According to a study coordinated by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2015, nearly 10 percent of Americans had smoked marijuana at least once in the past year. That accounts for 30-plus million people, which is slightly more than the total population of Texas. But it's only recently that the government has finally started to catch up with average citizens' attitudes toward the drug, which in the last half century has gone from the source of tremendous moral panic to something much less severe, something approaching a virtual non-issue.

Public policy is beginning to reflect this shift. Four states (California, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine) passed legislation decriminalizing weed for recreational use this past election, adding to an already healthy list where it can be enjoyed—for the most part—without fear of reprisal from law enforcement. Beyond US borders, the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau vowed to legalize cannabis across the country as soon as he took office. It's strange to think that in a moment where hard-line conservatism is sweeping much of the Western world, weed is more or less a bipartisan cause. And as attitudes about weed change, and it becomes available legally in more places, an opportunity to make money has been enjoying increased attention for a few years now: buying stock in companies hoping to capitalize in the quickly growing industry.

"You could almost watch a correlation between how much volume our stocks moved and how well Trudeau was doing in the polls prior to the election," says Jordan Sinclair, director of communications at Tweed, an Ontario-based cannabis business owned by the overarching company Canopy Growth. "People would see his chances improving and think, Oh, how can I capitalize on this?"

Canopy Growth, which describes itself as "a world leading diversified cannabis company," is one of many trade-able enterprises that are taking advantage of the newly fertile corporate ground for marijuana in North America. Hopeful investors are dumping money into these weed companies the same way you might take a flyer on a bright-eyed tech company. And for good reason: With pharmaceutical conglomerates producing cannabis-related medical products, and speculative companies getting their feet wet in the burgeoning possibilities of decriminalized recreational weed, CNBC reports legal marijuana sales will eclipse $20 billion by 2020.

You may be wondering how these businesses can position themselves in the marijuana sector despite national prohibition. Weed is still a Schedule I drug, and there's no guarantee enforcement of the drug will continue to be de-emphasized by the federal government—effectively drying up locally legal marijuana sectors. Still, in early 2015, the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC)allowed the registration of shares of storefronts whose business model included the cultivation and sale of marijuana, and there are many other companies tapping into the industry without directly touching the plant.

The valuation of Miami-based Novus Acquisition and Development, for instance, jumped a ridiculous 3,100 percent in 2014, and it focuses mostly on providing membership services for alternative medicine patients. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company is pouring millions of dollars into hydroponics, apparently convinced the weed sector will invigorate the sale and production of its grow lights across the country. There's even a Denver-based social platform for marijuana called MassRoots, which applied for NASDAQ listing last year. Which begs another question: Are weed stocks something savvy investors should be considering adding to their portfolios, or is it foolish to put your money in something that could go belly up with a new, possibly less weed-friendly administration?

"There are definitely some concerns in regard to this due to previous commentary from Jeff Sessions, but I look at that as noise," says Jason Spatafora, one of the owners of marijuanastocks.com, and the self-proclaimed "Wolf of Weed Street." "This industry is the fastest-growing emerging industry in the world and employs hundreds of thousands of people, churning billions of dollars in revenue. The election had both red states and blue states adopt cannabis legislation, and it stands to reason that it signaled a paradigm shift for cannabis."

One of the epicenters for amateur marijuana investors is r/weedstocks, a subreddit for enterprising hopefuls to discuss, advise, double-down, and commiserate. It's a fast-paced ticker-tape for a very specific corner of stock exchange. Every day, the faithful try to keep up with a volatile industry. Last November, Canopy Growth's value dropped 15 percent on a Tuesday, only to rebound 20 percent the following Wednesday. The subreddit is there every step of the way, a support group of sorts for those navigating these new and sometimes very choppy waters.

"Raiden" is a regular on r/weedstocks, and started investing in marijuana in 2013. Over the past four years, he's watched all the triumphs and anxieties you'd expect from a developing sector, and maintains that buying weed stocks isn't nearly as clandestine as you might expect.

"You can trade weed stocks through most platforms," he says. "Your typical new entrant is going to use an online trading service like Scottrade, Etrade, Schwabb, TD Ameritrade, etc. It is just the same as buying or selling any other stock."

The users on r/weedstocks rely on each other, because there's no definitive mainstream literature on marijuana stocks. The weed industry is still nascent, and while a small handful of cannabis-related companies like GW Pharmaceuticals and Cara Therapeutics are traded on the NASDAQ, most are unlisted. "You're normally trading in penny stocks here, and inherently taking on a higher risk because of it," says Raiden.

Eventually the real players will level out.

Companies that trade smaller, over-the-counter stocks aren't required to show the same transparency as the conglomerates on the New York Stock Exchange. That doesn't mean you can't make money off them, but it does open the door for more uncertainty, and more mischief.

In 2014, the US Securities and Exchange Commission suspended five weed-related tickers for fraud, surmising that "fraudsters often exploit the latest innovation, technology, product, or growth industry—in this case, marijuana—to lure investors with the promise of high returns. Also, for marijuana-related companies that are not required to report with the SEC, investors may have limited information about the company's management, products, services, and finances. When publicly available information is scarce, fraudsters can more easily spread false information about a company, making profits for themselves while creating losses for unsuspecting investors."

Bombshells like those suspensions can cause sudden ups and downs in the weed market. "There are probably hundreds of tickers out there touting a connection to cannabis," Raiden says. "People saw the wave, put out some PR fluff that they knew a guy who knew a guy who owned a grow store and operation. It can be very shady if you don't know how to perform your due diligence on a company or at least properly look over their charts, stability, share count, etc." He adds: "A few stocks were made examples of, and for good reason."

Sinclair concedes he's noticed some troubling incidents of fraud in the past, but maintains that any instability in the market is predictable given the newness of the trade. Eventually, the real players will level out.

Ultimately, Raiden believes if you're savvy and do your research, weed can be a viable investment. For now, he recommends people stick to stocks that don't deal directly with marijuana production, instead investing in weed-adjacent equipment manufacturers or consulting firms. Those businesses should still be viable even if Mike Pence or Jeff Sessions go to war with pot. "We believe states' rights will be honored, but having the federal level accept legal weed income is a whole new ball game. We don't know what our political climate will cause, but there are some favorable signs in the new president," he says.

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Louisa Preston says that hers may be the only field in which scientists don't know if the object of their study actually exists. The 33-year-old Preston is an astrobiologist working on the quest to find extraterrestrial life. But her work is more likely to involve examining soil under a microscope than sending signals to the outer reaches of the cosmos. In her recent book, Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe, Preston offers an introduction to the search for extraterrestrial life—a search that sheds surprising light on our own planet and biological history.

Preston's book takes its punny title from two important concepts in the search for ET life. The first is the "Goldilocks Zone," which refers to the set of conditions on a planet that would allow life to develop. But the criteria is far more rigorous than eliminating "too hot" and "too cold": To support life, a celestial body must offer potential inhabitants protection from radiation, have a nice insulating atmosphere, a decent amount of gravity, be a certain distance from the star it orbits; even plate tectonics help make a planet habitable by maintaining an environment that's warm and water-rich.

The second concept is the "water bears" of Preston's title, tardigrades, multicellular critters that look uncannily ursine. Tardigrades are one of the only creatures that could survive in space—they're hardy enough to survive a vacuum and extreme cold, can expel almost all of the water in their bodies and go into hibernation, only to reinflate themselves and come back to life when they happen back into a friendlier environment. Water bears belong to a class of organism called extremophiles, who live in corners of the planet that are hottest, coldest, most acidic, or most crushed by pressure, etc. Think the Mariana Trench, or Antarctica's subterranean liquid Lake Vostok, or Spain's salty and sulphurous Lake Tirez. Investigating these animals and how they survive in their almost-alien habitats gives insight into how life outside our planet could work.

One expects the takeaway from Preston's book to be—in classic cosmos-narrative style—a feeling of awe at the size, scope, and strangeness of the universe. And you do get this feeling, as she walks readers through a tour of the spots in our solar system (and beyond) where we might one day find life or evidence of past life. But more striking is the sense of how very special our own planet and moment in geologic time are. It's a compelling book to read at this moment, as man-made climate change is throwing planetary systems off balance. In her brief history of the Earth, and of the other rocks that hurtle around space with us, Preston shows just how very lucky we are to live on a planet that is—for now at least—just right.

Recently I sat down and talked about all that with her.

Photo by Ed Marshall

VICE: I'm wondering about the day-to-day life of an astrobiologist. Are you visiting extreme places on earth, looking at a telescope, working in a lab?
Louisa Preston: You know its probably exactly the same as most people—I come in and sit in my office and do research. I do go into the lab sometimes but I'm either looking at organisms down the microscope or crushing up rocks, which is extremely therapeutic. Or I'm using this thing called a spectrometer, which bounces infrared light off these organisms so that I can figure out what's inside them. You're working toward something that you might not ever get to the answer, you're just putting together little pieces of the puzzle for quite possibly the next generation of scientists to figure out. But then there is obviously the fieldwork, which is the best bit.

What are some of the more memorable of those extreme, alien-like environments that you've visited for your fieldwork?
My favorite is Iceland. It's incredible, it's almost cathartic. I worked around Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that caused the ash cloud. We went up there nine or ten months after it erupted, because we wanted to see how much life could survive there, what were the first organisms to make it back. It was difficult to do—mainly because it was so hot. You could still see lava flowing underneath the ground. The soles of our boots started to melt as we were hiking. But it was still snowing. It was such a strange environment, but you could look at it and think: There's heat, there's water, there's all these volcanic minerals that organisms love—it's a perfect environment for some really tough organisms. And the minerality there in Iceland is the same as Mars. It looks very similar, and for us it's a great site to compare because it's quite remote.

