If you eat a 500 gram steak, you’re also eating about 7,700 litres of water. Most of that goes into watering the six square metres of corn or grain required to feed each half-kilo of cow. And sure, half a kilo of cow served with salad and fries is a tasty meal, but it’s also a grossly inefficient way of getting protein. And especially when you consider that Planet Earth gains an extra 83 million people every year—all of whom want to eat protein.

But there’s a solution. Food scientists call it entomophagy, which is the practice of eating insects. They say that a bug-heavy diet could provide our swelling population with all the same proteins, fats, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals as traditional livestock, but without the strain on our natural resources.

The United Nations has been instrumental in this push, forcing entomophagy into popular culture with the 2013 paper: Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security. The paper was downloaded 2.4 million times in just 24 hours, and as you may recall, 2013 was a big year for people saying stuff like: “apparently hamburgers in the future will be made from locusts.”

But now, five years later, that still isn’t happening. The world’s ecosystems are in worse shape while another half-billion people have been born. And still, no one’s eating bugs, which makes me wonder: is an insect diet really a solution?

I decided to find out.

Preparation

I started with an online supermarket called Edible Insects, which seems to have cornered the bug market. From there I bought $5 of basil-flavoured grasshoppers, $15 worth of cricket protein powder, $15 in roasted crickets, $6 worth of chapulines, two edible tarantulas at $10 each, $17 of grasshopper salt, $10 worth of mopane worms, and a $5 vial of black ants. It all came to about $170 of edible insects.

Another company called Karma3, which manages biodiversity waste in Melbourne, also graciously supplied me 500 grams of their dry-roasted fly larvae for free. I asked CEO James Sackle how he’d cook the larvae. “I recommend them more in a salad or that sort of thing because they offer crunch,” he said. “Or put them on top of pasta.”

Monday

My first meal taught me that crickets taste like dirt. I drank a cricket powder protein shake, which felt a bit like sand sliding down my throat. After drinking two-mouthfuls of sludge, I threw the smoothie in the sink and went to work on an empty stomach, unsatisfied and hungry.

By lunch I was starving and decided to tackle the bugs head-on. So I inundated a vegetable stir-fry with maggots, sort of as James Sackle had recommended. “They’re crunchy and they kind of taste like caramel popcorn,” he’d assured me. I pushed myself into eating as much as I could, but the tropical fly spawn ruined everything. I'd managed two bites before I burst into tears, alone in the staff room.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d made a horrible mistake.

See, the truth is that I’m afraid of bugs. Deathly afraid. When I was seven I became convinced that if I didn’t cover my face while I slept an earwig or a redback spider would crawl into my ear canal and lay eggs so I slept with a hand over my ear for years. And while don’t do that anymore, I’m now a vegan who is happy to kill spiders. They’re just ugly and hairy. They’re unnatural and I hate them.

And now, I was attempting to derive all my protein needs from insects, for a whole seven days.

Needing help, I contacted Professor Arnold Van Huis, who is the world’s leading expert in entomophagy and co-author on that previously mentioned UN paper. I was honest with Arnold about my fear of bugs, and assured me that most people are more receptive to eating insects when they’re hidden. “There has been quite a number of studies on consumer attitudes and those studies point to a few things like burying the insects in things like bread, noodles, or pastas,” he told me over Skype.

But the challenge, he admitted, was replacing all my vegan protein staples, like tofu and legumes, with bugs. “Don’t make it a snack,” he recommended. “The challenge is to turn it into staple foods.”

Later that night I reheated my lunch and the larvae stir-fry wasn’t terrible. Their hard bodies added a “shallot” texture to the meal, but I could only eat half a bowl because I could see their eyes watching me. I also got paranoid about getting a leg stuck in my teeth and then went to bed feeling like a failure.

Tuesday

I woke up feeling depressed. I had six days to go and I was hungry, but I was also weirdly mad at myself for feeling hungry. I didn’t want to eat, but I’d decided that I could at least get some insects cooked by professionals.

Jethro Canteen is a Melbourne restaurant that serves bugs, and was astounded by how they managed to blend the nutty flavour of crickets with macadamia hummus in my Buddha Bowl. Their food was way better than mine and I had a chat with the co-owner, Billy Zarbos.

Billy told me that they originally served the crickets as a main ingredient in one of their salads but they made it a side because it wasn’t selling. Apparently customers would say they’d come back and try it, but never did. Weirdly, Billy noticed that under-12s took a real shining to the crickets. “We found that kids are really open to it, maybe because bugs haven’t been drummed into their heads as being a bad thing,” he said.

That night I approached dinner in a spirit of competition. If a 12-year-old could eat bugs, why couldn’t I? So I beer-battered some tarantulas, and although the two fist-sized arachnids were the most intimidating of the bug haul, their bodies were leathery and chewy and undeniably gourmet.

As a side note: none of my housemates could watch me eat the tarantulas, which was a little irritating. All of them eat meat on the regular, but they were disgusted by tarantulas. Why?

Wednesday

It’d been 48 hours and I was over it. The days were fused together by the ritual of working myself up to eating a buggy breakfast, then barely eating it, and being angry all day. I wasn’t plucky anymore. I was just furious.

I started my day with another protein smoothie. But this time I had two scoops of Greensect which had spirulina and cinnamon in it. Again, I could only stomach half of it. Inevitably I got angry and wondered about what was stopping me from finishing the food? Why couldn’t I finish a simple goddamn smoothie? I’d been vegan for five years but couldn’t have a simple cricket thick-shake?

Maybe I needed a little hand-holding. So I hassled my boyfriend into eating cricket fritters with me, made from processed vegetables and crickets. And although the burgers were sloppy, watching him eat a critter-quarter-pounder made me feel safe. I managed to eat half the burger before he suddenly felt sick. Then I felt sick too.

Not being able to eat all the food I prepared also upset me on a ethical vegan level. Before the diet I’d always polished off every plate—literally licking bowls and knives in restaurants because I figured it was better digested in my stomach than at a tip. But now I was pouring these $15 smoothies down the drain without a second thought. And as someone who loves animals and callously chastises anyone for eating meat, it made no sense.

