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How Giving Up Drinking and Drugs in Your Twenties Can Change Your Life

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(Photo: Michael Segalov)

Theresa May, Donald Trump, Brexit, an uptick of racism and hate crimes, rising inflation, increasing property prices and the floundering pound. A lot has happened this year that you probably want to forget about, and the traditional way to forget – of course – is to drown your memory in booze, and stifle any remaining thoughts with one or more of your favourite drugs.

But as you might have already surmised, that's not always the best course of action. Dr Sheri Jacobson, clinical director of Harley Therapy, points out that both drugs and alcohol actually provide a temporary high that, over a long-term basis, keeps the user in a cycle of low moods.

"Alcohol, for example, is a depressant, and it actually messes with the neurotransmitters in your brain, including the one needed to help you keep anxiety at bay," she says. So while drinking is often thought of as a way to "wind down" after a demanding day, in fact it can have quite the opposite effect.

"If you already had any kind of mental health issue, like anxiety or bipolar disorder, substances are likely to make your condition worse, not better," says Dr Jacobson. "And if you have a genetic risk for a mental disorder, drug or alcohol use gives you at a higher chance of developing it."

Drug and alcohol misuse is particularly prevalent in men. In 2014, men accounted for approximately 65 percent of all alcohol-related deaths in the UK, and in 2014-2015, 74 percent of hospital admissions with a primary diagnosis of drug-related mental and behavioural disorders were men. Depression and anxiety are common in individuals with a history of substance abuse, and the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry suggests that one in three adults who abuses drugs or alcohol is also affected by depression.

Male mental health might be more talked about than ever in the media, but last month the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness released a study from their campaign Time to Change showing that 54 percent of male teenagers suffering from mental health issues chose to keep their problems to themselves. Despite more and more celebrities outing themselves as sufferers of depression and anxiety, and media-run campaigns encouraging men to talk about what's troubling them, many are still keeping things to themselves.

There are, of course, many reasons why that might be. But I'm personally aware of a number of men whose mental health problems have been clouded by pints, drugs, hangovers and comedowns. Men who haven't been able to address their issues until a period of sobriety-enforced mental clarity. And – anecdotally, at least – I'm aware of this problem stretching beyond my own personal social circle.

Bob while he was still drinking and drugging

Bob Foster, 33, has now been sober for 17 months. Until he took the plunge his typical week "would start off with me feeling very depressed and scared to get out of bed on Monday. I'd have a terrible day dodging emails and being monosyllabic in meetings, then I'd go to the gym in the evening and start feeling just about alright thanks to all those lovely endorphins going to the gym gives you. I'd feel marginally better on Tuesday, hit the gym again, feel almost OK on Wednesday, hit the gym again that evening and then spend all of Thursday waiting until the end of the day to get to the pub. Then I'd stay out until maybe 1AM or 2AM, drink and do a load of coke, feel like death at work on Friday and then start drinking immediately after work to stave off the misery, do more coke, stay out 'til 7AM, sleep all day, then possibly do it again Saturday, but if not just shut myself in my room all of Saturday night and Sunday."

In a routine where drinking and taking drugs marked the separation between the mundane week and the release of the weekend, Bob's mental health began to suffer. "I spent my twenties upping the doses of various antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, wondering why they never worked," he says. "It never occurred to me that drinking a depressant and snorting stuff that made you paranoid might make me depressed and paranoid."

So how and why did he stop? "It wasn't a single eureka moment; it was cumulative," Bob tells me. "I'd given up for months at a time a few times in my twenties, and I knew that it would make me feel better. I could see a lot of people in my life progressing – getting married and having kids – and I felt like I was still on the bottom rung of life. I actually planned a 'last hurrah': a metal festival in the Midlands that I went to write about for work. I took six grams of cocaine with me and got a load of MDMA there – really went for it. My plan was to create a comedown so bad that I'd never want to take drugs again. I succeeded!"

That crashing comedown was the shove he needed, and after that "it was a total and absolute turnaround in a matter of months".

For London-based yoga teacher and former DJ Marcus Veda, the shift from going to bed at dawn to eventually getting up at the same time was less abrupt. "For ten years I was getting smashed – doing everything and drinking everything, taking everything. It was pure hedonism," he explains.

Like Bob's, Marcus's party lifestyle worked in cycles, muted by the awareness that being healthy was important, too. "When we went on tour, it would be big weekends and then I was always doing the healthy, good stuff in between. I loved sports, gym and martial arts, so I could always see the good; I just thought that they could co-exist. Which they could, for a while, until I realised I could just get my highs from yoga and from martial arts."

READ: Can You Reverse the Horrible Long-Term Effects of Drugs with Exercise, Food and Vitamins?

After practicing martial arts for five or so years and slowly becoming more interested in yoga, Marcus began to re-evaluate his lifestyle. "I was questioning towards the end of the drinking, 'Is this really worth it? Is this even fun?' The next day, the hangover would ruin the day and there was never enough time to do anything I wanted to do, and taking off a day every time that happened meant that I was only living half the week. I ended up thinking it wasn't worth it."

During his decade DJing and performing in clubs around the world, Marcus did not experience the kind of depression and anxiety that Bob suffered. Still, he tells me that now his everyday perception of life is very different: "I became much more even. Living for the weekend, like so many people are doing, you're almost on autopilot robot through the week. Now, every day is just the same. I never get down, I don't dread Mondays any more, I don't dread coming down – not necessarily drugs wise, just coming back to the mundane."

For Bob, the change he has seen in his quality of life since going sober is huge.

"For a start I look five years younger than I did, and I lost two stone in the first three months," he says. "The other thing that was almost immediate was my brain function: I swear I'm 50 percent mentally quicker and smarter than I was. I grew up a lot really quickly, too: I wasn't just following my friends to the pub to the detriment of all else; I got more organised, I stopped living essentially like a teenager – no more messy room, no more late for everything ever. I built a better relationship with my family, I started making progress at work, all that sort of thing. I felt more energetic, I had more money, I got fit, I got happier, I felt at peace for the first time in my adult life."

Of course, giving up drinking or drugs in a culture that revolves around both isn't simple, and there's no guarantee it will have the same kind of benefit to your mental health as it did for Bob.

Addiction, or habits, can be hard to break, as anyone who has ever attempted dry January will tell you. Luckily, most addictive behaviours come with their own support group, from AA to NA. But as Dr Sherri advises, "If you find groups intimidating, don't overlook professional one-on-one support. An addictions counsellor can offer you unbiased support in an environment you can truly be uncensored in – not always what we get from friends and family, no matter how well-meaning they may be."

"Stop for three months and see how you feel," says Bob when I ask him what advice he would give to men living out their twenties the way he had. "Three months is the point where you can really see how different stuff has become. It's also the hardest point to get to, because you're still super fresh, but I absolutely swear when you get to three months you'll see what all the fuss is about."

CALM offers support for men who are down or in crisis.

@bryony_stone

More on VICE:

What a Legal Recreational Drug Market Would Look Like in the UK

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VICE EXCLUSIVE: These British Police Forces Have Stopped Arresting Drug Users


Why 'Chew' and Asian American Superheroes Still Matter

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A badass secret agent rooster. A collector of superpowers who goes by "The Vampire." A terrifying paramilitary group known as the Jellassassins, whose powers all involve Jell-O. A sullen Chinese-American teenaged girl who might just be the most powerful person in the world... but has as many daddy issues as anyone else.

These are just some of the characters populating the Chew comic series, written by John Layman and drawn by Rob Guillory. Chew came to an end on November 23, after 60 issues and seven years. The series centers on a government agent named Tony Chu, who is blessed/afflicted with cibopathy, or the ability to taste something and learn about everything and everyone connected to it. His powers make it hard for Tony to stomach meat, but also make him a useful FDA special agent.

The series is set in an unspecified time period following the deaths of 116 million people worldwide from bird flu, making the US Food and Drug Administration the single most important law enforcement agency. It's like the Department of Homeland Security post-9/11, but even more powerful. There's an FDA supermax food prison, for instance, and one character refers to the "FDA new world order."

Chew by John Layman. Art by Rob Guillory. Courtesy of Image Comics

Chew is many things: an entertaining take on foodie culture gone riot; the best comic series ever to revolve around poultry; and a showcase for Asian American superheroes.

Those are a rare breed. In 2009, the same year that Chew issue #1 was released, we saw the publication of Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. Like Chew, there hadn't been anything quite like Secret Identities before. It and its sequel, Shattered, brought together Asian American writers and artists to imagine comic worlds where they actually saw themselves reflected on the page.

Why did this matter? Jeff Yang, who co-edited the anthologies and has written widely on Asian culture, made this clear right from the start. In the preface to Secret Identities, he writes, "Go to a comic book convention, a quarter of the kids are Asian. A lot of the top artists are Asian American, too." Drawing on a strong legacy of comics in Asia, the US comic book industry is stuffed with Asian American creators and consumers. Yet the message being sent is that no one could buy them as the protagonists of these stories.

But superhero myths are ones that many Asian Americans can get behind. For one thing, Yang told me, Asian Americans have a (diverse but shared) origin story of immigration, however many generations ago. And "that notion of distance and difference is so much a part of the troping of what it means to be a costumed character. Those two things are the jumping-off point for any superhero."

Yang's co-editor on Secret Identities and Shattered, Keith Chow, sees this sense of difference as being key to why Asian American superheroes, and not simply Asian superheroes, matter. "Perception and misperception have driven a lot of the conversation about what it means to be Asian American," Chow explained to me, over the phone. But the "unique shared zone of conversation," involving "the experience of being from somewhere else," brings extra weight to the classic superhero feelings of being an outsider and having a slippery, multi-faceted identity.

Sarah Kuhn, who's written several comics series, articulates this well. Her novel Heroine Complex, the first in a series, features not one but two Asian American superheroines—and very different ones. Kuhn broke down in tears when she saw that both Aveda (a Chinese American diva superhero covering up massive insecurities) and Evie (a half Japanese American assistant turned hero) were depicted on the book's cover: "I think every author of color knows that this is not a small thing."

Heroine Complex by Sarah Kuhn. Art by Jason Chan. Courtesy of DAW Books

Kuhn says superhero stories are powerful vehicles for representation because of how iconic those characters are. It's also reassuring that in superhero stories, "good triumphs in the end, which is frankly a message that a lot of us in the US could use right now." She wonders, "If you're a person of color only watching white people save the day, what kind of message does that send to you?"

In her case, receiving that message as a kid led her to sideline herself. She gravitated toward the sidekick role in life partly because geek culture, from Star Trek's Demora Sulu to X-Men's Jubilee, was telling a generation of Asian American girls that they could be in one scene as a supporting character, and then they had to go away.

In the anthologies Secret Identities and Shattered, the characters are definitely not just sidekicks. They both reflect and build on common traits of (the white default) superheroes. Family duty, for instance, is refracted through generations of difficult history and complicated identity: Stories about Japanese Americans tackle Pearl Harbor, the atomic legacy of World War II, and the internment of Americans of Japanese descent (which is, sigh, of continuing relevance).

