Here's a quick list of the things we know about Showtime's Twin Peaks revival: It's coming sometime next year; it's not a reboot, so it's going to pick up after the events of season two and go from there; it was allegedly written as one long-ass script and then cut into 18 episodes; there are a shit-ton of weird actors filling out the new cast.

And now, thanks to another in a line of inscrutable teaser trailers from Showtime, we know that David Lynch himself will be reprising his role as hard-of-hearing FBI administrator Gordon Cole.

That's about it, though. The teaser is literally just Lynch-as-Cole absentmindedly munching down a glazed donut in his suit and ear piece. The whole 30-second teaser is even more infuriatingly vague than the last infuriatingly vague teaser Showtime dropped on us a couple months back.

Give it a watch above and expect a steady stream of similarly frustrating clips in the coming months as we approach the yet-unnamed drop date for the new season.

(Donnie Darko still via Tumblr)

Jake Gyllenhaal breaking hearts in a grey hoodie, bubble spears coming out of people's chests and a hideous man bunny; Donnie Darko is a film quite unlike any other. It follows the story of Donnie, a misanthropic and troubled teenager, and his movements between an oppressive school environment, a blossoming romance with Jena Malone's character and his adventures with Frank, a strange man in a rabbit costume. Part sci-fi, part teen movie, part psychological horror, since it came out there's been a debate around whether Donnie is descending into madness or has entered into a space where time is fluid and looping, and travelling backwards is possible.

As with many cult films, Donnie Darko was initially an impressive flop. No one wanted to see it in cinemas in the US, in part because it was released right after the 9/11 attacks, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was sit in the dark to watch a weird reverie on plane crashes and metaphysics. But a year later, when it came to the UK, it made half the amount in a fortnight as it had over its entire American run. Young people became die-hard fans, obsessing over plot theories on the internet and putting Donnie and Frank stills in their About Me sections on Myspace. Essentially, it was British teens who made Donnie Darko into a classic.

Fifteen years after it's release it's being shown in cinemas nationwide, so I met with writer and director Richard Kelly at the BFI to reflect on his debut film. He got very excited when I told him there were Frank slippers in the gift shop.

Still from Donnie Darko

VICE: How deep into the rabbit hole did you get when you were thinking about time travel and researching it? Did you become obsessed with it?
Richard Kelly: Yes. About as deep as you can get. I think I did travel through time at some point. It was a fully immersive experience from the day I started writing the script until today. The movies never leave you; they're with you for your entire life. They're part of your soul. This movie in particular has been a part of my life since I've been alive, really, but since we realised it 15 years ago it's stayed with me.

Do you think you'd ever pick it up again, or do you feel like after this run it'll be put to bed?
There's definitely more I'd like to do with this film. We'll see...

Do you still get people coming up to you asking what the film is about?
All the time. There really isn't a concrete answer. It's about what each viewer wants it to be about. I like to let people come up with their own answers. I see it as more of a science fiction story. I see it as a superhero story, in a lot of ways. Other people see it as a movie about mental illness, or they see it as a film about a dream.They're all equally valid theories, I guess.

Still from Donnie Darko

You can't escape the unfortunate timing that almost makes Donnie Darko a 9/11 movie. How do you feel about that retrospectively?
There's a lot of melancholy when the credits roll at the end of this film, and that got amplified by the horrible tragedy that happened in real life. It's troubling, but the film was always intended to be cathartic and to be a thought-provoking exploration of a lot of big ideas. Looking at any piece of art in the shadow of 9/11 is going to have new connotations, and in a way all my work feels pretty heavily influenced by that day. Southland Tales was an absolute response to 9/11, and even in The Box we see the twin towers on TV. We are all still in the shadow of that event. But that's why we make films – to work our way through the trouble. I just try to remind everyone that films are supposed to be cathartic and they're supposed to make you feel better about the world. That's always been my hope – that this film makes people feel better about the world, about themselves, and not worse.

I definitely found it miserable. Loving that film was very much a part of being a British teenage emo in the mid-2000s. Were you an emo?
Partially. I was brought up in a very fraternal order of Southern California college students. I see myself as an emo being trapped in a frat house and socialised by a fraternity system that everyone had to go through in college. Now, with social media, there are so many other ways to meet people. So I was kind of trapped in this system where I was trying to break out, and that's why I wrote this script, because I really wanted to be realised as an artist. Do people even use the word emo any more? So it's still a thing?

Still from Donnie Darko

It is if you're me.
Hasn't the definition shifted a bit? Isn't everyone emo now? Aren't we all having a nervous breakdown?

That's true. Why is Seth Rogen in the film, and more importantly how?
My casting director brought him in for an audition and I thought he was hilarious. He was probably 18 when we shot the movie. He had been on Freaks and Geeks and this was his first movie, and he's playing one of the bad guys, which is hilarious because he's such a lovable guy. Seeing him play a villain is funny. A lot of people see Ashley Tisdale in the corner, too.

Drew Barrymore was a producer and also plays the character Karen Pomeroy. How hands on was she with this film?
I think her agreeing to play the teacher – a big star who carries her own films agreeing to do a supporting role – was something of a gift to the production. It helped secure financing and it helped secure other cast members. She and Nancy Juvoven were great mentors with this project. Beyond that, she was there as a support system, so she was just an essential part of the whole process.

Still from Donnie Darko

Who was it that came up with Miss Pomeroy's line: "Sit next to the boy you think is the cutest"? That's genius.
It was in the script; I wrote it. Horribly inappropriate for a teacher to say, but then she does get fired. She's kind of a little unhinged, her character, but she's trying to shake up the system.

Did you have any teachers like that?
No. I had a lot of English teachers, mostly women, who had a lot of influence on this screenplay and on this film. In fact, I think I thanked them in the end credits. Some of them were really funny ladies and taught me a lot. So I wanted the teacher to be kind of zany and a little unhinged, but in a good way.

You were only 25 when you made this film. Can you believe, looking back, that you made it so young? It makes me feel very unaccomplished.
Well, don't ever feel like trash – that's not good. I think the film could have only been made by someone that young. We took a lot of risks in making the film, and those kinds of risks are rarely taken by someone with a more seasoned track record of success and failure. The older you get the more risk-adverse you become, because you have family or publications or a mortgage – those kind of things that come with adulthood. So when you're 25 years old you don't necessarily have any of those things and you take crazier risks. Sometimes they can ruin your life; sometimes they can give you a career. I'm lucky that it gave me a career.

What do you think the main risks were?
There was just a lot of really unconventional, stylish choices and concepts. It was a bold science fiction film that a lot of people felt was un-produceable. A lot of people said the script was un-produceable. Then they saw the film at Sundance and said it was unreleasable or incoherent or impossible to market. There were a lot of roadblocks in front of this film that we had to navigate around. Had I not been so young and belligerent or stubborn I don't think I would have been able to overcome those obstacles. I might have given up had I been older. I'm still pretty belligerent, don't get me wrong.

The teenagers' dialogue is so spot on. I love when Donnie and his sister are arguing at the kitchen table. Did that come from your relationship with your own siblings?
I have an older brother, but never in a million years would we talk like that in front of our parents. Never. I've never heard my mother say a cuss word in her life. My family just does not speak in such vulgar terms. But it's not my family; it's a fictional family. There's a lot of me in Donnie and there's a lot of autobiographical stuff in the film, clearly, but the Darkos are a little more unhinged than the Kellys.

Which character do you think you were most like when you were a teenager?
Donnie, obviously.

How about now you're older?
Now I feel more like one of the teachers, probably. One of the teachers who's afraid of losing their job or is about to lose their job. But that's fine. There are plenty of schools out there.

@hannahrosewens

The 4K restoration of Donnie Darko is at the BFI, London, from the 17th to the 30th of December, and nationwide from the 23rd of December. Details here.

More on film:

Meeting the Director of 'Your Name', the 'New Miyazaki'

What We Learned About David Lynch After Spending a Year In His Art Cave

An Interview With Todd Solondz, America's Darkest Director

As someone who writes about issues pertaining to race or gender, I'm used to being called a social justice warrior. The term, meant as a dismissive jab of anything resembling political correctness, is used so frequently that it's almost meaningless at this point.

But when I read about Sandor Dosman, who was fired from his job operating a cafe on the Wilfrid Laurier University campus because of a poorly thought out joke, I found myself aligning with critics who slammed the incident as an egregious example of campus censorship gone too far.