Thursday

Noma, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, famously serves lobster mains with live ants. So I tried the next best thing for breakfast: black ants and vegemite smeared on toast. My housemate Brad had a slice and revered the taste, saying: “this is next level woke!" Watching Brad eat the ants gave me a little confidence in the meal.

I ate the whole meal and felt a tiny surge of pride. The diet was no longer about the quality of the bugs, but about how I could get them into my body. And they were finally in there.

I skipped lunch, still full of confidence, and went straight for dinner. But that night I was making chapuline tortillas when I discovered a blonde hair sealed into the packaging. Already revolted, the chapulines—which were a very large and very intimidating species of brown grasshopper—now seemed dangerously unhygienic. So again, everything snowballed and I had another meltdown in the kitchen.

Interestingly, Professor Arnold Van Hius had told me that bugs are an infinitely safer meal than livestock. Pigs are a lot closer to humans, he explained. “If they have pathogens that means their pathogens can be dangerous for humans.” So I reminded myself that grasshoppers are too taxonomically distant to present a pathogen threat and forced down the tortilla. But then I threw it up and continued to cry.

Friday

By this point I was having a really bad time. Some quotes from my food diary read: “I hate everyone,” and “I don’t want anyone to look at me or ask me why I’m eating these fucking things,” and, the worst of them: “I wish I was dead.” I felt suicidal and stupid even though I was aware that it was just a simple lack of food. These manic episodes were just a byproduct of inadequate kilojoule consumption, but knowing that didn’t help.

Traumatised from the night before, I skipped breakfast and rode to work on my bike and my vision began to fade. The ground slipped beneath me. I wasn’t consuming food and my body had gone into starvation mode: I was hallucinating. I kept seeing Studio Ghibli’s translucent clouds hovering above my bike’s handlebars.

That afternoon, I went to visit my doctor. But in the waiting room I put my phone number as my last name, and my boyfriend and my housemates noticed I was pale and frowning a lot. I asked my GP Dr. Lisa Whitmarsh if I would die. She told me I wouldn't, but with a warning. “If you continue this diet for an extended period of time it can cause significant harm.” She said that the harm was related to my weight loss—I’d lost one kilo in four days—and that I was capricious and frustrated because I had no energy.

What I’d learned was that the nutritional value of a bug is irrelevant if you can’t eat it. I’d also discovered it was easier to tolerate starvation than the thought of bugs.

Saturday

I put off lunch, instead opting for something to cheer me up. A novelty scorpion lollipop. The banana-flavouring was nice but I kept looking at the lollipop and wondering how much it hurt the scorpion getting entombed in molten sugar.

Earlier in the week I'd spoken with an expert in the psychology of diet and perceptions of food, American lecturer Dr. Mathew Ruby. He'd said something that had really resounded with me. “As far as we know insects aren’t suffering that much, but if we’re wrong, we’re wrong times how many more lives? How many more insects would have to die to contribute to one kilo of food?”

An argument for the meat industry is that the slaughter of one cow feeds dozens. But if we want to satisfy one person’s hunger with bugs, we have to kill thousands. To me, this feels like an ethical pitfall.

But it was Saturday night and my housemate had a dinner party. While they ate a simple spaghetti I tried to eat my pasta with a larvae-laced tomato sauce. It was isolating eating by myself. One of the lovely guests, Lauren, told me encouragingly that the maggots looked like capers, but I ended up crying. I tried to convince myself that maybe this was what it was like for the first vegan to eat tofu, but one of my housemates reminded me that tofu doesn’t crunch like a dried-out maggot.

Sunday

It was now day six of my seven-day entomophagy trial and I wasn’t any closer to adopting bugs into my diet. And with that realisation, I decided the world has no hope. If I’m reluctant to eat bugs, what’s the likelihood of a blue collar type in a conservative seat adopting entomophagy in front of his mates? None, I thought. No chance at all.

I called my dad, who became a vegan in the 90s, and he reminded me that it was also hard when he abstained from meat products 20 years ago. Veganism was relatively new back then, he told me. “But bugs could be the new vegan. You could really impact people’s attitudes about what they consume and how the things they’re eating are cultivated.”

It was the last day and I owed it to myself to not let the rest of the bugs die in vain. So I made a childhood favourite: banana bug pancakes. I flipped pancakes and thought about the last seven days. My conservative Greek grandparents didn’t understand the diet, and neither did my vegan dad. Actually I wasn’t sure if I’d understood it myself, which I guess is why I hated the pancakes, as per usual.

While scraping them into the bin I remembered what Arnold Van Huis said about bugs being disgusting: “It’s an absolute cultural bias,” he said. “But it’s just a matter of educating the public, and it’s important to make insects favourable for the common people.”

I hadn’t done that at all. But now I was sure that insects weren’t the future of food, I was only too happy to eat something antiquated, environmentally dubious, and delicious. Peanut butter on toast. No bugs.

You can follow Angela Skujins on Instagram and Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

In a darkened and sweltering room in Hackney, dozens of people are dancing to pounding 50s rockabilly. The men are in braces and cravats; the women in sparkling dresses and pork pie hats. Most are supping booze served in flutes. All cheer when a compère – dressed in a bow tie, shirt and hot pants – climbs on stage and introduces a flapper girl group. So far, so East London.

There are, however, perhaps two slight differences between this and your average night out in scenester-land. Firstly, it’s only 2PM. Secondly, all 120 revellers here are at least 60-years-old, and often considerably older. Welcome to The Posh Club, an outrageous weekly cabaret-style party for people who – like the crockery the afternoon tea is served on – are of a certain vintage.

“When I first started performing here,” says Elvis impersonator Conrad Hamilton, “I thought, ‘OAPs, relaxed gig, no problem’. I could not have been more wrong. It’s the only place I’ve ever had knickers thrown at me.” There’s a pause of recollection. “They were big granny’s bloomers,” he says.

The Posh Club, it has been joked, puts the disjointed hip in hipster. There are literally crutches and walking sticks left by the dance floor. They once had to call an ambulance here because a woman in her 80s was having so much fun she forgot to take her daily medication.