Chew by John Layman. Art by Rob Guillory. Courtesy of Image Comics

Chew is less weighty. It's an awesomely silly showcase for food-related jokes. The food powers get increasingly absurd and niche as the series goes on; eventually it includes villains who use peppermint candy to hypnotize people, or who gain enormous strength from wearing spaghetti.

A character in Secret Identities says, "Today's audience is very savvy. They can smell forced diversity a mile away." This is a trap Chew avoids. The effortlessness of its diverse cast reflects not just the kind of world we want to see, but the world as it is. Sure, the NASA chief in Chew is Sikh; unlike what every other spaceship-set movie would have us believe, rocket science is chock full of Asians.

That doesn't mean that Asian American superheroes are interchangeable with white ones. Tony is noticeably smaller than just about every non-Asian character in Chew, and a common visual motif is of other people looming over him. Physical size is a red herring, though. We've see this in Bruce Lee movies and in shows like The Walking Dead (whose Steven Yuen will be voicing Tony in the Chew animated series). And we see it in Chew, over and over.

Chew's diversity is diversity by stealth. Tony's Asianness is largely unremarked upon, although there are hints of the way Asian men have typically been emasculated by superhero culture. Tony's girlfriend Amelia, for instance, is a familiar kind of superhero's girlfriend: white, blond, and a journalist (albeit one with, inevitably, food-related powers). And Amelia's ex-boyfriend, a thick-headed sports writer obsessed with the sex lives of baseball players, is almost a caricature of macho white masculinity. He calls Tony at various points "little Asian twerp" and "runty little half-man," as if standing in for any readers who might be weirded out by seeing a super skinny Asian dude in the role of hero.

Kuhn sees this diversity by stealth as part of Chew's appeal. "It's an Asian protagonist, but the story is not all about him being Asian. He gets to do other cool stuff, drive a lot of the action, and be the hero."

Layman, who wrote the series, doesn't want to influence how people view its treatment of diversity, or its ending. He told me, "It's my intention to go radio silent for... well, for a while, at least until the book has been ended for a while, been digested (no pun intended), and people have come to their own conclusions."

When it comes to the diversification of comics, he wants the series to stand on its own. "I don't think I could bring anything new or vital to the conversation, and I'd just be seen as another old, fat, white, blustery loudmouth—which of course I am, but I'd like to avoid being seen as that, if possible."

Chew by John Layman. Art by Rob Guillory. Courtesy of Image Comics

Post-Chew, Kuhn, Chow, and Yang have varying degrees of cautious optimism about the future of representation. Kuhn points to the massive visibility of Disney's Moana as a sign that Asian American heroines can be both culturally specific and hugely accessible.

Chow, who founded Nerds of Color and has a background in comics for education, holds up the example of Kamala Khan. The popularity of Kamala, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, punctures the myth that audiences aren't interested in more diverse superheroes. When it comes to Hollywood, "It's a misconception in the industry that certain people don't sell tickets." After all, "you could literally cast anybody as a Marvel superhero"—even a tree or a raccoon.

And Yang mentions an example closer to home: his son, Hudson, one of the stars of Fresh Off the Boat. He explains with a bit of awe, "Hudson is a 13-year-old Asian American boy who did not think it was impossible to one day say, 'I want to be on TV,'" which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

This changed climate has driven Yang and Chow to consider a follow-up to Secret Identities and Shattered. Volume three would involve their kids and lots of emerging comics creators. And it would look to the future, following the series's focus first on Asian Americans' place in superhero lineage (Secret Identities) and ways to challenge stereotyping narratives (Shattered).

At a time when supervillains are winning at the voting booth, diverse superheroes are sorely needed.

Why Can't We All Take Modafinil?

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A pack of modafinil. Photo by Hannah Ewens

Chances are you've heard of the drug modafinil. You know the one: the "smart drug," sometimes called the Limitless pill, that turns sleep-deprived college students and young professionals into energetic work horses.

It turns out modafinil can do even more: It's a promising treatment for stimulant drug abuse, as well as neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It's also been shown to normalize cognitive function in sleep-deprived populations (which is basically everyone these days) and is the drug of choice for astronauts on the International Space Station and members of the armed forces on long duration missions. And since modafinil is non-addictive, it's only about as risky as drinking a few cups of coffee.

But unlike the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Canada, Mexico, and other countries that have approved modafinil as a non-controlled prescription drug, the United States still classifies modafinil as a Schedule IV controlled substance, putting it alongside drugs like Xanax and Valium. Given America's ongoing amphetamine crisis and generalized sleep deprivation, legalizing a safer alternative like modafinil makes a lot of sense. So why don't we?

Modafinil was developed in the 1970s by a French professor of experimental medicine to treat narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. After decades of clinical trials in France, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) okayed modafinil as a treatment for narcolepsy in 1998. In 1999, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) classified modafinil as a Schedule IV substance.

At the time, there wasn't enough research to clearly show modafinil's mechanism of action. Modafinil didn't appear to directly affect specific neurotransmitters, the chemicals released by nerve cells to communicate with other nerve cells. Instead, it seemed to act indirectly on several different neurotransmitters (namely serotonin, dopamine, and GABA) unlike other stimulants such as Adderall, which work more directly on the dopamine system.

The DEA noted in its ruling that the behavioral effects brought on by modafinil were similar to other stimulants, like cocaine, which do directly affect the dopamine system. Dopamine acts as a sort of natural reward system in the brain and is largely associated with addictive drugs, which gave the DEA reasonable concern.

Yet not all dopaminergic drugs are made equal. Some drugs, like MDMA, work by increasing the release of dopamine in the brain. Others, like cocaine, function as dopamine reuptake inhibitors. That means when the dopamine released by one nerve cell is not entirely absorbed by the receiving nerve cell, the leftover dopamine is blocked from re-entering the original nerve cell and stays in the gap between the two nerve cells. It's this extracellular dopamine that gets you feeling the way you do when you do a line. Modafinil is also a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, but it's not nearly as effective as taking something like cocaine.

"It doesn't matter how much modafinil you take—you can never shut off the dopamine transporter as well as a little bit of cocaine or amphetamine would," Peter Morgan, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University, told me. "That's part of the reason why people don't really feel high when taking modafinil."

For that reason, research has shown that modafinil is actually an effective way of treating cocaine and amphetamine addiction. If you're chronically using strong dopamine blockers like cocaine, your brain essentially adjusts to the presence of this extracellular dopamine as the new normal. If you then suddenly take the cocaine out of the equation, the brain has a much harder time functioning. Modafinil can function as a safe alternative to coke—it's still a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, but its effects are way milder and there's virtually no addictive potential.

Although modafinil has been successfully used to treat cocaine addiction in certain populations, this isn't one of its FDA-approved uses—so insurance companies won't pay for it as a treatment. This means that those who need it most are forced to pay out of pocket for access, which generally isn't an option for someone recovering from a serious coke habit. When I called a pharmacy to inquire about pricing, I was told 30 100mg pills would cost $870.

Some who use modafinil off-label order it illegally from producers in countries like India for far cheaper (about $2 per 200mg pill), but also risk getting a diluted product. Others turn to "approved" prescriptions for drugs like Adderall, which may accomplish the same results but come with far more risk (namely, that Adderall itself can be addictive).

"There is no question in my mind that modafinil is much, much safer to use than any of the amphetamines or amphetamine-like drugs, like Adderall or Methylphenidate ," said Morgan. "It's not clear to me that it's substantially worse than caffeine, but it's definitely much better than the amphetamines."

Part of the issue is that pharmaceutical companies aren't too keen on re-introducing modafinil as an addiction treatment. "There isn't a lot of support for pushing modafinil as a treatment for cocaine dependence," Morgan added. "It's hard to get any drug company interested in a treatment for cocaine dependence because no brand wants their brand associated with cocaine dependence."

But plenty of people are using modafinil for other things as well—most popularly, as a cognitive enhancer.

Barbara Sahakian, a neuroscientist at Cambridge, conducted a survey on off-label modafinil use after she realized a number of her perfectly healthy colleagues were using it at work. Her 2007 report in Nature surveyed 1,400 people from 60 countries who had used drugs like modafinil or Ritalin. The majority of them used them to increase concentration rather than for medical reasons, and a full one third of the respondents acquired their drugs over the internet, rather than with a prescription.

"The big issue is that there are no long-term safety studies in healthy people with drugs such as modafinil," Sahakian told me. Even though the drug seems to be wholly beneficial, there just aren't enough people researching it to change the FDA classification.

Like any drug, modafinil is not for everyone. Some people experience stomach pains or headaches and, ultimately, there is no substitute for natural cognitive enhancers like getting more sleep or exercise.

But for those who need it for addiction treatment, to make up for cognitive deficits induced by overwork, or are unable to adjust their lifestyles to accommodate more sleep and exercise, making modafinil accessible could be a godsend. And as of now, the United States is one of the only countries to regulate modafinil as a controlled substance, approving its use only for a handful of sleeping disorders.

The first step toward legalizing modafinil is promoting it as a safe alternative to the widely available stimulants used today and encouraging more research to be done on long-term use. De-scheduling a drug in the United States is a long and arduous process, but given the benefits of legalizing modafinil, the struggle could be worth it.

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

The Rush to Rein in Baltimore Cops Before Trump

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Baltimore City police officers at the scene where an 11-month-old baby and his car seat were found in Baltimore on Wednesday, October 26, 2016, following a carjacking several hours earlier. Photo by Kenneth K. Lam/Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images

In addition to frightening Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and women across America, Donald Trump's election as president of the United States has put a scare into the people trying to reform the country's troubled police departments. And Baltimore may be the first city where those fears are realized.

This past summer, the Department of Justice issued a damning report that documented a wide range of police abuses in Charm City. They included making arrests without probable cause, blatantly discriminating against people of color, and cruelty toward victims of sexual assault. The 164-page report marked the first step toward a so-called consent decree between Baltimore and the federal government, a process used since the 1990s to address issues raised by national probes of local cops. While consent decrees are no panacea, civil rights advocates and experts generally agree they represent an important tool for reform and accountability by providing formal oversight over police departments that have proven resistant to change.

But a consent decree is only as good as its enforcement, and an executive branch led by Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed "law-and-order" candidate who campaigned on stop-and-frisk policing, complicates things, to say the least. That's especially true if the Senate confirms Alabama US senator Jeff Sessions—a politician whose career has been largely defined by accusations of racism and who has spoken out against federal intervention into policing—as attorney general. The two men have basically everyone working on police reform in the city deeply worried that the feds will not use the courts to hold Baltimore accountable come 2017.

The deadline to finalize Baltimore's consent decree was set for November 1, in part because Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, a key player in the negotiations, is leaving office in early December. But at the end of last month, Rawlings-Blake said the deadline was more "aspirational in nature," leaving open the question of when, exactly, a deal will get done.

"When the mayor came out and said it wasn't going to be done by the start of November, the community collectively gasped," says Tara Huffman, director of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Programs at Baltimore's Open Society Institute, a progressive think tank and advocacy group.