Dosman has run Veritas Café for the last five years, working for the Waterloo school's Graduate Students' Association. Last Monday, he said he was called into a meeting with his employers and was fired over a job ad he posted on Facebook in which he used the word "slave" in jest.

The ad, posted to a group called Food in the Waterloo Region in November, was chock full of dad jokes.

It opens with: "I need a new slave (full time staff member) to boss (mentor) around Veritas Café!" He describes coffee as "wake-up juice" and beer as a "confidence booster" and even advises prospective applicants that "man buns and tattoos are ok."

He said food safety certification was an asset because "we try not to kill our customers" and noted at the end that, unless you're really good, "pay is crap."

The offending post. Screenshot via Facebook

Dosman says the students' association wouldn't get into the specifics of why he was being terminated, other than to say they took offence with the ad. He told the CBC they mentioned the bit about crappy pay.

Meanwhile, Samantha Deeming, CEO of the students' association, told student publication The Cord the group had grounds to fire Dosman under a clause that referred to "conduct on the part of the Service Provider that is materially detrimental to the Business or would injure the reputation of the (Wilfrid Laurier University Graduate Students' Association) as determined by the sole discretion of the WLUGSA." The group will not be making any further comment about the termination, she said, but is hoping to have the cafe up and running by January. The university has given a statement supporting the decision to fire Dosman "given the importance that Laurier places on being an inclusive, welcoming and respectful community."

So now Dosman is out of a job right before the holidays as are the ten student staffers who worked at the cafe alongside him.

Who is really benefitting from this outcome?

Yes, using the word "slave" is in poor taste because of its heavy racial connotation. But context is important here and by simply reading the rest of the job posting, it's obvious that Dosman isn't going on a racist rant—he's trying to be humorous to appeal to young people. He got carried away, for sure, but is that the kind of mistake a sincere apology can't fix?

To that end, Dosman told the CBC he was sorry if people were offended by the ad because "that was not the intent at all. And of course, you know, with this outcome of me losing my livelihood, that's not something I wanted."

In most reasonable workplaces, that—along with a stern talk about cultural sensitivity—would be enough. The end goal should be educational not punitive. You would think that a university of all places would realize that.

Not surprisingly, members of the campus community are outraged over Dosman's dismissal. A Change.org petition to have him reinstated has garnered more 2,271 signatures and Laurier associate professor Byron Williston called out the students' association in an open letter.

"I suppose it's a sign of the times, especially on university campuses whose student bodies—undergraduate and graduate—seem to have been taken over by the terminally thin-skinned and self-righteous," he said. "Perhaps you should direct your moral outrage at some of the many real problems in the world rather than behaving like petty bullies."

By using the harshest disciplinary tool at their disposal in response to a relatively mild offence, the people who fired Dosman make it hard to argue with that. And they make it easier to dismiss those "social justice warriors" trying to shed light on legitimate issues.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Warning: Spoilers for all eight episodes of The OA ahead.

If there is one thing to learn from television in 2016, it's that Netflix—which has released over 100 originals this year, more than any other channel or streaming site—has the luxury of doing whatever the hell it wants. Netflix adheres to no genre or specific audience, instead providing viewers with everything from inventive sitcoms to gritty comic book adaptations, from true crime documentaries to 90s television sequels and "continuations" of existing shows. There's a whole collection of children's programming and stand-up comedy specials that mostly go unnoticed, as well as a Chelsea Handler talk show (renewed for 90 episodes) and Rob Schneider's attempt at making his version of Louie (Real Rob will air a second season next year, whether you like it or not).

Netflix is Peak Television at its worst (or best, depending on how much free time you have) but that generally means that there is always something interesting on the site that slipped by you the last time you checked. Stranger Things is the best example: a slow-burner hit that mysteriously premiered to little fanfare and then grew into a sleeper success. The most recent example is The OA, a series that was so purposely cloaked in mystery in the days leading up to it—not even a cohesive synopsis anywhere to be found—that it was frustrating before it even debuted. At this point, Netflix doesn't have much to lose—think of how much money it sank into The Get Down, or how Michael Bolton will have a "Big Sexy Valentine's Day Special" in 2017— so why not give creators the freedom to do as they please? We'll watch it, no matter how mixed the results are.

The OA, created by lovable indie duo Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij (who also directed all the episodes), might become the most divisive Netflix original of 2016. To describe the show is to both spoil everything and sound like a crazy person in the process. Marling plays a young blind woman named Prairie (also called The OA) who disappears for seven years and suddenly returns, now with an abundance of scars and the ability to see, after jumping off a bridge. She begins to regularly meet with a group of five people—four high school students and a teacher, all of whom are sad in their own ways—who sit in a circle and listen to Prairie tell her harrowing story, a story that she won't even tell her adoptive parents.

This story begins with a near-death experience as a child in Russia (one that led to her blindness), then being adopted. After exhibiting signs of mental illness, Prairie is kept medicated for 13 years before running away to find her dead father and play violin in Times Square. After being captured by a sinister doctor (Jason Isaacs), she's locked in a glass cage with four other people who have had near-death experiences and are being cruelly experimented on. The captives learn "movements," basically a mixture of Tai-Chai, the capoeira in Bob's Burgers's "Sexy Dance Fighting" episode, and Sia's "Chandelier" video (the latter makes sense, since choreographer Ryan Huffington also works on this show). When deployed correctly, these movements can heal someone's illness or even bring them back from the dead.

How well you tolerate The OA will depend on whether you read its unrelenting quirkiness as fun or just desperate. Paz Vega pops up to play some guitar; Prairie eats a bird; people dance well enough to effectively stop a school shooting (an incredibly exasperating and cloying climax to the series).

What's so frustrating about The OA is how some great parts fail to form a complete whole. Batmanglij is adept at capturing the aching between characters, the desperation for human touch—Prairie and another captive, Homer (Emory Cohen) fall in love, but can't touch each other, leading to a romance carried on entirely through body language. The acting is especially memorable, particularly in Marling's smaller moments: her childlike wonder, her scared-deer reactions when someone touches her, even the way in which she clings to a wolf sweatshirt at a Costco. Jason Isaacs as Dr. Hap is as intriguing as he is creepy, Patrick Gibson as bully Steve Winchell portrays the depression hidden underneath his anger, and The Office's Phyllis Smith turns the sad older teacher character into something less clichéd.

Even some of the most hackneyed themes—the power of love, friendship, connection, survival, storytelling, and so on—find some nuance throughout, but these moments are fleeting and lost in the overall weirdness and purposely confusing feel of the series.

Like some of Netflix's other shows it's built to be binge-watched, so mysterious that you'll want to keep watching just to know what the hell is going on, even if you don't really think you care. The OA is hard to stop watching, and doubly so when it frustrates you, because it's so aware of the power of ambiguity. The post-shooting ending is fascinating and haunting, but it doesn't quite reward viewers enough for the confusion they've had to put up with for the previous eight episodes. Mostly, it seems to want to leave you just intrigued enough to come back for the inevitable season two.

Follow Pilot Viruet on Twitter.

Two men have been charged after a woman was allegedly held captive inside a Toronto bar, given drugs, and sexually assaulted.

In a news release, Toronto police said the 24-year-old victim was forcibly confined inside a bar at College Street and Manning Avenue on Thursday evening where she was "given illicit drugs and alcohol" and sexually assaulted. It is not clear whether or not the woman took the drugs consensually or was forced to take them. VICE has reached the police for further comment but has not yet heard back.

On Saturday, Carasco Enzo Dejesus, 31, and Gavin MacMillan, 41, were each charged with forcible confinement; sexual assault; and sexual assault as party to the offence with any other person.

MacMillan is reportedly owner of College Street Bar, whose website describes him as one of the best flair bartenders in Canada. MacMillan's Facebook page says he's also the founder of BartenderOne, a bartending and hospitality training school.

Both men appeared in court Saturday.

The Sexual Assault Action Coalition, an advocacy group, said on Facebook it will be launching a petition to have the bar closed "until the staff receives anti violence and harassment training, until they develop anti harassment and anti sexual violence policies and ensure these two monsters never work there again."

VICE called College Street Bar for comment but was unable to reach anyone.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

It's hard out there for a racist.

While hating people who don't look like you has always existed, 2016 certainly seems like it was the comeback special for racism. The Trump election, the rise of the so-called alt-right, fake news, and glowing profiles of white nationalists have all emboldened the worst people in our society to once again be proud of their shitty views.

Much like what Pulp Fiction did with John Travolta in the early 90s, 2016 has thrust white nationalism back to the forefront of our collective psyche, forcing our society to—again, much like Travolta—stare continuously into its insane, twinkling, dead eyes.