“We’re probably the only club event in the world,” says producer Dicky Eaton, “where someone was rushed to hospital because they’d forgotten to take their drugs.” The oldest reveller, he adds, is 108. “Although, we haven’t seen her in a while…” Neither of us decide to dwell on why she might have stopped coming.

In any case, the point is that this event – one of five such regular pensioner shindigs run by London’s legendary alt club promoters, Duckie – is doing something truly unique: reinventing the idea of an older person’s social by refusing to do gentle and well-behaved. Here, live music, champagne and innuendo are the order of the day. All for a fiver a head.

“It’s probably the most rewarding thing I’ve ever been involved with,” says Dicky, who has worked with Duckie since it first threw gay nights at London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1995. “What we’re doing is really an anti-loneliness campaign presented as a club event. A lot of our guests maybe don’t get out as much as they once did and don’t see friends as often. Well, this provides a unique way to do both, while also being part of something that’s vibrant and exciting. Just because you reach a certain age, doesn’t mean you don’t want to have fun anymore. I think society has a habit of forgetting that. A lot of what we, as younger people, do to enjoy ourselves, these guys, they’ve not only seen it and done it all, they invented most of it.”

Everyone here is dressed to impress. Cuban heels, statement jewellery, capes and top hats can all be seen. I speak to 84-year-old Joan Huxtable. Friends call her Pinkie, because of her hair colour. “If a teenager can dye hers,” she demands to know, “why shouldn’t I?”

Today’s event kicks off with afternoon tea silver-served by some 20 volunteers in waistcoats; warms up with a flapper girl performance while the champers is poured; and gets steadily rowdier as things progress. There are no naked ballerina or burlesque performers stripping to nipple tassels (as there have been previously), but when Hamilton – whose hip thrusts are met with insatiable wolf-whistling – says he’s too hot on stage, he gets booed for only removing a tie. On the dance floor, the hip-swaying begins to border on twerking.

“My mum was still dancing until she was 91,” says 74-years-old Mabelyn Dick. “I want to beat that – come back in 17 years and I hope I’ll still be here.” She is wearing face paint. “It’s about staying glamorous,” she tells me.

Another guest drags me outside. Her name is Margareta Warllin and she’s 80-years-old. “It’s too loud to hear yourself think in there,” she says as the door closes on "Twist & Shout". “Isn’t that marvellous? Isn’t that just how it should be?”

The whole thing is the brainchild of Duckie founders Simon Casson and sister Annie Bowden. Their mum moved from Hackney to Crawley seven years ago and, aged 80, found herself feeling lonely. To cheer her up, the two siblings threw a vintage tea party in her front room. They invited a couple of neighbours – both in their 90s – served up sandwiches and scones on specially bought crockery and played 1940s records on an old gramophone.

The three ladies loved it so much, Simon and Annie decided they’d do it again. But this time in a local church hall, and with invites being sent out to older people across the area. They decorated the place, got a few more second-hand records, roped in some friends to act as waiters and, using their connections to London’s alternative nightlife, brought in a couple of turns to provide entertainment. “That went so well,” says Dickie, “that the Posh Club was born.”

It’s been running in Crawley more or less ever since, while also expanding to Hackney, Elephant and Castle, Hastings and Brighton. Tight funding (it’s run as a social enterprise subsidised by grants) means it’s not continuous in all five locations. In Hackney, for instance – where it takes place at St Paul’s Church Hall in Stoke Newington Road – they have two seasons of 10 weeks every year. Nonetheless, it’s estimated more than 10,000 revellers are served by 200 volunteers across the quintet of clubs every 12 months.

“We’d like to open more,” says Dickie. “We get people coming here from other cities while visiting friends or relatives in Hackney, and they always say, ‘Why can’t we have something like this where we live?’ So that’s an ambition. But it would need to be quality, have the right atmosphere, be done with love – because if it doesn’t have those things it’s not The Posh Club.”

One man who would support the expansion is Father Niall Weir, the rector of St Paul’s. Getting into the spirit of things, today, he gets on stage – dog collar and drink – and, during a brief speech which is ultimately about love and companionship, finds himself admitting: “I was a bit of a go-er in my youth.”

“Should a man of the cloth be admitting such things?” I ask him later on.

“Why not? It’s all good fun,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges we face is the isolation of older people. The Posh Club tackles that superbly. It gives its guests everything that is needed for human contentment: connection, laughter, physical activity. The implications it has on improving health and well-being are extraordinary.”

As the lights start to come on and he is dragged away for a final dance, he calls back to me: “If there was a Posh Club in every town in the UK, I’m certain the numbers of elderly on GP waiting lists would go down hugely. It is a wonderful thing.”

@colin__drury

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Logan Browning the actor is probably the perfect person to play Samantha White the activist.

Samantha on one hand moves through her fictional world in Netflix’s Dear White People as a mixed girl with a radio platform, intent on calling out racism and injustice. And Logan Browning moves through her own world as a mixed woman with a television platform, intent on calling out racism and injustice. When Samantha tears up over fictionalized alt-right hate, , Browning feels it all the same.

“If you have any real kind of empathy in your heart as I do as a person that wants this character to be real, it’ll hurt,” she tells me during a phone convo. “It really does.”

Dear White People creator Justin Simien’s film-to-television drama is bringing some of that hurt back with a season two dropping on May 4th. And what began as a satirical tale about black students navigating a predominantly white, Winchester University—post-Donald Trump, alt-right-bullshit incorporated—is now very much the same pressure cooker of racial tensions. Sam’s back in the audio booth, ex. white boyfriend Gabe Mitchell is producing an “Am I Racist?” documentary, and white students are further on the attack against black student unions and the Dear White People dialogue.

In advance of its return, I took the time to chat with Logan Browning about Dear White People, and why Samantha continues to be an inspiration for her own true-to-life forms of activism.

VICE: Congrats on Netflix granting that season two, how does it feel to still be on a show that’s so relevant?
Logan Browning: It's an absolute blessing and so exciting. It's continues to be this chance for me to be even more open minded and learn. I feel like we're actually in the process of filming and getting these scripts, and reading digging into these topics, relationships and really diving into what's behind them, what they're discussing and going through. But it’s really the promotion part of Dear White People that allowed me to examine how I relate to a lot of these topics. Like what do I actually believe, and think, and how am I affected by the stories we're telling.