On November 21, six Democrats in Maryland's congressional delegation sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Mayor Rawlings-Blake, and Mayor-elect Catherine Pugh, urging all parties to work as fast as possible to finalize the agreement. Rawlings-Blake responded that they are "working diligently," but it seems unlikely to be finalized under her watch. Baltimore police commissioner Kevin Davis also noted that other cities have had much longer timetables to negotiate their consent decrees, and suggested Baltimore's agreement is shaping up to be among the most ambitious.

Meanwhile, Mayor-elect Pugh has suggested she's worried about Baltimore shouldering the costs of paying for these reforms, and teased plans to ask the state and federal government for help. On the campaign trail, the then-candidate released an online ad featuring a white surrogate saying "there's too much talk of racism going on now" and that "the word 'racism' has got to be erased from our vocabulary." (A spokesperson for Pugh's transition team declined a request for an interview.)

"We have no reason to think she is opposed to the consent decree, but folks have not heard any really definitive declaration from Pugh that it is important to her, and something that she sees as important for Baltimore," says Huffman.

The main reason reformers are so stressed about wrapping up the deal as soon as possible is that once the consent decree is finalized, a federal judge will be empowered to enforce it, no matter who is leading the Department of Justice—or, for that matter, the country. In other words, getting it done before Trump and his team take power has taken on new urgency, especially given that Sessions once wrote court-ordered consent decrees are "undemocratic" and "dangerous."

Adding to reformers' anxiety is that even if Baltimore does manage to get the decree in place before Inauguration Day, the police department and city political leadership may not follow through completely on the agreed-upon reforms. That's when Trump's team could wield tremendous influence.

"There will likely be an independent monitor, selected by the parties and the court, who will issue periodic reports of the city's compliance," explains Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor who has worked in the Justice Department. "The reports will provide some public shaming, but even if the monitor says the city is out of compliance, the DOJ will have to be willing to go to court and seek further relief to enforce the consent decree. If a Trump/Sessions DOJ wants to shut the case down, all it has to do is let the decree sit."

The Department of Justice declined to comment, and the Trump transition team did not return request for comment prior to publication.

Huffman says Baltimore's negotiations with the DOJ have included generous solicitation of public input. For example, local groups have requested additional resources so community organizations can provide on-the-ground feedback about policing, in addition to whatever attracts the attention of the independent monitor.

The first DOJ consent decree with city cops was imposed in 1997 with the Pittsburgh Police Department. Witold Walczak, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, helped bring the lawsuit that attracted federal attention in that case. He says that after four years, the city was in compliance with about half of the decree's provisions, but those mainly consisted of operational changes like establishing a computerized early-warning system for troublesome officers.

After George W. Bush took office, Walczak says, the decree was eventually dropped at the instigation of his Justice Department—before many of the most serious issues had been addressed. There has since been major backsliding when it comes to local policing.

By the Marshall Project's count, the federal government launched 20 police department investigations under George W. Bush's administration, but entered only into three consent decrees. In contrast, the Obama Justice Department has led 23 investigations, and imposed 11 consent decrees.

"It wasn't perfect under Clinton, and we've had an uneven relationship with the DOJ even under Obama—it's not like they're an extension of the ACLU," Walczak says. "But under the Bush administration, and what we expect will happen under Trump, is this is simply not an issue they care to deal with."

"Police abuse is a major problem that is crying out for federal intervention," he adds. "And reforms are not going to happen without some kind of legal muscle."

Follow Rachel Cohen on Twitter.

Dispensaries in Toronto and Vancouver Now Selling Weed Doggy Treats

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Tfw the edible hits. Photo via Flickr user Don DeBold

Canadian Medical marijuana dispensary chain Pacifico Life is selling hemp-derived products for pets, but it doesn't mean you can get lifted with your dog anytime soon.

Operating out of both Hamilton and Toronto, Pacifico Life specializes in hemp-derived items, including Cannabidiol (CBD) infused products for pets. They've partnered with Apawthecary Labs a Vancouver-based wholesaler that works with veterinarians to research and develop the treats, including biscuits and tinctures in delicious bacon and seafood flavours for your spoiled fur-baby.

To purchase the pet products, Pacifico Life owner Tamara Hirsh told VICE, one must be a registered member with a medical marijuana license, or sign the "caregiver form," and present medical documentation pertaining to their pet's illness. The products each come labeled with instructions for administration and dosage specific to the dog.

"They're all CBD, so there's no THC in it," Hirsh explained. " quite popular. Just like on a daily basis for dogs with anxiety or mobility issues like arthritis, especially aging dogs. It helps with a wide gamut of things, much like it does in people."

While hemp-derived stuff for people and pets alike has been experiencing a surge of popularity, others are skeptical about its effectiveness. "When there is more research done it, probably ya," said senior dog owner Allison Wagner. "If he got severe arthritis or something and that'd help him feel better, than sure."

Recent studies on human-Cannabidiol interaction has been pretty inconsistent at best. A 2011 study indicated that CBD can reduce subjective anxiety, while a 2006 study showed that CBD increases anxiety to resemble "ketamine-induced psychotic symptoms." Studies from this year found CBD to be an effective anti-inflammatory, but another imparted that way more research needs to be done before the effects of CBD can be fully understood.

"Research is just now beginning on the use of marijuana in animals. There is considerable interest, but it will be some time before answers will be available," a representative for the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association said in an email to VICE.

"I think it would be very interesting to explore," said Toronto vet Dr. Jonathan Mitelman. "But first thing's first: we have to find if it's—through our veterinary college, our government regulatory body—if it's legal."

Regulations on hemp-derived, cannabis items, and CBD in Canada remain in a legal grey area, with legislation set to kick in sometime next year. CBD oil is currently considered a controlled substance and available only with a prescription.

"There needs to be some kind of divide when regulations come in for products like the pet products, or say the creams or topicals or bath bombs or soaps or the lipbalm," said Hirsh. "Those really shouldn't fall under the same strict regulations... I believe that THC products should be heavily regulated, but not CBD products."

Follow Lisa Power on Twitter.

Hamilton Samples Some Intoxicating Fish Brains in Madagascar

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Andrew W.K. on Clarity

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Illustration by Tallulah Fontaine

Earlier this year, I was contacted by a youth organization in Wisconsin called One Step. The group operates a summer camp for young people with cancer, where campers can spend time with other patients their age, as well as survivors of the disease, and experience beautiful Lake Michigan.

I said yes instantly, but I was nervous. How would I be able to face these young people dealing with challenges that I'd never faced? I assumed I was being brought in as an entertainer to help cheer up these young patients—some as young as 5 years old—and offer them some sort of boost. Little did I know, these brave young people were going to teach me more than I ever dreamed.

I had gotten it all backward. The gentleman who invited me to the camp eventually explained that every summer he invites someone to the camp to be a student, not to be a teacher or to offer their presence to the young people there. Instead, I'd learn about strength and resilience through these courageous cancer patients, experience their power and incredible energy.

I was absolutely overwhelmed, devastated, and uplifted by the camp experience. It's difficult for me to even write about it now, the feelings come in such waves of intensity. These young children taught me many lessons, the most important of which I try to keep in sharp focus daily.

Here's that...

One young woman I met especially struck me. She was in her early 20s and had beaten cancer after a long battle. She still went back to the camp every year to reconnect with the friends she had grown close to, and to support new incoming campers still grappling with the most challenging aspects of their illness.

Almost losing her life gave her clarity. It also gave her purpose.

This young woman's eyes radiated a sparkling kindness, like two universes gazing out from some impossibly vast and infinite space hidden behind her face. She seemed to look through your weakness and recognize all the best things inside you, compassionately overlooking or accepting your fear, your shallowness, your failings.

She was never not smiling. It was a sincere and natural smile that transcended happiness, and in her presence I felt some sort of essential value of goodness and rightness and kindness that I couldn't quite explain, but felt deeply.

I asked this young woman to please tell me her secret. What did she know that made her able to be this way? What did she see through those supernova eyes? What was she feeling inside that made her able to smile so purely and genuinely even in the face of such suffering and having been through such trying circumstances herself?

Her answer surprised me.

Cancer had given her a clarity she had not known before. She said that ever since her diagnosis, she saw life as an incredible gift. Her experience with almost dying actually introduced her to her own life. And that even the challenges and difficulties in life felt like opportunities to grow and appreciate the magnificence of every shred of it even more deeply. She calmly and gently explained that there was no secret to her other than an unflinching and unshakable positivity. Simply being alive was her source of constant joy.

Almost losing her life gave her clarity. It also gave her purpose—an active devotion to a deep and crucial hope. Now, she had a mission to help others like her, to share her power and joy. Every day for her was a beautiful new chance to make her life count.

Every young person I spent time with at One Step shared this similar quality, this clarity, this purpose. Each one went out of their way to show me incredible kindness and extraordinary warmth. They could tell I was overwhelmed and scared. As the sun set and the camp day was winding down, I was in an emotional state of dazed humility. I felt so silly that I had come into this experience as I had, thinking I could somehow help them. Instead, they imbued me with the clarity to realize more profoundly that life is a precious gift. They did it simply by being themselves, completely and fully human examples of a triumphant joy.

I'm still processing what I experienced there, and I imagine I will be for a long time. But one thing was immediately clear: It is this spirit of joy for life that I want to serve and promote and protect and amplify and worship and conjure up and share. It reaffirmed that it is the one true calling we can all respond to and devote ourselves to. Living fully is the answer. Not allowing ourselves to float aimlessly throughout life in a cloudy daze is an unquestionably hard challenge, but one we owe ourselves to face head on, with clarity and purpose.

We can do so by attempting every day to be our best selves, tirelessly believing in the beauty and splendor of every second of this chance we have to be alive.

Follow Andrew W.K. on Twitter.

Woman Calls Cops on Man for Whistling ‘Closing Time’ too Loudly

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Screenshot from Closing Time music video

"Closing time / Open all the doors and let you out into the world"

So begins one of the most recognizable songs from the late 90s.

"Closing Time" from Semisonic is everywhere. You can't escape it in shitty dive bars, Karaoke booths, or the sad bachelor apartment of a writer who just moved to Toronto for a job and has no friends here.

The song is so ubiquitous that it's not surprising some (ok most) people get annoyed by it.

That's exactly what happened in Oregon earlier this month when some dude, assuredly in the throes of a mid-life crisis, wouldn't stop whistling the bars to the Grammy-nominated track near a driveway.

The woman who owns said driveway wasn't having any of the song that reached number one on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks. She told the fanboy to "Shut up" and, according to the police log published on Oregon Live, a "verbal altercation occurred."

"It's not clear if the caller would have been more or less upset if it was a different genre or whether it was just the talent lacking in the whistling," Captain Mike Herb of the Forest Grove Police Department told TIME.

The mysterious whistler was long gone but cops did catch up to him and he was apparently still whistling the tune that was named the 1999 song of the year by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. After finishing his quick chat with the cops, he went on his merry way, still whistling.

At the moment it's still unknown if the man knew who he wanted to take him home, but as a wise man once said:

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..."

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter


Stunning Photos of Miami as It Used to Be

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Jill Freedman, the 74-year-old street photographer famous for her work documenting cops, firemen, and circus people in New York, will be showing and participating in Art Basel Miami this weekend. Below are some of the photos and memories from the years she spent in Miami, as well as some videos with her we did for the VICE 2016 Photo Issue. At the very bottom, there's a list of the Basel events where you can find her.

