; it would be the same as marijuana being legal in the US – I'd just have more people to sell to.

WATCH: 'Inside the UK's Ecstasy Underworld', the first episode of 'High Society', our new documentary series about drugs in the UK

Have you heard that drinking vodka with an energy drink supposedly has the same effect as a line of cocaine?
Bruce: I haven't heard that, no. I personally don't agree with it.

Why not? Science says so – you can't disagree with science.
Well, when I finish a vodka-Red Bull I don't automatically insist on downing another one straight away and get all weird about it if I can't.

Good point. Do you think the news will affect the cocaine trade?
Not at all.

Thanks, Bruce.

@williamwasteman

More on VICE:

How People Smuggled Drugs Into This Summer's Music Festivals

A Drug-By-Drug Guide to a Rational UK Drugs Policy

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

The star pre-destruction. Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images

On Wednesday morning, a guy disguised as a city worker showed up to Trump's star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood armed with a sledgehammer and thoroughly trashed the thing, Deadline reports.

Trump was awarded the star in 2007 for his role on The Apprentice, and it's been the target of multiple vandals over the course of the GOP candidate's presidential bid, but Walk of Fame officials have always been able to restore it to its original state. This time, there's not much left to restore.

The incident was caught on camera around 5:45 AM and released by Deadline. In it, the perp—who later told Deadline his name was Jamie Otis—is shown inside a perimeter of traffic cones, just mercilessly laying into the star. He eventually managed to smash the star into bits and pry it from the sidewalk, leaving only a dirt outline. He was gone by the time police showed up at 6:15 AM.

Otis told Deadline that he plans to auction off the pieces to support Trump's numerous sexual assault accusers, who Trump has threatened to sue after the election is over.

Otis has not yet been arrested, though police told the Los Angeles Times that the stunt is considered felony vandalism. Maybe he should have just puked all over the star, instead.

Read: Interview with a Guy Who Puked on Hollywood Stars

Obama signs the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010. Photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons

Creating and implementing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has been a political slugfest that's lasted nearly the entire Obama administration. In 2009, when it was first proposed, Republicans literally screamed in fury about it. After it finally became law a year later, conservatives dragged it to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to crush it and are still challenging aspects of it in lawsuits. The Republican-controlled House has voted repeatedly to repeal Obamacare, and during the GOP primary, all the leading candidates promised to get rid of it.

Meanwhile, the law has helped millions of Americans get health insurance, including some who badly needed it. But over the summer, it became apparent that there were problems with the state "exchanges" set up on Healthcare.gov, the official Obamacare website where people could go to buy plans from private insurers. These companies were losing money on these exchanges, and as a result, experts were warning that premiums could rise; some insurers ditched the exchanges altogether.

On Monday, the White House gave the country the bad news: Premiums are indeed going up an average of 25 percent in the 39 states with working exchanges, and in many places, people will only have one insurer they can buy plans from. Though government subsidies will help most of those covered by Obamacare—and this doesn't affect people who get insurance through their jobs—this is still bad news for the complicated system.

To find out how Obamacare got here, I called up Cynthia Cox, associate director of the Kaiser Foundation's Program for the Study of Health Reform and Private Insurance. She told me why operating within the Obamacare marketplaces turned out to be a real jolt for insurance companies, and what some healthcare reform reforms might look like.

VICE: Insurance companies selling plans in the marketplaces have been complaining about losing money on these marketplaces for months. How is Obamacare costing them?
Cynthia Cox: Before the reforms went into place, there was the old way of doing business: Avoid the sick people. The reforms all into place at the same time in 2014. Not only the reforms to the market, but the way that people buy coverage changed. That's why in some cases it was a shot in the dark how they priced their premiums.

What did they base these new premiums on?
What they did is they started with the premiums for when they would sell to small businesses. So they would start with that premium, and kind of work from there by adding additional factors of what they were estimating the health status of people might be who are purchasing coverage.

And what was wrong with those assumptions?
In some ways, their expectations were unrealistic, but in other ways, it may have been that the people who signed up were sicker than people expected. I think this really depended on the state. Another change that happened in the first year was that there were what were called "transitional policies" that were allowed to stay in place—these kinda non-compliant plans. The healthy people stay in those plans, and don't move onto the new market, and that means the sicker people on average are purchasing in the new market. So those are kind of a combination of factors that led to insurers guessing wrong.

Is it possible that people who had just gotten insurance for the first time in awhile were suddenly getting a lot of treatment they needed but couldn't get before?
That's a pretty reasonable assumption. In fact, insurance companies assumed that there would be what's called "pent-up demand" for healthcare. So they assumed that a lot of these people had been blocked out of the market before. They weren't able to get coverage because of preexisting conditions. They wanted coverage. They needed healthcare. And once they got it, they used it. I think the fact is that maybe insurers under-appreciated how much demand there would be for healthcare. And then also maybe underestimated how long it would take for that to wear off. I think the expectation was that there would be pent-up demand for the first year or two of the exchanges, and it may be that that's actually continuing longer—that people still have healthcare needs that have gone untreated, or that maybe have gotten worse because they weren't treated on time.

Will this be a one-time price hike?
That was generally the expectation especially as of earlier this year. In the first two years of the exchanges, insurers had very little information to use. Now they have a year a and a half at least of data that they can use to set accurate premiums.

Do you see any reason this could happen again?
There were a number of insurance companies that started announcing . This can have the effect of starting to destabilize the market. And it also may mean that premiums go up more than we expected them to. Because now, some insurers have the opportunity to revise their premiums if their competitors were dropping out, they now have to take on more enrollees than they were expecting, and so the stability of this market has been called into question.

How could the authors of Obamacare have created a more stable market in the first place?
There's always been a question as to whether the individual mandate was strong enough. There's a question about whether the penalty is large enough to actually encourage people to purchase, because it's capped at whatever a bronze premium would cost—so in no case is someone spending more on the penalty than they would if they'd bough an unsubsidized bronze plan. But at the same time, there are questions about whether the subsidies were enough. So there are carrots and sticks in this market, particularly to try and encourage young and healthy people to sign up.

What might we see during a Trump or Clinton administration to drive rates down?
Some of the legislative changes that could be made would be to increase the subsidy amount to help more people, maybe even people with higher incomes than currently get financial assistance. You could also increase the money that goes into outreach and enrollment assistance to help people understand their options and to sign up. Of course, both of those ideas cost money and may meet resistance. The other options out there are a little more dramatic. There are people out there who suggest repealing the law altogether. There are people on the left who support a public option . These would be more fundamental changes to the way that health insurance works in this market.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.