"I'm not a betting person, but if I were, I would bet there was life on Mars and we will find evidence of it in my lifetime."

This is one of the only fields where you're not sure if the object of your study exists. So I want to ask you—do you believe that other life is out there?
Yes.

Yes.
I say, part spiritually: I do believe it. But also, looking at all the evidence, I can't get my head around how life could have only have arisen once. I just don't think that's the case. I don't necessarily think that there's really intelligent life out there, as in life that we're going to be able to communicate with. I don't think that we're clever enough to do that yet. But small microbial life, absolutely. I'm not a betting person, but if I were, I would bet there was life on Mars and we will find evidence of it in my lifetime. I'm sure we will.

Is that because the universe is so big that it's a numbers game, there are so many places and settings out there that this process has to have happened more than once? Do you feel like there's something inevitable about the process that you describe in the book, life rising out of the hydrocarbon soup?
I'm not sure if it's inevitable. I think there's been a lot of strategic moves made by life, but also some lucky chances. But I find it hard to ignore the fact that we're finding water everywhere. Carbon's the third most abundant element in the universe—it's found in all the rocks and all the dust that we find. And energy is everywhere because the sun provides it or the planets or moons provide it—and that's all that life really needs. It may not have got as far as us, it might have happened and died out. We think that on Earth, life arose and was killed off multiple times before it really caught on and developed into multicellular life and beyond. Like Carl Sagan said, it would be an absolute waste of space, it really would, to have all the ingredients floating around and nothing being made of them.

"Anything that can get sent into space, and be exposed to a vacuum, and to subzero temperatures and to radiation, and just basically go to sleep and them come alive once it gets oxygen and water again, and then can carry on and have babies—that's incredible."

What makes you think that the form is more likely to be smaller, microbial, rather than a higher, intelligent life form?
It's because it's easier to build. Because they are so simple, they require a very basic set of ingredients. We don't know how the chemistry suddenly became a biological organism—we don't know how that happened—so obviously that is a tough step. But they're just simple, and they're stronger than us, they're so much tougher. If there was life on Mars before, and it started to get cold or it started to be bathed in radiation, or started to lose its water, those organisms could adapt and evolve. They could have gone underground; they could have tried to find a way to survive. Whereas we would have been killed off instantly. We're so weak. We have brains, but we can't save ourselves, and we can't adapt. So I just think that they're the hardiest, which is why we call them the extremophiles. Like the water bears.

You have this—
Obsession?

I was going to say affection, for water bears. What's so special about them?
They can survive anything. Anything that can get sent into space, and be exposed to a vacuum, and to subzero temperatures and to radiation, and just basically go to sleep and them come alive once it gets oxygen and water again, and then can carry on and have babies—that's incredible. And the fact that we can't figure out how they do it. The thing is, the more we study the water bear, the more it can help us with our own future survival. I mean for life on Earth—forget space—the way the tardigrade can survive things is what could help us make our planet better.

Watch the Motherboard documentary about water bears:

How so?
What we think they might do is, there might be certain genes that they can switch on and off depending on the environment. What is it that tells them to expel 97 percent of their water and then later get it back again—how does that work? If there's a gene in there that can survive really cold temperatures, could that be put into a crop? Not that genetically modifying things is definitely the best way to go, but for drought areas or for trying to get more crops into cold areas, is there something that tardigrades or other extremophiles do that could be vital? Also in terms of medicine, if we understood how extremophiles adapt and survive, that knowledge could help us immensely. People always say this thing about Mars being a lifeboat—that we could end up on Mars. But the thing is we need to save our planet first, to even have the right to have another world. So we need to be able to understand how to protect it better.

As I was reading I was thinking about all of these other planets, and the history of life on Earth. You have this understanding of planetary history that most people don't have, and I wonder if that colors your thinking about issues like climate change.
I know a lot of climate scientists who are very much like, "This is the way the Earth works. You adapt or die, that's the way it works." I see it as just worrying. Because you know that it has happened before. I study extinction events, and I see what's happened in the past. Those events have wiped out organisms that were tougher than we are—but then we do have brains and we might be able to fix it. We look at Mars and think, That could happen. And we look at Venus and think, That could happen, if we're not careful. And we wouldn't survive it.

"If I had to be stranded any place in the solar system I would choose to be stranded on Titan, because I could fly."

In the book, you tell us about the conditions on various planets and moons in our own solar system that make them more or less hospitable to life, and then you do the same thing with some of the exoplanets. Is there some particular spot out there that you are rooting for as the most likely source of extraterrestrial life?
With exoplanets, I try not to get my hopes up, because it's going to take too long to figure it out, to get a definitive answer.

I would love Enceladus [a moon of Saturn, covered with ice and cryovolacanoes] to prove itself. It's got all the ingredients. It's already showing us that it's got active, organic molecules being spewed out into space. The same with Europa [the smooth-surfaced, icy moon of Jupiter] as well, that would be really good, although drilling through the ice might be quite difficult. But I have to say Titan [a moon Saturn with a dense atmosphere and evidence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons] is my favorite. If I had to be stranded any place in the solar system I would choose to be stranded on Titan, because I could fly.

I know that your search is for a different kind of life than the kind that are typically represented in sci-fi—and culture more broadly, really—that are mostly imagining intelligent life. What's your opinion of groups like SETI or of the search for extraterrestrial life that is explicitly looking for other intelligences?
Oh, I'm all for it. Why not? We have to pay attention. Somebody had a great quote that was like "the proof that intelligent life does exist is that they haven't spoken to us," because we're just not ready. Obviously, probably, it verges on the realm of fiction, and it doesn't get the credibility it deserves. But the scientists who are working on it are more than credible. They're rock stars in their fields. You've got to look.

"The irony of [colonizing Mars] is that we've learned from the way that we've messed up Earth, how we could warm up Mars and make Mars more habitable."

You also have an interest in terraforming, right?
Well, it starts off with Mars gardening. We want to live on Mars, we do want to send scientists there—we don't want to make it a short trip. How are we going to do that? So I wanted to figure out, can we garden on Mars? It's covered in soil. Is that all we need? You've probably seen the film The Martian—it's not far off.

Terraforming is just one more step. It will take probably thousands of years. The irony is that we've learned from the way that we've messed up Earth, how we could warm up Mars and make Mars more habitable. We would need to put more CO2 into its atmosphere, to thicken the atmosphere. We could use CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons], but we could probably want to use CO2 instead. And that would thicken the atmosphere, and then as soon as the atmosphere starts to thicken, it'll start to warm up. So then all the ice will start to melt, and lots of CO2 is trapped in the ice, so the melting will release more CO2 into the atmosphere. And then once you start to melt the ice you've got liquid water and you can start to grow plants. And once you start to grow plants you start to release oxygen as a byproduct, and then the atmosphere starts to get oxygen in it. We do think that you could start to enact that in a small reactor and dot them around the planet and start popping stuff in.

The moral question is: Do we have the right to do that? Should we do that? We never will have explored every single inch of Mars so if there is that one microbe holding out somewhere and then we start to change its environment, then that's planetary genocide.

I love this idea that you bring up in the book, that a very intelligent and very successful civilization might have to leave a smaller footprint on its planet, and therefore be harder for us to spot.
Yeah, that's the hopeful thing. To find an industrialized civilization we know exactly what to look for: CFCs, lots of CO2, all the stuff that we're doing. Which teaches us a lot about what to look for. But if they're more intelligent than us, and they've got past that, we wouldn't necessarily find them because they're living harmoniously and nicely about their world.

Follow Rachel Riederer on Twitter.

Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe by Louisa Preston is in bookstores and online from Bloomsbury.

By now, Tick Segerblom has attended a lot of conferences where careful politicians frame their support for recreational marijuana use with a boilerplate disclaimer.

I've never smoked marijuana, but…

Segerblom is different. A state senator who hails from downtown Las Vegas, he is the rare politician who will say, "I have smoked marijuana, and I loved it." That helps explain why he's also the rare politician—at least in the United States—who has a pot strain named after him: Segerblom Haze.

After Nevadans voted to permit recreational marijuana use in November, I reached out to Segerblom to learn how that will actually work in Sin City. Among other things, he suspects casinos are still in denial about what lies ahead, that California will have a tough time adopting its own legal sales regime, and by way of an aside, he opened up about how in the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter's staff—of which Segerblom was a member—used to smoke weed on the White House roof.

"Before the Reagan administration, the reality was marijuana was not a big deal," he told me.

Speaking in a dry Western drawl, the fourth-generation Nevadan added, "I don't want to expound about how great drugs are, but I will say that when it comes to drugs, marijuana is probably the best one. And the more this country uses it, the better the country is going to be."

Here's what Segerblom had to say about the future of pot policy in the West.

VICE: First off, is Tick your real name?
Tick Segerblom: Rich is my real name. My sister called me Hickey when I was a baby and it evolved into Tickey. Being a Richard, you always get called Dick. And I'd rather be a Tick than a Dick.

Fair enough. So how did "Segerblom Haze" come about?
It was just a fluke. The girl actually had a strain with a name they didn't think was appropriate for medicinal use, so they said we'd like to name it after you. I asked my family and they said, "Oh, that'd be great," so I said what the hell… The former name was "Super slutty" something or other.

What's it like?
Everybody who's tried it is super impressed because it's very energizing, and a lot of people start with it first thing in the morning.

Does it represent your personality?
You'd have to ask other people. If I had a characteristic, it's never give up.