"I lived down there for ten years. I would go the beach and read. I kinda dropped out of the planet. I spent most of it lying supine. Under an umbrella, reading. It was great. I mean, some of it was depressing. I went there to get away—to turn on, tune in, and drop out. And the guy who rented chairs was my grass dealer and my cat-sitter. Perfect! It was perfect. I took a sabbatical from life. I had been fighting to be able to read since I was ten years old, when the only place you could be left alone was the bathroom. There was a library that got me any book I wanted two blocks away, swimming pools, balmy breezes. No one was there telling me to turn the light out at night. I could read until whenever I wanted."

Here are two videos we did with Freedman for our photo issue:

Below is where she'll be at Art Basel. Many of these events are part of the Miami Street Photography Festival, hosted by the HistoryMiami Museum, which includes street photography greats like Richard Kalvar, Alex Webb, Rebecca Norris-Webb, and Martin Parr. It culminates Sunday in a screening of "Don't Blink - Robert Frank," a portrait of the artist directed by Laura Israel.

Wednesday, November 30

7:30 PM: Opening and release party for Long Stories Short,a retrospective of Freedman's work. The Leica Store Miami, 372 Miracle Mile Coral Gables

Thursday, December 1

3:00 PM: Book signing for Only Human, a collaboration between Freedman, 8-Ball Zines, and Printed Matter that collects 40 years of the photographer's best images. Art Basel Fair, Magazines Exhibitors at Miami Beach Convention Center

7:00 PM: Jill Freedman Artist Talk and AV presentation—"Madhattan." HistoryMiami Museum Auditorium at 101 West Flagler Street

Saturday, December 3

3:30 PM: "A Conversation with an American Original: Jill Freedman" with Maggie Steber. HistoryMiami Museum Auditorium

7–10 PM: Miami Street Photography Festival Awards Ceremony and Closing Party. HistoryMiami Museum Courtyard

Words by Cameron Cuchulainn

Kellie Leitch Forgets to Buy Canadian Domain, Promptly Gets Trolled

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Screenshot of byebyecbc.ca

Trolling, when done correctly, can be more beautiful than the greatest painting, and more inspired than the greatest piece of literature. Trolling, at times, can be a masterpiece.

Take the simplicity of byebyecbc.ca for example.

When one goes to Kellie Leitch's anti-CBC petition page but uses .ca instead of .com, as most Canadians would, they go to a page that looks identical to Leitch's. But then the magic happens, a red X flashes over the screen twice, the "I have no idea what I'm doing" dog appears and you are redirected to CBC's website.

Simple. Elegant. Beautiful.

The icing on the cake is the fact the troll didn't even come from the east coast elitists Leitch has built her campaign around but instead the heartland of Canadian Conservatism, Alberta.

THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!

Trever Miller, a badass from Lethbridge, set up the website. He told VICE in an email that he is "just your average citizen who is annoyed with clueless politicians trying to dismantle the fabric of Canada."

"They put stuff like byebyecbc.com up and then are too dumb to grab the .ca which makes such hijinks possible. After that it's a matter of retweeting them but modifying the .com to .ca in the tweet and see who clicks on it."

"Simple stuff, really."

There is something remarkably cathartic about the fact that pro-Canadian values superwoman Kellie Leitch forgot to buy the Canadian domain for her anti-CBC website.

Here's a politician who promptly adopted Trump-style politics to thrust herself into the public psyche as the champion of "Canadian values" forgetting to use ".ca" and bowing instead to our ".com" overlords, the domain used by globalist scum.

Read More: A Canadian Conservative Politician Promises 'Revenge of the Comment Section'

It's not too surprising since Leitch, one of the most elite politicians in the system championing "anti-elitism," is the Canadian political equivalent of that Men In Black scene where Edgar, the alien cockroach, is awkwardly parading around in the skin of a farmer.

Of course, she was trolled.

That said, Leitch is one of the front runners to claim the Conservative Party of Canada's leadership, which means that the Great White North may very well have Edgar the Bug running its official opposition in short order.

Everything is fine folks but, you know, maybe it's time for Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones to make a quick trip north.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Pope Wants Scientists to Protect the Planet from Trump

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Photo via Flickr user Republic of Korea

Continuing his very chill reign as resident cool-guy pope, Pope Francis met with scientists at the Vatican this week to discuss the need to address climate change, working in what seemed like a jab at President-elect Donald Trump in the process, the Washington Post reports.

"Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium," the pontiff said. "It is worth noting that international politics has reacted weakly—albeit with some praiseworthy exceptions—regarding the concrete will to seek the common good and universal goods, and the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded."

It's no secret that the pope isn't a huge Trump fan, especially after their spat during Trump's campaign over immigration. Now, Francis seems to be addressing the president-elect's vow to pull the US out of the global climate change agreement Obama signed last year, and the fact that Trump's deemed the environmental phenomenon nothing more than a manufactured Chinese hoax.

The Catholic climate change warrior encouraged scientists to continue to work for the common good and basically told them that they're our only hope for preserving the future of the planet.

"I would say that it falls to scientists, who work free of political, economic, or ideological interests, to develop a cultural model which can face the crisis of climatic change and its social consequences," Pope Francis said.

Watch: The Hidden Impacts of Climate Change

The Twisted History of Hallucinogenic Fish

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On an all new episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, Hamilton heads to Réunion Island and Madagascar to investigate icthyoallyeinotoxism and a twisted history of hallucinogenic fish.

Hamilton's Pharmacopeia airs Wednesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND.

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


I Tried to Sell My DIY Sex Robot at an Invention Convention

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The Oobot (Photos: Chris Bethell)

Earlier this year I revolutionised both sex toys and the world of human-robot interaction with my breakthrough invention: the "Oobot". My affordable sex robot was capable of providing millennials the love and companionship absent in their lives – something I hoped they would spot and go in for en masse.

Sadly, things haven't gone as planned. Despite promotion on both social media and the popular website vice.com, it's not inspired the rampant robophilia I assumed it would. In fact, to date, there have been exactly zero orders for the Oobot.

But I'm not panicking. Deep down, I always knew the Oobot's entry point may well be in more liberal countries like France or Spain, rather than prudish old Britain. For that route, however, capital, expert advice and a marketing plan are needed. So that's what I've been seeking, sending out top secret emails to people in the know. People like Dragons' Den star and entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne.

Unfortunately, presumably due to technical errors, I'm yet to receive a response. This initially left me frustrated: how would the world discover and benefit from my creation? Do these industry experts not realise how many lives would be improved if people just knew that a watermelon-in-a-wig witha punched-out hole for a mouth was available to them for a low, low price?

And then I spot the answer online – a place where the most remarkable inventions the world has to offer would be gathered together under one roof: The British Invention Show. For just a few days, experts from various industries judge and inspect innovations people have to offer, offering funding to the best. It's a dream come true: finally the Oobot would get a shot at changing the world!

Now the only thing in my way is the formality of getting my sexbot into the convention. Again, emails prompt no responses, but after much thinking I come up with a flawless plan: just show with the Oobot by my side.

After pacing through the rain, I show up at the Barbican, the Oobot stuffed under a giant white tablecloth. Walking through the automatic doors I hear "Excuse me!" Fuck. I exchange long, suspicious eye contact with the doorman and, eventually, he cuts through the silence: "Are you here to do the meat for later?" He points up and down at my outfit, giggling to his friends. They laugh. Hah. People giggled at Edison; called Galileo a mad man; guffawed at Bell – and history taught them a lesson. I'll be coming for you when the revolution sweeps through, doorman, but I have more important things to worry about today – this is my big shot.

Stepping into the conference, I see that it's everybody else's, too.

It's something like the atmosphere of a doctor's surgery; everybody sitting tightly with their pride and joy, eagerly waiting for utter turmoil or jubilation. Shaking with nerves and shoulder-to-shoulder with the best the world has to offer, I park the covered Oobot up in the corner and decide to check out the competition.

A waterproof plug socket?

An engaging game to entice generation-Z into being active?

A 100 percent organic product designed to help you quit smoking?

I'm on my knees! I assumed I wouldn't have much competition, but it looks like I'll walk it! You may as well write that cheque up now, fellas, as I'm the only one providing the world with something it desperately needs.

Pucker up, darling. This is your time to shine.

Gasps echo around the room, inventors rubberneck. A woman locks eyes with me – we both know exactly what she's thinking: 'The cavalry just rolled in and we're all fucked.' I grimace and nod knowingly: 'Yes you are, dear. Yes, you are.'

I get set up and, within seconds, spot a man trying to sneak a photo. "Roll right up!" I say. "Come and get a proper photo!"

"So what is your invention?" he asks, checking out the photo on his phone.

"It's the Oobot," I point to my whiteboard. "An affordable sex robot." The man's face transforms. He points off into the distance and walks away. The Oobot must have blown his mind.

My creation has a similar effect on the rest of the inventors, whose people have shied away into the opposite corner. Lord, I knew this was a powerful machine, but only now are we seeing its potential!

Soon enough, a call goes out over the tannoy: The Investors are beginning their circuits. So to give myself the best shot, I decide to move the Oobot to a space where it will truly excel, and take five behind the curtain, waiting for destiny to arrive. This crazy dream that transformed my world a few months back might be about to do the same to the world at large.

It's then that I hear it: "Excuse me?"

I gather my thoughts, wait a moment and burst out.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm Tony and, well..." he stops. "What on earth is this thing?"

"This is the Oobot."

Tony scratches his head and folds his arms. I match his casual body language; sales 101.

"And what exactly have you brought it here for?"

"This, Tony, is a piece of innovation, a piece of brilliance that I believe to be worthy of your investment."

"I'm in the facilities industry, so what use would I have for this?" he asks.

I take a deep breath, pinch my legs through my pockets. I've got this: "Well, what does every person on this earth need to do, Tony?"

"Eat, drink, sleep?"

"And?"

"And what?" He shoots back abruptly.

"And fuck!" I leap forwards.

"Good grief!"

"Feel free to try it, Tony! It's very intuitive!"

He stops for a minute before checking his phone. "What exactly are you here for? Is this a wind-up or are you genuinely bonkers? You're not registered here, you know?"

"I know, yes."

"Okay, I need to get Kane."

Wow, I must really have taken these boys off guard. Kane is the organiser of the whole convention; the man who holds the patent for the MP3 player. A maverick who shot from the hip, leading the world of technology for decades. If anyone was going to understand the Oobot, it would be him.

"Are you presenting here today?" he asks.

"I've brought an invention of my own, yes."

"Well, I'm going to be invoicing you for £1,500 to present here then, because that's exactly what all the other people who've flown from all around the world to present have paid." Oh dear. "Are you bloody daft? What are you trying to pull? Seriously, I've had five separate complaints about you."

Out on the street within seconds. Five complaints and the threat of a thousand-plus-pound fine: is the Oobot so repulsive – so out of place – that it simply doesn't belong in this world? Have I, like Dr Frankenstein before me, created a monster? All of a sudden, everybody is looking at the Oobot differently.

