This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

My friend Sara loves weed. She’s a great person without it, but when she lights up, Sara becomes the funniest, most relaxed, creative and energetic human I have ever met. Her mind suddenly makes astounding connections and she reaches an almost post-human level of chill. Another friend of mine describes being high as feeling like you've morphed "into one of those plastic bobble head dogs with huge grins". They're not the only ones – a lot of my friends are weed enthusiasts, and it's the one thing I can't share with them: no matter how hard I try, weed just makes me feel like shit.

When I smoke a joint I become extremely self-conscious and stressed. I'll make a mundane comment about something and instantly start worrying about how lame it was. I'll leave a room and worry that the vibe won't be the same when I come back. I get into this state of paranoia, and although I'm still able to rationalise the situation – 'Hey, you’re only thinking these things because you're stoned, you weirdo!' – the paranoid thoughts don't go away. And if I happen to also be drunk I just end up with my head resting on a toilet seat, fearing that I'll be trapped in that position for the rest of my life.

It bugs me no end that weed isn't fun for me. Not just my friends, but many of my personal heroes – Rihanna, the Broad City girls, Sarah Silverman – happen to be proud stoners. I'm not sad because I think getting high is cool, but I just really feel like I'm missing out on some euphoric experience. What is it, exactly, that's keeping me from being a happy stoner? Am I doing it wrong and could I just learn to appreciate it? I need answers, so decide to contact a few experts to shed some light on my shortcomings.

All photos by David Meulenbeld

First, I speak to Natasha Mason, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maastricht and an expert on how THC – the psychoactive element in cannabis, which makes you feel high – affects the chemicals in your brain. She tells me she won't be able to give me a clear-cut answer, since using drugs is a subjective experience and effects differ from person to person.

But she tells me a study by the University of Chicago shows that a low dose of THC in weed can help reduce stress, while a high dose can lead to feelings of fear, paranoia and discomfort. Alongside THC, weed contains many different substances, including CBD – which counters the drug's psychoactive effects and is known to have a range of medicinal qualities. The Dutch weed I usually smoke tends to be comparatively high on THC and low on CBD – which could possibly stimulate my sense of paranoia.

WATCH: How to Treat Weed Dealers, According to a Weed Dealer

The environment in which I smoke plays an important part, too, Mason tells me. Research carried out on rats has shown that a fear that's stimulated by THC increases when the rats are in a new or potentially stressful environment. In addition, Mason tells me that people who smoke regularly usually experience less worrying side effects – but, she adds, it could be that people who never had negative experiences with weed are just more likely to smoke regularly.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t explain why I transform into this socially awkward, paranoid mess while my friends comfortably enjoy their high. We always smoke the same strains, with the same THC percentage, in the same familiar environment. Mason thinks my personality is to blame.

"The general opinion is that THC intensifies feelings of anxiety – and those feelings are already present in you," she explains. "If you are naturally very analytical or a bit agitated and anxious, certain chemicals in your brain, like serotonin [which controls your mood], noradrenaline [the hormone that prepares your body for sudden physical action], GABA [a downer] and glutamate [a substance that helps the brain function normally] might operate differently in your brain than in the brains of more relaxed people – and that could result in a more extreme response to the THC."

Floor van Bakkum, a prevention worker at the Dutch drug education service Jellinek, agrees with Mason. She thinks it's almost certainly down to the fact that I'm naturally anxious and tend to overthink stuff. "If you like to overanalyse things and try to have everything under control in your day-to-day life, it's probably harder for you to let go of that control after you've smoked a joint," she says. "Basically, you’re blocking the fun stuff."

When I ask her what I should do to enjoy weed, she tells me to smoke joints that are higher on CBD. However, she also advises me to maybe just accept that you can't always have what you want – weed might just never be for me.

But that can't be it. Can't I just learn to smoke weed like I learned to drink alcohol? With that in mind, I call Daan Keiman of the Trimbos National Institute for Mental Health and Addiction. He assures me that the effects I describe are pretty common with cannabis use, and that it’s quite possible I could "learn to appreciate it".

I ask him if my symptoms could mean I'd be more likely to experience psychosis after smoking. "Being at risk of psychosis and having anxious feelings are completely different things," he tells me. "But you should be especially careful if someone in your family has ever suffered from psychotic episodes."

After running out of experts to talk to, I finally turn to my friend Anne, who puts my mind at ease. "You know, to you it might seem like stoned people are having a great time, but that’s not always true," she assures me. "The fact that you don't enjoy it and don't do it might just be a blessing."

If she's right and I'm really not missing out on anything, that would make the whole situation a lot easier to accept. Why do I need to be part of stoner culture if it's not as fun as people make it out to be? With that thought, for a moment, I finally do feel as content as a plastic bobble head dog with a huge grin on his face.

This article is supported by Monash University's Faculty of Arts. In this series, we ask a bunch of professors about issues relating to their industry.

After almost five years in incarceration, Gene Gibson walked free in April this year. The 30 year-old Indigenous man from the Western Desert had been convicted of beating to death a young guy named Josh Warnake outside a Broome nightclub in 2010.

Gene pleaded guilty to manslaughter but in a unanimous court decision that conviction was overturned because Gene didn’t completely understand the process or instructions from his interpreter when entering his plea. Gene’s first language is Pintupi and he speaks limited English. He also has a cognitive impairment. None of this was taken into account during his interviews, which seem a fairly obvious departure from due process—and one that's all too common when Indigenous people encounter the legal system.

The case underscores the relationship between language and justice. Not just in a legal sense, but in many humanitarian and crisis contexts around the world. Be it conflict zones, natural disasters, refugee camps, or terrorism trials.

To get a better sense of how language skills affect affect social equality, we spoke to translation and interpreting experts Marc Orlando and Silvia Martinez.

VICE: Hey guys, can we start with the sorts of failures or injustices Gene Gibson’s case exposed in the Australian legal system?
Marc: Mr Gibson wasn't able to express himself in his own language or understand what was going on, and no interpreter was called on the day he was sentenced. As in the US where many people are unfairly sentenced because of language barriers, there are a lot of cases with Aboriginal Australians where justice isn't delivered because interpreting services aren't available. Over the past 10 or 15 years, we have seen legal acts passed in Australia and many other countries, like in the EU, confirming the right to be assisted by an interpreter in any legal or healthcare context.
Silvia: It’s not just about a person being physically present at their own trial, they need to be able to properly tell their story. Interpreters need to learn that it’s about delivery as much as content, because the jury is looking for credibility and reliability. So their assessment has to be the same as that of a witness who is delivering their testimony in their own language. People who speak Australian Aboriginal languages often say this is the most challenging situation because the number of speakers of many of these languages is even smaller than in minority migrant communities. There are many examples of miscarriages of justice because of this gap.

What skills does an interpreter need?
Marc: Just because you have two hands, does not mean you can play the piano, just as having two languages does not make you an interpreter. Anyone working in the humanitarian or aid sector will tell you about the problems created by using interpreters who have not been properly trained.
Silvia: Being an interpreter is also about having a full understanding of the cultures that languages carry. As a language professional, you need to have the skills to convey the message of another person as if they spoke the same language, so we have to be experts in knowing the different contexts and strategies for dealing with different pressures. The difference between someone who operates across languages and a professional interpreter is extremely apparent in medical settings. For example, there was a case that involved an elderly Portuguese-speaking woman who turned up at a hospital saying that she was ‘constipado’—a word which sounds ‘constipated’, but actually means cold. The person doing the interpreting was another patient and the woman was treated for issues relating to her bowel. She landed in ER with serious problems that resulted in death. So in situations like these, accuracy and professionalism is about life risks, not just a situational problem.

I’ve heard of many situations where interpreters’ biases have seriously affected the outcome—for example, prejudices about gender or sexuality in reporting cases of sexual violence among refugees.
Marc: Being a professional is not only an issue of impartiality, but has to do with all aspects of confidentiality. An interpreter has to learn to develop emotional neutrality. And if you are using a family member to interpret, as has been common practice—especially in medical settings—this is always going to be a problem. Not having impartiality and emotional neutrality often results in not passing on the right information and not using the truth as it is.
Silvia: Untrained interpreters can adversely intervene in sensitive cases, such as those involving family violence, where they have not been impartial or failed to provide accurate renditions of what was said. For example, trying to convince the woman to reconcile with her partner; criticising the woman for taking legal action; not interpreting words like 'penis' or 'vagina'. The Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence recommended that interpreters receive training specifically for working in these settings, resulting in increased support from the Victorian Government for this training to be provided through the Monash T&I professional development program. We’ve been able to deliver training to 116 interpreters covering over 100 languages in the last year.

How equipped is Australia to deliver real social equality and inclusion across language barriers?
Silvia: This is about recognising the right to access public services that affect really significant aspects of people’s lives—where they should have the right to communicate in the most direct way. On a national level, there has been an increased understanding of the fact that if you want full social inclusion, you have to deliver services and access through language, which means having well-trained interpreters. For example, in NSW you now cannot have any kind of medical conversation about consent without a professional interpreter, and there is an extremely solid national protocol for working with interpreters for members of the judiciary. Of course, there are always challenges in terms of availability in languages new to Australia—for example, Farsi or African languages.
Marc: Australia is very multicultural, but also very multilingual—27 per cent of Australians speak another language at home. In the 1970s, there was a move away from assimilation and we have seen a real political shift to cultivate multiculturalism. I believe that compared to many places in Europe, we are better organised around respecting other languages and cultures. What we realise now is that it is important to train not just interpreters, but also the users—whether journalists or doctor or judges. This is not only for the benefit of non-English-speaking migrants, but for the benefit of Australian society. We can all gain from understanding different stories and identities and cultures.

This article is supported by Monash University's Faculty of Arts. You can find out more about the Master of Interpreting and Translation Studies here.

It’s been four years since he lost his leg, but Esko Saarinen still replays that day in his mind at night.

Saarinen was working as a tree faller in Haida Gwaii when he slipped and his leg was crushed under a huge Sitka Spruce. But it’s not just the accident itself that causes him to lose sleep—it’s the 11-hour journey he had to take to the hospital.