They could have named it after anyone, though! Why you?
I'm very well known in the industry as somebody who is not just a good vote, but a real advocate. Back in the 60s and 70s, when I was going to college, it was a pretty common thing. I used it and I enjoyed it. It's the kind of thing where, in midlife, you can't use it as much because it kind of distracts you. But I'd always realized it was far more preferable than alcohol. It was never lethal or leading to suicide or anything like that.

So where does Nevada fit into the national pot movement?
We only just implemented medical marijuana in 2015 and before we did that, we looked at Colorado, we looked at Arizona—we looked around and tried to pick the best practices. Turned out, we were on the cutting edge of where recreational was going: Everything has to be tagged and tested. We have the toughest mandatory testing [in state labs for mold etc.] law in the country. So our medical program is better than anybody else's recreational program as far as being totally government controlled.

California is going to have to go back and put their medical program under a regulatory framework and it's just gonna kill them. You have an industry which thinks it's done great, but no, now you have to have your product tested. You've been using pesticides—you can't use pesticides. You've been using fertilizer—you can't use fertilizer. If there's any mold, it's thrown out. You can't just barter how much it's gonna be. We have to know where the plant came from, how much it weighed, tag it. If it goes into a place with oils, what goes in has to be measured, what goes out has to be measured. It's a whole new world. Alcohol, cigarettes, any of those regulated industries—they're used to it. But to start that on an existing industry is really tough.

Watch Abdullah Saeed explain how to make firecrackers—a.k.a. weed peanut butter crackers—at home.

So what is recreational weed use going to be like in Las Vegas?
The big issue is where to use it. This is really important in a tourism state like Nevada: You're gonna have people come here to purchase it, so we need to allow them to have it at concerts, maybe bars, nightclubs, maybe on designated streets. We could have a street called Amsterdam downtown where anyone could walk around smoking in different stores and cafes.

Everyone already thinks everything is legal here. They think prostitution is legal. The image around the world is that in Vegas, you can do anything you want to do. And that's basically true, frankly, but this would be something you could do legally.

I've heard the casinos are opposed to it. What's the reality of the situation?
They're afraid of losing their gaming licenses. Right now we have a gaming control board which is very tough and they've said no marijuana in any hotels, which is totally unrealistic because it's already there, obviously.

I think the biggest concern is that you can't allow people to do it on the casino floor. Because of federal law, they don't want it inside. But there's no reason why there couldn't be a bar or an outdoor café or park next to a casino, where people can go use marijuana.

Are you doing anything to make sure the industry isn't taken over by the typical Vegas oligarchs? Nevada is sort of famous for that kind of cronyism.
To the extent I can. I'm hoping one of my bills will require diversity as one of the necessary elements for picking a dispensary owner. So we're looking for minorities, looking for women, looking people from different economic levels. But at the end of the day it is a business, and in all businesses, rich people have a leg up. I think the bigger issue is not to let it get too concentrated. The law we passed in 2013 said no one company could have 10 percent of the market in any county. Something like that which tries to spread it around a bit. I would like to make sure that minorities have a chance to participate because it is a government run program, and if it's all old white guys, that's not good.

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I knew that running up naked to a group of Massachusetts locals drinking beers on their porch at night had the potential to be awkward, but I still didn't get the reception I hoped for. The Cambridge natives failed to realize I wasn't a deviant sex criminal exposing myself for jollies, but rather a college student participating in the time-honored tradition of streaking. Standing there naked and covering my shame, the subtle nuances distinguishing streaking and indecent exposure were starting to blur for me, too. Just moments before, I'd run away from a group of Cambridge police officers.

I had a choice to make. Did I run further into the night to try to find more fun-loving strangers, or did I risk arrest by sneaking back onto campus? Neither path was looking promising. Streaking was suddenly way less fun than it had been earlier that night.

I was in a pickle with my pickle out.

Streaking first became popular across US college campuses in 1960s and 70s. At my alma mater, Harvard, the tradition of streaking dates back even further. Although the historical record is inexact, there appears to be some evidence that as a student, Charles Adams, son of President John Adams, was disciplined for getting drunk and running naked around Harvard Yard in 1788.

In 1804, Washington and Lee University senior George William Crump was arrested for leaving the campus and running naked through the adjoining town of Lexington, Virginia. Crump's honor, however, was restored when Robert E. Lee himself sanctioned streaking as a "rite of passage" for college gentlemen. (Crump went on to become a US Congressman.)

Lee, of all people, seemed to get that it could be funny, but standing there naked in front of strangers, I knew that my nudity was not funny. I thought it had been when I first got naked earlier in the night at a party with the cross-country team—but maybe I was wrong about that, too.

We were at an after-party following the hazing of the new freshmen. I was a sophomore runner on the team who hadn't distinguished myself in races, but had distinguished myself as someone very willing to get naked. I'd earned this reputation when I was hazed the previous year: Before the seniors had finished saying "naked obstacle course," I had already taken my clothes off. My eagerness stemmed from a desire for approval—but paradoxically, being too willing to get naked took all of the fun out of hazing.

Now the new freshmen were getting hazed, and I was jealous of the attention they were getting. I know my inability to distinguish between negative and positive attention doesn't speak well for my sense of self-worth, but so it goes.

As the party heated up, a senior bellowed out a dare: "Hey freshmen, I challenge you to go streak in the Quad Yard." The frosh demurred. Nobody stepped forward. Seeing an opportunity for attention, I began stripping. If you ever feel like a night isn't about you and you want it to be, getting naked works pretty well as a magnet for eyeballs.

"I'll do it!" I said, pulling my clothes off and throwing them into a pile in the middle of the dance floor. Naked, I ran out the front door.

It was around midnight when I began running naked laps around the Quad Yard. A small contingent from the party had come out to watch. By the second lap, passersby had begun to glob on and gawk. As I came around for my third lap, I noticed something unexpected: flashlights.

Streaking is funny until it isn't, and hearing "sex offender" was a great way to make it not fun real fast.

That's weird, I thought, why do people have flashlights? Is it to get a better look at my streaking antics? Flattered, I ran toward the beams, like a moth to a flame. Just as the source of one of the beams began to run towards me, it dawned on me that something was wrong.

"COPS!" a college-aged voice shouted into the night. I tried to stop my forward momentum as quickly as possible, resulting in my naked ass falling hard onto the grass. I shot up and began sprinting the other way. A few moments later, a friend of mine on the team, Connor, caught up to me.

"Dude… the cops… are here," he said between puffs of breath.

"Dude… I know… what should... I do?" I spat back.

"They said… if they... catch someone… streaking… they'll arrest them… and they'll... have to register… as... a sex offender."

"What?!"

Streaking is funny until it isn't, and hearing "sex offender" was a great way to make it not fun real fast.

I hit the edge of campus and kept running, down a street and off into the Cambridge night, which is how I found myself standing in front of the locals.

"Hey, weirdo, want me to call the cops?"

It was clear civilians wouldn't understand my plight. I ran again, but now weaved back toward campus. I snuck along in the shadows of buildings and crept behind rows of shrubbery, at last finding a hiding spot in a large bush on the edge of a pedestrian walkway. If someone came across me naked and hiding in a bush, it was going to be hard to pass this off as a harmless college tradition. I waited, praying I'd see someone I knew and wouldn't be seen by someone I didn't. After about 30 minutes, I saw Devon, an upperclassman on the team and the host of the party. He was walking back towards the festivities, a box of beer in each hand. I whisper-yelled to get his attention and implored him to go get me some clothes.

Thirty minutes later, I was still waiting. I'd now been naked hiding in a bush as co-eds walked past me for the better part of an hour. I tortured myself with thoughts of how thoroughly ruined my life would be if I had to register as a sex offender for this stupid ploy for attention. Certainly people had been forced to register as sex offenders for far less. A possible saving grace was that since my penis was as flaccid as a worm in a jar of melatonin, if I was spotted, I hoped it would at least be clear that I wasn't masturbating. A naked guy masturbating in a bush is way worse than a naked guy just shivering in a bush, right?

At last, I saw someone I recognized, another sophomore on the team named Patrick. He was walking around holding a pile of clothes given to him by Devon. He handed me the garments. I put them on, relieved.

I was too spooked to return to the party. I figured the police had an all-points bulletin out for my arrest. I ran back to my dorm. Once inside, I decided I needed to disguise myself. I had a beard. I shaved it. I had long hair. I shaved it too. I usually sleep naked, but that night I slept fully clothed.

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Last night Buzzfeed published the full (and unverified) dossier of memos that have been doing the rounds in Washington and beyond for a while now; memos that make a number of allegations against President-elect Trump's ties to Russia an—

No: you know what? You're right. Let's skip the recap. Here's the bit about Trump getting a load of sex workers to do a big remunerated piss all over Obama's old hotel bed:

To reiterate again: these reports are unsubstantiated. They have not been verified in any way. Users on 4Chan have claimed the story originated there as a prank, but haven't provided any real proof. Trump himself tweeted to say: "FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!", and you have to believe him, because historically his character has been so trustworthy and dignified – almost to a fault! – that such slurs against him are entirely outside the bounds of possibility. Get a load of sex workers to piss all over a bed in some petty and unseen act of revenge? Donald Trump? Don't be absurd.

As many others have pointed out, the publication of the unverified dossier also brings up a bit of a smudgy black mark against Buzzfeed, and with it the whole idea of journalistic ethics and morals. So top to bottom: there is a lot to be wary about here, when we read the story about Donald Trump and the Piss Bed.

But—

No, this is silly. It's a silly thing to say. I shouldn't even… no.

B–but, what if— right. What if? What if, hypothetically, Donald Trump did actually pay a load of Russian sex workers to piss on President Obama's hotel bed, as alleged in that dossier about him?