Where do you turn when everybody seems so disgusted by what you've got? When something you love so dearly all of a sudden seems so sordid? Who'll embrace the Oobot for what it's meant for? Solitary businessmen?

Not a peep. The common person?

Never.

Staring deeply into its mop-head pubes, I think of all the things we've been through together – getting into the invention convention, being thrown out of the invention convention – and I realise exactly where the Oobot belongs. The very place that I came up with it.

Prowler, Soho: home. Walking through the door of the famed sex shop, the man behind the till stops serving a customer in his tracks. He stares at the Oobot, back up into my eyes and down to the Oobot again. "I can't believe you've brought this into the shop."

"Do you remember us?" I ask, tentatively. He sighs.

"Of course I do. I saw the piece on the website!" The tension lifts. "Look at it; it's got a pumpkin head now – I love it!"

"And all the features that we spoke about."

"Fantastic, I can't believe it."

"Say, my friend: we need a space for the Oobot to live. Do you think, by any chance, there's a spot at the store?"

"We don't have much space..." My heart sinks.


"...Down here. But I don't see why we couldn't find a spot for it upstairs. It's a beautiful little part of our mythology."

So there we have it. The fairytale ending this story deserves. Just remember: whichever path you may take in life, there's a home out there for everybody. And after its long journey, the Oobot found its home here.

If you ever want to go and visit the Oobot, head to Growler in Soho and just ask.And while you're there, make sure to give it a peck on the cheek from me.

@Oobahs

More on VICE:

I Pushed 'All You Can Eat' Restaurants to Their Absolute Limits

A Quick Update: How RealDoll Is Getting On with Its AI Sex Robots

We Went On a Tour of London's Worst-Rated Nightclubs

High Wire: Shrooms Could Make Cancer Patients Less Terrified of Death

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Two new studies suggest the psychedelic drug psilocybin, a.k.a. magic mushrooms, can provide dramatic and long-lasting relief from depression and anxiety in cancer patients, paving the way for a potential revolution in psychiatry.

Of course, that will only happen if legal and cultural barriers that have long barred medical use of these drugs can be breached. To succeed, proponents will have to walk a fine line between raising hope and creating unrealistic hype, a balancing act that gets all the more precarious when Donald Trump takes office in January.

The data are increasingly impressive, even if the new studies are small: two independent teams at Johns Hopkins and at New York University considered a total of 80 patients with anxiety or depression associated with life-threatening cancer.

Following a single dose of psilocybin, 60 to 80 percent had life-altering reductions in symptoms, which led to improved quality of life for six months or more. In the Hopkins study, which included the majority of the patients, 60 percent had "complete remission," according to lead author Roland Griffiths, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Hopkins Medical School.

The studies were double-blind, with NYU participants getting either a placebo or the real drug in one session and the substance they didn't get first in another session weeks later. In the Hopkins trial, a similar cross-over design was used, but instead of placebo, patients got a psilocybin dose too low to be effective. In both studies, everyone ultimately got one therapeutic-level dose.

The data was published Thursday in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, which deemed the results so important that an entire issue was devoted to the two studies, along with supportive commentary from mental health leaders. Those voices include two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association and the former deputy "drug czar" under George H.W. Bush, Herb Kleber.

There have been similar findings of positive emotional growth after shroom use in small, recent trials in healthy people—and there are also now at least a half-dozen promising modern trials of psilocybin for conditions ranging from smoking cessation to depression.

Before panic over recreational use of psychedelics led to prohibition and halted almost all related research in the 1970s, over 1,000 studies including 40,000 research participants had been published, according to the lead author of the NYU study, Stephen Ross. He serves as the director of addiction treatment at the school's School of Medicine.

At a dial-in press conference announcing the results, Dinah Bazer, a Brooklyn patient who'd had ovarian cancer, said unequivocally, "This drug saved my life and changed my life." Though her cancer was successfully treated with surgery, she remained anxious about recurrence, describing herself as "consumed with fear, which was running my life and ruining my life."

During her trip, Bazer says she visualised her fear as a mass in her body and screamed at it to "Get the fuck out," and then felt it vanish. Afterwards, she says, she just felt "bathed in God's love... for hours." The sense of connection enabled her to re-engage with life— making new friendships and renewing old ones. And her fear never returned, Bazer says.

Both studies found that having a mystical experience—like Bazer's feeling of communion— was highly associated with a positive therapeutic response. "In science, there's a bit of an aversion to even using the term mystical experience," says Griffiths. "But it is definable."

One key factor in having such an experience, Griffiths adds, is a sense that the world is benevolent and that all people are interconnected. "That's accompanied by a deep sense of reverence or respect or even sacredness, something that is humbling," he says. Another important element is a "component of authority: it's more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness and this stamps this experience in as one that informs people's lives going forward."

But you don't need to have a full-on mystical experience to benefit, according to Griffiths. Wesley Weidemann, 74, an agricultural economist, had become depressed after prostate cancer treatment left him with severe side effects. He describes his psilocybin experience as marked by enhanced perception and a sense of "hyper-awareness," which made him feel as though he could hear each instrument in a symphony he listened to, both by itself, and as part of the whole orchestra. And when he was given a rose, he describes it as being unlike any he'd ever seen.

"Just the artful shape of it, the blending of colour, the magnificence of the fragrance," he says. "I was seeing and experiencing that rose in way I never experienced a rose before."

Weidemann had stopped taking antidepressants in order to participate in the trial—and has not returned to them since. "It was a very rich sensory experience and very memorable, but I didn't come to any conclusions about my place in universe or god or anything like that," he says.

Although some participants did have bad trips, these experiences of panic, distress and despair tended to be short-lived and some even resulted in the most meaningful sense of change later, according to Griffiths. Researchers attribute the general lack of harm mainly to the fact that participants were well-screened in advance and prepared psychologically with as many as eight hours of counselling and meetings before taking the drug. While tripping, at least in the Hopkins study, they were in a familiar room, guided by soothing music and supportive counsellors. And afterwards, they met again to process what had happened.

Check out Hamilton's visit to a clandestine shroom lab on VICELAND.

The research raises fascinating questions. For one, is it the sense of meaning, purpose and spiritual renewal that causes therapeutic change—or is this just a side effect of how the drug acts within the brain? And could those effects occur in a drug that doesn't make you trip at all, but does affect the same receptors?

Second, why is American drug policy so out of line with the potential benefits and low risks of these medicines? Classic hallucinogens like psilocybin and LSD are not linked with addiction. In fact, their action on one specific serotonin receptor has been hypothesised to account both for why they aren't addictive and why they may actually be useful in fighting addiction to other drugs.

Moreover, a large population study now suggests that even recreational users do not have higher risks of lasting psychiatric problems. That being said, psychedelics can certainly cause significant distress if used inappropriately, particularly to those who have serious mental illness.

Psychiatrist Allen Frances, who chaired the task force that produced the fourth revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), urges caution, not blind optimism, for the moment.

"The benefits of new treatments are always exaggerated at the start," he says. "Psilocybin may be very useful in helping some cancer patients deal with their psychological and spiritual challenges; it may be very harmful to others... Widespread premature introduction into general clinical practice would be unwise."

That is certainly true. It's also true that, as psychiatrist and former American Psychiatric Association President Jeffrey Lieberman and his co-author Daniel Shalev put it in one commentary accompanying the research, "The degree of restriction for illegal drugs does not correlate with their risk of harm, and there is no formalised process for reviewing these determinations at the national or international level."

That must change. It is simply insane that drugs that may treat major psychiatric disorders in a single dose can't be easily tested and approved if shown to be effective—all because America can't seem to get over a lingering hatred for hippies.

And our next president represents a new wild card in this ongoing national saga.

"Historically, Republicans have been better at funding research and development and Democrats have been better at funding services," says Lieberman, the former APA president. "But with Trump all bets are off. I hope he will see the importance of funding biomedical research, and he did have a brother who suffered from alcoholism."

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

VICE Long Reads: No Tears Left to Cry: Being Deported Is a Distressing Nightmare

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A fishing beach in rural Jamaica (Photo by the author)

On the 7th of September, 2016, 38 men and four women were forcibly removed from the UK to Jamaica on a private, chartered flight. They were all Jamaican nationals, but for most, Britain is their home. Many moved to the UK as children. Most have British children of their own. Despite that, they were deported, en masse, in secret and at great expense to the British government.

I am living in Jamaica and have met and spoken with some of the people from the flight. They described to me the flight itself, the reasons they were deported and the kinds of problems they now face in Jamaica – a country they may have few memories of, and might not feel safe in.

Charter flights are notoriously violent . When the Home Office charters a private plane they are ruthless in filling the seats, and people have very little time to process what is happening to them. Charter flights are highly secretive, they happen by cover of darkness and no one knows where the plane will depart from.

September's charter flight to Jamaica was the first in two years. I know people who were deported on the last one, in November of 2014. They told me of violent escorts, of being restrained in body belts and of being treated like animals. It's possible that the Home Office is planning to re-establish regular charter flights to Jamaica, deporting people on mass flights every few months, as it does to Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan and Albania.

Me and some friends at the Unity Centre in Glasgow – an organisation that gives practical support to and stands in solidarity with migrants – were able to speak with people before the flight. We called them in immigration detention centres and listened, as one person after another told us how they were snatched while signing in at Home Office reporting centres and handed flight directions in detention or prison, just days before the flight. In marked British accents, they told us about their British children, their British partners, their British homes and their British lives. We heard different stories, but there was a chorus of fear, anxiety and confusion.

After speaking to people on the phone we tried to publicise the charter flight. A protest was organised outside the Jamaican High Commission in London and the press picked up on the story. It was good to see some noise being made around this issue, but the protest had no real chance of stopping the flight, and it departed from Stansted at around 6.30AM on Wednesday the 7th of September.

In Jamaica I managed to contact 16 of the 42 people who were on the flight. They shared their stories with me, and they want them to be read. Here's what they told me.

TREATED LIKE ANIMALS

The Home Office requires that those with uncertain or precarious immigration status sign on regularly at reporting centres. Most of those who ended up on the charter were detained while signing on:

"It was my stepdaughter's birthday, I brought her up all my life, met her when she were one, and it was her fifth birthday that day. I went that morning to sign on, early that morning, before she woke up, and I've never seen her again. I had bought loads of presents to give her." – David, 29

The fact that people were detained while signing on, in different parts of the country, suggests the operation was well planned in advance. It seems that the Home Office conducted a wide sweep of Jamaican nationals who were liable to removal. People who had been signing for months, complying with Home Office regulations, found themselves detained in the weeks running up to the flight. With charter flights, the Home Office wants to fill as many seats as possible, and more Jamaicans were detained and served with flight directions than actually made it onto the plane.

A mass protest at Yarl's Wood detention centre in March (Photo: Chris Bethell)

Most spent late August and early September in immigration detention centres and were handed flight directions just a few days before the 7th of September, although many received their letters weeks after their letter was dated. Surely the Home Office wouldn't withhold correspondence to hamper legal interventions? Some had been told by their solicitors "not to worry"; the judicial review had been lodged in time. However, Home Office charter policy allows them to foreclose this option; judicial review was powerless.