The trip could have taken 40 minutes in an air ambulance, but instead it was taken entirely by ground ambulances, included two separate ferry trips and a bumpy ride in a mechanic’s vehicle over an unfinished resource road.

“It was freezing cold. The whole leg was totally crushed, bones were sticking out from the socks,” Saarinen recalled. “I’m in the middle of nowhere there. We don’t even have a road. And there’s all this time we’re wasting.”

Eleven hours later, when Saarinen finally arrived to hospital in Vancouver, his leg was “black,” he said, and it had to be amputated below the knee. He cannot go back to his career in forestry, and will forever wonder whether he would still have a leg if he would have arrived at a hospital sooner.

“It’s devastating to lose your leg like that. It changes everything really fast,” he said. “It’s really hard, I’ve been in the bush all my life.”

If you live in a major urban centre such as Vancouver or Victoria, you can expect that if an accident happened, you would be taken to a hospital almost right away. But if you’re more than 10-minute drive away from a hospital—“you’re in deep trouble,” according to experts.

Convoluted service delivery, lesser-trained paramedics, and outdated provincial rules are all factors that leave rural patients to face dangerously long wait times.

There’s no shortage of horror stories, nor is there a shortage of reports calling for change.
But despite ongoing attempts to put a Band-Aid on the problem, critics say the layered method by which BC has been providing ambulance care for more than four decades remains “deeply systemically flawed.”

It’s a hard pill to swallow, one critic says, when the province of Alberta, just next door, not only has a non-profit helicopter ambulance service that serves rural areas, but 10 times more highly-trained paramedics who are distributed throughout the province. With an opioid crisis killing hundreds and a new provincial government in power, advocates say now is the time for change to happen.

Esko Saarinen holds up a photo from his logging days. Photo by Cara McKenna

In BC, Saarinen’s case was one of many that prompted a report earlier this year from the province’s Forest Safety Ombudsman demanding change in the way service is delivered to rural areas. Roger Harris said in his February 2017 report titled “Will It Be There?” that the BC government has made a “choice” not to provide adequate care to rural communities.

The report argues that BC could easily change its mandate so that everyone has access to emergency response that doesn’t involve hours of arduous travel, and that it has all the equipment and technology to do so, but has decided not to.

“It’s not gone unnoticed that BC Ambulance Service concentrates all its assets in the major urban centres,” Harris said in an interview. “When you live in rural BC and the primary method of dispatching an ambulance is land-based, that’s not equitable service.”

Under the current system, he said, if a child in Vancouver breaks their arm playing soccer, they can get to Vancouver General Hospital within 15 minutes. If a child breaks their arm in Dease Lake, a northern interior community of 300, they’re probably facing an uncomfortable eight-hour ambulance trip on gravel roads.

Currently, Harris’s report states, nearly three quarters of all people who die of trauma-related conditions in northern BC do so before they can even be brought to a hospital, compared with just 12 percent in Metro Vancouver.

However: “At the end of the day, nothing is going to change,” Harris said.

“Those in charge of creating equitable ambulance service across the province, in my interviews with them, have told me clearly that if you don’t live in a large urban setting, you can’t accept the same level of service. They’ve already conceded that they can’t do it.”

Linda Lupini, executive vice president of the Provincial Health Services Authority and BC Emergency Health Services, acknowledged that the issue is complex.

Lupini said in an interview that the ambulance service itself is restricted on what it can do by various rules. Paramedics, for example, aren’t allowed to put themselves into dangerous situations in order to retrieve an injured person from a hard-to-access ravine or a steep cliff.

“The rural and remote issue is very complicated because there are obligations on three or four parties,” she said.

She said that in Metro areas, service is straightforward because there is almost always somewhere the patient can be taken to get the exact type of treatment needed. In rural areas, patients often need to be taken to smaller hospitals for assessments before being transferred to a larger centre for specialized care.

She explained that ambulances also must often wait on third parties such as search and rescue or the employer to bring patients to them, which can take time.

“We’re in situations every single day where we have to wait for patients to be brought to us,” Lupini said. “We do our best to save lives but we’re actually not allowed to do the things that paramedics want to do sometimes.”

Lupini could not comment on Saarinen’s case specifically because of privacy reasons, but pointed out that the service is also reliant on people at the scene to give first responders accurate information. The service will send an air ambulance when a call is “high-acuity,” meaning the patient is in immediate danger.

“If we get the wrong information in, we may not be responding correctly,” she said. “If it’s a medium or low-acuity issue, the system is set up so you may have to wait so the system is available for high-acuity calls.”

She said that BCEHS has gradually been making improvements to the system and is now working with the provincial government on future changes.

After the air ambulance service was subject to a scathing audit several years ago, the service has implemented every single recommendation that came from that report, Lupini said.

Currently, BC has seven fixed-wing aircrafts, four helicopters, and the service has access to more than 45 air ambulances owned by contractors. There are 585 ground ambulances.

“If we keep layering enhancements to our services in rural and remote … we will improve service,” she said.

“Some of it is just beyond our control. We look at what is in our control.”

But Hans Dysarsz, newly appointed executive director of the BC Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operations Society (HEROS), said the small changes aren’t enough, and the system needs a full overhaul.

His group BC HEROS was formed in Prince George in 2012, after 24-year-old Jackie Inyallie’s seemingly preventable death—she was in a car accident near Bear Lake and suffered a punctured lung and broken arm, but it took paramedics five hours to get her to a hospital and she died during the wait.

Dysarsz himself, a former air ambulance co-pilot who helped start the helicopter non-profit STARS in Alberta, has been advocating for better prehospital care in BC for three and a half decades.

“I’ve heard ‘we’re working on it’ for 30 years,” he said.

“It’s systemically so deeply flawed, that if you’re more than 10 minutes away from the hospital, you’re in deep trouble in BC.”

Dysarsz said problems in the ambulance service can be traced back to the outset, when it was formed in 1974. Before then, services were provided jointly by various groups such as fire departments, volunteer ambulance crews and private operators.

Recommendations stemming from a Foulkes Commission report on health care a year earlier created the BC Ambulance Service, but Dysarsz said a quick scan of the document reveals that many of the suggestions were “completely ignored,” he said.

“The NDP created this system 43 years ago and no subsequent government has decided to touch it,” he said.

“It’s a chosen system. It doesn’t have to be this way. When you compare the truth to what other provinces have and what other jurisdictions have internationally, we are so far behind.”

Hans Dysarsz points to BC paramedic data found through freedom of information request. Photo by Cara McKenna

Dysarsz recently filed a freedom of information request which revealed that Alberta has 10 times as many Advanced Care Paramedics—who are some of the most highly trained and capable workers in the field—as BC does.

BC has 240 Advanced Care Paramedics centred around urban areas, while Alberta has 2,668 that are distributed province-wide.

In total, BC has 6,786 EMS attendants while Alberta has 9,377. Of the licensed attendants in BC, almost half aren’t even allowed to treat the general public, Dysarsz said, because they work for private companies and not BCEHS.

“Because of the seniority system, the most junior workers go to the most remote locations where the longest return to hospital times exist,” he said. “That means patients with urgent care needs suffer or die the most.”

BC HEROS is now calling on the BC government to strike a royal commission that’s made up of a panel of EMS experts to create a new “made in BC” model. The group is also calling on a universal cost-benefit analysis of all aspects of prehospital care.

BC Health Minister Adrian Dix, a former opposition health critic, said in an interview that his concern about something like a royal commission is that it could take several years.

“If people are saying we need to improve service, I would agree with that,” Dix told VICE. “I think some steps need to be taken right now. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Dix said one of the biggest ongoing challenges has been staffing ambulance crews in rural areas. There’s also the issue of navigating BC’s large and difficult terrain. But he said some things have improved in the past year.

He said he is hopeful about a community paramedicine program that started in 2016 and involves offering more regular employment to rural paramedics instead of keeping them on-call.

A new air ambulance was also recently added in Fort St. John.

He said the province will keep working with the ambulance service and paramedic’s union to make improvements. “We have significant issues that weren’t dealt with for more than a decade,” Dix said. “I think it’s time to get on with some things.”

Saarinen said he hopes to see some significant changes happen soon, so that other people won’t lose their limbs—or their lives.

“So the ambulance will get there,” he said.

“It’s an emergency situation. You’ll be dead if you don’t get help.”

Follow Cara on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Arabia

For women, even walking alone during the day can often entail running a gauntlet of misogyny and harassment. We've all had to deal with anything from casual comments about how we look or present ourselves, to random strangers thinking it's fine to walk up to us and physically demand our attention. That kind of abuse only gets worse when you're walking alone at night.

Last year, VICE offices across Europe spoke with women from 13 different countries around the continent about the shit they have to deal with when walking around alone at night. More recently, our new VICE Arabia office did the same, to hear about how street harassment across the Middle East influences women's lives, and what precautions they take to stay safe.

Tunis, Tunisia

Photo courtesy of Ghada

Ghada, 25, Marketing Manager

VICE: Hey Ghada. Do you feel safe when walking alone at night in Tunis?
Ghada: Generally, yes. I often go out in Tunis and, luckily, I’ve never felt threatened or in danger in those situations. But of course there are some neighbourhoods I would never walk around in by myself.

Do you take any specific precautions to stay safe?
I stay clear of the neighbourhoods around the city centre – the areas with a lot of cheap bars and cafes, where you won’t find any women after 11PM. But there are other places in Tunis that are perfectly safe for women to be until at least 2AM, because there is plenty of traffic and people about.

I always try to walk with someone else. But if I have to walk alone and feel someone is watching or following me, I’ll sometimes call my parents and just have a chat. I know it won’t save me if I'm in actual danger, but their voices help to reassure me a bit.

Have you ever been physically harassed?
Yes, about two years ago. I usually don’t use public transport, especially at peak hours, but this time I had to take the subway. It was about 8PM and the train was packed to the point you could hardly breathe. I noticed a man behind me and suddenly I felt his hand deliberately touch my back. I felt terrified and scared and tried to get away but there was no room to move. I felt so insulted and I wanted to hit him, but I just froze. I got off at the next stop and didn’t look back because I didn’t want to see his face.