But how did working on this show affect you? Because as a black journalist, I sometimes get some occasional shit thrown at me. But when this show first came out, the vitriol by racists was on another level.
I mean in life, you’re going to get that negativity anyway, and you don’t go around expecting good to come from that. I feel like when you take the positive route and always know what you’re intentions are going in, it makes dealing with it easy. Our intentions for this show were was good. It’s not like we were going in to hurt anyone, and sure, maybe we were aiming to stir some feelings that may have been subdued, but it was always with good intent. When you’re aware of that, you don’t really worry about the negativity because you already know that none of that stuff is for you. It’s not the space you live in. So when we got bombarded with that, it didn’t even bother me. It just let me know that we were doing the right thing, because antagonizing voices want to tear down something that’s working. It’s just fuel in the knowledge that we were on the right path.

When you talk about fuel though, you’re pretty much playing a character that’s an activist, which I imagine you can draw a lot from in real life. The Alt-Right, Donald Trump, Kanye West, Starbucks. Do the lines ever blur between you and Samantha?
There are similarities between my character and I, simply because we’re aware of what’s happening around us and we speak up about it. I think the difference is in what we’re being bombarded with, because our platforms are similar but different. She has an actual radio show with the purpose of calling things out that aren’t just. I don’t have that, where I proclaim myself a knower of all things having to do with race. Sure, I’ve been blessed to be on a show that tackles those issues, with a platform that asks questions. But I’m no expert in the matter. I just have opinions, experience, and I have the people around me that have their own experiences. The way we maneuver around it all is different. I’m not seeking this out, it’s just the position I’ve been put in.

I asked about the blur, because there’s a moment in episode one when we see her vulnerable side when she comes across a few alt-right commentators. There’s a really believable hurt there. What are you drawing from in those moments?
It’s just a raw emotion that I experience through Sam. Yeah, I can experience something like that, but when I’m playing this character, I’m really committed. I’ll have an awful comment typed up on my phone by an alt-right person from the show said about her family, and father, and it’ll hurt. If you have any real kind of empathy in your heart as I do as a person that wants this character to be real, it’ll hurt. It really does, because I know it’s happening in real life, and it’s sad when someone like Samantha has been so active on campus, and she’s trying so hard that she almost forgets that she’s going to be a target.

When it’s that close to home, you can only do so much to keep your guard up. She’s human, and that’s what this season is all about. You can pretend, but that stuff plants some deep seeds, and you won’t know where any of it is going to end. Because none of us knows if racism itself will ever end. That’s exhausting.

One theme that seems consistent in this new season, is that everyone is dealing with a demon. We’re so used to the image of the strong activist. But from your viewpoint, why are you guys so intent on showing that vulnerability?
Everyone has a platform these days, you just need a couple thousand followers, some pics on Instagram here and there, and you’re good. I’m sure you have a platform, and people who have them with important voices that use them for good are often put into positions where they’re under fire. We have a ton of amazing young, very young activists who are in the public eye right now. And it can be equally forgotten that they’re also human. We put so much pressure on them. Our Generation Z aren’t just the future, they’re the now. It used to be, I believe the children are the future, no, actually the children are going to save the world right now.

It’s actually scary when I think about them. Even all the young activists from the Parkland shooting, or even me, who some would consider young. Sure, I lived a little bit of life, found a school, and I live on my own, but I’m not out here taking tests and falling into high school love while dealing with another young black person being shot. This is a whole new ballgame, and we really really need to stay aware of everyone’s humanity.

Has your view of activism changed as a result of Dear White People ?
In a way. I’m always wondering what else I could be doing. It never feels enough to just use my platform. I’m happy to give a voice to people who may not be heard half as much, but I’m always wondering what else I could be doing since my position almost requires me to do more. And I want to do more. I don’t want to look up and think, wow, I had a moment to really be a part of changing the world and I didn’t live up to it. I’m just trying to figure out how to be a good natured assistant. But I’m also hesitant, because I don’t want to be so outspoken about issues that I may not be well versed in, only to be a detriment to the cause. I’m very cautious about that.

So apart from the character you play on his show, this is largely a responsibility for you?
Absolutely. It's a responsibility, but it's one that I like and want.

One trait about Dear White People I want to comment on, is the fact that it doesn’t pander to me that much. There are things I can’t relate to. There’s also a college bougieness. But when it gets down to the issues of discrimination, there’s a kinship there.
Absolutely. There's a lot of sisterhood going forward as well which is really great in terms of what's going on around us right now with the #metoo movement and women empowerment being such a strong force in our society. Sisterhood is very strong and I'm really excited for people to see that.

Since I got you here, what’s your view on the #metoo movement anyway. As of this convo, Bill Cosby was just convicted.
Yeah, and man, it’s just time for women’s voices to be heard. People need to understand our position and what’s expected of you when you’re a woman. I don’t think men realize that when a woman walks out every single day, there’s an unconscious way that we cater to making some man comfortable. That’s our experience. It’s time for men to be held accountable when they instead make women feel uncomfortable or do things out of line. Why does one genre species get to maneuver the world and not have to worry. It’s just time.

Nicely said. Obviously though, I can’t complete this interview without allowing you to address the critics. Especially those who claimed that too much of the black experience in this show was defined by whiteness. What’s your view on that?
My view is that they should write it (laughs). This is a very specific experience that’s being fictionalized. A Justin Simien creation. This is a young black kid going to a predominantly white institution, so of course the narrative is under the lens of whiteness. That’s where they are! And it’s the whole point. Make a show if you have an issue with it. Write a show about kids going to an HBCU. There’s room for it. But this specific experience exists, it’s real, and it correlates to our society. We live in a world of whiteness and we have to navigate through that. It’s our world and we’re literally giving you a reflection of it. So if you got an issue, turn it outwards and turn it inwards. It’s what’s around you.