Thankfully, the movement seems to be, at least at this moment, contained mostly to screeching Twitter eggs and anonymous forum posters who rarely meet up in real life. However, the truth is that behind each one of those accounts screeching "cuck," "ZIONISTS," or "refujihad!!!" exists a real life person (almost always a dude) physically typing the tirade.

The thought of the human side of this cyber hatred is a scary one, right? And it raises a massive questions. Mainly, what is life like for these people? Is it fun? is it normal? Can anyone actually put up with the real world selves of these people in a romantic sense? Do they all, like I assume, breathe really, really heavily?

To answer at least one of these question I, like any sane person would, decided to see if the fleeting online popularity of the alt-right has translated into dating success for its followers.

So, I went to the source and talked to a self-described white national and member of the alt-right who started a dating site for his brethren to find love.

"Our society, the education , and the media has created an anti-white ideology among people. People that want to be with their own kind, that's seen as a negative," the man who wanted to be referred to as Stonewall, told VICE.

"So when you find somebody and you start expressing some of these ideas, you know, they might think you're racist or a horrible person and they might split up with you just because you're expressing these ideas."

"It's hard."

So, how the hell do racists date? Well, for many cyber hatemongers, online dating is the way to go.

A lot of them utilize sites like Plenty of Fish, Ok Cupid, and so on with a statement in their profiles like "If you're not white, don't message me," but for many that's not enough. This is where sites like WASP Love, Where White People Meet, and Stormfront (an infamous neo-Nazi forum) enter—all sites that, willingly or not, cater to racists who want to find love.

I started my journey into this weird world with a simple Google search for "alt-right dating." It brought up a site called WASP Love, which advertises itself as a dating site for traditional Christians, white nationalists, Quiverfulls, confederates, southern nationalists, and the alt-right.

"The patriarchs of the Old Testament continually warned against marrying strange wives which would lead to idolatry," reads a post by Stonewall, its founder. "We must obey the wisdom of our fathers by only marrying within our own race."

A day after she was reported missing, the body of Dr. Elana Fric was found on December 1 of this year stuffed into a suitcase and dumped at the side of a bridge in Kleinburg, Ontario, 30 kilometres away from her home.

Today, Monday, December 19, electors will be meeting in the 50 state capitols to go through the formality of casting their ballots and officially making Donald J. Trump the president of the United States. Itis almost certainlytoo late to stop Trump, though groups of protesters were still trying as late as last night at candle-lit "vigils" all overthe country where people called upon red-state electors to break ranks and vote against Trump, as a few already have sworn they would do. It's just the latest, and likely last, expression of a sentiment shared by anti-Trump conservatives and liberals alike: This guy can't be president, right?

Trump's entire year-and-a-half-long campaign unfolded in a bubble of unreality. Before the primaries, when he was leading in the polls, it was dismissed as a blip. When he won a whole bunch of primaries, people noted he still wasn't on track to secure a majority of GOP convention delegates. When he did win a majority of the delegates, anti-Trump Republicans talked about using last-ditch maneuvers at the convention to stop him. After he accepted the nomination, everyone who knew about such things looked at the polls and figured he couldn't win. I sure didn't think he could win. Then he won. Fuck.

In such a close election—Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes nationwide than Trump, but lost thanks to a combined margin of less than 100,000 in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—breaking down the causes can be tricky. But Trump was aided at every turn in the process by a pervasive attitude that he couldn't become president. The establishment Republican candidates didn't realize the threat he posed to them fast enough to coordinate any kind of response; instead, he took advantage of a crowded field, building a sizable delegate lead without winning a majority of votes until the New York primary in April. Clinton's campaign was so convinced of Trump's vulnerability that they looked forward to facing him (or Ted Cruz or Ben Carson) rather than someone like Jeb Bush. The media didn't take Trump seriously until he had steamrolled the Republican Party—important stories about Trump's lack of proven charitable giving and his habit of not paying contractors didn't come out until he had the nomination locked up. Before then, Trump was regarded as a sideshow and given heaps of coverage, most embarrassingly when he got major coverage of a fundraiser he put on for veterans instead of participating in a primary debate. And in maybe the most damning example of overconfidence dooming Clinton, her campaign failed to pay enough attention to Michigan because it was certain of victory there.

It's hard to blame anyone for not taking Trump seriously, since it's not clear how serious Trump himself was about actually becoming president. One former campaign staffer said in March that Trump was supposed to be a protest candidate, and after the election a Chris Christie aide told CNN that Trump thought he'd be done by October 2015. Like a sitcom character caught in an escalating series of fibs, Trump took things further and further. Meanwhile, anti-Trumpers gawked in horror at his nativist rhetoric and fact-free bluster while simultaneously reassuring themselves that this guy really, really couldn't be president.

That's why Trump's election hit so many people like a personal trauma—for months, the possibility had seemed both remote and disastrous, like being crushed to death by a falling piano. A Trump administration was never contemplated as an actual reality, and so when we found ourselves suddenly living in that world it felt so much worse. Trump's victory still feels impossible, hence the last-ditch vigils, the demands for electoral defection, the posts on Facebook and Change.org and Medium.

Absent some unlikely last-minute legal chicanery—maybe there's something written on the back of the Constitution we missed?—the electoral votes will be formally counted in Congress on January 6, and Trump will take the oath of office on January 20. After that, people will have to start treating the Trump administration as a reality, because it will be.

This means not engaging in impeachment fantasies—incredibly unlikely with a Republican congress—or continued demands for go-nowhere recounts. It means operating from the assumption that Trump will be the president for four years, because that's what's going to happen.

There's been a lot of talk of how "normalizing" Trump only plays into his hands. But live with anything awful long enough and you know that it does become normal. Losing an arm is normal. Being so broke you can barely eat is normal. Getting cancer is normal. Watching your friends die because of suicide or drugs or both is normal. Your mind naturally dulls the pain of trauma, because otherwise how could you get through the days? That doesn't mean those who oppose him won't continue to pursue every avenue available to block any of his harmful policies, but they will be doing it with the acknowledgement that Trump is officially the president of the United States.

The other path, to continue to deny Trump's legitimacy, to decry him as an outsider hell-bent on destroying the republic, grants him that same aura of impossibility that helped him so much during the campaign. Trump is very good at playing a cartoon, a tabloid star so ridiculous the rules of ordinary morality don't apply to him. Low expectations helped him cruise to the nomination, while hysteria during the general election just affirmed his narrative that he was coming to break apart old Washington, DC and drain the swamp. Going forward, any expression of rage at Trump—however justified—will be used by him as proof of the irrationality of his opposition. (He's already making those sorts of remarks on Twitter.)

So treat Trump as what he is: a politician who caught a shit-ton of lucky (and occasionally Russian-aided) breaks and wound up in the White House. Call out his failures and any corruption that emerges, note the damages his policies do to the poor and the vulnerable. Don't dismiss him as a buffoon or imagine him to be the Julius Caesar to America's Roman republic. He's just a man with ugly hands who we have to deal with for the next four years.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Professor Jordan Peterson. Screenshot via YouTube

It only took Dr. Jordan Peterson a little bit of controversy and a few short months to move from being an accomplished academic and tenured professor to a bonafide right-wing star.

It took him an even shorter time to turn that fame into some serious bank.

Peterson was thrust into the spotlight in December when he declared he would ignore his University's demand to use gender neutral pronouns for his students. The incident sparked a debate over political correctness that resulted in several rallies, a forum, and some pranks against Peterson.

"Discussions of those sorts that are predicated on group identity have gone so far they pose a far greater threat than any possible good they can do," Peterson previously told VICE.

His YouTube videos and media appearances made Peterson a star in the right-wing anti-PC crowd and, apparently, some cash.

According to his Patreon page, Peterson, who once taught at Harvard, will make $11,403 US a month which equals out to $136,836 US a year or $183,319 CD. According to this year's sunshine list (public salary disclosures) Peterson made $161,635 CD for his job at U of T.

"The additional financial support helps me remain confident that I can remain independent in my thinking and less vulnerable to institutional pressure, should that be brought to bear," he writes in a thank you note to his supporters.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Hotboxing is the stoner rite of passage that stands out among the haze of sessions throughout one's life. The communal toke in a tight space is great for de-stressing during the cold winter months—plus it gets you high as fuck. And, there's just something nostalgic—even heartwarming—about cramming three of your old high school friends into your parent's glass-doored bathtub to blaze.