Damascus, Syria

Photo courtesy of Hala

Hala, 23, Journalist

VICE: How would you describe the streets of Damascus at night?
Hala: At one point during the war, being out at night in Damascus was safer than going out in the morning because evenings were the only time the bombing stopped. In fact, we're still living by the rules of war, not the conventional social rules of a night out.

In general, being out late has never been a great idea for women in Damascus. But these days, things seem to have calmed down a bit and it’s more normal to see both men and women out late at night, especially in areas far from direct clashes.

Before the war, did you feel uncomfortable walking around alone?
Apart from the weird comments and strange looks you get from guys that can get you in a right state of panic if you overthink them, I’ve never really felt threatened walking around in the evenings.

Do you take any precautions?
I always try to avoid any dark or abandoned alleys, and opt to walk through crowded or wider streets. Sometimes, I find myself coming up with a whole escape plan in my head – I work out the nearest exit and my method of fighting back in case anyone were to harass me. Also, I tell my friends and family where I’m going, the time I’ve left and my route in case anything happens. Some times, I send messages updating them along the way, too. Most of the time, though, the best way is just to be with a friend when you're out late.

WATCH: Will the Weinstein revelations change anything?

Rabat, Morocco

Photo courtesy of Salma

Salma, 25, Journalist

VICE: Are there any areas in Rabat that you avoid at night?
Salma: I try to avoid going out anywhere alone. I feel scared and unsafe in a lot of Rabat neighbourhoods, regardless of whether they are posh or poorer areas. If I happen to be going home late, which I sometimes have to because of work, I make sure one of my male colleagues walks with me.

What sort of things are you worried about?
Personally, I have not had any bad experiences, but I often hear of girls who've had to deal with verbal and physical abuse. One of my relatives was mugged by three young people not far from the train station in the Agdal district.

What do you think is the safest way to get home?
Driving is by far the best solution. And taxis are also a fairly safe alternative.

Beirut, Lebanon

Photo courtesy of Laila

Laila, 21, Journalist

VICE: Are there particular areas in Beirut, where you'd rather not be alone at night?
Laila: There are several places in the city where I don’t feel safe at night – generally just around empty streets that attract no traffic in the evenings.

Have you personally been bothered when walking alone at night?
I haven’t experienced anything directly, but we constantly hear stories of girls being harassed around the city. One of my close friends was on her way home when she was followed by a car full of young guys. They kept following her all the way to the entrance of her house, but thankfully nothing happened. It was only 8PM, which isn't even that late.

What precautions do you take?
We have to walk alone in the evening or at night in Beirut, that's unavoidable. So my friends and I carry pepper spray in our bags at all times, in case we have to defend ourselves. The best and safest way to get home at night is by taxi, but those are very expensive. It's also become pretty popular to ride-share.

Cairo, Egypt

Photo courtesy of Mai

Mai, 25, Journalist

VICE: What's it like for women traveling around Cairo at night?
Mai: When I started working nights – from 6PM to midnight – I thought I would suffer lots of harassment and abuse from strange men on my way home. So far, though, I’ve not had any problems on my commute from the city centre in Ramses Square to my office in Mohandeseen.

So you haven't experienced any physical abuse?
Personally, no – nobody has ever tried to steal from me or physically harass me. The only thing that happens is that sometimes I have to take a taxi home, and often the driver tries to cheat me because I am a woman. They refuse to run the meter, and instead ask for a higher fixed price, which is so frustrating.

How do you respond to any verbal harassment you receive?
Guys who comment on me being out alone at night never expect me to respond, but it always shocks them when I speak up to defend myself.

Amman, Jordan

Photo courtesy of Dana

Dana, 36, Public Relations

VICE: Are there certain areas in Amman, where you don't like to be in at night?
Dana: I’d say it is a safe city, though at the same time it’s not easy to walk through. I generally use my car to get anywhere. And to be on the safe side, I'd always recommend that people travel in groups at night.

Do you ever change the way you dress when going to certain places by yourself?
It completely depends on where I’m going and how I'm getting there. But, yes, sometimes I'll make sure to put on a shirt with long sleeves.

Jerusalem

Photo courtesy of Ranin

Ranin, 26, Director of the Palestinian Museum

VICE: Do you feel safe at night in Jerusalem?
Ranin: Yeah, I feel fairly safe, especially in the Arab neighbourhoods. I don’t mind going out alone before midnight, but it's better to head out with a relative or a friend. The strange thing about Jerusalem is the intense Israeli military presence, specifically in the Old City. It often feels like Jerusalem is always on the brink of war.

Are there certain streets and areas in Jerusalem that you avoid walking or going to at night?
Yes. As a Palestinian, I often feel unsafe around Israeli settlements, and the Old City of Jerusalem, where there are a large number of soldiers.

Have you or one of your friends ever been attacked?
Most women experience lots of verbal harassment and strange looks, especially in places like Jerusalem and Ramallah. The best response, though, is to just ignore it.

Of all the unpopular white-people fashion choices floating around in 2017, dreadlocks is definitely a key one of them. Either because dreads signify unwashed, pot-powered uselessness, or because they’re culturally offensive. Particularly the latter.

As Miley Cyrus discovered when she mangled the traditional Mapouka dance into something called Twerking, or when a Victoria's Secret model donned Native American headdress in 2012, or when a whole bunch of Victoria’s Secret models donned African beads in 2017, cultural appropriation just isn’t acceptable anymore. In fact, it‘s a very effective way to make people mad.

So how do white people with dreadlocks feel about all this? Do they see their dreads as unwashed, or culturally inappropriate? We asked some to find out.

Tasha, 25
Has worn dreads for nearly two years

VICE : Hey Tasha, so I’ve seen heaps articles like 7 Reasons Why White People Should Not Wear Black Hairstyles or Dreadlocks Are Not OK for White People to Have. Period on the Web. What’s your thinking on all this?
Tasha: I have never heard anyone say something like that. Dreadlocks are a hairstyle that has historically spanned cultures from Ancient Greece to Egypt, with one of the first depictions of dreadlocks being in images of the Hindu god Shiva. And yes, dreadlocks are popular today in Rastafarian culture, as well also a very effective way to style Afro hair, but they did not originate from that. If it was created exclusively from their culture, I would understand. The thing that annoys me most about this comment is that I have spoken to many black people about this issue and no one has ever had an issue with white people with dreadlocks. In fact, I am also nearly always complimented on my dreads by black people. In my experience it’s only white social justice warriors on the internet looking for a reason to moan who have an issue.

Tell me about the story of your dreads. How did they get there?
I always loved the way they looked and wanted them for about five years and hated brushing my hair. Then, when I went travelling, I decided to finally get them made to keep my hair neat and low maintenance. Well, low maintenance in the short term anyway. Dreads are comfortable and they make me feel comfortable. I also shave the sides of my head because it’s nice to feel the breeze and not have those dreadlocks falling into my face. I would like to see dreadlocks become more of a mainstream hairstyle and not always be affiliated with hippies. A lot of the time people just get them because they look good and feel practical.

Okay, full disclosure: in my mind, dreads are for bong smokers who smell like patchouli oil and sweat. I’m sorry.
Look, I don’t smoke weed. I shower every day and I’m a clean freak and I hate sitting around all day and I hate those who do. Also, most of the people I know who are those typical kinds of stoners actually don’t have dreads. That might be the case in some countries but not in either of my lives in the UK or Australia.

What would be your advice to anyone who reads your answers and feels so convinced that they decide to get dreads?
Think about it for a while, and if you still want it, do it. It’s a big commitment, but now I don’t think I can go back to normal hair.

Gregory, 25
Has had dreads for eight years

Hey Gregory, do you ever feel culturally inappropriate wearing dreadlocks?
I have never had anyone had a direct issue with my dreadlocks. I grew up on the surf coast, swimming in salt water every weekend with curly hair. It’s pretty impossible to not get matted hair so dreadlocks were a very practical solution. This was before I was even old enough to know what Rastafarianism was. I also had no idea that dreadlocks were significant to black people because I just saw them in my everyday life as I grew up on the beach. The only times I have seen this brought up was after those issues with the Indian headdresses. We are in the 21st century and are way past holding onto cultural semantics. I think instead of nitpicking at political correctness we should be celebrating cultural diversity. So until a black person approaches me with some valid points as to why I’m being insensitive, I'll keep them. Also I just think comments like “dreads are for black people only” are the opposite of cultural progression.

And you’ve worn dreads for eight years. It’s a lot. Like a lot.
I started getting dreads when I was 17. I wanted them for years and Mum said I couldn’t get them. She also said I couldn’t get tattoos or smoke cigarettes and all of those things happened so maybe it was a sign of rebellion. I’ve been in two minds about them recently, coming close to nearly cutting them off, although now I'm glad I kept them and have fallen in love with them again. I just find them comfortable and I like the aesthetic. After having them for a long period of time I now feel they are part of my character and I’m glad I’ve kept them.

Would you describe yourself as a neo hippie?
Look, stereotypes exist for a reason and I’ve definitely known some dirty weed-smoking hippies with dreadlocks. However, I’m not one myself.

Katie, 26
Has worn dreads for three months

Hey Katie, do you think dreads are for black people?
People automatically assume that dreads are part of the Bob Marley/Rasta culture. But I think they’re a personal choice, and not so much to do with culture. They’re pretty mainstream now: basketball players, singers, they all have dreads.

Why did you get them?
I just wanted dreads since I was a kid, growing up surrounded by surfer girls and guys with blond dreads and stuff. Dreads are soooo convenient. You wash your hair once a week, put in a spray, and that’s all. Actually, I want to get them longer.

What’s the worst comment you received about them?
That people with dreads aren’t hygienic, don’t shower, or wash their hair.

When was the last time you showered?
I shower every day.