So in regular Dear White People Samantha fashion, what do you want your white fans to take away from this new season.
As much as it’s important for us all as a human race to understand what whiteness and blackness, as it relates to history in America, it’s just as important for us to understand that we’re all a part of the human race. The world isn’t just black and white. There are so many other colours, and ethnicities. So for white people specifically, it would be to watch it and somewhat learn about an experience you may not have. Watch it to connect to these characters who are still just people. You can be a Coco, a Lionel, a Troy and be a fan. You don’t have to be black to get any of that.

Follow Noel Ransome on Twitter.

Nova Scotians consume the most cannabis per capita out of all Canadian provinces, according to newly released data from the country's government statistics agency. The Maritime province, best known as the setting of the Trailer Park Boys and kitchen parties, beat out British Columbia by several grams per capita, with an average of 27.1 grams of cannabis used per person last year.

That’s roughly between 27 and 85 joints per year per person, depending on the size of the j.

Canadians overall on average are consuming 21.1 grams per capita annually, according to Statistics Canada.

Ontario, home to the largest city in the country, came in fourth per capita behind Alberta with an average of 21 grams. Nunavut ranked lowest for cannabis consumption per capita.

Residents of BC, which has long been known for its cannabis industry, came in second for use per capita, consuming 24.6 grams on average in 2017. Even though its inhabitants’ personal use may not top the charts, British Columbia produced the most cannabis products last year out of all provinces. BC’s cannabis industry accounted for 36.6 percent of total production in Canada in 2017.

Since cannabis is not yet legal in Canada—though it will be later this year—the government’s statistics agency is releasing “experimental historical data in advance.” The agency cautions that this data comes via infrequently collected surveys that lack some details.

Congratulations to Nova Scotia on their historic victory over BC.

As a rule, I take issue with dismissing women’s magazines as shallow, vapid junk. Society has a habit of turning up its nose at things that are marketed to and enjoyed by women, which, yeah, is kind of an unfair double standard. No one should feel shame while reading Allure or the like. That said, go back far enough and there are some very valid reasons to drag women’s magazines that don’t involve shitting on people for being interested in fashion or makeup or home decor. As I learned over the course of a weekend after reading nothing but women’s mags from the ‘50s, ‘60s and 70s, there are some truly bonkers things buried in their dusty pages. So let's jump in the way-back machine to take a look at how women were told to be women back in the day. And then find your grandmother and give her a nice, firm hug.

Don't Talk About Sex on Dates...Kiss on a First Date... Or Dress to Accentuate Sexual Appeal

The January 1957 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal tackles an issue on every mother’s mind: her teenage daughter’s marriage potential. In an interactive quiz contained within, a woman can find out whether or not her precious angel baby will one day be found suitable for marriage by answering a series of questions about her daughter. Does she go on blind dates, for instance? Does she "pet when she goes steady"? Does she "refuse to go to church regularly"? Well, these, as you may have guessed, are bad signs.

In fact, if you daughter follows ten or more of the practices in the quiz (loses her temper easily with family members, goes to parties...occasionally), the magazine warns "she may find it difficult to make a successful marriage." But it's not all bad news. "On the other hand, if your daughter is too prudish, lacks spontaneity, and is always in a state of conflict, she may also not be able to make a happy marriage. With either extreme, she needs more understanding or guidance than you are giving her now.”

Douche Often

Every issue of Seventeen, Cosmo, and Ladies’ Home Journal I flipped through featured two or more ads for douches. Women's magazine publishers were obsessed with the stuff, apparently. Or addicted to the money the ads brought in. Either way, the message was clear: Vaginas are weird and meant to be treated as problems to be solved. Of course now we know the practice is not recommended by doctors, and can lead to yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis and, in some cases, ovarian and uterine infections.

A Gentle Spring ad, left, from 1978. Demure ad was from 1969.

But beyond the questionable efficacy of the product is the way it was marketed in these periodicals—it was made abundantly clear you couldn't be truly beautiful or keep a husband if you didn't use them. The tagline to one: "The world's costliest perfumes are worthless unless you're sure of your own natural fragrance." Pretty foul, manipulative stuff. But at least women of the day weren't being encouraged to use Lysol for feminine hygiene. Oh wait.

Learn Where to Smoke

According to Peg Bracken, author of the book I Try to Behave Myself, an etiquette guide for “liberated young ladies” sampled in a January 1964 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, once a lady takes up a healthy cig habit, it’s important for her to know when and where it's appropriate to light up. Bracken, quite reasonably, suggests women shouldn't smoke in elevators. But also suggests they not smoke on the street. Such an act, she writes, “gives her a Sadie Thompson or beatnick or washerwoman effect, depending on her age and build.”

Furthermore, Bracken writes, a woman who smokes should carry her own cigarettes. "No man will marry a woman who's always bumming theirs."

Coddle Your Man

An article in the August 1965 issue of Cosmopolitan titled “38 Ways to Coddle a Man” is an early look at the long tradition of such lists in the pages of women's mags. And some of the suggestions here are truly bizarre. Highlights include:

“Just once—don’t wake him in the middle of the night to say you’re feeling lonely and insecure. If he has a tough day ahead, he may need the sleep.”

“Give him your full, rapt, before-marriage attention when he’s telling you what happened at the office.”

“His idea of Nirvana is a vigorous backrub... Instead of investing time with the PTA, take a course in Swedish massage.”

"If you know exactly why his motor is sluggish (his car motor) don't say so."

Earn Money... Like a Man

“The childishly simple truth (not yet recognized by many women) is this: the way to earn a man’s salary is to get a man’s job,” writes Caroline Bird in a February 1974 issue of Cosmopolitan. Bird’s article, “How to Get a Man’s Pay,” is filled with tidbits like this, as well as lots of advice for women looking to climb the corporate ladder without sacrificing their feminine charms.

Are you the type who can handle doing a man's job? Bird suggests asking yourself:

“Can You Keep Going Without a Daily Dose of Praise?”

“Can You Manipulate Circumstances to Your Advantage?”

“Can You Regard Men as People Instead of Sex Objects?”