We asked readers to share their stories about the weird and wonderful places they've hotboxed.

Cale R., 35, Toronto

"There have been a lot of hotboxes over the years, everything from snow forts to walk-in fridges. Probably the strangest was a stainless steel tank, like the type you would see on the back of a transport truck that was delivering milk. When we were teenagers it was with a lot of the municipal vehicles by the Cornfest grounds on St. Joseph Island. It was not in a truck but just sitting there. There was a hatch in the tip that you could climb through, so naturally it had to become a hotbox. We were in there about 45 minutes. If it were larger it would have sucked, but it was quite small and therefore a very good hotbox.

Karina S., 35, Toronto

"Under an upside-down canoe."

Alex F., 20, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

"A bathroom stall in the Cambrian Mall. And the trunk of an unlocked SUV in a used car parking lot. It was one of the cars for sale. We were in there probably about an hour, we weren't worried since it was the middle of the night. It was better to hotbox than the mall bathroom, but it was totally uncomfortable! I'm not sure why it was unlocked, but I'm guessing someone got in trouble the next day."

Ray G., Little, Oklahoma

"It was in the 80s. I was in my early 20s, in the army on leave. I was headed back to Germany on a commercial flight. I had a joint in the bathroom. When I opened the door , there was a line-up. I wandered back to my seat and put my headphones to watch the movie. They interrupted the movie, announcing that they had open smoking seats—but only cigars and cigarettes were allowed. The airplane bathroom makes an excellent hotbox, though—I was blown away."

Kelly, Calgary, Alberta

Before my husband and I had our lovely camper we would take our tent camping. This particular time we were driving through Marble Canyon Provincial Park, which was right off the highway and full of people. Because of this, there was no good place to smoke besides our tent. We hotboxed it several times, trying not to be noticed by the hordes. From inside the tent, we could hear a man and his son walking by. The son says, "Dad, what's that smell...?" Dad replies: "It's a special cigar." To this day, we call our phatties "special cigars."

Jason K., 34, Cochrane, Ontario

"I was in my later teens. We smoked in an unplugged freezer—one of those big old freezers that we grew up with. We sat in it, knee-to-knee. We had a thin shim so it couldn't lock. We were waiting for guys to meet up with us for the night, and we figured it would get a good laugh when they came in."

Francis M., 33, Fernie, BC

"I was working at . One night I asked a girl who worked there too to come over and hang out. I asked her if she had ever hotboxed. She said no. So my roommate and I and this girl all got into the bathroom. We turned the hot water on to get the room steamed up. We set up some buckets and proceeded to get super ripped. I was having a great conversation with my new friend and everyone seemed to be having fun. That is, until there was a knock on the bathroom door—It was one my roommate's friends telling me that there was a lady knocking on our kitchen window. I looked out the window. Who do I see? My mother and my two older sisters! They had traveled six hours to Toronto for shopping or some shit. They did not tell me in advance. I was so stoned! I was tripping balls when I moved the curtain to see my mother's face in the shadows. I think this event was the first time she realized that I smoke weed and that I was not her little baby anymore. I was 19."

Jake S., BC

"I was at a fishing/hunting camp in northern Ontario, where my family goes every August. My father and brother were out on the lake trying their luck at some bass, leaving my friend and I alone at the cabin. We noticed the empty hot tub on the deck... We decided to lift up the hot tub and hop underneath. It was a light, plastic shelled hot tub. Not a large fiberglass tub—we're no Lou Ferrignos. After about fifteen minutes, it was so smokey we had to hop out. It ended as all good hotboxing stories end, with an afternoon nap.

Lucas G., 34, Vancouver

"I was hiking in Lynn Valley Canyon this summer. We hiked across three the trails and found an abandoned outpost—a tiny wooden one-room shack. We crawled through the mossy, slimy window opening. After we got baked, a huge snake—it must have been four feet long—glided over my buddy's foot and tripped us right out. We wondered if we were in some sort of snake pit and got the fuck out of there—fast."

Joe B., Toronto

"I was 17. My buddies and myself once hotboxed a tiny closet in my mom's place. We were skipping class and mom was at work. We picked the closet because it was the smallest place that could fit the three of us. We didn't hear her come home. My mom found us in there because she followed the extension cord to the lamp we brought in... I was wearing a bathing cap for some reason. Mom was not impressed."

Bobby R., 38, London, Ontario

"I had been picking up night shifts at McDonald's to make some extra money over the summer. I was 19 or 20. I was working with this younger guy who was doing the mopping out front and I was cleaning the fryers and stuff in the back. I told him we are going to be working together Friday night, I'll bring the joint and we'll smoke it and get nice and blazed. I'd smoke before work, maybe on my break, but not really inside, and with the person I was working with. I thought, if it's just us two—it's Friday night at one in the morning, why not. I said, once everyone leaves, we'll go in the freezer because it's contained.

We thought that the manager had left. I sparked up the joint, we smoked it fast, stayed in there for a bit, but it got pretty cold. I guess it technically wasn't a hotbox, but a 'cold box'. All of a sudden we hear the manager run up the stairs, shout 'oh my God.. are you stoned? What the hell!?' He starts freaking out. He asked if we were smoking weed, I told him we smoked in the freezer. He was like, 'Oh FUCK. It's going to be in there til tomorrow. I can't even fire you guys because you're the only ones who will work the worst shifts. This never leaves here.' That was pretty much it. Except we did smoke again later that night, after he left."

Lisa K., Calgary, Alberta

"I first got my medical marijuana license in 2009. I've vaped in the Harry Hays (federal) building and the waiting area of the children's hospital, I've used my volcano in the cafeteria in the courthouse. I won a court case recently with Calgary Transit—allowing me to hotbox in their bus shelters.

During my gastric bypass I spent months in-patient, using a vaporizer in the hospital with no problem. Something happened at the end of 2012/13—Alberta Health Services didn't ban the use of vaporizers in AHS facilities, they just made it so difficult—the only place you could go to vape was a specialized negative pressure room (where you go if you have ebola or something) and staff had to wear hazmat suits. My doctors would refer me to specialists or appointments at the hospital, and AHS would cancel and say they didn't have a negative pressure room, so I can't come.

I had an emergency and EMS spent two hours trying to get any hospital to accept my ambulance, and none would. So the wonderful officers at the Calgary City Police called around and found Foothills Medical Centre, who said they would be able to take me—on the condition that the police would escort me outside—wheeled out on a wheelchair, approximately every 20 minutes to a half hour (I have to go through a lot of cannabis)—two or three blocks off AHS property. The cops did this twice, wheeled me all the way out of there. The cops said 'fuck it.' They had their police van parked outside the ER doors, by the ambulance. They opened up the back of the van, stood outside so I wouldn't get harassed, and I smoked my pipe for hours and hours in the back of the police van. That must have been a mind-fuck for the next person put in the back of that van."

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A truck plowed through a bustling Christmas market in Berlin on Monday night, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens more in what authorities suspect may have been a terrorist attack, the Guardian reports.

Police say that the tractor trailer ran through the market at Breitscheidplatz, outside the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church in the western part of the city, a destination known as a heavy tourist hotspot. Video footage of the scene shows stalls knocked over and people injured on the ground.

According to the BBC, police believe the tragedy was an intentional attack and pointed to terrorism, although they have not definitively named a motive. One suspect was apparently arrested at the scene.

The incident resembles the truck attack in Nice, France, last July, in which the vehicle plowed through a busy Bastille Day celebration, killing 86 people and injuring 434. ISIS later claimed responsibility for that attack, calling its architect a "soldier."

"There's no way it was an accident," witness Emma Rushton told CNN of the Monday attack in Berlin. She said the truck was going about 40 mph in a crowded area with no roads.

Police have since cleared the area, roping it off, and have set up an information checkpoint for family members looking for loved ones.

Thumbnail photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The families of three men who lost their lives at the Pulse nightclub shooting back in September have filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Google's parent company Alphabet, and Facebook claiming that the tech giants helped disseminate information that inspired Omar Mateen to commit the worst mass shooting in US history, Reuters reports.

The lawsuit was filed in Detroit on Monday by Tevin Crosby, Javier Jorge-Reyes, and Juan Ramon Guerrero's families, and claims that the social media companies had a hand in providing "ISIS with accounts they use to spread extremist propaganda, raise funds, and attract new recruits." The lawsuit seeks damages from the companies and argues that they have violated the Anti-Terrorism Act.