Good to know. Now, you told me your mum’s family is Russian and your dad’s side is German. That’s a weird combo for someone who has dreads.
I’m probably the first Germanico-Russian to wear dreads. I reckon I can’t go to Russia. I’ll be stoned in public with this haircut.

Josh, 21

Hey Josh, for how long have you had dreads?
Shoulder length.

What? No—how long have you had dreads?
Oh. Since December last year.

Why did you get them?
Have you ever seen a person with dreads and it hasn't suited them? No, you haven’t. Dreads suit everyone, they're amazing. I love them.

What about Justin Bieber? He looked like a giant mop.
I think they suited him really well. Like, seriously.

Do you think dreads would suit me, with my blasé-pretentious-French face?
I could actually picture you with dreads and it would look amazing. Seriously!

Follow Sophie on Twitter

Back in the day, it looked like the Roots and Biggie had some major beef. However, as Black Thought explained on Desus & Mero Monday night, the group's relationship with the late rapper was simply made up of a bunch of wild misunderstandings.

Black Thought explained that it all started when he first thought the Notorious B.I.G. shaded the Roots in "Flava In Ya Ear (Remix)." But after calling Bad Boy Records, he learned he just misheard the lyrics. In fact, Biggie was actually a huge fan of the rap group all along.

Their pseudo-feud continued when the Roots released their iconic music video for "What They Do." In the video, they parodied a bunch of rap clichés at the time and directly poked fun at Biggie's "One More Chance." As Black Thought explained, B.I.G. was not enthused and released a veiled threat that while he might not come after the Roots, he "can't speak for the rest of Brooklyn." In the end, though, there were no true hard feelings between the hip-hop legends.

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.

In the third episode of Question IT we speak with Andini, the 20-year old inventor of The Hollow Flashlight, which ingeniously converts body heat into electricity to power an LED lightbulb. Musing on her unique approach to tackling problems, her inspiration from the world of magic and silent films, and how she’s changing outdated perceptions of inventors, This episode offers us a glimpse inside one of the brightest young minds working today.

Not many people enjoy careers like Jamie Hewlett. Long, storied, intense ones. Ones where you hit it big early in life, and then again in your thirties.

In fact, the last 25 years of Hewlett's career read like a This Is Your Life big red book special. Co-founder of a fanzine as an art school student, co-creator of a hugely influential comic series and the visual architect of an internationally renowned band – and a play and film writer to boot.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing, which may not come as much of a surprise: a quarter of a century is a long time for everything to work out as planned.

WATCH: Desus & Mero – Da Vinci's Jesus

It was at college in West Sussex that Jamie's career really began. In the 1980s, while studying in the seaside town of Worthing, he met friend and future collaborator Alan Martin, and with another mate – Phil Bond – they created the fanzine Atomtan.

"At art school we drew it, we photocopied it on the college photocopy machine and we sold it for 50p to people," recalls Jamie. "I love that format. It’s very punk rock, it’s very garage. I love that you can do what the hell you want and it’s yours."

The creation of Atomtan and an encounter with the late and legendary comic book artist Brett Ewins at college set Jamie on a rapid career trajectory: "We took [Ewins] for drinks after the guest lecture he gave [at our college], and we kept in touch after that," explains Jamie. "He contacted us later to say he was doing a magazine with [comic artist] Steve Dillon, and would we be interested in working on it?"

Unsurprisingly, they were. "That was always my dream as a kid, to draw comic books," says Jamie. "I'd done a drawing of this female character, and I just called it 'Tank Girl'. We showed it to them and they loved it. They asked us to turn the drawing into a monthly comic strip."

The magazine, Deadline, launched in 1988, and the Tank Girl strip was a hit straight off the bat. At the time, Margaret Thatcher was coming to the end of her premiership, and youth disillusionment was rife. So the timing was just right for the character of Rebecca Buck, whose punk-tinged, countercultural Tank Girl alter-ego immediately resonated with young women around the world.

"We were always quite disappointed by the fact most females in comic books were usually drawn by men who'd never even spoken to a woman," says Jamie, of his and Alan's view at the time. "So they were [drawing] big-breasted, curvaceous characters, wearing tight costumes. And they had a stupid superpower, like they could become invisible. What the fuck good is that?"

It was Jamie’s friendships with strong women – relationships that still exist today – that helped form the direction and traits of Tank Girl. "She is sort of based on girls that I went to university with, and who I shared an apartment with," he says. "I was always very inspired by them. I liked their attitude; they were quite ferocious."

As Tank Girl's star was rising, so was Jamie's, and it wasn’t long before MGM approached the comic creators about a feature film. "Twenty-two years-old and suddenly getting MGM calling you and saying, 'We love Tank Girl and we want to make a huge Hollywood blockbuster movie' – we got excited about that."

However, the film veered wildly from the kind of artist direction Jamie and Alan wanted, and ended up bombing commercially.

"They played that game of looking for things that are cool, buying those things and then turning them into something else," Jamie explains. "Which is what Hollywood does. If they were to stick to the actual storyline of the original idea of Tank Girl, then you’d probably have an x-rated movie on your hands, and what they want is a family movie they can open and have a big box office weekend with. They take out all the essence – all the good ingredients – and then turn it into something else."

Following the 1995 movie and the closure of Deadline the same year, Jamie was left largely disenchanted. "'I just can't draw comics any more – I did that for ten years,'" he remembers thinking. "Plus, I didn't want to work for DC Comics or Marvel Comics because I’m not interested in superheroes."

Instead, he went on to work in set design for the kids show SMTV: Live – "they didn't use it because it was a bit weird" – followed by a foray into advertising, which he "hated", and some illustration work for magazines like Just Seventeen and Smash Hits. As he remembers it: "Just fucking stupid shit just to earn some money."

Jamie's animations in the SM:TV opening credits

Jamie remembers this time as his wilderness period. "From the end of Tank Girl, I was just sort of flapping around like a fish out of water. Trying to find…" His sentence hangs in midair.

And then, in 1998, came Gorillaz. "Damon [Albarn] started talking about Gorillaz, and that was like a completely fresh idea," Jamie recalls. "For me to step out of comic books and to create a fake band, I got very excited by that. And that's been going for 18 years."

The story of Gorillaz is well told, but let's go over it again quickly here: after meeting when Jamie interviewed Blur for Deadline, him and Albarn moved into a flat together in west London. Watching MTV, the two decided that the best way to lampoon the complete lack of substance in what they saw was to create a fictional band, with Hewlett designing the members and Albarn writing the music. Nearly 20 years later, they're still going strong and have just been nominated for a Grammy.

Original poster for the contemporary opera Monkey.

During that time, there been plenty of other projects – including the late-2000s stage show Monkey: A Journey to the West, another Albarn collaboration, and Jamie's tarot card-influenced fine art exhibition The Suggestionists, in 2015. Speaking to him, though, it seems to be his 2009 trip to Bangladesh with Oxfam to investigate climate change that left the biggest mark. "It was an amazing trip, but it was quite sad as well," he says. "To see these villages that get swept away once a year – they lose their children and they lose their their homes, and everything."

On his return to the UK, Jamie created a series of paintings. "They sold the prints," he explains, "and I asked for all the money that was made to be sent to the villages that I visited so they could rebuild their homes."

Monochrome drawings from the series Pines.

The last few years have seen a continuation of Jamie's established style of graphic drawings, tweaked here and there through various means. "I can draw and paint in many different styles, and use different mediums to create work," he says. "I was also doing a lot of paintings in oils. To me, it's just drawing. I love to draw and paint – that's what makes me happy. When a picture is done, I’m not concerned with it any more; I’m onto the next thing."

Pines, for example – a simple set of black-and-white pictures of the pine trees found over every inch of France's Cap Ferret peninsula – was one particular passion project. "The pines just became an obsession," he says. "I was on holiday in France and I just started drawing pine trees at five in the evening, when the sun was low and was casting all these shadows on itself. I was just doing it because it was really satisfying."

The fictional poster for 'Honey'

Jamie’s relationship with his art is just one of the many pivotal relationships he's had in his life. The partnerships along the way – including those with Alan Martin, Brett Ewins, Steve Dillon, Richard Benson, Damon Albarn and many more – have been crucial in shaping his work and career, and it's with sadness that he reflects on the recent passing of both Martin and Ewins, two men who helped him get his career off the ground.

The women in his life have meant equally as much: his wife, Emma de Caunes, a French actress, who was front and centre in the 70s-style exploitation cinema posters from his Suggestionists series, along with the female university friends who inspired Tank Girl.

"I used to come home from the pub and there’d be food dripping from the ceiling, and the fridge would be on its side, and the floor would be sticky," remembers Jamie. "Everything would’ve been emptied out of the fridge and emptied on the wall, and I’d say, 'What the fuck happened?' And they’d say, 'Oh, we’ve had a food fight.' I have many women in my life who are smart, tough wonderful, inspiring. In fact, all of my management are women. There are no men running this show, bar me and Damon. The people who really run the show and make everything fucking happen are all women in my management. They’re great at their job."

So what's next? Well: more of Jamie's unique takes on the world, he's guessing. "I’m obsessed with how things look," he says. "I’m a visual person, you see."

A retrospective book ofJamie Hewlett's work is out now on TASCHEN. There will be a book signing on the 7th of December, from 4:30PM to 6:30PM, at the TASCHEN store in Chelsea, London.