That last one is indeed real, and about it Bird writes, “Don’t laugh. The working world is full of men, and they are not there to play the mating game. A few women do sleep their way to the very top, but that is not a reliable means of professional mobility.”

Yep, sounds right.

Above All Else, Understand It's Always Your Fault

Back in the 60s, Ladies’ Home Journal had a recurring feature called “CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?” in which a male therapist, William Zehv, weighed in on the woes of average couples everywhere. First, the woman tells her side of the story, followed by the man, and then the good doctor issues his diagnosis and explains to the reader how it all worked out.

In the January 1964 edition of “CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?” 28-year-old Vera discovers her husband Thad has been having an affair. It's also revealed that her husband Thad—literally his name—has flunked out of medical school and has taken a job as an insurance adjuster from the father of his mistress. When finally confronted by Vera, Thad proceeds to 1) Deny everything 2) Refuse to grant her a friendly divorce. 3) Continue to see the other woman and lie to Vera about it.

Zehv excuses Thad’s lies. His shortcomings, after all, a result of an overbearing mother and Thad’s fears that Vera may have undiagnosed epilepsy (???). "Thad's mother brought him up to believe that it was unmanly to admit error, weakness, ignorance in any field," he writes. "She taught him to regard failure as a calamity. So he refused to acknowledge his failure at the university, hiding the truth as he had hidden smaller failures from his mother in boyhood."

He implores the couple to have more sex. "When they frankly discussed their sexual difficulties and accepted a little sound professional advice, the difficulties gradually were eliminated," Zehv writes. "Their lovemaking became mutually enjoyable and more frequent." In the end, all that sex leads to the ultimate quick fix for any troubled marriage: a baby! The couple brings their infant to Zehv's office after six weeks, and the magazine therapist is happy with what he sees. "As a counselor, I was proud, seeing the radiance of their faces as evidence of a marriage that would last."

Nothing left to see here! Great advice as always, Will!

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Netflix just released the trailer for the Duplass brothers' next true-crime docuseries, Evil Genius, about the 2003 "pizza bomber heist," and it looks even crazier than Wild Wild Country.

Back in August of 2003, a pizza delivery man robbed a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a bomb locked around his neck. Police caught the guy only 15 minutes later, but as they arrested him, the delivery guy began frantically warning them that the bomb was going to explode. Cops called in a bomb squad, but before it could arrive, the homemade collar bomb went off, killing the pizza guy while he sat cuffed on the street.

The story just got weirder from there. Cops searched the dead man's car and discovered a letter addressed to the "Bomb Hostage," which mapped out a complicated, Saw-like scavenger hunt that the man would have to do to retrieve three keys that would eventually unlock the collar from his neck. Robbing the bank was just step one. It took investigators years to fully unravel the mystery of the bizarre, failed heist—a mystery that turned out to involve a gang of middle-aged outcasts, double-crosses, and 700 pounds of cheese.

The whole saga is so bonkers that it's almost surprising that it's taken this long for Netflix to give it the true-crime treatment since the streaming service has already cranked out so many true-crime bangers. The streaming services is even developing a follow-up to one of the docs that invented the long-form true crime genre, 2003's The Staircase.

Evil Genius: The True Story of America's Most Diabolical Bank Heist will be a four-part miniseries directed by Barbara Schroeder and, like Wild Wild Country, executive produced by the Duplass brothers. The show's set to hit Netflix on May 11, so get ready to stay inside for an entire weekend and figure out how someone dreamed up that DIY collar bomb plan in the first place and why anyone would ever need that much cheese.

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It seems like everyone on the internet is talking about orbiting. Not astronomy orbiting, but the dating kind. A newly-discovered (or at least named) relative of ghosting. Last year, I wrote about ghosting, so I felt like it only made sense to weigh in on this not-so-shocking development in internet-age dating.

First, a recap: ghosting is when you’re seeing someone and they disappear out of nowhere, stop all contact with you, and essentially *piff* disappear from your life. It can be great for mutual one night flings, but gets to be a little bit troublesome when one person gets ghosted from what they thought was more than a casual hookup. People who aren’t great communicators often opt for ghosting people instead of having a mature and adult conversation about how they’re not interested in continuing seeing you, or go through the months-long saga of letting the budding romance peter out naturally by sending one word “haha” replies to your texts. Ghosters sometimes just want to rip the bandaid off quickly, for everyone’s sake.

Now orbiting, allegedly, is when someone ghosts you, yet still interacts with you on social media, liking your posts, or watching your stories. They won’t reply to your texts, but they’re still ORBITING in the periphery of your life. (I capitalized it there because it’s like when they say the name of the movie in the movie you’re watching.)

I have some issues with orbiting, as a phenomenon. Essentially, an Orbiter is a ghost you can still see. Some people would kill for the ability to be able to see ghosts. Just because someone did a shitty job at ghosting you doesn’t mean they need to get classified into a whole new category. I don’t think it’s as intentional and malicious as it’s being described. I think orbiting is just reading too far into the residual social media connections of a relationship after it’s fizzled out. Just because you can see the Ghost of Hookup’s Past in the corner of your eye doesn’t mean they’re mocking you on purpose. It means they are bad at ghosting. If you get the impression that they aren’t considering your feelings enough to have the decency to ghost you completely, maybe the problem is you.

It takes a certain amount of ego to take orbiting as a personal attack. There is a balance between someone being inconsiderate and someone being oversensitive. It’s no one’s obligation to reply to your texts. It sucks when they don’t, but maybe they have some shit going on and don’t feel like talking to you. Maybe they’re not into you but you posted a cute selfie they double-tapped or watched a story of your dog in the park. Their replying to you is their privilege, but so is their privilege to be able to see what you’re up to, and you can revoke that whenever you want.

Yes, that’s right, there isn’t a complex religious ceremony like an exorcism to rid yourself of lingering ghosts that you feel are haunting you. If being able to see them seeing you is so terrible, just block them. ESPECIALLY if you think they’re actively staying on your radar to fuck with your head. Why would you want to be dating someone who’s being that manipulative anyway? If you’re worried that blocking them will somehow give them the upper hand, or show they’ve won, who cares? Thinking that way just reifies your participation in the petty game you’ve been tricked into playing. But you don’t have to be playing it at all. I love blocking people. If I am in the right mood and someone posts the wrong thing, boom—the perfect storm. There is no shame in prioritizing your mental health, and it’s honestly destructive to be ignorant of how much social media bullshit can affect your mental state. It’s stupid, but it’s reality.