ALL THE QUESTIONS I HAVE FOR DONALD TRUMP IN THE ENTIRELY HYPOTHETICAL CASE OF HIM PAYING A LOAD OF RUSSIAN SEX WORKERS – OR THEY COULD HAVE BEEN FROM ABROAD! WE'RE ASSUMING! – TO PISS ON BARACK OBAMA'S BED

HOW MANY SEX WORKERS, EXACTLY, DID YOU PAY TO PISS ON THE BED?

Now, I've never paid a sex worker to piss on my bed before (*1), but if I'm going to make an event of it I'm going to need more than one bladder's worth of piss and, long story short: I am estimating this job took anywhere between 16 to 20 piss-doers – please confirm.

WHERE DID YOU SLEEP, SIR, AFTER THE PISS?

Listen, I don't know about you, but if I've paid a number of sex workers to piss all over my bed, I'm not going to sleep in that bed. That's just going to be such an uncomfortable night's sleep, even if you're bang into piss. I think there's a real glass ceiling when it comes to "getting really horny over piss", and it is pretty precisely situated over "the slow, dawning realisation that you're sleepy but you've got all piss on your bed". So.

Where did Donald Trump sleep, that hypothetical night, the piss night referred to in these unsubstantiated memos? Because I checked the specs of the Ritz-Carlton Moscow Presidential suite and here are all the beds they have:

You assume the Obamas slept in the Oversized King, so we can update the list a little bit:

So either, in this totally speculative situation: Donald Trump just tucked himself up on one of the many cosy seating areas and banquettes and what-not that were littered around the 2,550 sq ft room, sort of tucked his arms in a bit and folded his legs over, propped a few cushions behind him, tried to get his customary three hours on there but kept fidgeting, the velvet kept rubbing his back up all wrong; or – and I think this is more likely, in this situation I have imagined – Donald Trump rang down meekly to reception to ask for a rollaway.

In which case:

HOW DID THE CONVERSATION WITH RECEPTION GO WHEN YOU HAD TO TELL THEM THAT YOU, A THEN 65-YEAR-OLD, HAD GOT PISS ALL ON YOUR BED?

"Privet, kak ya mogu vam pomoch."

"HELLO, IS THAT RECEPTION?"

"Da."

"GOT A BIT OF A SITUATION UP HERE WITH THE BED."

"Tell me."

"LISTEN I DON'T KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS BUT UH… IT'S GOT A LOT OF PISS ON IT."

"…"

"THE BED. THE PRESIDENTIAL BED."

"Sir, did you—"

"NOT MY PISS, JESUS. GIRL PISS, LADY PISS. BUT IT'S PISS, AND IT'S EVERYWHERE."

"Sir, would you like me to send your butler—"

"NO, IT'S LATE, IT'S LATE. CAN SOMEONE BRING THE ROLLAWAY?"

"Da."

"AND UH… YEAH. PROBABLY GOING TO NEED TO HAVE A LITTLE THINK ABOUT WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THE PISS."

"Can I ask, sir, exactly how much piss we are dealing with?"

"A COUPLE LITRES, I WOULD VENTURE."

"Excellent, sir. I will send the rollaway up right away."

"SURE, SURE. LISTEN UH… CAN YOU. UM. NOT MENTION THE PISS."

"Sir?"

"THE BEDFUL OF PISS. THAT I DID. THAT… THE GIRL PISS. DON'T MENTION IT, TO ANYONE."

"Of course."

"WE'LL DEAL WITH IT TOMORROW."

HOW DID THE CONVERSATION WITH THE HOTEL MANAGER – WHO, PRESUMABLY, YOU WERE REASONABLY PALLY WITH, SEEING AS HE HAD YOU IN THE HOTEL, IN THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE, I.E. YOU WERE THE MOST VIP GUEST THEY HAD AT THE TIME – HOW DID THAT CONVERSATION GO?

"Run it by me again, Mr Trump."

"LISTEN JUST TELL ME HOW MUCH THE BED IS."

"Sir, I'd just like to— indulge me, a second here. How did the piss get on the bed?"

"I PAID FOR THAT TO HAPPEN."

"Okay, OK. And it was—"

"THE PISS FLOWED FREELY FROM THE SEX GIRLS, YES."

"Ah, OK, OK. And you weren't—"

"I WASN'T INVOLVED WITH THE PISS AT ALL, OK? GET THAT OUTTA YOUR HEAD STRAIGHT AWAY. I JUST SAT THERE AND WATCHED. I WASN'T UNDER THE PISS STREAM."

"So it was just—"

"REVENGE. I GOT CALL GIRLS TO PISS ON THE OBAMA BED FOR REVENGE."

"…"

"YOU STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND, DO YOU?"

"No, sir."

HOW MUCH DID THE BED COST TO REPLACE AND WAS THAT WORTH IT, DO YOU THINK?

If I pissed on a bed in a Presidential suite I would guess that it would cost me somewhere around – remembering this is oversized King, almost certainly custom made, replete in fine linens and covers, with exquisite feather pillows and comforters and with likely the finest mattress money could buy – I am going to eyeball the cost of this at about £20,000, and that's assuming none of the piss got on a fine rug or the floor. I'm trying to decide if paying £20,000 to piss on a bed is an incredible, incredible flex, or whether it's the most embarrassing way to spend two racks ever in history. Still torn on that one. Will get back to you with a firm answer anon.

WHY, IN THIS HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION, DIDN'T DONALD TRUMP PISS THE BED HIMSELF?

I have been thinking about this a lot and I think if I was mad at someone – really mad – and had a chance to defile their bed with piss… yeah, I think I'd want to do the piss myself. You know? There's just something so triumphant about that. It's me. My piss. I pissed on the ghost of you. That's the biggest F–U I can think to do with my piss.

So it's unusual, to me, to instead allegedly pay anywhere between one and a thousand sex workers to do the piss for me. Firstly: you're out of pocket. Secondly: you've stolen the real moment of retribution (*2) from yourself. And thirdly, now you have a load of someone else's piss to deal with. All the sex workers have filed out in clattering heels and with handfuls of cash, and it's just you, left alone, feeling that sort of feeling of dirty gloom you get after you wank, only your bed is full of piss and has piss all over it. Donald Trump, picking up a single pillow to see if it can be rescued somehow, and it just dripping a perfect line of piss out of the dangling corner of it. That can't be a good feeling, can it? Now imagine you just spent £100,000 on that (estimated cost of suite + cost of bed + sex worker costs + tips to hotel staff to please be discrete about the piss thing). That can't be a good feeling at all.

WHAT IS THE ATMOSPHERE W/ YOU AND MELANIA LIKE TODAY? AROUND THE HOUSE? SHE COOL?

She cool with the piss thing, bro?

FINAL Q.: W–WHY DID YOU PISS ALL OVER A BED, MY MAN?

Listen, this whole thing is moot. It's moot. As far as we know, he didn't do the piss; he didn't pay women to do the piss for him. The piss has not in any way been verified. There was no piss, even though it really sounds like the kind of piss that Donald Trump would do. But no. We have to believe – until I have footage, until I have recordings of Donald Trump howling "I AM THE PISS KING" out off the balcony and into the frigid air of Moscow at night, until I have that – we have to believe there was no piss . But what if there was, though. These are the questions I would ask.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE!

Is Donald Trump Sexy? An Investigation

How Reality TV Made Donald Trump President

The Story of Donald Trump

*1 SIDE-QUESTION: At what point does a sex worker cease to become a sex worker and simply become a piss worker? Because if they were only paid to piss, then that's just piss work. I suppose the question really is: at what point does several women pissing on a bed become a sex thing, and not just the maddest thing anyone's ever done with some piss? ✝

✝Actually reading back words 39 to 53 of that paragraph I think I have answered my own question, haven't I, really? It is always, always a sex thing.

*2 For this article please note we are occupying a mental space where "pissing on a bed someone slept in once" is considered in any way retribution or revenge for something, when it blatantly isn't, because, like: it wasn't even his bed. He just slept in it once. I'm just thinking about how I'd feel if one of my many enemies pissed in my bed to flex on me and I'm just laughing and laughing and laughing. How does you pissing in a bed hurt me! It doesn't! It's not my bed!

(Top image: bed photo by Derek Jensen, via; Donald Trump photo by Michael Vadon, via)

Donald Trump is facing fresh questions about his links to Russia after a sensational report published Tuesday claimed that the Kremlin holds compromising personal and professional material on the president-elect. The unverified report's contents set off a fresh row between the president-elect and the intelligence community, and kickstarted a debate on media ethics, after one site published the contents of the report despite admitting that they could not confirm its veracity.

Here's what we know:

• A series of memos, written by a person claiming to be a former British intelligence official and based on information gathered from senior Russian intelligence sources, says the Kremlin has a dossier of compromising material on president-elect Donald Trump. The memos, which are unverified, were published in full by Buzzfeed but have been circulated among journalists and politicians for several months.
  
  
• CNN reports that both President Barack Obama and Trump were briefed on the memos last week, as part of the intelligence agencies report into Russian hacking of the presidential election. A two-page synopsis of the memos was attached to the main report.
  
  
• Perhaps the two most damaging claims relate to an allegation of ongoing collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russian intelligence, facilitating the sharing of sensitive information beneficial to both sides; and allegations that Russia has video footage of Trump watching sex workers engage in a sex act.
  br>Read more on VICE News

It's pretty common for two celebrities to have some major beef. But Chris Brown and Soulja Boy just out-feuded the rest by taking their fight off social media and into the boxing ring. Yes, the two musicians are heading to Dubai to duke it out with the help of Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, and 50 Cent.

On Tuesday night's Desus & Mero, the Bodega Boys talked about this upcoming battle royale, and gave their predictions on how long it will last and which musicians will follow suit.