"They create unique content by combining ISIS postings with advertisements in a way that is specifically targeted at the viewer," the lawsuit reads. "Defendants share revenue with ISIS for its content and profit from ISIS postings through advertising revenue."

Social media sites like Youtube and Twitter have been instrumental recruiting tools for ISIS, which uses the platforms as a place to spread propaganda. Twitter announced in August that it had suspended nearly 360,000 accounts for violating its policies and promoting terrorism, and earlier this month Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter announced they would be working together to remove terrorism content, USA Today reports.

The suit faces an uphill battle because large tech companies are protected by a clause in the federal Communications Decency Act, which says they are not responsible for content that's posted by users.

Although Twitter and Google haven't commented yet, Facebook released a statement on Tuesday assuring the public that it takes terrorism content on its site very seriously.

"We take swift action to remove this content when it's reported to us," Facebook said. "We sympathize with the victims and their families."

Donald Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen, Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Netherlands' Geert Wilders—2016 has been a banner year for nativists and white supremacists, and I'll join in with all those lamenting a catastrophic year's events. Not everything's been hateful, though. I've loved, in particular, one heartening trend countering the upsurge of xenophobia: this year's bonanza of English-language fiction published by writers of Asian descent.

The obvious examples are Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer and Han Kang's The Vegetarian, 2016 winners of the Pulitzer and Man Booker International Prizes, two of the best-known anglophone literary awards. But there's been a profusion of less high-profile books by Asian Americans that merit celebration as well. I'd like to tell you about them, though I find I pause over the words I've just used: bonanza. Profusion. What I really mean is that it's a relative bonanza, a profusion compared to the more usual lack. As recently as 2015, an institution no less venerable than the New York Public Library issued a short list of recommended Asian Pacific American books that included Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (an exoticizing book featuring Japanese geishas, written by a white man), James Michener's Hawaii (an exoticizing book featuring indigenous Polynesians and Asian immigrants, written by a white man), and Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing (a book about white sheep farmers on a British island, written by a white woman).

Also last year, a white poet named Michael Derrick Hudson provoked an outcry by publishing his writing in a Best American Poetry anthology with the pen name Yi-Fen Chou, an act of yellowface reflecting a general acceptance of yellowface in the arts. More white women have won Oscars for acting in yellowface than Asian women have for acting, period; in 2016 alone, Tilda Swinton has been cast as a Tibetan man, Scarlett Johansson as a Japanese cyborg cop, Billy Magnussen as the lead in a Bruce Lee biopic, and Matt Damon as China's white male savior. 2016 is also the year when Calvin Trillin published a poem of racist doggerel about Chinese food in The New Yorker, then defended it as an attempt to be funny.

With their range and excellence, these novels and collections should, but won't, render obsolete the idea of a homogeneous Asian American experience.

So, maybe I am glad, but glad in spite of the prevailing context: glad as an act of defiance. What a relief that, when Trillin failed to apologize for his poem, I could toss his New Yorker issue into the trash and turn instead to Jade Chang's The Wangs vs. the World, an authentically funny novel about a Chinese American family on a road trip, or to The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, an expansive fictional account of Chinese Americans through the past century. I've relished, too, Vanessa Hua's Deceit and Other Possibilities, a shrewd, often hilarious story collection about immigrants' challenging lives. The Border of Paradise by Esmé Weijun Wang is a singular achievement, difficult to describe briefly, but I'll note it's also about immigrants, it's gothic at times, it includes untranslated Mandarin and incest—really, you should just go read it.

The more alarming the news has become, the more I've felt drawn to fiction that explores varieties of political strife. Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs, for instance, is a steadily intelligent novel (excerpted in VICE) about the long-term effects of a terrorist bombing in Delhi. The vibrant and astute Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa, depicts the kind of large-scale domestic protest that will surely become more frequent in the years to come. Krys Lee's first novel, How I Became a North Korean, follows refugees who live in a Chinese-North Korean border city, while The Other One, a moving story collection by Hasanthika Sirisena, examines the repercussions of civil war for characters living in Sri Lanka and America.

I've also delighted in Asian American fiction that portrays lives in less exigent circumstances. The first such book that comes to mind is Private Citizens, by the virtuosic Tony Tulathimutte, about four Stanford graduates in 2000s San Francisco, and which Christian Lorentzen at New York Magazine proclaimed as "the first great millennial novel." There's Tanwi Nandini Islam's Bright Lines, a lively, wise novel set in Brooklyn and Bangladesh, and Alexandra Kleeman's deliciously surreal Intimations. Finally, I can't talk about Asian American novels without shouting out Alexander Chee's splendid The Queen of the Night, the epic tale of an opera singer in 19th-century France.

If I could, I'd applaud books published in 2016 by Anuk Arudpragasam, Leland Cheuk, Jung Yun, Viet Dinh, and Sonya Chung. How wonderful, on the one hand, to have more titles I'd like to praise than I have space, but I also wish it didn't feel so urgent to spread the news of these books. With their range and excellence, these novels and collections should, but won't, render obsolete the idea of a homogeneous Asian American experience, or one that can ever be represented in yellowface. Before 2016 ends, I want to celebrate these richly various books: They're here, and look how beautiful.

Top photo: (from left) Han Kang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Karan Mahajan

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When I appeared on a Texas radio show in May this year, one caller exemplified a huge problem in the way we talk about addiction in America, one that has serious implications for pain patients, people with addictions and babies born exposed to drugs.

"Chris from Houston" said he's taken opioid painkillers for six to seven years, allowing him to function, despite chronic pain, at what he called "a very labor intensive job." However, if he doesn't take his pills, Chris suffers withdrawal symptoms. Concerned, he asked whether this makes him "an addict."

That question has massive implications for Chris's health—and even his freedom and that of his doctor. It also has significant repercussions for drug policy. The wrong answer can literally put people in prison. And yet confusion about how to label Chris's experience is widespread, appearing everywhere from a recent survey in the Washington Post to doctor's offices across the country.

According to the way I see addiction—and the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the most recent version of psychiatry's diagnostic manual, the DSM5, agree with me—Chris doesn't qualify, so long as his description of his situation is accurate. What he describes experiencing is physical dependence, a natural consequence of taking certain medications over time. Addiction, in contrast, consists of compulsive drug use despite negative consequences.

"Physical dependence occurs very frequently with repeated opioid exposure, but dissipates promptly after a few days of opioid tapering and discontinuation," explains Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. "Addiction occurs only in those vulnerable and is a slow process that, once it has occurred, can take months and even years to overcome and requires persistent treatment."

In other words, if pain medications are making your life genuinely better and improving your ability to love and work, what you are experiencing if you have withdrawal symptoms is dependence, not addiction. People with diabtes, for instance, are dependent on—but not addicted to— insulin; people on certain antidepressants are dependent on them, but, again, not addicted.

On the other hand, if drugs make your life worse and you still can't stop taking them, that's addiction.

This may seem like a trivial or academic distinction, but it shapes policy and medical decisions that affect people like Chris. For instance, if he told his doctor he's addicted, the doctor would have a legal obligation to either taper the drugs no matter how much they might be helping his pain—or else come up with a rock-solid reason why he should continue to be treated with them for pain despite addiction.

That's because, under federal law, it's illegal to prescribe opioids to supply people with addiction—except for in two special and restricted cases for the use of methadone and buprenorphine. If doctors believe that a patient is addicted and then carry on prescribing medications like Oxycontin, the DEA or state authorities will happily take away their medical license or even criminally prosecute them. In cases like Chris's—where opioids have apparently been used without problem for years and are continuing to work—being denied access can lead to agony and disability, not "recovery."

"Even patients themselves [confuse addiction and dependence] and feel guilty about it and feel like something is wrong with them," says Richard Saitz, professor and chair of community health sciences at Boston University. "They are often treated as if something is wrong with them, when there's nothing wrong at all. All of that ends up leading to actions or policies or guidelines that are really misguided and address the wrong thing."

Much of this confusion results from the history of our understanding of addiction and a very unfortunate decision made by a DSM committee in the 1980s. Early definitions of addiction often did indeed see it as being identical to dependence, in part because physical withdrawal symptoms can be objectively measured and researchers were trying to minimize subjectivity.

These conceptions of addiction as simply needing drugs to avoid withdrawal were based on observations of people with alcoholism or opioid addictions. These folks generally have very visible physical withdrawal syndromes: Opioid withdrawal involves shaking, sweating, vomiting and diarrhea, and with alcohol, there can also be hallucinations and potentially deadly seizures.