If you’ve already been overthinking your entire situation with this person to the point of speculating that they’re mischievously snickering in a dark room watching your Instagram story, maybe it’s time to hit that block button. Really, it’s the only way out of the rabbit hole you’ve crawled down. If you had preferred they would have just ghosted you entirely, the ball is in your court. Block them and set them free. Free to float around with all the other invisible ghosts you forgot about a week after they ghosted you.

Dating is pretty stupid, and social media is really stupid. Nothing good can come from their combination. Except maybe a storybook romance. But mostly it just means obsessing over things that ultimately don’t matter. Sure, maybe they’ll notice you blocked them and figure out they fucked up. Maybe they’ll even reach out to apologize and clear the air. But most likely they won’t even notice. And you know what, that’s OK. It’s not your problem anymore.

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The bizarre 2004 "killdozer" incident that again proved real life is crazier than any movie is becoming an actual movie, Deadline reports.

If the phrase "killdozer" doesn't immediately ring a bell, here's a quick refresher: Back in 2004, a muffler shop owner named Marvin Heemeyer got so angry about a zoning dispute in his hometown of Granby, Colorado, that he decided to teach the city a lesson—by secretly building a homemade armored bulldozer in his garage and using it to obliterate the town hall and ex-mayor's house on an angry rampage.

Heemeyer's bulldozer, later nicknamed the "killdozer," demolished a total of 13 buildings in Granby until it got stuck in the basement of a department store as he tried to mow through it. He committed suicide inside the vehicle before police could arrest him—the only person to die in the rampage—but it still reportedly took cops 12 hours to break into the killdozer and retrieve his body, since Heemeyer spent the last year and a half reinforcing the thing with layers upon layers of nearly impenetrable steel, concrete, and outfitting it with a few automatic weapons. Yes, all because the guy was pissed about the city's zoning laws.

In the subsequent decade and a half, Heemeyer's destructive drive has become the stuff of legend, with a few even heralding the guy as a folk hero who took on city hall or something, regardless of the fact that he was, as AV Club points out, a crazed, domestic terrorist. Now, it looks like we'll finally get a chance to set the record straight on Heemeyer thanks to Tread, an upcoming documentary about the man and his armored machine.

According to Deadline, the upcoming doc will be directed by Paul Solet and produced by Doug Liman, who produced that Tom Cruise movie Live Die Repeat and one of the Bourne sequels, among others. The doc will recreate some of the scenes from the rampage and also feature interviews with people who knew Heemeyer in the time leading up to the killdozer incident. Heemeyer also recorded almost three hours of audio cassettes spelling out his motives, so it's likely that'll wind up in the doc as well.

"Marvin's story is part wish fulfillment part cautionary tale," Liman said in a statement announcing his attachment to the project. "He left behind a wake of unbelievable destruction and Paul Solet is the perfect director to bring this story to the screen."

With Tread currently in production, it's probably only a matter of time before we get a movie about that teen who stole a bulldozer and went on a cop car-smashing rampage, since the world has a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories that feel like Grand Theft Auto cutscenes come to life.

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In the middle of the afternoon I stop a man walking his dog. He is big and his dog is small. Both seem agitated. His name is Steve Bull.

“I live here, right down there—” He points down a street lined with trees blooming in pink and white flowers, a short walk from Kinder Morgan’s marine terminal in Burnaby, British Columbia. “And (these protests are) too often. Too goddamn often. The sooner these protesters get out of the neighbourhood the better.”

“The oil company has been a great neighbour,” he adds. “All these people are hypocrites—they all drove here. If they wanted to do something differently, stop driving cars—ride a damn horse.”

“That's not true—that's not right,” says another man, this one tall and thin. He says his name is Richard Moran. He also lives in the neighbourhood and is also walking a dog, a large red one trotting along behind him off-leash.

“There are so many inaccuracies in the facts Kinder Morgan presents about this pipeline,” he says.

People—mostly protesters—gather around the two men as they argue, calling either for calm or supportive words for Moran.

“I wish (the protests) happened more often,” Moran says. “I fully support the pipeline protesters.”

“I am totally against them going into the neighbourhood. They've been building down there without Kinder Morgan's permission, which is illegal,” says Bull. “If they're going to protest, they should do it legally.”

The argument becomes heated, and boils over with Bull storming away. Moran stands beneath the branches of a cedar tree, looking puzzled and shaking his head. He calls for his dog before he, too, departs.

Proponents of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain pipeline tout its economic value and the jobs it will create. The official Trans Mountain Pipeline website lists its estimated value to the Canadian economy at $7.4 billion in “project spending” with another $73.5 billion in increased revenue for producers and $46.7 billion in taxes and royalties for Canadian federal and provincial governments over 20 years.

Opponents of the project decry the potential environmental impacts, including the increased danger of spills which might come with the increased tanker traffic the pipeline would bring, as well as the pollution associated with tar sands production. Moreover, the lack of Indigenous consent to the project, which would occupy and use—and, many say, threaten—the traditional lands of multiple First Nations has brought Native land rights to the forefront of the discussion.

It might be said that this argument between these two men—men who are neighbours, who share not only a postal code but drink the same water and get caught in the same rainstorms, men who walk their dogs on the same streets and smile at the same neighbours on their way to work and shop at the same grocery stores—is a microcosm in the macrocosm which is the conflict between First Nations and environmentalists and Kinder Morgan and its pipeline supporters:

Two side with utterly incompatible views, locked in hot combat in which there is little room for compromise and much to lose.

This weekend marked the latest seven of nearly 200 arrests at Kinder Morgan’s marine terminal in Burnaby, as faith leaders of all denominations became the latest group to block the Texas-based oil company’s gates.