@Shaydakisses

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

US News

Trump Drops ‘Pocahontas’ Joke at Native American Ceremony
Native American organizations condemned the president for referring to Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” at a White House ceremony Monday honoring Navajo World War II veterans. “The name becomes a derogatory racial reference when used as an insult,” said the general secretary of the Alliance of Colonial Era Tribes. Warren called it “deeply unfortunate.”—VICE/ABC News

Two Officials Continue Strange Fight Over Wall Street Watchdog
White House official Mick Mulvaney told staff at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he was the agency's new acting director Monday, asking them to “disregard” a claim made by deputy director Leandra English to be performing the same role. The CFPB’s general counsel has backed Trump appointee Mulvaney in the dispute, but legal experts said English—who is suing to prevent Mulvaney from keeping the gig—has a case. The saga could directly impact your wallet in the Trump era.—VICE

Fake Roy Moore Accuser Apparently Tried to Dupe Newspaper
A woman who made a false allegation that the Alabama Senate candidate got her pregnant when she was 15 was seen at the premises of Project Veritas—a right-wing group set up to damage the credibility of mainstream media outlets. Martin Baron, executive editor at the Washington Post, said the woman’s claims were part of a “scheme to deceive and embarrass us.”—The Washington Post

Weinstein Brothers Face Sex-Trafficking Lawsuit
British actress Kadian Noble has accused Harvey Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in a Cannes hotel, an allegation made as part of a lawsuit launched against both Weinstein brothers and the Weinstein Company. Noble claimed they broke American sex trafficking laws when Harvey Weinstein allegedly forced her into a nonconsensual sex act abroad.—NBC News

International News

Kenyatta Returns to Office in Kenya
President Uhuru Kenyatta began his second term Tuesday with an oath ceremony in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Elsewhere in the city, police used tear gas on opposition activists attempting to demonstrate against Kenyatta; deaths were reported in the clashes. Opposition figurehead Raila Odinga, who boycotted last month’s election, referred to Tuesday's ceremony as a "coronation.”—AP

Volcanic Ash Shuts Down Bali Airport
Indonesia’s transportation ministry decided the closure of Bali’s airport would go on for another 24 hours while the island’s Mount Agung volcano continued to expel ash and smoke. The island remained on high alert for another eruption. Ferries have begun taking some of the 59,000 passengers stuck on Bali to an airport on Lombok island.—BBC News

Australian Police Arrest Suspected New Years Terrorist
A 20-year-old man was arrested Monday and accused of planning a gun attack at Melbourne’s New Year’s Eve celebrations next month. Police said Ali Khalif Shire Ali—who was charged with terrorism-related offenses—wanted to “shoot and kill as many people as he could.”—ABC Online

Japan Detects Possible Preparations for North Korean Missile Test
A source close to the Japanese government said radio signals suggested Pyongyang could be getting ready to launch another ballistic missile. Although the source said the signals were “not enough to determine” a launch is imminent, a South Korean government source also cited intelligence pointing to the potential for a missile test.—Reuters

Everything Else

‘Get Out’ Triumphs at Indie Film Awards
Jordan Peele's film won three prizes at the Gotham Independent Film Awards Monday night, including the audience award, breakthrough director, and best screenplay. Call Me by Your Name won best feature.—Variety

Tumblr Founder Resigns as CEO
David Karp has announced he is leaving the platform he launched a decade ago, with COO Jeff D’Onofrio taking over. Karp said he made the decision “after months of reflection on my personal ambitions."—Reuters

Bruce Springsteen Lengthens His Broadway Run
The musician plans to keep performing his acclaimed solo shows at New York City’s Walter Kerr Theatre for another four months. The “Springsteen on Broadway” concerts have already earned a reported $18.6 million, with the average ticket costing $500.—The Hollywood Reporter

Miguel Drops Collaboration with J. Cole
The artist released a studio version of “Come Through and Chill” after performing the song live on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert two months ago. It features two verses from J. Cole, who references Colin Kaepernick.—Noisey

Researcher Gets $10,000 for Finding Facebook Bug
Pouya Darabi discovered a flaw in Facebook’s polling feature that would allow anyone to delete another user’s photos using a poll. The company gave the security researcher the substantial reward after he reported the problem.—Motherboard

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we delve into DIY internet and how to end our reliance on big telecom companies.

On Monday night, Access Hollywood took a moment to remind the world that Trump's "grab them by the pussy" recording is real, regardless of what the president is reportedly saying now.

According to a recent New York Times article about Trump's decision to endorse Roy Moore despite allegations of sexual misconduct against the GOP Senate hopeful, Trump has apparently started questioning the validity of the infamous 2005 tape. The Times reported that Trump suggested that the recording was not authentic to a senator and an advisor.

This, of course, is a shift from last year, when Trump copped to the recording and apologized back when the story first broke. On Monday, Access Hollywood hosts Natalie Morales and Kit Hoover felt the need to clarify any confusion.

"We wanted to clear something up that has been reported across the media landscape. Let us make this perfectly clear: The tape is very real," Morales said. "Remember, his excuse at the time was 'locker-room talk.' He said every one of those words."

In the tape, Trump can be heard talking to then-host Billy Bush about women on the Access Hollywood bus, minutes before meeting soap opera actress Arianne Zucker. "I just kiss. I don’t even wait," Trump said. "And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

Zucker also commented on Trump's bizarre turn Monday during an interview with CNN host Anderson Cooper, questioning how—and why—the president decided to change his tune so far after the fact.

"I don’t know how else that could be fake unless someone’s planting words in your mouth," Zucker told Cooper. "How do you apologize for something and renege on it? It’s puzzling to me."

Puzzling or not, Trump loves a juicy conspiracy theory, and this new one will likely just fuel the fire for the 46 percent of voters who believe that the media is conspiring against him or whatever.

If you’ve spent any time on social media these past few weeks, you’ll know that the internet has a new boyfriend. Going by the unbelievably opulent moniker of Armie Hammer (his namesake, grandfather Armand, was an industrialist who became part owner of Arm & Hammer purely for rich-person kicks), this all-American square-jaw is having a long overdue moment.

Though he first came to prominence at the beginning of the decade, playing Harvard douchebros Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in David Fincher’s The Social Network, it’s only now that Hammer is truly blowing up. And he may be due an Oscar nomination, too: Hammer’s lively, deceptively complex performance in Luca Guadagnino’s new queer masterpiece Call Me by Your Name, is that good.

It may seem ironic that, after the actor has already headlined several huge tentpoles, Guadagnino’s $3.5 million indie is the movie to at last deliver on Hammer’s star potential. Following his breakout dual turn in The Social Network, Hammer was promoted immediately to blockbuster lead; after Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar Hoover biopic J. Edgar, Hammer appeared in the candy-coloured Snow White-reimagining Mirror Mirror ($85 million), the bloated action-western The Lone Ranger ($250 million), cult spy thriller The Man from UNCLE ($75 million) and most ignominiously, the Entourage movie, which representative as much as any film could be of the pungently superficial worst of the movie business.

That Hammer’s star seemed to fade in this period wasn’t just because the films weren’t very good; he barely registered in them, either. Between 2011 and 2016—the year he course-corrected back into mid-tier projects and indies—you’d be forgiven for forgetting who Armie Hammer even was. But what Hollywood initially did with Hammer makes sense: This is an industry that has forever conflated image with ability, and in this topsy-turvy world, regular-looking guys with leading-man charisma like Michael Shannon become supporting stars while chiselled character actors are pigeonholed as bland leading men.

We’re conditioned to believe someone who looks like Hammer doesn’t deserve to just wallow in the kind of lesser-seen independent movies that his Call Me by Your Name co-star Michael Stuhlbarg typically books. A longtime lead in the theater world, Stuhlbarg didn’t get his break in the movies until he was 41, where Hammer was fast-tracked for franchise fame seemingly from the moment he set foot in Hollywood at the age of 19.

A century of matinee idol worship has taught us that such a face as Hammer’s belongs on billboards, and that a body like his—pampered and moulded like wagyu cattle by a multimillion-dollar upbringing—ought to be displayed on the most screens in the best blockbusters money can buy. WASP-ishly handsome, Hammer appears tailor-made for the kind of career Hollywood singles out for its most beautiful (and, almost always, white) men: one that asks they coast in big-money projects on their looks, charm and little of the raw acting talent that got them in the game in the first place.

The problem, as Hollywood has been late to discover, is that Armie Hammer isn’t a cookie-cutter movie star, but a character actor trapped in the body of a leading man. There’s something a little bit off about him, whether he’s publicly berating a Buzzfeed author over her theory that his regular guy image is just a construct or showing a liking for BDSM when he thinks no one is looking. Watch him dancing in this glorious clip from Call Me by Your Name: he’s too goofy to be taken seriously as a Prince Charming or Lone Ranger, even if physically he might be mistaken for a match.

Hammer just doesn’t appear comfortable in the role of the squeaky-clean hero figure—but give him a part that challenges this archetype, or that deconstructs Armie Hammer-style privilege, and he shines. This was apparent in The Social Network, though perhaps those that subsequently tried to make Hammer the next Tom Cruise missed the subtleties of the performance(s). On their surface, the Winklevii are Ivy League perfection, but beneath there’s shades of entitlement, smug masculinity afforded by a lifetime of privilege—and vulnerability.

Hammer’s charmed existence (including his ability to spring back repeatedly from career failure), as observed in that Buzzfeed piece, is clearly something the actor has wrestled with. He’s too awkward about his own identity to successfully play icons of white, handsome masculinity, and his apparent desire to prove there’s more to him than what we see has informed his best performances—which have come in smaller, more character-driven movies.

In Ben Wheatley’s action comedy Free Fire, his ultra-capable nice guy exterior betrays a sly psychopathy; in Tom Ford’s queasy thriller Nocturnal Animals, his model-perfect alpha male husband radiates a dreaded mid-life ennui; and in Call Me by Your Name, Hammer’s outwardly jock-ish Oliver is initially ogled as a sex object and treated as an airhead by Timothee Chalamet’s Elio, only for the character—and the actor—to gradually reveal unknown depths. In all of these roles, and in Call Me by Your Name especially, Hammer happily upends our notions of what to expect from someone who looks like Armie Hammer. Has Hollywood finally realized that there’s more?

Here at VICE we make it a priority to report on how shitty the housing crisis is for young people.

Finding a decently-priced place in a building where no one recently got murdered is a chore. But what happens if you manage all that, only to discover that your neighbour will not stop playing “Wonderwall.” Hell is other people and you’ve just signed a lease to the dregs of the 9th circle.

That’s the predicament one Toronto man found himself in, and naturally, instead of just having a conversation with his neighbours, he complained about the issue in Bunz, a popular local Facebook group.