Cocaine, in contrast, doesn't have such an obvious and reproducible withdrawal syndrome: While people quitting coke often become irritable and strongly crave the drug, they don't generally look and act physically ill.

This difference led to the development of the belief that there are two separate aspects of addiction: "physical dependence" and "psychological dependence"—an idea that remains popular in the public mind today.

Back then, since physical dependence was seen as more severe, so were addictions that had physical withdrawal symptoms. Meanwhile, drugs that produced mere psychological dependence were seen as not especially dangerous: a 1982 Scientific American article described snorting cocaine as being roughly as addictive as potato chips.

Then, of course, came crack, which no sane person would argue is not among the most severe addictions. Researchers revised their views, recognizing that the essence of addiction is the craving and compulsion to keep doing it no matter what— even if you don't get physical symptoms when you try to stop.

Unfortunately, when the DSM-III committee on addiction issues convened to update the manual in the 80s, they couldn't come to consensus on a suitably medical-sounding diagnosis. Many argued for the simple clarity of addiction, but others thought that the term was too stigmatizing. By one vote, the diagnostic label became "substance dependence."

Chuck O'Brien, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of that committee. In a 2006 editorial published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, he and his cu-authors wrote: "Experience over the last two decades has demonstrated that this decision was a serious mistake…[It] has resulted in confusion among clinicians regarding the difference between 'dependence' in a DSM sense, which is really 'addiction,' and dependence as a normal physiological adaptation to repeated dosing of a medication."

"...if addiction is properly understood as compulsive drug use despite negative consequences, maintenance [for opioid addicts] cannot be seen as addiction."

The editorial, co-written with NIDA's Volkow and another colleague, concluded, "It is clear that any harm that might occur because of the pejorative connotation of addiction would be completely outweighed by the tremendous harm that is now being done to patients who have needed medication withheld because their doctors believe they are addicted simply because they are dependent."

But that's not even the only problem the "d word" has caused. For starters, if addiction and physical dependence are seen as the same thing, then maintenance treatments with buprenorphine or methadone—the only treatment known to cut the overdose death rate by 50 percent or more—really are "substituting one addiction for another," as critics often claim.

But if addiction is properly understood as compulsive drug use despite negative consequences, maintenance cannot be seen as addiction. What maintenance does, in fact, when it works most effectively, is replace compulsive drug-seeking (in the face of harm) with simple physical dependence. This is not a problem if someone has a safe, regular supply.

Watch the TONIC video about how running is the worst way to get fit.

An accurate conception of addiction also has implications for the fate of children exposed to drugs in the womb. During the crack era, stigma against "addicted" babies did real harm: Teachers, parents and medical professionals viewed so-called "crack babies" as doomed to be either helpless invalids or psychotic criminals. Of course, babies can't get addicted, since a helpless infant cannot pursue drugs despite consequences and doesn't even know if what he craves is drugs or a diaper change. But at least one study found that the derogatory labeling produced more punitive responses from adults and lowered their expectations of the children—in itself a harmful outcome.

In fact, much of the damage initially attributed to crack exposure in babies turned out to be associated with stress and poverty—and could be ameliorated by a loving, stable home.

In 2013, the DSM-5 finally dropped dependence from its terminology, and addiction is now generally known as "substance use disorder, moderate to severe." Sadly, many media outlets and public officials have yet to recognize this essential rethink. And when the people meant to inform the public about addiction don't even specify what the term means, we're failing everyone. Addiction is not dependence, and dependence is not necessarily a problem.

Until America understands that, needless suffering will continue.

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Toronto Mayor John Tory is blaming a spike in the city's gun homicides this year on lax gun laws and he's calling for the federal government to tighten them.

Toronto has seen 39 gun-related homicides in 2016, compared to 26 last year, according to police statistics. In a letter addressed to Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, Tory writes that no one should have to lose a loved one to gun violence.

"I want to get the guns out of the hands of those who choose to do harm and are hell-bent on disrupting our peaceful city," he says. He notes that 50 percent of illicit guns in Toronto are smuggled from across the border, while the other half are either stolen from legal firearms owners or obtained on the black market.

Tory says he finds it troubling that licensed gun owners here are able to "amass small arsenals of handguns" and that there's no limit to the number of firearms a licensed owner can possess.

"This, I'm sure you would agree, is an obvious gap that needs to be addressed particularly given that legally purchased Canadian guns are turning up in criminal investigations with greater frequency."

Table via Toronto Police Service

Canada has about 30.8 guns per 100 people, ranking roughly fifth in the world among developed nations, while restricted gun ownership (handguns and semi-automatic rifles) went up 9.5 percent in 2015. The gun homicide rate is about 0.5 per 100,000 people—seven times lower than the US. Toronto's homicide rate was 1.35 per 100,000 in 2015, compared to 3.30 per 100,000 in Regina, which had the highest rate in the country. For comparison, the homicide rates in New Orleans, Detroit, and Chicago, respectively, are: 46.9 per 100,000; 45 per 100,000; and 16.4 per 100,000.

Last month, the Toronto Star wrote about four men who legally purchased guns and sold them on the black market. The story referenced a Toronto police memo that said domestic trafficking was an issue that was exacerbated by the difficulty in information sharing between local police and the RCMP, which runs the country's firearms program. Tory's office said the memo is in part what he based his letter on.

In response to Tory's letter, Goodale has said the Conservatives under Stephen Harper "steadily weakened our gun laws in ways that made Canadians more vulnerable and communities more dangerous" including removing the requirement for businesses to record the sale of non-restricted firearms.

He said the government is looking to develop a gun control strategy, the details of which will be announced next year.

But gun advocate Rod Giltaca, president of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, says Tory's letter is based on rhetoric, not facts.

"He has absolutely nothing to bring to the table. Nothing. He has no ability to solve his own problem," Giltaca told VICE. "So he wants the federal minister to punish 2.1 million gun owners from Whitehorse to Charlottetown."

Giltaca, who owns 20 guns for teaching a safety course and several more for personal use, said the gun homicide rate has still been in decline since the long gun registry was scrapped in 2012.

In fact, 2013 marked the lowest national gun homicide rate recorded since the Homicide Survey began in 1974, with 135 homicides, followed by an increase to 156 gun homicides in 2014 (still the second lowest), according to Statistics Canada.

As for people who sell guns illegally to the black market, Giltaca said they are already breaking federal laws, and he doesn't believe adding more laws will change anything.

"Stopping gang violence is hard work, it takes a decade to do that," he said. "(Tory) wants to write a letter attacking millions of people he's never met. That's his answer."

Mike Bartlett, an Ontario-based gun collector, told VICE he sees the government's conundrum but he doesn't think placing a limit on the number of firearms a person can own will help.

"If I were going out and buying 10 brand new Glock pistols then I would like to think that that would raise a red flag," he said. But at the same time, he thinks stories like the one in the Star paint all gun owners negatively when "it's really such a small and highly sensationalized number of bad apples."

At his peak, Bartlett owned 250 firearms; many of the guns he owns have historical significance (i.e. World War II-era.) He also owned a gun store in St. John's, Newfoundland, where he said he took his social responsibility of selling guns very seriously.

"I think there's a misunderstanding of the culture that we're not talking about. Somebody who necessarily owns or purchases a lot of firearms (is not) necessarily a risk."

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One day after British Columbia declared that its opioid overdose epidemic killed more people in the month of November than in any other month over the past 30 years, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested he could be open to legalizing heroin—though not anytime soon.

During a chat with the Vancouver Sun's editorial board Tuesday afternoon, the newspaper's ed-in-chief Harold Munro said that under heroin prohibition, black market dealers have explicit control over the supply. Citing Trudeau's stance on weed, Munro then asked if he would consider a similar policy for all illicit drugs.

"As you've all heard me say, I'm a big fan of evidence-based policy," Trudeau responded, adding that's why he's working to change legislation to make it easier to bring in safe injection sites and other harm reduction measures.

Just a few minutes earlier, Trudeau had made a similar observation about black market weed. He said the reason he was bringing in legalization (and not decriminalizing in the interim) was because safety is his top priority, and he doesn't want to give money to gangs and dealers.

BC's most recent wave of deaths is suspected to be linked to the super-potent opioid carfentanil, which authorities are only beginning to test for. In some cases, even the antidote naloxone fails to bring people back from overdose.

"I know that there have been pilot projects in Vancouver leading the way on prescription heroin," Trudeau said, referencing SALOME trials for deeply-entrenched users, adding he'll be interested to see deeper results. "I'm not ideologically or philosophically opposed, but I do know more needs to be done on public awareness and how best to help people."