You can watch last night's Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

Businessman Bradley Charvet caused tabloid commotion earlier this year when he announced his plan to open a fellatio café in London. Inspired by Thailand's blowjob bars, he envisioned a place where men could enjoy a 15-minute blowjob along with their morning coffee. But local laws outlawing brothels made the project impossible — at least while human sex workers were in the picture. So with that in mind Charvet announced he'd found a way around this legal impasse by replacing human escorts with robots.

But are we ready for a Starbucks of sex robots?

David Levy,  a robotics expert and author of Love and Sex with Robots, told VICE that sex with robots will become commonplace in a few decades, and even predicted that a new wave of sex robots will hit the market this year. In view of these predictions, Charvet's idea of a robot-staffed sex café sounds like a taste of the future. But is it actually realizable? Robotics experts agree that while sex robotics has a lot of potential, sex robots are only in their embryonic stages—still far from the uncannily human-like robots we see in sci-fi movies. Robotic BJs are still quite a ways away, and industry experts dismiss the fellatio café idea as a PR stunt. But Charvet's project has attracted a lot of attention, pointing to an important debate that has been taking place about what the prospect of sex robots means for the future of sex, and for gender equality.

Right now, the few sex robots that do exist are rudimentary: Essentially, they are enhanced silicon love dolls. Futurologist Ian Pearson says when it comes to look and feel, there are very good, life-like reproductions of the human body. From there, "people take [love dolls] and add very simple robotic movement,"  he says. One of the most advanced examples of sex robotics is a Chinese sex doll called Z-one, which blinks, moves her mouth, has genitals which heat up, and can have "Siri-like conversations in Chinese," says Jenna Owsianik, editor of FutureofSex.net. 

Sex robots are still just "motorized dolls," says Kathleen Richardson, research fellow in the ethics of robotics at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

"They can't give you fellatio," says Owsianik. You could get creative by combining love dolls with teledildonics (a "sleeve" and dildo equipped with sensors and connected over the internet, enabling long-distance blowjobs), but "it won't be like having a woman come up and crouch down in front of you," Owsianik says.

Besides having limited motor skills, sex robots also can't talk or respond like a real person, if that's what you are into.  

"Communication is our target [for the fellatio café]," Charvet, the founder of bumpix.co.uk (a UK "adult directory platform") told VICE. "Sex robots need to speak, need to discuss, to listen to the client like a human would" — something impossible for the moment (unless you consider Siri's conversational skills up to par). But "one robot maker is on the way to make this crazy project alive," according to Charvet.

Abyss Creations, known for making high-end, realistic love dolls, will release a robotic head for its RealDolls this year. This is exciting news, Owsianik says: it has recruited a team from Hansen Robotics, which is respected in the robotics field, to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced robotic head. Abyss is also working on a complementary app, which it hopes to release in April. Through it, users will be able to interact with their robotic partner even before they physically 'meet' her. "She will remember, and the more [you talk to her], the 'smarter' she gets," Matt McMullen, the creator of RealDolls, told me.

Such sophisticated technology comes at a price, at least for now. RealDolls cost around $6,000 USD, and the Realbotix head would come at an additional cost — around $10,000 USD. Yet Charvet, who confirmed he's looking into this new wave of sex robots about to hit the market, told VICE the cost would be about $2,200 to $3,700 per doll—which wouldn't begin to cover a non-roboticized RealDoll. McMullen says Charvet contacted Abyss Creations for his project. "He was under the impression that we had [blowjob] robots on the shelf ready to go." He hopes to release the RealDoll robotic head by the end of the year, and says he's "not aware of a blowjob robot."

Charvet said that he has been in talks with Chinese company MySiliconLoveDoll (which sells silicon dolls for up to $2,600 USD, though none of them robotic), but told VICE that he is still considering several brands.

At best, Charvet, who claims the café will open around April 2017, is optimistic about the technology available at present (and the discount he might get for buying in bulk). The idea is, at this stage, "pretty conceptual… it sounds like the perfect recipe for a headline," says McMullen. Richardson was even more blunt: "it's a marketing ploy."

Indeed, Charvet's project cleverly taps into our cultural obsession with human-robot relationships (and, of course, sex.) The prospect of sex robots has created strong reactions not just in the robosexual community (people who are attracted to robots), but also among experts and the general public.

"People have super lofty expectations [from sex robots]," says McMullen. Some, like Levy, are excited with the possibilities that this emerging field might open up—such as STI-free robotic sex workers—or accept sex with robots as an inevitable development. Once android domestic aids become mainstream, says Pearson, sex will simply be one of their many uses.

Richardson told VICE that sex robots reinforce the narrative that sex is "a market with buyers and sellers, where some people are products." Eleanor Hancock, a graduate student studying the effects of technology on the sex industry and a panelist at the 2nd International Love and Sex with Robots Congress held in London last month, says that sex robots (largely designed for, and by, men) commodify women, "but we already have real people selling sex — this is about something else. It's about objectifying women, not just their bodies, but their minds, too." Sex robots risk becoming subservient, "user-customizable" versions of women. McMullen told VICE that clients will be able to "create a personality" for their robotic doll, "more [or less] dominant, intellectual or naive, sexual or sex shy."

McMullen says his dolls aren't meant to objectify women. "We all have our fictional, ideal partner that we carry around in our minds. There's nothing wrong with giving people the ability to create the physical and mental model of their dreams." He's focused on making robots people can connect with. This project is about "far more than sexual entertainment," he told VICE.

Owsianik says "a lot of [the men buying sex dolls] are not terrible and objectifying women, they really care for [them]." People are already falling in love with robots—"there's a big loneliness market," Pearson says. But according to Owsianik, sex with robots wouldn't only be for those lonely or shy people—it could benefit everyone. "When [robots] are able to learn what you like and your responses, they might be able to anticipate [it] and teach you what you enjoy. It will be exciting to see if this will help people become more fulfilled sexually."

Still, when Owsianik says that robots could one day make us "better lovers" and sexually educate us, I wonder who will teach those robots what the "right" way of having sex is. Will everything else—the incredible variety of things different people like to do in bed — become wrong then? And if their makers' ideal woman is an object, what will these robots learn, and then teach humans, about gender roles?

Progress in the field of sex robots really depends on who's creating them, in terms of resources, says Owsianik. If companies like IBM were to work on erotic AI, we would be much further ahead, she says. But it also depends — I would add — in terms of what they will teach these robots. When I ask Charvet whether the fellatio café has encountered any opposition, he says that "men love the project, girls don't." Maybe it's a slip of the tongue that he chose to call women "girls," but even so, it speaks volumes for how a large part of the industry he comes from sees women as subservient and disempowered. It's no wonder some women are less than enamoured with his idea.

For the moment, however, this project doesn't seem to involve much more than teasing: Though it points to a very real fascination with robots and how they could transform our sex lives, the fellatio café idea itself is little more than a PR stunt—at least for now.

I wanted him to say Fuck you.

I wanted him to not stop his 20,000-member audience from booing when he alluded to the peaceful transfer of power that will take place next week.

I wanted him to transform into Luther from the Key and Peele skit just this once and finally let loose on all those who had spent the past eight years lying about him and passing along ugly stereotypes about people of color, who spread the bigotry of birtherism, who didn't do enough to push back against that ugliness when it showed up in their friends and families and political partners.

Fuck you, I needed him to scream from that stage in Chicago. You tried to tear this country apart while blaming me.

I wanted him to say it was nonsensical to say he was being racially divisive by noting that if he had had he a son he would look like Trayvon Martin, or that he was anti-cop for speaking against police brutality. I wanted him to point out the blatant political hypocrisy on display during his final weeks in office from people who preached morality and principles but now supported maybe the most immoral man to walk into the White House in decades.

I wanted him to be every bit as radical as Fox News and right-wing talk radio have accused him of being.

Fuck you.

That's what I wanted to hear, what I thought I needed to hear.

Alas, President Barack Obama did during his final address to the nation on Tuesday night what he spent most of his adult life doing: working to find common ground between liberals and conservatives. He did this work as the Harvard Law Review's first black editor, and as an Illinois state senator who helped pass bipartisan bills that fought racial profiling and reformed campaign financing rules. Most famously, he called for unity when he launched his national political career with his "red state, blue state" speech during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

When he talked about the love and pride he has for First Lady Michelle Obama and their two daughters, he softened me. The moment reminded me why I decided to visit a former slave plantation on the night of his first election to sit with the spirits of the enslaved, to let them know the good news: that their lives, the blood they sacrificed, had not been in vain, that the country built upon their backs was still perfecting itself deep into its third century of existence.

"Of all that I've done in my life, I'm most proud to be your dad," he said of his daughters after wiping away a tear while thanking his wife.

It's that image—the image of a beautiful black family, of a black father publicly and unabashedly loving on his black wife and black daughters—that will stand the test of time and will resonate three centuries from now in ways we can hardly fathom today.

There will be plenty of time later to dissect his legacy on health care and immigration and foreign policy and the domestic auto industry and gay and lesbian rights. We'll be debating the next four years why a man like him was followed by a man like Donald Trump, and about the Democratic Party's prospects for regaining power in 2018 or 2020 and the role Obama will play in that fight.

We will no doubt discuss his frequent use of drone warfare, as well as his decision not to send thousands of troops to invade Syria—even as he got the Syrian government to declare and give up its chemical weapons stash—and why he never succeeded in closing the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay. Did he have too much faith in white people? Or too little? Why weren't any of the main characters on Wall Street made to perform a perp walk for the decisions they made that helped lead to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression? Why didn't we do more to help more underwater homeowners?