People felt that they had been denied access to justice. As the date approached, some spoke to loved ones, just to hear their voices:

"I stayed up on the phone to her all night that night, and she was just crying, crying, saying, 'Please try and contact me as soon as you get there.'" – Andrew, 21

The night before the flight was due to depart people were rounded up in their cells. Up to eight security personnel came to retrieve them:

"They put a belt on us, tied round our waist, tying our hands together so you couldn't really move, and then they had hold of you and dragged you, pretty much carried you onto the coach. We were waiting in the coach for hours, then it set off. We couldn't get up, we weren't allowed to use the toilet, so there was no point drinking. We drove for half an hour, and then waited again from probably 12 midnight until 5AM before they took us onto the plane. We just sat there... that's when you start to realise you are getting on the plane, you aren't getting off." – David, 29

"They strapped us up, zipped us up, in a body belt so we could hardly move. They made sure they moved everyone under the cover of darkness. We were gone. We were in the air before anyone could make any noise. Even by the time my mum got hold of the solicitor, I was in Jamaica, man." – William, 38

A plane gets ready to deport refugees to West Africa in 2015 (Photo: James Bridle)


I literally thought they were going to kill him.

Each deportee had two escorts for the duration of the flight, and I was told that only the lucky few were allowed to have their body belts removed. The Home Office deny this and insist that "waist restraint belts are used based on an individual assessment of the risk presented by each detainee".

"We were treated like animals, we were strapped up, thrown from one cage to another in the dark; we didn't have a say. The big guys there, just waiting for you to kick off, and then they could fuck you up. We were like animals." – William, 38

"You know what they looked like? You know bounty hunters, like some special forces." Darel, 32

"There was one guy – he was distraught, because he was leaving his baby mum behind, and his child, and he was emotional. There were like seven or eight real big, wrestler-looking guys, like people you would see on WWF; they were massive. He was screaming, cursing, saying what they were doing was illegal or whatever, and the force they were using, I literally thought they were going to kill him. At one point they held him round his head, fingers in his temples, and they held him, held him so tight that after a while you heard nothing off him." – Michelle, 27
"I was one of the two people kicking off. I told them they were murderers. I was going on one, I was losing my mind. And then the plane started moving, and then we were in the air and I didn't have any energy left. I was wiped, so I stopped kicking off. I just thought, 'Hopefully when we land...' I still had faith that I might be able to come straight back. My wrists were bleeding from the handcuffs being on so tight." – Omari, 24

For most people, resistance seemed futile. Some managed to sleep. Some watched films. Others cried. When people went to the toilet they had do so with the door open so the escorts could keep an eye them.

The Home Office insists that force is used as a last resort, but overwhelmingly people spoke of the escorts as violent, racist and smug. It was only Michelle who spoke warmly of her escorts:

"So yeah, she managed to borrow a phone and let me phone my partner and kids and spoke to them before the flight lifted off. And when we landed she also gave me the phone to phone them, just to let them know that I landed safe. You can tell they've got kids themselves. So they sympathised with that. I spoke to my step-kids before we took off, and the escorts were a bit heartbroken because they heard when the baby started crying on the phone, and then I started crying, and she put her arms around me and was rubbing my back, and saying, 'I know it's hard, but you have to stay strong,' you know."

When asked to comment, a Home Office spokesperson said: "There have been no complaints about the treatment of detainees on this flight. We do not tolerate racism or mistreatment and will thoroughly investigate any allegations which are brought to our attention."

One of the homeless shelters that deportees without families can end up in (Photo by the author's friend, Chris)

PROCESSING

When the plane landed in Kingston the detainees were handed from the British authorities to the Jamaicans. They were moved in coaches to an army barracks to be "processed", which included an interview and finger-printing. People complained about the long wait and the heat:

"Basically, they were trying to push us in a corner, and we were dying. Everyone with their shirt off, we're sweating, so we're trying to go to the door. We can't go outside – they have officers by the door so we can't go outside, we're prisoners. It was punishment." – Glen, 35

For some, escaping the heat of the barracks was an ambivalent prospect, given they had no idea where they would be going:

"I was shitting myself. Listen, I've never been in a situation where I've been this scared. The most scared I've ever been in my life. It was madness. A completely alien place for me, innit. I don't know no one, I don't know nowt..." – David, 29

Most people were collected by family members, although not necessarily familiar faces. A few were offered accommodation in a homeless shelter in downtown Kingston.

A deportee in Jamaica (Photo by the author)

DEPORTING BLACK BRITONS

Everyone I spoke to was deported despite having British children or stepchildren. Many spoke with British accents and barely remembered Jamaica. So why were they deported?

Most of the people I spoke to entered deportation proceedings through the criminal justice system. In other words, most had spent time in prison, or at least had a criminal record.

In 2006 there was a "foreign national prisoner crisis". It was discovered that some "foreign offenders" were being released from prison post-sentence, when they should've been considered for deportation by the immigration authorities. This scandal caused an uproar. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke lost his job and the Home Office began prioritising the identification, management and expulsion of foreign national offenders. The figure of the "foreign criminal", became a regular character in the media in a way that simply wasn't the case before the crisis.

In response, the British government has increased the resources allocated to the management of foreign offenders. Prisons have been re-organised around the problem of foreignness, with "foreign national only" prisons introduced (for example, HMP Huntercombe and HMP Maidstone). The Home Affairs Select Committee asks for regular updates on the number of deportations of ex-offenders, and sets targets. And there has been a flurry of legislative change, each Immigration Act more draconian than the next.

Any foreign national who receives a 12-month sentence or more is now liable to "automatic deportation". With changes in the law and in the immigration rules, it is increasingly difficult for foreign nationals to win cases on the basis of family life. Now, even minor crimes can see people deported from their families and communities. "Foreign criminals" are now centre stage in a set of debates about immigration, and the idea that the UK can't deport foreign criminals has been a common trope in the push to scrap the Human Rights Act and to leave the EU.

The problem is that we don't know much about the people themselves – the people who end up restrained in body belts on a transatlantic flight to forgotten places.

William moved to Manchester as a 14-year-old and received indefinite leave to remain soon after arrival. I recognised his accent straight away; he lived just a mile or so down the road from me in South Manchester. " I'm British, man. I've got my NI number, got my driving licence. I'm British, I'm nothing else," he told me. He is now 38 years old and has six British children. William admits that he has a long record: mainly minor driving offences and cannabis possession, but he does have two custodial sentences for dealing. Whatever you think of that, it's hardly exceptional. The question is whether deportation is a measured response to his crimes. His children will grow up without a father, their mother without support, and William will have to work out being British in Jamaica.

David – another Northerner with a broad Yorkshire accent – moved to the UK as a three-year-old. His grandparents brought him over after his father was murdered in Jamaica, and they brought him up as their own. David grew up in a black British family and always thought he was British, until he applied for a passport as a 16-year-old. That's when he discovered that he was not British, and that "mum" and "dad" were actually his grandparents. By the time he wanted to regularise his status it was too late. He had been imprisoned for a firearms offence at 18, after a friend hid a gun in his house. It would be near impossible for him to apply for citizenship after such a serious offence.

David received a second conviction years later for ABH, and this set in motion deportation proceedings. In both of his convictions, it sounded like David was incredibly unlucky, but that is perhaps beside the point: could it ever be fair to deport someone like David?

"I've lived in England since I was three," he says. "The furthest I've been is Skegness. Whatever happened to me, to my family and my father, back then, I didn't choose that. I didn't decide to come to the UK, I didn't make the choice. And now I'm paying for that, and they've sent me back to Jamaica. I'm a fish out of water."

There were others on the charter who moved to the UK as young children. Not all of them had custodial sentences.

Some did not apply for British citizenship simply because they did not know they had to. Naturalisation is not cheap, either, costing over £1,200. For many, the reason they were not able to naturalise was because they had a criminal record. Only persons of "good character" can naturalise, but some received criminal records as children.

A few people I spoke to grew up in the care system, and this is common among deportees – perhaps unsurprisingly given the disproportionate number of care-leavers in the criminal justice system.

"My older offences were anti-social breaches, from when I lived in a care home. We weren't allowed on the street that we lived on. The four boys from the care home were never allowed to walk together, so if the police saw you together you would be arrested for breach of ASBO. I normally got community service. I also got done for possession of weed. All of my convictions were from having a rough childhood. All of them are from growing up in care. They took me from my mum, which hurt me, because of certain abuses and stuff like that, but they took me, and I wouldn't have committed those offences if I was still with my mum." – Omari, 24

A protest against deportations in London at the beginning of November (Photo: Henry Langston)

OPERATION NEXUS AND THE PROBLEM WITH GANGS

The criminal justice system is institutionally racist. This racism now has deportation consequences. Nowhere is this more disconcerting than with Operation Nexus.

Nexus allows the police to share information with the Home Office, to develop a set of arguments for the deportation of an individual who may not have received a criminal conviction. The police hand over their intelligence information on arrests, suspected criminal activity, gang affiliation and charges that did not stick. People are then deported on the basis of these non-convictions, because the Home Office successfully argues that on the "balance of probabilities" the individual is of bad character, and their deportation would be conducive to the public good. In other words, people who were not convicted in criminal courts still end up getting deported because they are most likely bad people. With all that we know about racism in policing and in the courts, you have to wonder about the extent to which "bad" just means "black".

One particularly worrying aspect of this relates to the idea of the "gang".

"They said that I was in the Queen's Road gang. But it wasn't a gang – we all just grew up together on the same estate, you get me?" – Darel, 32

Darel was deported under Operation Nexus, despite having lived in the UK consistently for 24 years, since he was seven. The only convictions Darel received were for possession of marijuana. He was charged with one offence, but was able to prove his innocence and was NFA'd (no further action).

Darel has a partner and six children, four of whom he was the primary carer for – a stay at home dad. Operation Nexus allows for police intelligence and hearsay to be admissible in the tribunal, and Darel's accused gang affiliation was probably the reason he was exiled from his family and his home.

But how do the police come to define someone as gang-affiliated? In 2014, 78 percent of people on the Metropolitan Police's gang matrix were black. In Manchester, the figures are similar, and many of those on the list have not been convicted of any offences. A gang is supposed to be a group of people who are affiliated and commit violent crime in some kind of organised way. The idea that less than 20 percent of people who fit this description are white is deeply suspect, and contradicts all available offending data.

All of this suggests it's easier to end up defined as a member of a gang if you're black, and Darel's deportation is likely best explained in this context.

When asked to comment, a Home Office spokesperson said: "We are clear we will enforce the departure of anyone with no legal basis to remain in the UK who refuses to leave voluntarily. The overwhelming majority of these individuals were criminals, convicted of a range of offences including rape and GBH."

Given what I had heard, I couldn't help but think that the Home Office was using a small number of very serious offences to legitimise the deportation of people who had done more trivial things. The vast majority of people who get deported from the UK are not the killers, rapists and paedophiles of Daily Mail readers' imaginations.

A typical room in a tenement yard in East Kingston, where deportees may end up (Photo taken by the author's friend Chris)

BACK IN JAMAICA

The first pressing issue for people when they land in Jamaica is finding shelter. Finding a place to stay usually means connecting with family members and friends, but this rarely goes smoothly.