Trudeau said the crisis intersects with many other issues like poverty, mental health, and housing, and that any good strategy on opioids would have to work on many levels.

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She lives at the base of Sydney's Blue Mountains, in one of a cluster of units. She gets on well with her neighbors but she couldn't tell you much about how they got here.

"We don't normally tell our stories to each other," says Margaret, 60. "We've just become friends. What's happened to you in the past is your past." Living in social housing run by Mission Australia, that may have something to do with the fact her neighbors have all faced homelessness at some stage of their lives.

Read more on Broadly

On an all new episode of CYBERWAR, we investigate the future of artificial intelligence. We talk to experts about how an artificial brain could evolve, the dangers that come with military applications, and the possibility of programming our own extinction.

CYBERWAR airs Tuesdays at 10:30 PM on VICELAND.

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

It's called the "N64 moment", though for me it happened with a Sega Saturn[1]: that moment, one precious Christmas in childhood, where you get the gift you always wanted and never expected. The Big Gift, the gift you've waited hours to open, through so many unwrapped Cadbury's Selection boxes and weird jigsaws from your nan, and you tear at the paper and there, gleaming, is an N64 – or a PS3, or an iPod, or a Barbie Dream House, or a scooter, or whatever it was for you – brand new, that scent of newness about it, both your parents standing over you, still nudging each other to remind themselves that Santa delivered you this present, and not them, saying, "Do you like it?" Saying, "Is it everything you dreamed of and more?"

But now you are 25 and you have a load of student debt and you know what joints taste like and despair, too, and you're treading water, in a way, aren't you, both physically and in terms of your life and your career, and that relationship you always had but that died, and you thought it would be better than it is now, growing up, but it isn't, and you wonder whether you've ever really progressed from where you were aged 18, bright-eyed and excited to dive into the world and everything within it, to now, where you are, here, again, sleeping on mum's sofa – "We turned your room into a peace sanctuary for the dogs; we'll have to push two armchairs together and you can sleep on that" – for the holidays, because nothing is as good as it used to be and that includes Christmas. Are you going to get an N64 this year? You are not.

Here's all the shit you're going to get instead.

FROM YOUR MUM: EXTREMELY PRACTICAL GIFT PLUS "A LITTLE SOMETHING"

Your mum stopped getting you good gifts the year you left for university (do you remember what you got that year? It was an off-brand iPod speaker, a lamp and £200 in cash) and they've only been getting worse ever since, but this one really takes the cake: in a moment of middle-of-the-dark-November-night necessity you negotiated that, instead of a Christmas present this year, you would forgo all festive jollity if your mum just paid for an emergency plumber to come and fix the boiler in your share-flat, please mum, please I can see my breath, and now it's Christmas Day and your mum, £460 out of pocket because you were cold once, remembers.

"I've just got you a little thing," she says, "because obviously I got that radiator bled for you," but it's a decent-sized box and there's a little flutter of hope that your mum has come the fuck through – that, despite it all, Christmas is real, that she went and got you something brilliant, like that gourmet wok you wanted, or the North Face jacket you were saying about, or… – ah, no. "It's just a silly thing," she's saying, and that's how you end up spending the day in the George by ASDA elf dressing gown she got you, because if your mum buys you clothes for Christmas you have to wear them on Christmas Day, for that is the rules. "I can take it back if you don't like it," she's saying, two hours later as she meets you on the stairs, half-drunk and visibly miserable. Do you? Do you hate it? Is it really worth breaking this old woman's heart, this old woman who loves you and raised you, who bought you a fun £8 dressing gown for Christmas, who saved you in the dark of November, for just a bit of fun, just a festive laugh? "No," you choke, thinking of how much you really wanted a pair of Air Max this year. "It's great."

FROM YOUR DAD: SOMETHING SO MUCH WEIRDER THAN YOU EVER COULD'VE THOUGHT

Your dad looks at the little displays marked "Secret Santa" that pop up in every shop and department store this time of year and chuckles to himself. "Secret Santa?" he's saying. "Amateurs." Secret Santa presents can go one of three ways: an elaborate £5 fart or shit joke (small vinyl turd emoji; whoopee cushion; something like that); a book of topical jokes (The Brexshit Book, 2016); or a small childhood toy that costs around £6 ("Ah, a hoola hoop. Yeah, thanks, yeah").

Your dad is 20, 30 levels above this shit. Your dad has taken joke presents and flipped them upside-down, inside-out. Your dad has inverted the joke present, then extrapolated it, spun it in a chamber until it is atoms, reassembled it. You open a package from your dad – you know it is from your dad because it is wrapped roughly in six layers of wrapping paper, every single edge of it taped down tight, and there is no label, just, faintly, in that red pen he uses to do his crosswords, your name written on the back. It's… OK, right – a pair of secateurs?

"Remember when you were a kid," he's saying, barely able to contain his laughter. "You had that T-shirt?" A T-shirt with some flowers on it, yeah. You wore it every day of your first holiday to Majorca. It was an extremely real T-shirt. Its vivid colours mark every treasured photograph from your childhood. Got torn up in the laundry one time when you were eight and you cried. "Right… secateurs!" your dad is still explaining, quite a few minutes later. "For flowers!" Ah, you see what's gone on here – in your absence, your dad has quietly gone fully mad.

STOCKING: SHITSHOW

In my humble opinion, the stocking is the best bit of Christmas: the toys and gifts you get to guiltily indulge in before Christmas Proper, cosy and joyful in your bed, no tearing wrapping paper and any of that shit. Plus it's mainly stuffed with chocolate coins and Terry's oranges. W–where's the Terry's Chocolate Orange, mum? "I didn't think you liked those any more." Of course I fucking like them. Where are the chocolate coins? "I couldn't find anything this year!" Your stocking used to be a rolled up copy of the Beano, a chocolate Santa, a plastic flute. This year you've got a telephone book (???), a novelty ice cube tray and a tightly rolled up £5 note. Shitshow.

FROM YOUR UNCLE: YOUR UNCLE DOES NOT KNOW YOU AT ALL BUT HE DOES KNOW YOU HAVE KEYS

Your uncle hasn't really checked up on you and who you have become since you were 13, and so for the past half of your life he's just had you down as a big fan of Limp Bizkit, Xanga and moping, and buys for you accordingly. You unwrap your present and it's a Donnie Darko DVD with the "Two for £5!" label half peeled off. You peer inside a gift bag and see he's bought you some Harry Potter stationary because he still thinks you queue up at midnight for the books. This year, he's somehow outdone himself: a McLaren key fob that he absolutely got free with a polo shirt one time, gifted to you because "of that year you liked F1, remember?" Ah, yes: that one time he took you to the British Grand Prix and you tried really hard to be interested. Just add it on to the other key rings he got you last year, and the year before that one (one: small pewter shark fin guitar; two: Leonardo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, his head now separated from his body), and let that be that. Don't think about why it is that people at the hard end of their fifties have this unerring compulsion to embellish your keys.

AUNT: AN ABBEY ROAD MUG BECAUSE "YOU LIKE MUSIC"

"Oh, I never know what to get you," your aunt is saying, before you've even unscrunched the tissue paper she's stuffed this mug with, apologising before you've even had a chance to be disappointed. She's pointing at you vaguely with one hand now and gesticulating helplessly at your mum. "What do you buy them?" It's an Abbey Road mug, a mug with the Abbey Road album cover printed all around it and a small plastic submarine of jelly beans inside, which she has bought "because you like music". This, you cannot argue with. You do like music. Not the Beatles, exactly – you're more tropical house, now, aren't you; I saw that subtle change to your Soundcloud DJ bio – but yes, you like music. This is all you are to her: a faceless, depthless music-liker. She doesn't know you and you don't know her, but because of this blood clause between you, you have to share this yearly rigmarole, where she spends four weeks stressing before impulse-buying you an £8 mug in the Debenhams queue and giving it to you on Boxing Day. Really: isn't it your own fault for not being more interesting? Isn't it your own fault that this is the third Beatles mug you now own?