Those questions, for one night at least, could be put on hold. His farewell address reminded me that citing the long list of his accomplishments—or tallying up criticisms against him—won't do justice to what he meant to this country. What the Obamas represent will forever be bigger than any one data point, any single policy or political choice.

I wasn't expecting to feel that way, wasn't expecting to feel anything at all. I've been too busy readying myself to deal with the pending peaceful transfer of power to a man who has said and proposed despicable things, steeling myself to oppose the ugliness I presume will be coming in batches over the next few years. The joy I felt eight years ago has given away to a deep cynicism, one that says reaching across the aisle or beyond barriers to try to achieve the kind of unity Obama is still calling for—despite all the disrespect he had to endure during his two terms—is a fool's errand.

And yet, one last time, with soaring oratory, President Obama reminded me that when others go low, he goes high. In times like these, that may end up being his most lasting, and maybe most important, legacy.

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

US News

Intel Chiefs Briefed Trump on Alleged Russian Blackmail Efforts
Senior US intelligence officials last week presented both President Obama and President-elect Trump with a classified summary of unsubstantiated claims that Russia had gathered compromising personal details on Trump. An unverified dossier obtained by BuzzFeed News, based on claims made by a former British intelligence official, alleges Russian officials had evidence Trump hired sex workers for "perverted" sexual acts, including golden showers. The dossier also alleges the Russian government had been "cultivating" Trump for several years.—CNN / BuzzFeed News

Obama Makes Somber Farewell Speech in Chicago
President Obama warned about threats to the strength of US democracy in his farewell speech in Chicago on Tuesday night. He cautioned against becoming "so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions." The outgoing president also said "stark inequality" was "corrosive to our democratic principles," and conceded race "remains a potent and often divisive force."—The Guardian

Trump Wants Congress to Replace Obamacare Quickly
President-elect Donald Trump said he wants Congress both to repeal the Affordable Care Act pretty much right away, and pass a replacement soon after. Despite several senior Republicans suggesting a replacement bill could take months or even years, Trump said the replace will come "very quickly or simultaneously, very shortly thereafter."—The New York Times

Dylann Roof Sentenced to Death for Murder of Nine
A jury unanimously sentenced Dylann Roof to death for the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Judge Richard Gergel told Roof he was "strongly disinclined" to grant a request by Roof for new, court-appointed lawyers after the verdict, but said it could be discussed at Wednesday's sentencing hearing.—VICE News

International News

UAE Diplomats Killed in Bomb Attack in Afghanistan
Five diplomats from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were among 11 killed in the bombing of the state governor's office in Kandahar, Afghanistan Tuesday. The attack left 17 others injured, including the UAE ambassador. The Taliban denied responsibility for the attack, but claimed two suicide bombings in Kabul on Tuesday that killed 30 people and injured 80.—Al Jazeera

Top Samsung Official a Suspect in Corruption Investigation
The South Korean special prosecutor investigating political corruption surrounding the president will question Samsung Electronics' Lee Jae-yong as a suspect. Samsung allegedly made payments to foundations run by Choi Soon-sil, the friend of President Park Geun-hye at the center of the scandal. Investigators are examining whether any payments were linked to political backing for the merger of two Samsung group affiliates.—BBC News

Taiwan Scrambles Jets Over Chinese Ships Entering Taiwan Strait
Taiwan ordered jets and navy ships to monitor Chinese Navy vessels discovered sailing through the Taiwan Strait late Tuesday. The Chinese warships did not encroach on territorial waters, but did enter Taiwan's "air defense identification zone," according to Taiwan's defense ministry. A minister for Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said it was not necessary to "overly panic."—AFP

Frontrunner in French Election Wants Immigration Controls
Center-right presidential candidate Francois Fillon thinks France needs to consider immigration quotas. Although the EU's Schengen agreement complicates limits on the freedom of movement in Europe, Fillion said, "I want France to be able to decide every year the number of people it can accept on its territory."—Reuters

Everything Else

George Lucas Says His $1 Billion Museum Will Be in LA
George Lucas has announced that Los Angeles's Exposition Park will be home to his $1 billion museum of narrative art. The Star Wars creator, who considered San Francisco and Chicago as locations, has a collection of 10,000 pieces he wants to display.—TIME

The National and Common to Play Planned Parenthood Fundraiser
The National and Common will co-headline a benefit show for Planned Parenthood in Washington, DC, the night before Donald Trump's inauguration. Organizers said the Show Up! concert at the 9:30 Club is for "reproductive health, freedom, and justice."—Rolling Stone

New Primate Species Named After Luke Skywalker
Scientists have named a new species of primate found living in southwest China the "Skywalker hoolock gibbon." It was so named partly because the Chinese translation means "Heaven's movement," and of course because the scientists are Star Wars fans.—BBC News

RFK Jr. Claims He Has Position on Trump Vaccine Commission
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has embraced the widely discredited theory that thimerosal is linked to autism, said Tuesday he was working with Donald Trump on a new commission regarding vaccine policy. Trump's team later stated that "no decisions have been made at this time."—VICE

LA Artists Used Activists' Blood in Anti-Trump Painting
A group of artists in Los Angeles are using activists' blood donations for a new painting called RISE UP THY YOUNG BLOOD, a symbol of opposition to Donald Trump. One might call the artist Illma Gore and collective INDECLINE's work a "blood oath" against the nascent presidency.—The Creators Project

Over the last few days, you might have seen headlines about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking a schmoozy vacation with spiritual leader and billionaire Aga Khan. Critics say Trudeau may have unfairly used taxpayer dollars for a luxurious holiday trip, and may have created a number of conflicts of interests by accepting gifts from someone whose organization receives money from the Canadian government.

Regardless, if you're like me, you're probably thinking, "Who the hell is the Aga Khan, and why does this matter?" Both good questions. Let us help!

On December 26, Trudeau and his family left on a holiday vacation to Bell Island—-a small portion of the Bahamas owned by the Prince Shah Karim Al Hussaini, also known as the current Aga Khan.

For context, the Aga Khan is the leader of the Nizari Ismailis—a sect of Shia Islam—whose family consists of bloodline successors of the Aga Khan title. The current Aga Khan amassed his fortune through a continuation of his family's wealth, as well as running a number of lucrative businesses—the most well-known of which are his investments into horse racing.

The Aga Khan foundation is set up as a philanthropic organization, one that generally focuses on improving quality of life in developing countries and helping encourage investment in parts of the world slogged by slow economic growth.

Trudeau first flew to the Bahamas from Montreal via a Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) jet, and later, allegedly, by a personal helicopter owned by the Aga Khan to his $100-million personal island.

According to Trudeau (when questioned about the ethics of accepting a trip from the head of an organization that received $55 million in Canadian funds for foreign aid programs in Afghanistan last year), the Aga Khan is a "long-time family friend" who was the pallbearer at his father's funeral, and he argues that the vacation was strictly personal.

The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) also originally told reporters that no one was on the Dec. 26 jet ride except for Trudeau and his family, but the National Post has reported Wednesday that both Liberal Party president Anna Gainey, and Liberal MP Seamus O'Reagan, were also on the trip with the prime minister.

When asked about their presence on the trip at a press conference Tuesday, Trudeau declined to comment, but the PMO has since confirmed to the National Post that both Gainey and O'Reagan were on the trip. O'Reagan has said that he seeks to personally reimburse the Aga Khan for any costs incurred, and is not putting it on the taxpayer's tab, while questions over Trudeau's use of public funds remain an attack point for critics.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

On Monday, Conservative MP Andrew Scheer filed a complaint with the Parliamentary Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, arguing that the prime minister had violated his duty in keeping conflict of interests away from the PMO.

"The Prime Minister of Canada must be held to the highest standard which is why I have called for this investigation," Scheer said in a statement. "As a former Speaker of the House of Commons, I take the rules that MPs must follow very seriously. We need to know if it is appropriate for Trudeau to accept gifts from someone whose foundation receives funds from the Government of Canada."

Why does all this matter? Well, for once, people railing against the leader of a western country for taking a vacation have a really good point. Trudeau, regardless of the fact he's been a longtime friend of the Aga Khan, is the leader of Canada—a country which has given the Aga Khan Foundation Canada $310 million since 2004. That alone is a reason to not take a vacation on the privately-owned island of a billionaire whose organization lobbies your workplace for cash.

What's almost more worrying, however, is that this is the second major stumbling block for Trudeau in the last two months regarding his acceptance of donations (and now a gift of sorts). At the tailend of last year, the prime minister was tangled in a cash-for-access controversy after he was found to have been holding meetings and speaking events at a $1,500-per-ticket price.

When pressed on the issue, Trudeau said he was using the exclusive-access events to talk about how others could help his government "create economic growth for the middle class."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

 Head photo via THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick.

On Wednesday, President-elect Trump will face the press in his first news conference in 167 days—and the first since he's been elected—at Trump Tower at 11 AM EST.

Trump hasn't held a wide-ranging press conference since that time in Florida during the campaign when he directly called on Russia to help him "find" Hillary Clinton's missing emails. He was supposed to give a press conference last month to address what he plans to do with his business interests once he's sworn into office, but that plan fell apart, and today's conference will probably focus on more than just that.

The media likely has a lot of questions for the president-elect regarding that unverified report that Russia has been trying to blackmail him with sensitive personal information, along with his refusal to accept that Russian hackers had a part in influencing the election, his call to repeal Obamacare, and his plan for his "Great Wall," among other things.

Check out the livestream from PBS News Hour below.

Devin Morningstar, one of three individuals accused in the murder of 18-year-old Moncton man Baylee Wylie, was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday morning.