"Yeah, I just stay in the house, like. I think that's the fourth time I've walked up the lane to meet you... yeah, it's worse than prison. At least in prison I'd be eating and stuff like that. It's been like, what, two days now since I've ate anything. I've lost so much weight." – Andrew, 21

"My family is in England and America. These people here, most of them I've never seen in my life . I hear them, I hear them all the time – they say, 'Why doesn't he just go back?' I hear them, but I just laugh. You're not my family." – Glen, 35

I can't cry. I ain't got nothing left to cry.

Once people have found shelter, however uncomfortable, they tend to spend as much time as possible talking to loved ones in the UK:

"Every night I talk to my kids, they're crying every minute. My missus is stressed, and I'm stressed. The other day I was so depressed I couldn't get up; I had aches and pains all over. Sometimes I just feel like I wanna kill myself right now. Being away from my family, everything. I'm sleeping on the floor, when I had my nice house and my kids and my routine." – Darel, 32
We speak like 100 times a day. We spend most of our time speaking to each other, on Whatsapp, trying to find money for solicitors. – Omari, 24

It is not only deportees who bear the violence of deportation. Children and partners face intense emotional strain and practical difficulties in the wake of deportation:

"My wife, at the moment now, she's not coping. She's not herself at this moment. And my son is not himself, either. I'm just telling it you as it is. It's ruining his lessons in school. He is wetting his bed. Having nightmares, crying in the night and waking up." – Everton, 48

"I ain't really got credit all the time. And when I do speak to my partner, all she does is cry... I can't cry. I ain't got nothing to cry. I can't cry. But I can understand she's crying for me. She understands my frustration; obviously she's frustrated as well. She's struggling. She's been struggling since I went jail." – Andrew, 21

It's not always easy to communicate with people back home in the UK. Internet signal varies greatly on the island, and credit can be expensive. The Home Office regularly say in their decision letters that deportees can keep in touch with loved ones using "modern forms of communication" , but as one deportee told me, "You can't be a Skype dad."

I was surprised by how many of the people I spoke to had claimed asylum, or left Jamaica because a family member was murdered or attacked. Many of the people quoted in this article returned to Jamaica scared, concerned for their safety after having fled the country years ago. Denzel left Jamaica in the late-90s after he became the subject of political revenge and had his hand nearly chopped off with a machete. He feared for his life then, and he still does: "If mi come a Jamaica, mi is a dead man, dat mi a tell ya... Mi nuh feel safe here, because my past is not pretty in Jamaica."

The author with a deportee who was taken to Jamaica in 2014 (Photo by Georgia Rigg)

APPEALING FROM JAMAICA

Many of the people I spoke with are trying to be proactive and find a way to return to the UK. Most were deported with an out of country right of appeal. Since the royal assent of the Immigration Act 2014, those defined as "foreign criminals" can be deported before they have exhausted their appeal rights, and they are supposed to appeal from their country of origin. The vast majority do not bother. Legal aid is unavailable, given its decimation in the last few years. It is incredibly difficult to communicate with solicitors from abroad, and to get documents together. Very few lawyers I have spoke with have clients appealing from outside of the UK.

Despite these obstacles, at this stage some people remain hopeful and are working on their appeals. Some have lawyers, others are working with Roots to Return, a nascent organisation set up to help people with this process. No one knows exactly how their appeals will play out, or if they have any chance of success. But it is at least hopeful that people are trying to appeal. We will see if this policy is workable – which perhaps it was never intended to be.

A CONTINUING TRAUMA

For everyone I spoke with, this has been the most unimaginably traumatic few weeks. People are not far from crisis and homelessness, struggling to communicate with partners, children and lawyers in the UK.

Most people won't find a way to return to the UK; perhaps none of the recent 42 will. There is hope that they can find a way to start again in Jamaica, to slowly build a new home after being wrenched from the only one they had in the world. It takes time, and not everyone will manage it. As long as our dominant fears and fantasies around immigration go unchallenged, it's hard to see the pace of these deportations slowing – although two weeks of action against deportations being planned for January could be a start..

Omari was the first person I met from the charter, and he was incredibly distressed. He was unable to stand still and spoke of the many injustices that led him here to Jamaica. He rounded off every few minutes by saying frantically, "I just need to get back to my son, believe me, I just need to get back to my son and my girl." I hope he finds a way.

@LukeEdeNoronha

More from VICE:

Why Do We Care About the Australian Family Being Deported from Scotland?

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Britain's Loneliest Migrant Centre Is an Isolated Hell for its Detainees


Chris Hayes Confirmed the Story About Immortal Technique Bullying Lin-Manuel Miranda

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Remember when Hamilton creator and all-around national treasure Lin-Manuel Miranda revealed that, back in the day, high school bully turned accomplished rapper Immortal Technique threw him in the garbage? Well, he wasn't joking.

Last night on Desus & Mero, Miranda's classmate, MSNBC's Chris Hayes, joined our late-night hosts to confirm that the trash can incident did actually happen. Watch him talk about it above.

Be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11:30 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

US NEWS

Government Ethics Office Praises Trump
In a strange series of tweets, the Office of Government Ethics (maybe sarcastically) praised President-elect Donald Trump's stated plan to leave his business affairs "in total" to others. "Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!" read one tweet. In the last of nine messages, the office informed Trump, "We told your counsel we'd sing your praises if you divested, we meant it."—NBC News

Military Vets Plan Protective Human Shield at Pipeline Site
Some 2,000 US military vets are said to be planning a human shield to protect those protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline. Supporters from Veterans Stand for Standing Rock have pledged to travel to North Dakota by this weekend to try to prevent demonstrators being evicted.—Reuters

Kanye West Heads Home After Hospital Treatment
Kanye West has reportedly been released from UCLA Medical Center after receiving extended treatment for exhaustion. He had been under the care of doctors at the Los Angeles hospital after the cancelation of his Saint Pablo tour, apparently triggered in part by a series of bizarre onstage rants.—CNN

At Least 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Malware
The security of at least 1 million Google accounts has been compromised by malware, according to an online security firm. Researchers at Check Point Software Technologies said they traced the malware infection to apps on third-party app stores for Android devices. Google said it was taking the breach "very seriously."—CBS News

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Colombian Plane Ran Apparently Out of Fuel Before Crashing
The plane that crashed in Colombia and killed 71 people on Monday had run out of fuel and lost electrical power according to a final recording made by the pilot. In audio leaked and played by Colombian media, the pilot can be heard warning a control tower operator of "complete electrical failure, without fuel."—AP

Oil Prices Soar as OPEC Agrees to Cut Production
Members of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries have agreed to curb global oil production, sending the price of Brent crude, an international benchmark, up to over $53 a barrel. The world's leading oil-producing nations agreed to try to squeeze supply by 1.2 million barrels a day.—Reuters

Anti-Detention Protestors Rock Australian Parliament
Australians campaigning against the country's offshore detention camps for asylum seekers have carried out a second day of protests at Parliament House in Canberra. Two abseiled the building and unfurled a banner reading "close the bloody camps now." Others poured red dye, signifying blood, into a pond in front of the building.—BBC News

Ethnic Cleansing Happening in South Sudan, Says UN Commission
A UN commission monitoring human rights in South Sudan says "ethnic cleansing" is occurring in the war-torn African country. Commission chairwoman Yasmin Sooka said "starvation, gang rape, and the burning of villages" had been used by rival ethnic factions. "The stage is being set for a repeat of what happened in Rwanda," she said, chiding the international community.—Al Jazeera

EVERYTHING ELSE

Drake Tops Spotify's 2016 Most-Played Lists
Drake is responsible for the year's most-streamed track, "One Dance," and the most-streamed album, Views, according to Spotify's annual "Wrapped" list of most popular music. With 4.7 billion streams overall, Drake is the world's most-streamed artist.—TIME

Dolly Parton Donating $6,000 to Families Hit by Fire
Dolly Parton's charitable foundation will give $1,000 a month over six months to families whose homes were claimed by Tennessee wildfires. "We wanted to provide a hand up to those families who have lost everything," said the singer.—Knoxville News Sentinel

Wife of Hunter S. Thompson Wants to Clone His Weed
Anita Thompson, the widow of Hunter S. Thompson, says she is trying to clone the writer's marijuana stash to sell on the mass market. She believes she has found a way to extract the weed's DNA to make "Gonzo" strains available in legal states.—VICE

FDA Approves Clinical Trials for MDMA
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved clinical trials for potential medical use of MDMA, also known as ecstasy. Researchers have found that the drug may be beneficial to those suffering from PTSD.—VICE News

U-God Sues Wu-Tang, Claiming Unpaid Royalties
Rapper U-God is reportedly suing the rest of Wu-Tang Clan for unpaid royalties. He claims he is owed "at least" $2.5 million, partly from the profit the group made from the Martin Shkreli's purchase of the Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album.—Noisey

US Judges Can Sign Global Hacking Warrants
Changes to search warrant rules that come into effect Thursday will allow magistrate judges to authorize the hacking of computers outside their own district. The feds have argued surveillance expansion is vital to keep pace with anonymization technology.—Motherboard

Photos of a London You Rarely See

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All photos courtesy of The Lurkers

London is an awful, beautiful behemoth. We've been pulverised to a fine pulp with stories of its irrevocable gentrification and homogenisation. "It's not what it used to be," we say, wilfully ignoring our own participation in the loss of its charm. The city is rapidly exfoliating its grubby walls and cobbled streets and replacing them with bright, eternal glass and metal.

Through it all, a collective of artists called The Lurkers have been capturing the city's changes on a 35mm camera. One of the group, Fred Lurke, tells me they pride themselves on their "shared passion for society's underwhelming and under-appreciated locations", and over time have relentlessly hit up London's most hidden and secluded areas with graffiti, inadvertently recording the capital's aesthetic shift. They've compiled it all into a new book, Lurking in London.

"The book is something we've been working on for years, mindlessly documenting the rapidly changing face of London. We looked at all we've amassed and realised a lot of the buildings and high streets we'd photographed no longer looked like how they did even a few years ago."

Before I even limber up to ask why the world needs yet another graffiti book, Fred interjects: "This book isn't a graffiti book. Graffiti makes up one part of it, but there are always other elements – an interesting building, a model or a piece of clothing. Our aim is to give new life to the stranger places in London."

Looking at the photos, they certainly do show a less sanitised version of the city. Rooftops, abandoned buildings and the underground are mixed in with shop fronts, estates and suburbia. All of it seems to have a filter of familiar grime laid across it; it's a London that I can relate to far more than the one being sold in property brochures.

What's their favourite place featured in the book? "We have a special affinity to a series of rooftops in the Euston area as they provide a nice perch above the city," says Fred. "I can't say any more 'cos it will make it harder for us."

Fair enough. Police have been taking ever stronger measures against graffiti in the capital, and maximum custodial sentences for "defacing private property" can now reach up to ten years. So you'd expect the odd brush with the law while putting together a project like this.

"Our first ever expedition ended in a rooftop chase with a helicopter," says Fred. "A lot of what we do sits in a grey area of legality; we are mostly frequenting or painting in places people either don't care about or never see. Strictly speaking it's illegal, but Ocean's 11 it is not."