“I recently moved into a new low rise apartment building and our downstairs neighbours have been playing Wonderwall by Oasis on guitar for hours for the past 2 days,” he wrote. “Last night they didn’t stop until 12:30 AM. Today, it started an hour ago with no sign of letting up. How do we file a noise complaint? What are the noise restrictions for times of day and when do they come into effect? Please help.”

We sympathize. “Wonderwall” is the kinda song that’s been so overplayed you can only stand to hear it like once a year—maybe on your annual ‘shrooms trip.

Step 1. Decide if you are Liam or Noel in this feud

How will you proceed in your path to vengeance and/or justice? Are you going to live your best life while calling everyone within earshot a “fookin twat” or are you the type of person who will put a scissors player in your band just because you know it will slowly rot the soul of your sworn enemy. Once, you’ve decided on your approach, stick with it and under no circumstances decide that maybe you should stop being such an asshole and try to work it out.

Step 2. Leave the neighbour a note voicing your displeasure

Liam: “The majority of solo stars are cunts. The ones that split bands up because they need their egos fuckin' stroked are the biggest cunts. If someone said to me, 'OK, get Oasis back or go solo?' I'd get Oasis back. There's not enough bands out there. There's far too many fuckin' solo stars. It's shit. This is the last fuckin' roll of the dice for me. For me to go and get another band back together it'd only be compared to Oasis anyway, so what's the fuckin' point?”

Noel: "I don't like workaholics. Don't fucking trust them. Why are they working? I don't trust busy cunts. That's how wars start: busy fuckers."

Step 3: Play Blur on repeat

Liam: “Song 2”

Noel: “Tender”

Step 4. Play your solo shit

Liam: “Chinatown”

Noel: “Ballad Of The Mighty I”

Step 5. Enlist the help of ‘The Man’

Liam: Call the cops: Well, this is it. You’ve tried nothing, and you’re all out of options. The only thing left is to bring in the big guns: municipal law enforcement. The city is stretched thin trying to keep the social fabric from unraveling by policing the fuck out of non-violent drug offenders but you need the long arm of the law to slap your neighbours down over some extremely petty shit, because that’s why you pay taxes. Unfortunately, all the cops can legally do is tell your neighbours to keep it down and possibly out you as a 90s narc, which would be a brutal personal humiliation and also escalate the situation where they start playing “Wonderwall” on an electric-acoustic guitar and utterly destroy your brain. Do not summon the blue devil lightly.

Noel: Call the landlord: Ah, the landlord. Humanity’s oldest foe. A wonderful servant but a terrible master—especially in an apartment complex. If you’re lucky, the building manager is a real person and not a faceless real estate holding group, so you can pass along your tip directly instead of waiting several weeks for a reply to that complaint form you fill out by which time the problem has probably disappeared or you have moved. They can definitely bring the hammer down on the noise much harder than the cops. But landlords are also like vampires, in that if you invite them over to your place there is no guarantee they won’t look around inside your apartment and eat you and/or keep your damage deposit because of that weird spot on the carpet that you’re pretty sure was there when you moved in but you can’t really prove it so now whenever you do move because of your inability to tolerate the wonderful human mosaic of a big city, you will have to come up with a new security deposit instead of endlessly kicking the same one forward from like 2012 and that’s a fuckin bummer dude, let me tell you.

Step 6. Call your mum, Peggy Gallagher

Liam: "Sorry for being such a twat, mum, but can you help me with this problem?"

Noel: "Sorry for being such a wanker, mum, but can you help me with this problem?"

Step 7. Start subtweeting terrible one-liners

Irritate not just Bunz with your inability to handle a relatively benign issue like an adult, but Twitter as well.

Liam: “Maybe I should be thankful that he's not playing it on a SUPERSONIC level. LG."

Noel: “Hey, mate. I need a little time to wake up, wake up.”

Step 8. Enlist the help of the Press

Now shit is truly getting real. If the landlord, law enforcement, Bunz trading zone, subtweets and calls to mum, can’t solve it, there’s only one solution: take your snipes to the press. Some local paper—presuming there’s one left—will let you take this spat public and if you are lucky, take a picture of you with your arms crossed looking very, very angry about your neighbour playing
"Wonderwall" way too loud and too often!

Liam: Call Noisey.

Noel: Call the NME.

Final Step: Reconcile with the neighbour

You tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter. You know, this is a crazy mixed up world and we’re all just trying to get by as best we can. Sometimes that’s posting passive-aggressive comments on a popular Toronto-area Facebook group; sometimes it’s strumming Oasis to yourself, constantly, all the hours of the day and night. Each one of us walks a lonely road to the same end and it’s the journey that makes all the difference. So maybe you can just get used to hearing “Wonderwall”, muffled through your floor, forever. It’s not so bad, you know. It’s a beautiful song, really, in and of itself, it’s just been totally destroyed by overexposure and its awful afterlife as the mating call of the Basic Guitar Bro. Eventually you will get used to it, and soon its soaring chorus will lull you to sleep every night, soundtrack all your romantic nights in, become an inside joke between you and your friends to be retold endlessly until it is immortalized forever in your best man’s wedding speech.

And then one day the music will stop, because your neighbours have moved on with their lives. You will be lost, only now understanding the value of this surreal moment in your life after it has slipped through your fingers like the bittersweet memories of your faded youth. The fire in your heart dwindles and goes out as you finally get the punchline of your own cosmic joke. You could have made beautiful music together.

The cast of Jersey Shore is coming back together for a new reality series, MTV announced Monday.

MTV revealed the show, called Jersey Shore Family Vacation, during the premiere of Floribama Shore—one of many Jersey Shore spinoffs that crams a bunch of people into a house and films all the alcohol- and producer-influenced hijinks that ensue.

According to Deadline, the new series will reunite every member of the original cast except for Sammi Sweetheart, bringing The Situation, JWoww, Ronnie, Pauly D, Snooki, Vinny, and Deena back together again half a decade after Jersey Shore ended its run in 2012. Earlier this year, five of the eight-person cast reunited for a one-off episode on MTV's Reunion Road Trip, but this will be the first time the original Jersey Shore stars come back for a whole new series.

The Jersey Shore reboot seems like it could wind up becoming a Big Chill-style reunion of aging friends trying to relive some magic of their youth, since the cast is all around 30 now and some are sober, married with kids, or have been accused of tax evasion. It'll be interesting to see how the gang is dealing with heavier adult drama and not just worried about who's going to end up in the smush room at the end of the night or whatever.

Jersey Shore is just one of MTV's old reality TV series the network has been reviving lately, including Total Request Live and My Super Sweet 16, as Deadline points out.

MTV has not announced an official release date for Family Vacation yet, but the show is set to debut sometime in 2018. You can watch a short promo for the upcoming series over on MTV's site.

Major federal busts of the Bonanno and Gambino families earlier this month and the DeCavalcante family in 2015 suggest there’s there’s still a fair amount of Mafia activity in New York and New Jersey. But it's nothing on the scale of 40 or 50 years ago, when taking kickbacks from made guys was just how mayors got things got done. La Cosa Nostra diminished over time for a variety of reasons, from better law-enforcement to cultural assimilation to bloody infighting to changing economics. But even as the mob’s time-honored rackets started to run dry and The Sopranos convinced your baby-boomer parents to subscribe to HBO, New Jersey's real-life mafiosos remained a poorly understood bunch.

In Garden State Gangland: The Rise of the Mob in New Jersey, out next month from Rowman & Littlefield, Mafia historian Scott M. Deitche—who we talked to about the bonds between cocktails and organized crime in 2015—provides a comprehensive survey of the mob in the state. We called him up to find out why New York gangsters get all the hype, who the lesser known (and most dynamic) New Jersey mobsters were, and, more recently, who—if anyone—The Sopranos were really based on. Here’s what he had to say.

VICE: Why explore the rise of the mob in New Jersey? Between The Sopranos and constant fawning in the tabloids, it's not like this is underreported turf, right?
Scott M. Deitche: My whole life and formative years were [spent] in New Jersey. I was kind of in that Northern New Jersey sphere of influence, not too far outside New York City. I saw a lot of [mob activity] going on back then. I’ve always thought that a good overall history of the mob in New Jersey was lacking in Mafia literature. There’s been tons of books on New York, but there’s really only been a handful of books written about New Jersey’s mob. This book builds on that canon of work.

To address the elephant in the room, experts and Mafia pundits have joked for years who The Sopranos are really based on, with the DeCavalcante family often described as the obvious answer. Where do you come down?
I think The Sopranos are kind of an amalgamation of different characters in the New Jersey underworld. It’s like The Godfather—who was he based on? People said [everyone] from Sam DeCavalcante to Carlo Gambino. I think its the same thing with Sopranos. There are people in the Lucchese family and the DeCavalcante family that could fit [the bill] for the characters. Of course, the DeCavalcante family was caught on an FBI wiretap comparing themselves and certain people in their crime family to Sopranos characters, so I think the DeCavalcantes being a smaller hometown, New Jersey Mafia family kind of mirrors The Sopranos in that sense.

It often seems like, when it comes to nonfictional characters, New York mafia figures get all the juice, all the attention. Is that just a function of the media concentration in the city?
The one thing about the New Jersey mafioso is that generally a lot of them have done most of their work in New York. You would never really associate Vito Genovese much with New Jersey, but he lived in New Jersey. He was head of the Genovese family [in] New York City [and] that’s [what he’s] associated with. I think part of it too is [that] New York City is a large iconic brand in and of itself. It’s not as fancy or sexy to think of a wise guy operating out of Newark as it is a wise guy operating out of Manhattan.

Also, some of your larger than life gangsters—John Gotti, Carlo Gambino, and Frank Costello—were all out of New York City. A lot of the New Jersey wise guys who might have had a lot of influence and might have been a lot more powerful just kind of stayed under the radar a bit.