According to the CBC, Morningstar, 19, was given life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years for the first-degree murder charge related to Wylie's December 2015 death, and an additional three-year sentence for committing arson (from setting ablaze the home that contained Wylie's body).

Morningstar was silent during the hearing, and simply nodded along while being read his sentence. On top of the sentence, Wylie's aunt read an impact statement during the hearing, but his mother did not.

In November, Morningstar was found guilty of both charges after an extensive and intense trial that reportedly left jury members crying after delivering the verdict. The trial was the first of three—alleged accomplices Marissa Shephard and Tyler Noel are scheduled to go to court in May and October 2017 respectively.

According to testimony giving during Morningstar's trial, Wylie was killed after a dispute broke out between the four while they were smoking crack cocaine in the basement of a Moncton, New Brunswick, townhouse regarding who had slept with who.

Wylie had reportedly told Shephard that he was sleeping with Morningstar and Noel, which triggered a violent and angry response from the two men toward Wylie. When Wylie said he was going to call the cops, Morningstar devised a plan to frame Wylie for possession of drugs—which him and Noel were allegedly selling themselves.

They decided to beat him and leave him for police to arrest, but changed their minds at the last minute. Morningstar then allegedly ordered Shepherd to stab the teen to death, and burn the house down. Wylie's body would later be found by authorities in the basement of a burned out townhouse, leading to a manhunt for the three suspects that lasted weeks.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Few urges are as domineering as the one that compels you to seek food after a night on the tiles. The drunchies, if you will. No matter how many times you tell yourself that you'll go home from the bar and swallow nothing more than a Tylenol and pint of water before bed, here you are at the fridge, chain-spooning leftover lasagne into your mouth and wondering where you hid the emergency Snickers. Or, worse in terms of waistline but totally superior for satiating inebriated tastebuds, at the kebab shop on the corner ordering a deluxe doner with extra garlic mayo. Oh, and a side of cheesy fries while you're at it.

But according to a new study from the Francis Crick Institute research center in London, your drunken food cravings could all be down to a neural mechanism.

See? It's not your fault you gravitate towards carbs and cheese when buzzed. It's your brain.

Read more on MUNCHIES

Breaking up with someone, if you have any semblance of a soul, is not a pleasant experience. How do you do it? Do you really need to meet in a public place and look them in the eye when you break their heart? How honest do you need to be for them to get the idea that you never, ever want to sleep with them again? It's questions like these that making ghosting so tempting. But you don't need to go through this experience alone, you can take your problems to a professional.

Natalia Juarez is a former elementary school teacher turned certified dating coach. But in the last few years, she's seen the demand increase for helping people find their way out of love. As a professional breakup coach, she can help you firm up resolve to (gracefully) dump your partner—or she can help you work through a painful split. "I like helping people through the messy part," she says. "Healing, recovery, then getting back out there."

VICE: How'd you get into this?
Natalia Juarez: I had pretty tumultuous relationships in my 20s. They were amazing men, but we weren't good matches. Then when my engagement ended just before I turned 30, I got into therapy. I started reading every book I could. I was really concerned about my mate selection—am I addicted to drama? I didn't have it in me to do this again.

When I started this, a lot of my friends were getting married. In my family, there's not a lot of divorce. So I really felt like I didn't have anybody to help. Bit by bit, different resources have helped. I think attachment theory is incredible to help us understand why we love the people that we do. I really did this to help myself, then I started becoming a resource to my friends who were going through big breakups, they started referring me to their friends.  

What I love now is, I get to be the kind of person I really wish I'd had in my life at the time. Someone who can validate my experience and be comfortable enough to witness my pain and not try to rush me for it. And to offer up these great resources. Because at the time, I really felt there was something wrong with me.

Natalia Juarez is a professional breakup coach. Photo supplied.

What do you need to do this job well?
Experience is my greatest asset—I've been cheated on, I've been in triangles, I think I went on 80 dates in those five years after my ended engagement. So experience. And [you need] compassion. Because it makes you more open-minded. Less judgmental. Unless you're in a complicated, messy situation you don't know who you will be.

Who are your typical clients?
It's 50/50 men and women. A lot of men in their 40s and 50s. Many have had a long relationship in their thirties and they're looking to end it and start again. Or post-divorce—that's a good chunk of my practice.

And then women in their 30s who had a vision of what their life should be like at 30 or 35. So this concept of starting over—which is what I did when I turned 30. Now I'm 35. They're also just clinging to this relationship because of how they thought their life should be. So for some of these women, in their mid to late 30's—especially if they want kids—the strategy becomes a lot more aggressive. For those people, it's a combination of going into recovery but actually implementing some dating strategies as well. Just to start meeting people—because it needs to be accelerated.

What percentage of clients are looking for an "exit plan"?
I help people through the beginning, middle, and end. When I got into it, I thought it was going to be mainly on the recovery end. But people were really debating whether to make a big change in their life. So that's become more of a focus. People will come to me and do a consultation, and I have a pretty great assessment tool where we just really lay it out. Every relationship has positive and negative aspects, it's not black and white. But we weigh it out against their personal values and vision for what they want. Then I leave that with them—and I either hear from them, or I don't. I would say in at least 70 percent of cases, it will play out into a breakup or divorce.

Is it better to be the dumper or dumpee?
It's so painful when you're trying to decide whether or not to leave. But I'm working with a handful of clients right now whose partners basically just left them. They just disappeared, really abruptly left. Those breakups tend to be more traumatic.

Are you seeing more ghosting ?
In dating, it's a thing. To a certain degree, it's kind of OK. If someone is not contacting you, they kind of want you to get the message. But in a relationship—I'm working with people who, from one day to the next, their life totally changed. And these are relationships that lasted from three to five years.

Why is breaking up so hard to do?
It can be so uncomfortable to hold someone else's pain and be responsible for it. It's like they've lost track of the fact that—if you let someone go, as painful as it is—if you let them go, they'll recover and meet someone else. It's like they're trying to protect themselves, but they're also holding back the other person. Once I'm able to help them wrap their head around that, they can move forward.

You mention a social media strategy on your website. What does that entail?
Social media is making the breakup experience more difficult. Before, when you broke up, you wouldn't have to see that person. Now, you can obsess—always checking people's accounts. Then they start creating stories around ' what does that mean.'

I'm working with someone pretty aggressively on the social media side. Because she's looking up her ex boyfriend on Instagram and she's able to see who he's liking, and who he's following. So she's obsessing; who is this person, how did he meet this person? She's also doing things like creating fake accounts—to get closer to him or keep an eye on him. Because she knows he's blocked her. Social media is making it easier to cheat. So it's making it easier to connect and disconnect from others.

Photo supplied

What was your weirdest experience as a breakup coach?
I work with a lot of people who are going through infidelity. This man was having an affair, it had been going on for about a year. He was trying to decide if he should leave his wife to pursue a relationship with this other woman. We sat down and laid it all out. He came to realize that he didn't want to leave his wife. He was trading one set of challenges for another. So that was it. Then, a couple months later, he contacted me to ask if I could coach the woman who had been his mistress, because she was having a hard time with the breakup.

It was fascinating to me because I got to see the other side. He also had this investment—because his wife had found out, and they were rebuilding—he thought, if I don't get this other woman under control, she will start contacting me and stirring up things. I was able to work with her on that. A lot of it had to do with the rejection of it all. And just wanting to win. The one thing I was able to help her see that this actually wasn't what she wanted. He was a lot older, had kids. Once she was able to see it wasn't what she wanted, it was a lot easier to let go.

Also, there was another guy who I met in an Uber pool, who contacted me a few months later to ask me if I could help him cheat on his wife. I was like, no, that's not what I do.

Why aren't breakups are given the same weight as divorce?
Although breakups can more definitely be just as emotionally painful as a divorce, I believe they are not given the same gravity because of the legal, financial and social complexity of marriage. The fact that marriage has a sense of permanence and is often seen as the ultimate end goal of a relationship positions unmarried couples as "less committed," and thus less emotionally invested. Also, someone can literally walk away after a breakup without having to engage in a legal separation, a process that can get very messy and often take years. That said, it is important to note that the fact that someone can just walk away and abruptly "abandon" a relationship is one of the most common reasons many of my "breakup" clients feel devastated.  Many of them had no idea their partner had been contemplating leaving them, and then bam, from one day to the next their life totally changed. Not having a transition period is traumatic in its own way.

I would also say that the length of time is another [factor that gives weight]. I worked with a client who had been with someone for a couple of months. They were surprised that it was discredited among their social circle because they were saying; 'oh you've only been dating for two months.' But there was something about that particular relationship that just brought up a lot. Length of time is irrelevant. There's no mathematical equation for heartache.

So, say I've just been dumped. What do I do?
Besides seeing me? [laughs] It's self-care. Really protecting yourself. It can seem selfish, but you really have to create an environment around yourself that really supports you throughout that initial process. There may be certain friends you're not able to see right away. Spend a bit of time alone. But hopefully a good friend will come over with some food and wine and just be with you. Have some compassion for yourself, and let yourself express it. Especially through that first week of shock. We are so fixated on happiness and it can be very uncomfortable for other people if we are unhappy. Just allow yourself the full expression of your humanity. Balance working through the emotional challenges and logistics of rebuilding your life with experiences that bring you happiness.

What has this taught you about relationships?
There is so much helping people to get into love. But there's very little on how to leave a relationship. Relationships are work, it takes work to maintain that connection. How do you exit lovingly, where both people are intact? We're not really taught that. We don't really know how to grieve.

Follow Tiffy Thompson   on Twitter.

If you woke up with a throbbing pain in your jaw, you'd trust your dentist to properly diagnose what's going on—odds are he's seen dozens of patients with problems just like it before.