ANOTHER AUNT: SOMETHING BAFFLING FROM THE HOMEWARE SECTION OF A GARDEN CENTRE

Your other aunt, another aunt – so many aunts, aunts nested in doors and drawers, aunts popping out of cupboard and the cabinets – another aunt has given up on trying to delve your infinite depths and folds, and just buys Whatever the Fuck She Fucking Wants when she's at one of the 30 garden centres she visits each year, and that'll be your present, whether you like it or not. In a way, you respect her flex: ah, it's… oh, OK, a small pencil and pad set in a floral box and print. Thanks! And what have we got this year, a– OK, a £12 jar of jam and a small straw box with daffodil bulbs in it. Well, alright then! Thank you anyway! Shall we get drunk? And the answer, because she is a rich old auntie who loves to buy things at garden centres, is always: "yes".

Yeah it looks good but only about three of these are for you (Photo via color line)

YOUR YOUNGER BROTHER HAS BOUGHT YOU A BOOK HE LIKED THAT YOU WILL NEVER READ AND, IN RETALIATION, YOU HAVE BOUGHT HIM A BOOK YOU LIKED BUT HE WILL NEVER READ

Try and fob me off with My Kind of Crazy will you, you little cunt? Get your fucking face round this hardback Knausgård and an award-nominated graphic novel about sex, then! Enjoy pretending to read that for my benefit and my benefit alone while I'm downstairs watching Nemo and eating all the good Quality St!

YOUR SMALL NEPHEW HAS DONE YOU A DELIGHTFUL HANDMADE CARD

Ah, your small, sweet nephew – the cuteness locus of the family since you grew up, since everyone stopped caring about you and your excitement, you noticed a certain tarnish on Christmas the first year you started crying mid-opening the presents and nobody really cared because you were 15 – has made you his present this year, because he is a tiny funds-less child! Ha, ha, ha. Aww. Okay so it— ah, right. A large sheet of A3 paper with a big painting of a dinosaur on. "He spent ages on it," your sister's whispering. "He thought you could put it up?" Ha ha, yeah, sure. Only not in the front room, obviously, because you share that with six other people. And not on the fridge, either, because the fridge is covered with a load of old decaying letter-shaped fridge magnets and a small ceramic model of a dish of paella someone bought back from a holiday in Spain. And, I mean… I mean, obviously you can't put it in your room, can you, because it's not… it doesn't actually look good. You think about that tight space under your bed and how you could maybe stash it there, among the old hairdryers and all the notebooks you used at university. "Do you like it?" your little nephew is saying, and you look at him – he's such a pure, beautiful child, such large innocent eyes, those curly little locks – and say, "Yes, mate!" and "Thank you!" and, when nobody is looking, stash it in the big binbag full of wrapping paper someone's already started putting out. When he is older, he'll know. When he is older – when he is paying £600 a month to live in a single room in a flatshare – he'll understand the struggle of having no physical room for sentimental things. Then he'll forgive you.

OTHER ASSORTED ERRATA:

(Photo via Frank Jarnia)

YOUR MUM HAS GOT YOU A CARD AND SIGNED IT FROM THE DOG EVEN THOUGH SHE PHONES YOU EVERY DAY

It's sort of weird your mum got you a Christmas card because she phones you every day and, like, you are here, on Christmas, so she doesn't really need to do that, but in your absence she has forgotten all the fine-toothed little rules and unrules between you and fully mummed it and got you a Christmas card. You can see, there, printed on the opposite page of the card, a little smudge of biro ink where she closed it too soon after blacking in the dog's pawprint.

A MILLENNIAL JOKE BECAUSE YOU ARE A MILLENNIAL

Ah, shit son! Nan read about millennials in The Times and slowly done the maths on her fingers and yes, yes: realised you are one! And here, look, she's found just the gift: a small cardboard box with the words "MILLENNIAL ENTITLEMENT" printed on it, that screams like a baby when you open it! Ha, ha, thanks grandma! That'll teach me for being born into the wrong economy!

A TOILET BOOK ABOUT TRUMP BECAUSE OF "THAT FACEBOOK UPDATE YOU DID"

"This is one from your dad," your mum warns, as she hands it over to you, and: ah, OK. The Little Book of Trumpisms, just what you always wanted. "Because of that Facebook update you did!" your dad is saying. "Remember! After the election?" Ah yes: on two hours sleep, you took to Facebook to really stick it to Trump, and a 60-reply thread and a load of texts from your dad later and it escalated into a full-on family barney. Your mum's walking out of the room with a "I can't talk about this again" look on, and dad's half out of his armchair, snarling. "YOU THINK YOU FUCKING KNOW SHIT, DO YOU?" he's saying. "YOU'RE 23. YOU DON'T KNOW SHITE." Lord help you if someone brings Brexit up over dinner.

THE INEVITABLE DESCENT INTO "YOUR FAVOURITE SWEET, A SHOWER GEL TWO-PACK, SOCKS"

You always used to chuckle when that was what you all got your dad each year – his favourite sweet (Liquorice All Sorts); a pair of cosy day-of-the-week socks from his favourite shop, Next; and a shower gel/deodorant set. That – when you boil your dad from the bones and dissect him – is all he really is: a man with cold feet and a regular grooming regime who has one sweet he really likes. Now look at your Christmas stash: big thing of jelly beans, cosy knitted socks, thing of Dove for Men. It's all over now, isn't it, your life? It's basically done now.

A SINGLE BOTTLE OF BEER IN A TUBE WITH SANTA ON THE FRONT OF IT AND/OR A MINIATURE-SIZED BOTTLE OF VODKA THAT COMES WITH THREE SILVER-COLOURED TRUFFLES

Now that you are an adult, everyone knows you drink, but sadly that is the full extent of this particular personality aspect of yours, so you have a gift version of the drink that most aligns with the expectation of your gender, and you will drink it, won't you, alone in your room, taking a little breather from all the winter festivity, listening through the ceiling as your family pop crackers and laugh over dinner, but you can't take it, can you, you need a little You Time; and your mum shouts weakly up the stairs, doesn't she, for you. "Hey–y?" she says. "There's pudding!" But you don't answer – you're in the dog sanctuary now, with the dog, weeping a single tear as you remember where your racing car bed used to be, all those posters you had up, how the very shape of your room has seemed to change since all your stuff was moved out of it. "It's all in the attic, a lot of it," your mum told you, over the phone, after she'd done it. "Most of it, anyway. I didn't think you still wanted all those Fall Out Boy posters." But she was wrong, and now you realise how much you miss it: this glowing house, a place to truly call your own, the embracing feeling of love, of family, of Christmas.

You rifle through your wallet, the one they bought you for your 18th birthday, grown squidgy and worn after years of being wedged full of Pret receipts in your arse pocket: your train home is in two days. Your dad talks to you in tropes and banter, now – he ribs you about football results, he tells you embarrassing things your mum has done in supermarkets, every time he spends a single penny he mocks the fact that it's coming out of his pension. He can only speak like a Furby now, 100 pre-programmed lines that you are almost entirely sick of – but he corners you in the kitchen for a brief, sincere word. "It's nice to see you," he says, single hand on the shoulder. "Are you planning on coming back up anytime soon?" Well, no: you're going to Berlin for your birthday, in May, with a few mates; Easter it sort of depends on the trains, someone's doing a "lost and strays" dinner and it's pretty close to your house, so; oh, yeah, mum's 60th is in September, you'll probably be up for that. "Ah," he says – quietly, sadly – "OK," and pootles off, and you don't really see him again until it's time for him to drive you to the station, with the big Bag for Life full of tinfoil-wrapped Christmas cake your mum has done for you that you'll be eating for dinner until mid-January. "Bye then," he says, turning to you and giving you a big stiff dad hug. "Bye, son and/or daughter. See you again in September." Yeah, nice one, dad. Bye.

@joelgolby

More festive stuff from VICE:

Here Are All the People You're Going to See When You Go Home This Christmas

Why Beloved Christmas Cartoon 'The Snowman' Is Actually About Cocaine, One Night Stands and Death

We Asked A Satanist What He's Doing For Christmas

[1] I have a lot of things to say about the Sega Saturn and my saying them now will rather shit on the enforced nostalgic glow I was trying to bathe this paragraph in but needless to say: I asked for a PlayStation, my mother got it wrong, and one 32-bit console is not interchangeable for another, mum, even if it did have Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA on it. There is nothing quite so deflating as a child to have your friend come over to play and look at your Sega Saturn and go, 'Oh, do you not have Final Fantasy VII on it?' No. 'Does it not have the triangle button?' No, it has the A, B and C buttons – the X, Y and Z are essentially useless. 'Does it have a Rumble Pak?' No, Steven, it does not have a Rumble Pak! The point isn't that getting a Sega Saturn at the age of 12 was the worst thing to ever happen to me, it is: Christmas was different, when you were a kid, wasn't it?