Abner "Longy" Zwillman was a very powerful Jewish mobster about a century ago who most Americans probably don't know about. But he wasn't just a gangster, right?
Zwillman came out of the Jewish third ward in Newark and really rose to power during Prohibition. He was known as the Al Capone of Newark. What was interesting about Zwillman was that he took a lot of the money that he made during prohibition and his illegal rackets and invested it into a lot of legitimate companies. He owned a pretty wide portfolio of businesses by the time of death in the late 50s. He was definitely one of the more influential and powerful racketeers in New Jersey. He was close to Meyer Lansky, had ties to New Jersey and New York mobsters. He was in Havana, Cuba, so he had his hands in a lot of different pots. But he generally flies under the radar when people think of influential Jewish mobsters. Meyer Lansky immediately comes to the top, but Zwillman was very powerful and he lived his entire life in New Jersey.

I'm also fascinated by Ruggiero “Richie The Boot” Boiardo. Even in a world where murder wasn't exactly unheard of, he seemed to stand out, right?
He lived in this huge mansion in Livingston, New Jersey, that supposedly had a place where bodies were disposed of, likely his enemies. He had a lot of powerful political connections and he was able to able to leverage them in his gangster career. Certainly, by the 1960s when the FBI started taking a better look at organized crime in New Jersey, The Boot was one of the first guys they really started concentrating on.

You mentioned Simone “Sam the Plumber” Decalvacante. What made him so remarkable, even iconic?
He kind of carried himself with a little bit of sophistication if you look at the way he dressed. He became the boss of New Jersey’s only homegrown mafia family, the Elizabeth-area family. When he took it over, that was when the FBI was naming families by who was in charge, so it became known as the DeCavalcante family after Sam the Plumber.

He abdicated the throne in the 70s and actually retired to Miami Beach and died in 1997. He was one of the few bosses who was able to come out the backside [of crime] without dying in jail or being killed. He was one of the first Mafia bosses to be bugged by the FBI—at his headquarters, which was a plumbing and heating company in Kenilworth, New Jersey.

I was struck by Angelo “Gyp” Decarlo in part because of his relationship to Richard Nixon, which reminds us that politicians like him weren't always so afraid of being up front about this stuff. And he also had ties to Frankie Valli, right?
Gyp DeCarlo operated mainly out of Hudson County/Hoboken area and he was known as a loan shark and bookmaker. He was tied in with Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio as well as Hudson County politician named John Kenny. What was interesting about Decarlo was that he was wiretapped at his headquarters, which was known as the Barn, for almost three years between 1961 and 1963. The DeCarlo tapes cover everything from the mundane to what they were watching on TV down to business. He was sentenced to prison around 1970 and pardoned by President Richard Nixon two years into his sentence. He’s in the movie The Jersey Boys about Frankie Valli—he was one of Valli’s early backers.

Maybe the most lasting non-Sopranos-related image in the annals of the New Jersey mob is the photo of the Willie Moretti hit. Who was he and why was he whacked?
Moretti was killed in 1951 in New Jersey at Joe’s Elbow Room restaurant in Cliffside Park. He was supposedly the guy that got Frank Sinatra out of his contract with Tommy Dorsey [as immortalized in The Godfather]. He was kind of a well-known character on the nightclub scene in New York and New Jersey. But there were rumours before he died that he had advance-stage Syphilis and that his loose lips led to him getting killed.

It was a pretty spectacular hit. It took place during the day. Some mobsters came in and killed him right there in the middle of the restaurant. To this day, no one has been convicted for it. There are a lot of theories as to who might have killed him and why. But officially, it's one of the great unsolved mob hits.

Learn more about Deitche's book, which drops in December, here.

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For many of us, the holiday season means making joyous memories with your loved ones, exchanging gifts, and transforming your home into a winter wonderland. For others, it means briefly reverting to your neurotic teenage self and making bad decisions during a week in your hometown. For Melania Trump, however, the holiday season means something different, something darker. As the classic song goes:

Oh the weather outside is frightful / and inside, it's also frightful / and since we've no place to go, feel woe, feel woe, feel woe!

As her chief of staff Stephanie Grisham noted, the first lady "is seeing to every last detail" of the White House's Christmas decorations, apparently to ensure maximal darkness and despair. After all, it is literally the darkest part of the year, the months when the cold's bitter embrace feels inescapable, when the last dead leaf has fallen from the trees, and we are most alone.

This year the first lady has decked the halls of the White House to match her haunted heart, presumably in anticipation of her annual holiday tradition—shattering the faces of her porcelain doll collection to release the souls of forgotten children she has spent all year collecting.

For Melania, Christmastime is goth, and I am 100 percent here for it.

"The President, Barron, and I are very excited for our first Christmas in the White House," the first lady hissed in a press release Monday. "As with many families across the country, holiday traditions are very important to us. I hope when visiting the People’s House this year, visitors will get a sense of being home for the holidays." I wish being home for the holidays meant solemnly surveying an army of Christmas ballerinas to ensure the mood remains grim as my doomed soul. Because that's what it means for Melania:

Now, you might be inclined to believe that Melania's Christmas darkness can be chalked up to her perceived discontent with being the wife of the president. ("She didn’t want this come hell or high water. I don’t think she thought it was going to happen," a longtime friend of the Trump family recently told Vanity Fair.) But let's not project emotions on Melania. As her tweets from past years illustrate, her Christmases have always been dark. After all, being goth isn't a phase, it's a way of life.

So as we take up arms in the annual War on Christmas, take a page from the first lady's book, and make your holiday season as dark as the past year has been. In the immortal words of Blink-182, "We'll have Halloween on Christmas, and in the night we'll wish this never ends."

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It's a weird to watch the country with an almost fetish-like focus on freedom constantly attempt to roll that freedom back.

The United States is currently in a tizzy, again, over what should be a simple and quick discussion—net neutrality. On December 12, the FCC will vote on whether it wants to roll back the net neutrality regulations that were hard won by information activists in 2015. If reeled back there is a possibility that internet service providers could put in place a two-tier internet, one in which they control which sites get high-speed access and which won’t.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that the internet has worked well with fewer regulations in the past and he is putting the power back in the hands of the ISPs instead of bureaucrats (because telecommunication conglomerates have never abused their power in the past, right?). Pai, and the rest of the folks trying to roll these regulations back, have been met with intense and vocal opposition to their decision.

"The major fear is that they could do things like creating a two-tier internet that only sites that are willing to pay the additional fees will be carried on the fast lanes and everyone else is consigned to the slow lane,” Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading authorities on internet law, told VICE.

The thing is, America ruining their net neutrality regulations won’t just impact them—it’ll impact the rest of the world as well.

Geist, a professor and founder of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, said that currently Canada has “robust” net neutrality regulations, but due to its proximity to the United States it can’t help but be the first to be impacted. Simply put, if this change transpires, it will impact Canadians, and other people around the world, on two different levels—business and consumer.

The most profound impact will be on businesses attempting to break into the large American market. If a two-tier internet is put in place it could allow internet service providers [ISP] to pick and choose which sites and applications get preferential treatment, something that could seriously hamper innovation and the growth of new businesses.

"The example I've given a few people features one of Canada's e-commerce stars, Shopify, and one can imagine a scenario where a large US provider strikes a deal with one e-commerce provider other than Shopify and ensure that all its online stores and services go on the fast lane,” said Geist. “That becomes an attractive thing for sites that want to set up shops online."

Another worry would be something called zero-rating—when ISPs allow preferential sites to not impact a data plan—which is a form of price discrimination. Say an ISP has a streaming service, well, they could allow access to that service with no impact to a user's data plan whereas a competing service would impact their bill.

An artistic rendering of how rolling back net neutrality will suck.

The impact on the consumer will be much more subtle than the glaring impact on business. Let’s be honest here, Silicon Valley like it or hate it, is the driving force for the majority of innovations in the digital world and it will be affected as well. Essentially, over time, with a two-tier internet, innovation will be slowed because small businesses can’t break into a market and with the even further consolidation of the oligopolies that already exist the choices will become more and more narrow.

Speaking of oligopolies, one horrifying analogy Geist made is to that of a cable company where you are forced by the demons who work there to pick from packages—where what you receive is not at the user's discretion but the companies.

“We could start seeing the world in which some of the internet packages look a lot more like cable, especially for some of the wireless services, where you have to pick your sites and social media,” he said.

Recently, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he was “very concerned” with the developments regarding net neutrality in the United States. Navdeep Bains, the Canadian Minister for innovation, science and economic development expressed to VICE that net neutrality is an important issue for him.

"This is a very important issue, not only for me but, you know, it's an issue of our time, just like freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” Bains told VICE. “I think it's an important to raise awareness around net neutrality and inform the public what is at stake.

"This is about making sure that people have access to information without prejudice, I think it's really important the public understands that."

Another underlying issue at play here is America’s position as a geopolitical leader. Geist says in other parts of the world may look to America’s decision as an excuse by other regimes to pull or weaken their own regulations—something Canadians might need to worry about in the future.

The Canadian government works to promote a free and open internet across the world, a stream of advocacy that Minister Bains says is "essential" to continue.

"It's really about levelling the playing field," said Bains. "While other parts of the world are focused on building walls, we're focused on opening doors."

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In high school, it's not uncommon for teachers to subject their students to new and innovative ways of learning, like showing that cat intestines can be used to jump rope, for instance. But last week, some students witnessed their teacher doing something disturbing when they caught her doing drugs in her classroom during the middle of a school day, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Last Wednesday, junior Will Rogers noticed his English teacher, Samantha Cox, 24, was up to something strange in the corner of her classroom. As teens are wont to do, he pulled out his phone and started filming, recording her through the window of the locked classroom door. The footage shows Cox pushing what looks like white powder into lines on a book, then bending over to snort it off her desk.

"She’s in the corner, hiding with a chair and a book and what appears to be cocaine, putting it into lines,” Rogers told Chicago's WGN-TV. "When I actually watched the footage again and again and I just realized that my English teacher just did cocaine."

And because teens today are apparently very anti-drug, a few students who saw what went down told administrators at Lake Central High School, who then called the cops. Police then brought down a drug-sniffing dog to Cox's room and found "a clear tightly twisted bag with multiple small rolled up pieces of tin foil' and "a rolled up small piece of paper," which they said could be "used to ingest illegal narcotics through one’s nostril," the Tribune reports.