But for the average transgender patient, finding a doctor with the appropriate training in hormone therapy could be a total crapshoot. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the Endocrine Society recently surveyed 411 endocrinologists, doctors who specialize in treating your body's endocrine system, which produces hormones. The survey revealed that while 80 percent of doctors said they had treated at least one transgender patient, only 1 in 5 reported having any formal training in transgender care.

"We expected an education deficit would be present, however the extent of this deficit was surprising, especially in practicing clinicians," says study author Caroline Davidge-Pitts, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic.

Endocrinologists are the specialists transgender patients need to visit if they're seeking hormone therapy, which is necessary to develop secondary sex characteristics like breasts or facial hair that are more in line with their preferred gender. In the survey, 45 percent of endocrinologists said they typically see at least five transgender patients each year.

Read more on Tonic

Around 5 AM on Wednesday morning, the Sausage Castle—central Florida's infamous ratchet party house—caught on fire. Firefighters extinguished the flames, but not before the building burned to the ground. Local Florida officials have reportedly dubbed the blaze "suspicious," but no cause has been reported yet.

"I have no idea [what happened]," Sausage Castle impresario Mike Busey told VICE Wednesday. "I woke up to the news."

For three years, the Sausage Castle served as a commune for outcasts from both conservative and liberal society: Juggalos, country lesbians, and Iraq War veterans, to name a few. The castle first made headlines when its 600-pound resident Big LA received a lap dance from Ratchet Regi, the self-proclaimed "most ratchet stripper" in Orlando. It continued to stir up love and controversy as Sausage Castle residents had sex in showers, pulled American flags out of a drag queen's asshole, and donated Christmas presents to a kid with Down syndrome.

Last fall, however, public opinion won, and the castle residents were evicted and moved several miles away to start a new Sausage Castle. The old space had sat empty for roughly six months, and no one was hurt when it caught fire Wednesday, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Prudes and fires can't stop the Sausage People, though. As Busey regularly says, "The Sausage Castle is not a place. It's a way of life."

Read more about the Sausage Castle, and check out some photos from the original castle here.

On Wednesday, at his first press conference since the election, Donald Trump brought out his lawyer to announce that he will be handing off his business operations to his two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric—but his decision is unlikely to satisfy critics who worry about potential conflicts of interest.

Rather than completely severing his ties to his business empire by selling his assets or putting the Trump Organization into a blind trust, as the Office of Government Ethics has urged him to do, Trump will merely be resigning from the organization, Trump's lawyer, Sheri Dillon, explained. His daughter Ivanka will also have no management authority in the group, likely to avoid a conflict of interest with her husband, Jared Kushner, who was just named a White House senior advisor.

Dillon also explained that the organization will be hiring a chief compliance counsel to act as an ethics advisor for the company and will be responsible for vetting and approving any new domestic deals. She said that the Trump Organization has terminated all existing pending deals and will not enter into new foreign deals while Trump is president. Trump will also apparently have limited "information rights" that will prevent him from knowing or discussing the operations of the company with his sons.

According to the lawyer, selling the company to a third party would inevitably lead to further potential conflicts of interest. "If President-elect Trump sold his brand, he would be entitled to royalties for the use of it," Dillion said, "and this would result in the trust retaining an interest in the brand without the ability to assure that it does not exploit the office of the presidency."

And selling the company to his sons would be impossible without third-party financing, which would bring its own problems. "President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built," Dillon insisted.

Dillion also said that Trump hotels would donate all profits from foreign government payments to the US Treasury, though it was unclear how that would work in practice.

Trump himself spoke more casually, appearing to congratulate himself for not doing a $2 billion deal with a Dubai developer who proposed the deal after the election. He also said that conflict-of-interest laws don't apply to the presidency and that he was not obligated to divest from anything.

"I could actually run my business and run government at the same time," Trump said. "I don't like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to."

New data from Statistics Canada show that an alarming percentage of Canada's prison population are people who have not actually been found guilty of the crime they are accused of, but are rather awaiting trial or a verdict to be brought down.

The most recent report from the government agency shows an average of 13,650 Canadians were in prison while on remand from 2014 to 2015—roughly 57 percent of the average 24,014 Canadians that locked up nationally during that period. The remand number broke the 50 percent threshold of total prison population in 2004 - 2005, and has been on the rise since.

Across the board, all provinces and territories except for PEI saw a growth in their average remand population—some more than others. Nova Scotia jumped 192 percent; Northwest Territories; 139 percent; Manitoba 134 percent; and Albert 109 percent.

Nova Scotia also led provinces in the ratio of prisoners in remand compared to those serving a sentence—68 percent, followed by Alberta (67 percent), Manitoba and Ontario (65 percent), Yukon (59 percent), and British Columbia (57 percent). The report note that pre-trial detention for youth is still higher than those serving sentences, but adds that the number has been decreasing over the years, and advises against the potential downsides of remand.

"The remand population can pose challenges for the provincial and territorial correctional system. Remand tends to require higher levels of security and more intensive supervision; it can be more costly; and planning correctional space can be difficult given that the length of time spent in remand is not predictable," the report reads.

"Studies have shown that many individuals in pre-trial custody are housed in maximum security facilities where they are held in small cells with two or three other people. They often do not have access to rehabilitative or recreational programs, and face a high degree of uncertainty regarding the length of time they will be incarcerated."

The statistics also show that Indigenous individuals had statistically disproportionate rates of being put in remand compared to other demographics. While only 3 percent of the active prison population is Indigenous, they made up 25 percent of the remand population, suggesting that Indigenous people are more likely to be locked up while waiting for a trial/verdict than other demographics. This is up 9 percentage points from 2004 - 2005, when the number of Indigenous people in remand was only 16 percent.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Lead image via Flickr user Biggunben.

It should have been a surprise, but to so many sex workers and advocates, it wasn't.

Vancouver Police Department anti-exploitation detective Jim Fisher was arrested last month on six criminal charges including sexual exploitation, sexual assault, breach of trust, and obstruction of justice. It turned out the high-ranking cop whose job it was to investigate crimes against vulnerable women and children had allegedly hurt at least two of the people he was supposed to protect. One of whom was underage.

The news came out of a police force that supposedly has some of the country's strongest guidelines around protecting sex workers and other marginalized people. Advocates say police support for sex workers across the country is inconsistent at best, as neighbouring forces take radically different approaches. The RCMP, for example, has been criticized for carrying out large-scale stings to rescue women from the industry.

Vancouver was supposed to be different from the rest, Brenna Bezanson of PACE Society told VICE. Despite Stephen Harper-era laws that criminalizes the sex trade, passed in 2014, the VPD issued its own directive not to target, harass, arrest, or intimidate sex workers. The guidelines say sex work between consenting adults "is not an enforcement priority," meaning that sex workers should be able to report violence and other crimes against them without fear of being charged themselves.

"Every bit of policy exists to do the right thing," Lorimer Shenher, former Vancouver detective and author of That Lonely Section of Hell, told VICE. Shenher, whose memoir recalls the initial missing women investigation that led to Robert Picton's murder trial, left the force four years ago and then transitioned genders in 2015. He says it's police culture itself that repeatedly fails sex workers on even the most well-intentioned forces.

"Institutionally the police are coming at it from a paternalistic place," he told VICE. "The notion of protection can be so simplistic, they don't understand how they're being perceived by sex workers—that their presence completely changes that space."

Read More: How Canada's Immigration Laws Make Migrant Sex Workers' Jobs More Dangerous

A lot has changed since Shenher's early days on the force, when he says sex workers were openly referred to as "whores." It was BC's commission on missing and murdered Indigenous women that first pushed Vancouver police to undertake some serious efforts to build trust with sex workers. Today there's a VPD liaison for sex workers to call, and a "Sisterwatch" program with both women's advocates and cops sharing a mission to protect Downtown Eastside women. (One of the other key recommendations, to create a cross-regional police force in BC's lower mainland, has yet to be implemented.)

"She's fantastic, and many of the sex workers in the city trust her," Bezanson said of VPD sex industry liaison Linda Malcolm. "That's a big thing, holding that trust."

But even with a growing number of women officers—at least one that practicing sex workers trust—there's still ample opportunity for police to abuse power, say Bezanson and Shenher.

Shenher says police forces are spaces where top ranking members like Fisher see little to no supervision, leaving it up to close colleagues and subordinates to report and investigate abuse. "I spoke about this in my book, a dynamic that I see happening. When people are in policing for a long period of time, there does start to be a sense of entitlement—especially in officers who are good at what they're doing," Shenher told VICE.

"They don't see results in the justice system that they'd like to see," he said, "they think they're special, and maybe above some of the codes of conduct that exist on the force."

Bezanson says that just having laws against sex work on the books makes industry women easy prey for any predators, including the ones that work for police. That police command structure allows for power-seekers and predator-types to work their way up to seemingly untouchable positions only makes it worse: "The opportunity for corruption when subordinates are the only ones who are going to be checking in on you is so obvious," she told VICE. "Any other industry wouldn't even question that."

How to change that culture? Shenher says he'd like to see a higher proportion of women doing police work and leading high-profile anti-exploitation units, but cautions that just a few token women won't be enough. "There's always that line that women have to walk, where they don't want to be seen as overly sensitive to women's issues," Shenher told VICE. "They're trying to survive, and it's career suicide to speak up too much for women."

Culture change is happening, but it's slow, and even women police aren't immune from it. "We've seen a few different cases in which police can't even protect their own officers from assault," Bezanson told VICE. A class action case will compensate an estimated 14,000 former RCMP employees for systemic gender discrimination later this year.

For Bezanson, that's another sign of a wider culture that needs to change if it's going to help people most prone to violence.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.