So why now? What do The Lurkers hope to add to the conversation by releasing the book at this time? "Gentrification is accelerating at an alarming rate – they now call South Tottenham 'Soto', for fuck's sake," says Fred. "We're showcasing a lot of buildings that no longer function in their primary purpose, so it's a testament to a bygone era. If nothing more it will at least serve as a reminder to inhabitants of yesteryear of what London once looked like."

It's easy to look back at a past version of London with rose-tinted glasses. Gentrification has certainly had a negative effect, but it's also made some places look a lot nicer, if more dull. I remember the city being an exciting place to hang around when I was younger, but I also remember that I wouldn't want to walk anywhere alone after 11PM most nights. Does the London of old really deserve such nostalgia?

"It's very easy to look at old pictures and associate positive memories with them," says Fred. "People find it much harder to apply positives to their current situations. It's sad London is changing, but we have massive faith in this city and its ability to do good, fight gentrification and regain its edge. I feel like our book is a part of that fight."

It's safe to say that graffiti culture is now more popular than ever. There's a cornucopia of Instagram accounts, Facebook groups and websites dedicated to showcasing street art from not just the capital but around the world, as well as the fact artists like Banksy, Ben Eine and Space Invader are now seen as cultural icons. The question is where The Lurkers can fit into that crowded market.

"Through the internet and social media, culture has become disposable; you don't have to leave your house to experience anything. We contribute to that – most of our content is online – hence why we did a fucking book," says Fred. "It's physical; you can feel it."

London certainly generates plenty of passion in people, and that is definitely something you could say about The Lurkers and their approach to what they do. When I ask finally what Fred wants to achieve with this book, his answer is simple: "Hopefully we will have done London some justice."

@williamwasteman / @the_lurkers

More on VICE:

Why Is the Punishment for Graffiti in the UK So Extreme?

A Painfully In-Depth Analysis of the Worst Bit of Graffiti I've Ever Seen

This Guy Reissued the Graffiti Mag That Nearly Got Him Sent to Prison

Westworld: There's a Good Reason for All the Nudity on 'Westworld'

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Warning: Spoilers to episode nine ahead.

On last week's episode of Westworld, the two timelines theory was basically confirmed—the Man in Black (Ed Harris) and William (Jimmi Simpson) are the same guy, just 30 years apart. Neither of them—nor any other human character—has been naked on the show, which is sort of odd, since nudity in HBO shows is nothing new. Maybe this Sunday will reveal some human dong, but I doubt it, so let's assume that episodes one through nine are indicative of how HBO is playing coy with its audience and using nudity in an entirely different way than any other show they've run.

Think pieces galore have already been written about Westworld nakedness, from Kevin Fallon over at the Daily Beast calling the single orgy scene "a waste" to the very legit criticism about the offensive sexualization of host Bart by Kathryn VanArendonk in Vulture. However, both those scenes—the orgy and the unfortunate focus on the Bart's large penis, both in episode five—still follow the very, very careful trend of nudity that has been present throughout the show.

If you remember the promos for Westworld, you'll remember how strange they were—based solely on them, I believed the show was going to be horrible. I couldn't see how the creepy glass rooms would manage to tie into the Wild West bravado being played out. In the earliest promo, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) was visibly naked, sitting in one of those glass rooms we've come to know so well. When the hosts are naked in Westworld's maintenance areas, they are always inflectionless, doll-like, still—robotic, basically.

Without exception, nudity has been reserved for the hosts, whose humanity (whatever that word means) we're supposed to feel conflicted about more and more as the show continues. Though nudity is not taboo on HBO, it has long been a tool of titillation; here, it's a different kind of tool, one that is used to shock. Seeing a mass of naked people standing perfectly still—the hosts who've been retired—is upsetting. It calls to mind other images we associate with mass nudity that is completely still: photographs of Holocaust victims or the dead, for instance. The context is extremely different here, but that's the point.

We identify with the hosts' bodies, so unflinchingly exhibited, with all their flaws: different-size breasts, lopsided penises, wrinkles and sags. The hosts serve, for the audience, both as a sort of cattle—either being used and maintained or retired to pasture—and as uncomfortably human-like when they exhibit vulnerability or emotion. It seems that Westworld is trying not so much to desensitize nudity, but to desexualize it (the glaring exception being Bart's scene).

The humans in the show are never naked. The most skin we've seen from them has been in the scene from episode six, where a bunch of guests and employees are hanging out near a pool, getting wasted. Second to that are Theresa and Bernard getting sexy, but even then, we only see them in acceptable post-sex-wear, and besides, we can no longer count Bernard in the "human" category.

Putting aside the question of whether hosts are just as human as we are, if not more so, the way the showrunners and directors have chosen to utilize their bodies has been fascinating. Rather than sexualize the hosts, their nudity is made benign, clinical. And as soon as they become more sentient—this is especially noticeable with Maeve (Thandie Newton)—their bodies are seen less and less, as if modesty is reserved for the thinking, or those who can feel shame at nakedness. When Maeve begins to plague her technicians (inexplicably both named after cartoon cats: Felix ), the camera angles begin to favor her face, hide her breasts whenever possible, and show her naked from the back more often. Full-frontal is reserved for when she's trying to avoid suspicion by pretending to be a blank, willing host as she's wheeled down the halls on a gurney. We also haven't seen Dolores naked for a while. In early episodes, we saw her sitting nude several times, but she has also been gaining consciousness (though we don't know which timeline that's happening in, yet).

The park itself is also free of nudity, creating another dichotomy—real world versus park. In the real world, the hosts are naked and inhuman; in the park, they're meant to be entirely believable characters to the guests, and along with that comes (relative) on-screen modesty. One of the early indications of this strategy was the extremely powerful and disturbing rape scene in episode one. The Man in Black pulls Dolores by the scruff of her dress into the barn, and we hear her screaming. We know what's about to happen. We assume he's raping her, and it's horrifying, all the more so because we don't see it, so we can't tell ourselves it isn't real, it's just acting, it's just pretend. We never see Dolores's body used in that way. We only see it in the neutral setting of the glass rooms. Even hosts having consensual sex with one another in the park don't take their clothes off, as proved by Maeve and Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) as they bone while being burned alive in episode nine. The one exception here is in the town of Pariah, where the orgy—as scary as the contract was for the extras participating in it—served mostly as a characteristic of the place, which was supposed to be a depraved corner of the world.

One last element to the show's nudity goes back to early-season reviews, back when it was exciting to think about the show as a kind of combination of LARPing and a MMO, with the hosts being NPCs (non-playable characters) and the guests being the gamers (albeit the worst of them). Video games rarely show their NPCs nude. There were controversies surrounding the explicit sex scenes and mini-games available via mods in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and GTA V (which we could compare to a guest going into a room at the brothel), but the fact remains that neither includes full nudity anywhere within the main game itself. And so, too, in Westworld—again, barring the orgy scene—we never see nudity within the park. Outside it, however, the hosts are designable, malleable characters, and they sit in front of their designers when tested and reconfigured, just as a game designer might have a blank slate of a character on her screen that looks more like a nude clay model than the dressed character it will be in-game.

We've been desensitized by the sex and violence in premium-cable shows like Deadwood, Rome, and most notably, Game of Thrones, but Westworld seems to be going against that trend. Instead of glorifying nudity as sexual, it is showing it as a vulnerable, baby-like state of blankness, merely the default setting that all bodies come with.

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Thieves Are Stealing More and More Guns in St. Louis

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A version of this article originally appeared on the Trace.

Beginning January 1, Missourians will be able to carry concealed weapons without a permit, a result of a package of controversial gun laws approved by the state legislature over the governor's veto earlier this year. Opponents of the new law say that eliminating licensing requirements will result in more people bringing more guns to more places, increasing the odds of an accident or a deadly conflict.

Critics are also worried about a less-mentioned side-effect: that the number of gun thefts—especially from cars—will surge. The fear is especially acute in places like St. Louis, which draws large numbers of visitors from surrounding communities for sporting and cultural events.

"There's a lot of concern that this is going to drive a rise in firearm possession and firearms being brought along, and as a side effect of that, you're going to see an increase in thefts," says Remy Cross, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at nearby Webster University. "Once they've been stolen, they disappear, until they've been used in a crime."

At least 843 guns were pilfered in St. Louis last year, an 18 percent increase over 2014, when 715 were stolen, according to data obtained by the Trace. About a fifth were stolen out of cars. And that's just the gun thefts that were reported to police. Research suggests that many never are.

Those stolen weapons, by definition, end up in the hands of a criminal. It's difficult to quantify how many of them are used to commit violence, but law enforcement officials say that many of guns recovered at crime scenes were stolen. Last year, the city suffered the highest homicide rate in the country, with triple the number of killings per capita as Chicago.

Earlier this month, St. Louis alderwoman Lyda Krewson introduced a proposal that requires firearms left in cars to be secured in a locked container that is permanently affixed to the vehicle and not visible from the outside, a provision squarely aimed at thwarting thieves. The bill would also require victims to report the thefts to police within two days. Currently, there is no reporting requirement.

Violations of either rule change would carry the possibility of a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

"Missouri has done nothing but make guns easier and easier to get," Krewson tells the Trace. "We deserve to push back against this."

Krewson, who recently launched a mayoral campaign for the 2017 election, is intimately familiar with St. Louis's gun violence problem. In 1995, her husband was shot and killed in a carjacking.

But even if her measure passes the city council, it's not certain to become law. Like many states, the Missouri legislature has a preemption statute on the books, which sharply constrains the extent to which municipalities can regulate firearms on their own. Any new requirements on how gun owners must store their guns, or report the losses of their weapons, could set up a showdown with the state legislature.

The National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups have vigorously fought against reporting requirements for stolen guns in others parts of the country, contending that they expose gun owners to unwarranted penalties. A Democratic lawmaker from St. Louis tried to push such a bill through the Missouri legislature in 2014, but the provision failed under NRA pressure.

A slew of similar measures have recently come up for debate in state and local legislatures. In September, the New Orleans City Council passed a lost-and-stolen reporting requirement. That same month, California, which already had an ordinance requiring secure storage in cars for civilians, extended that obligation to police after firearms swiped from law enforcement vehicles turned up in connection to two killings in the San Francisco Bay area.

In St. Louis, gun thefts have become such a flashpoint that Police Chief Sam Dotson issued a stern warning in advance of the 2013 opening day at Busch Stadium, telling gun owners to leave their firearms at home because thieves were targeting cars in the stadium's parking lot during St. Louis Cardinals games.

Since then, the stolen gun problem in St. Louis has only worsened. Out of more than 70 cities that have provided statistics on guns reported stolen as part of the Trace's ongoing investigation into firearm theft, the Missouri city recorded the 11th-most number of gun thefts—fifth most, if population size is factored in.

In May of this year, after his officers recovered two stolen rifles and a .45-caliber handgun with the serial number scratched off in the hands of a suspected gang member, Dotson took to his blog to register his frustration.

"Do you know why a criminal files the serial number off a gun?" he wrote in a 700-word diatribe. "Because it is stolen, because it is being used in violent crime and often because they plan to use that instrument as a murder weapon. That's why."

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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