The cops arrested Cox and marched her out of the school in handcuffs while at least one student filmed the whole thing on Snapchat. Investigators found a range of other drug paraphernalia in her car, including a glass pipe and two more paper straws, the Tribune reports.

According to CBS Chicago, Cox admitted to bringing coke into the school in an interview with police, telling investigators she'd bought $160 worth of "dope cocaine" from her dealer that morning and snuck it into her empty classroom during a break—minutes before Rogers started filming.

Lake Central schools Superintendent Larry Veracco said he was happy the incident was dealt with swiftly—but that at the end of the day, the whole fiasco is a pretty major bummer.

"She was popular with the students," Veracco told the Northwest Indiana Times. "It's a sad situation. We are happy that we got her removed from the classroom very quickly after being tipped off by a student. But we are also concerned about her welfare, too. She seemed to be a very good teacher."

Cox now faces charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to a police statement, which adds her to the growing list of teachers caught doing messed-up shit at school.

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During the Cold War, the Canadian government was preoccupied with the never-proven risk that Russia could blackmail closeted homosexual government workers and armed forces personnel. From the 1950s to the 1990s the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the Canadian Military rooted out perceived gays and lesbians who worked in the public service.

If they thought you were gay, you were fired or dishonourably discharged.

My father worked for the military and was a part of the SIU. He investigated and interrogated gays and lesbians. He has a gay son (me), and I work in the public service. It is tough imaging my father investigating gays and lesbians, turning them into his superiors who would then drum them out of the military, ruining their lives. Dad is wonderful father. Nowadays, he is progressive, goes to the pride parade and is absolutely supportive of my sexuality.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t find his old job troubling. As part of his investigations, he went to gay bars to monitor people. The gay bar is meant to be our sanctuary, a place where we are the majority and can live and enjoy ourselves without fear of judgement. The idea that there would be undercover state agents in a gay bar taking notes on who was there and what they were doing is frightening and would have made a presumably safe space dangerous. If you worked for the government and were gay, going to the gay bar for a drink could have gotten you fired.

I do not expect my father to have realized the implications of this while he worked for the SIU. I understand that in a militarized work environment, taking orders and not questioning the morality of your duties is the norm. He was in his 20s, and LGBTQ rights were not as recognized as they are now. The world had different values in mind, even if looking back now we can see those values were misplaced. What is most important to me is recognizing the social progress. My father, with his history, has evolved to now be a staunch ally of the LGBTQ community.

Today the government is publicly apologizing for this purge and will try and make amends with our community. I asked my dad what he thinks of the apology, and he responded: "it is long overdue.”

I sat down with my dad to learn more about his past work, and how it sits with him today.

VICE: Can you tell me about working on the SIU?
Stuart Mason: It was 1978 and I was 24 years old. I was posted to Halifax to work on the SIU as a field investigator for four years. My primary role was conducting security background checks on public servants and military personnel who had security clearance. They could be navy, airforce, or army officers, commanders or government administrators. Anybody with security clearance or access to classified information were routinely investigated for any “character weaknesses.”

What did “character weaknesses” mean?
We looked into financial and personal backgrounds of people. We would gather information on employees who were susceptible to blackmail due to these weaknesses. Back then, it could be anything from high financial debt, alcoholism, drug abuse, infidelity and homosexuality. Anything that could be used against someone to blackmail or bribe them into working for the other side.

How were people chosen to be investigated?
The files came from Ottawa. They had records of all the employees and would send the files to us in Halifax for investigation. I got about 10 files a month. They would come highlighted with stress factors, which were like a tip, something to look out for. The individual’s sexuality was sometimes a stress factor.

What were the interviews like?
We started with a background investigation by interviewing that individual’s community. We would interview their family, their friends, their colleagues. The scope of the research would depend on the person’s level of security clearance. If they had a lot of access to classified information, the investigation was more extensive. The individuals being investigated were not necessarily aware that they were flagged because Ottawa thought they were gay. They thought that it was a regular security clearance review.

Then what would happen?
If during the initial background investigation there was reason to believe that the individual was gay or a lesbian, then the investigation would focus strictly on that principle. The SIU would the interview the individuals directly and would ask them personal questions and see if they could get an admission of their sexuality.

Did the SIU ever follow people?
When individuals were under investigation, they were often monitored. SIU investigators would go out to gay bars to see if who they were monitoring would show up.

Did you go to the gay bars?
Yes. We went while on duty. We would go to watch somebody.

What did you do with your observations?
We would send our findings back to Ottawa. Many of the people we reported as likely homosexual would undergo the “released procedure,” meaning they would be fired or dishonourably discharged, which is almost a bad as a criminal record.

Did you feel guilty doing this work?
No, absolutely not. It is like you going to work now and having someone at work telling you how to do things. There was no animosity, it was not about the hunting of the gay people. It was about doing your job and finding out stuff about people that put the government and military at risk. You also have to remember that it was for the welfare of the gays and lesbians. Their workplaces were not necessary safe for them, and this was a way for the military to have them removed from the workplace. For example, if someone in the navy was thought to be gay while out at sea, they would be assaulted or would simply disappear. Ships would come back to port stated that a couple young men had been “lost at sea” and we speculated that they had been thrown overboard because they were gay. Our investigations were a way to avoid that, to recommend people be discharged before they experienced danger while at work.

What do you think of the policy today?
It was totally wrong. These people should never have lost their jobs.

How do you feel today about the work you did knowing you have a gay son?
This work exposed me to a community that I did not know existed and knew nothing about. My experiences in the SIU showed me what gays and lesbians had to go through and for that I have enormous respect for them. I carry this respect in my relationship with you. I am proud of you today.

Do you think you should apologize?
I do not think I need to apologize, I was just doing the job that I was assigned to do. Though I have regrets. I regret that people’s careers were destroyed. I really do believe that the federal government apologizing is appropriate and that people deserve compensation.

The interview is edited for length and clarity.

With Canada set to legalize weed by next year—and all levels of government intent on keeping it away from babies—we can probably expect many public service announcements in the immediate future.

A new campaign, brought to us by licensed medical cannabis producer Beleave and R.I.D.E. Checks, is already underway with a focus on not driving high. In terms of sensationalism, it’s not exactly a huge departure from the “Just Say No” and D.A.R.E. propaganda of the past.

The "Consequence Strains" project consists of a number of dramatic, black and white YouTube videos that drill down on the message that driving stoned could cause fatal accidents. The creators also made up a series of posters featuring Consequence Strains of cannabis that come in three flavours: Kourtroom Kush indica, White Whiplash hybrid, and Slammer Time sativa.

The main video begins with audio clips taken from a focus group of people who all believe driving high is not that dangerous or is not as dangerous as driving drunk.

“I’m strongly against drinking and driving. It’s inappropriate, it’s selfish,” says one man, “but I have a completely different perspective of driving high.”

There’s foreboding music as we’re told the three Consequence Strains are actually “warnings disguised as three new strains.” The strains flash on screen and we read the not-so-subtle descriptions attached to each.

Kourtroom Kush is “an emotional joyride that doesn’t end well. This first time offender conjures up feelings of regret, shame and guilt.”

Meanwhile, White Whiplash “has been known to strike the perfect balance of misery and devastation. A similar outcome to someone suffering from the pain of an auto accident injury.” And Slammer Time often induces “feelings of remorse, paranoia, and isolation from the outside world. The same feelings as someone who’s been sentenced to life in prison for killing another driver or pedestrian.”

Roger Ferreria, chief science officer for licensed producer Beleave, then says he wanted people to know the consequences of driving high include “getting caught and being charged with a DUI, getting into an accident and potentially suffering from life changing injuries, or worse, killing another person and spending the rest of your life in prison.”

Adds neuroscientist Steven Laviolette, “I think there’s a public perception that marijuana, because it’s sort of a natural product, that it doesn’t have the same sorts of negative effects associated with alcohol use during driving. That is a dangerous perception.”

The video ends with a car crash reenactment. Beleave did not respond to VICE's request for comment.

Rebecca Haines-Saah, a public health policy expert and professor at the University of Calgary, told VICE the campaign uses “the same old ‘scare tactic’ strategy” as other PSAs.

“I think it is cool they are doing something and trying but we just don't have great evidence that this works,” she said.

There have been conflicting reports of the risks on stoned driving.

A recent investigation by the Denver Post showed the number of drivers involved in fatal crashes in Colorado who tested positive for weed has been on the rise since the drug was legalized in 2012. However, the data doesn’t indicate whether or not drivers were actually high at the time of the crashes, because THC can live in someone’s system for weeks.

Other research has shown drunk driving is far more dangerous than driving stoned.

The Beleave/R.I.D.E. Checks campaign’s other three videos focus on questions like “Can They Tell If I’m High?” “Is Driving High Illegal?” and “What’s The Worse That Could Happen?”

We hear from an OPP officer who talks about (not-yet-approved) roadside saliva tests, and notes “if someone’s driving high and they end up in a twisted ball of metal… it is not worth the risk.”

One of the videos also highlights a 1999 car crash in which five teens were killed. A friend of the victims notes, the driver was “stoned.”

The driver of the crash pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and there was weed in his system, according to police. However, this campaign doesn’t note the fact that he was a teenager. Youth already have the highest risk of traffic injury and death per capita.

The campaign also cites a statistic that says 500,000 Canadians have admitted to driving high in the last year, a problem it claims “will only get worse.”

Haines-Saah challenged that assertion. “People are already driving high. I don't think this will drastically increase.”

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On Tuesday, VICELAND is debuting the second season of HAMILTON'S PHARMACOPEIA, on which host Hamilton Morris travels the world looking for the most potent, unique, and hard-to-find psychoactive drugs known to man. The season premiere takes him to the Sonoran desert, where he manages to track down bufo alvarius: a rare toad whose venom contains 5 MEO DMT, an overwhelmingly powerful strand of the drug he decides to try out himself.

HAMILTON'S PHARMACOPEIA airs Tuesdays at 10 PM on VICELAND. Find out how to tune in here.