A few days after a hallmark Indigenous protest blocked those gates on April 7, the oil giant upped the ante, setting a May 31 deadline to sort out whether or not its Trans Mountain pipeline can actually be built. All told, some 177 protesters were served with notices to appear in court.

Twenty-eight of those protesters appeared Monday, April 16, on charges of criminal contempt, with another 100 some people appearing on April 18, says Kris Hermes. Hermes is a member of the Terminal City Legal Collective, a group which helps social and environmental justice movements by providing legal training and working with lawyers to provide council when needed.

The way in which Kinder Morgan has enforced these charges is troubling, says Hermes, which many “did not expect Kinder Morgan to follow up on at all.” When those arrested were originally served with notices to appear in court, Hermes says they were initially given mid-June appearance dates. Kinder Morgan did not feel this was quick enough for their liking, he says, and asked that the dates be bumped forward for quicker processing. This means that some people may not have time to properly form a defence or acquire a lawyer, which may affect their ability to defend themselves in court, he says.

“(The accused) should be allowed to fight the charges and I think that's the assumption in the courtroom,” says Hermes. “Today was a good example of the judge trying to ram people through this legal process without consideration of whether or not they are adequately prepared.”

“This is a clear intimidation tactic.”

Hermes also points out that some people, especially those with limited financial means, may not be able to afford a lawyer. Although some people in this position have applied for legal aid, that system has a “high threshold to access” which means that many protesters “may be left to fend for themselves.”

Exactly what the consequences for the accused might be if they are convicted is uncertain, but similar cases have lead to fines of “hundreds or thousands of dollars” and jail time, he says.

That the defendants were served and brought into court so quickly is unusual, says Hermes, noting that the usual time from for this sort of thing is around two months. The “cynical nature” of these proceedings “was not lost” on those called before the courts, many of whom public ally questioned the court about the need—and the reasoning—behind this accelerated pace.

“There was a strong showing of resistance,” says Hermes. “People essentially yelled out 'why?' and demanded the court respond.”

“This is an illustration of what's to come and that these trials will happen but they are not going to happen easily.”

Pia Massie, a documentary filmmaker and Scholar in Residence at Emily Carr University was arrested April 12 as part of an artist-lead protest at Burnaby Mountain meant to demonstrate disapproval of the pipeline and their support for First Nations, she says.

Massie says Kinder Morgan's ultimatum is basically Kinder Morgan trying to “bully” the government into getting its way.

“Why should a Texas-based oil company be bullying the Canadian government ... and forcing the project which (the people) have said they don't want anything to do with?” she says.

“It's so clear that the pipeline can't go through,” she says.

“We all live in our separate bubbles, in our Facebook information cycles... it's hard to know the ripple effects of one's own actions... there's a lot of people who see this fight in Vancouver as the cutting edge, as a paradigm shift in environmental and social change,” she says.

Massie describes the arrest process, at least in her case, as “incredibly gentle,” and “almost like a ritual” with “people singing and chanting and supporting you.”

“Even the guys who have to arrest us don't want to be there.”

Massie appeared in court April 19 to answer her charges.

Will George of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation is a large man with a kind face and a determined but strangely gentle way of walking. When he speaks, he is both reassuring and intimidating. George, along with other members of his family, has been spearheading the resistance at Burnaby Mountain, including erecting a Watch House. This traditional cedar longhouse represents both a literal and spiritual watching over of the land. This is the building Bull was referring to when he said the protesters were erecting structures illegally, to which he was opposed.

The Watch House—and all of Burnaby Mountain, including the Kinder Morgan facility itself—is situated on unceded Coast Salish territory.

The original pipeline, which Kinder Morgan wants to twin, was built through Indigenous land without the consent of First Nations living there, says George, something he calls completely unacceptable in the first place.

“We're doing and have always been doing these protests in a peaceful way,” says George.

“I like to keep this as simple as possible. Once Trudeau got elected, we saw where the power really was. I find it very offensive, his not bringing us to the table for this... By not bringing us to the table and no negotiating with us it shows they are scared of our culture.”

“We need to show (the government) that this is a poor investment. They can't be spending time and money on this when there isn't even clean drinking water in some communities (in Canada).”

In the face of this new ultimatum, George says there is really only one option for protesters: hold their ground and turn up the heat on their protests.

“We're going to ramp it up,” he says.”That’s what we’re going to do—ramp it up.”

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A week ago, Toronto suffered its deadliest ever mass attack and guns had nothing to do with it.

Alek Minassian, 25, has been accused of deliberately plowing a rental van into dozens of Torontonians near Yonge and Finch, killing 10 people, and injuring many others. He has been charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder and 13 counts of attempted murder, though he is expected to face additional attempted murder charges.

In the wake of mass murders, many of which are carried out by firearms, we often hear about gun control. When the weapon used is not a gun, but a van or a knife, something different happens—people who are against gun reform point to it as an example that criminals will be criminals, and no amount of regulation will change that. It’s a disingenuous line of logic, for reasons I’ll outline below, but wildly popular no less.

Vehicle attacks have become highly publicized after terrorist attacks like the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, France that left 86 dead in August 2016 and the London Bridge attack last summer that killed seven innocent people and left the three perpetrators dead. According to the University of Maryland’s global terrorism database, vehicles have been used in 122 incidents since 2010, not including car bombs.

In America, where there are more than 350 million guns, and 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, the debate over firearms is the most polarizing. It’s common for the National Rifle Association and its supporters to say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” after every public gun massacre. Following the London Bridge rampage, US President Donald Trump, a vocal supporter of the gun lobby, tweeted, “Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!” Likewise, after the Christmas Market truck attack in Berlin in 2016, right-wing media personality Ann Coulter sarcastically tweeted, “Regardless of one's politics, I think we can all agree that the horrific German truck attack underscores the urgent need for gun control.”

Following the Toronto rampage, Guy Morin, vice president of the Quebec-based gun lobby group Tous contre un registre des armes à feu (which translates to "united against a firearm registry"), tweeted his thoughts on the “uselessness of controlling the object to save a single life” as well as a meme depicting a van sitting on top of a trigger with the caption “while we're trying to record large-scale hunting weapons...” Last December, Morin's organization was panned for wanting to host a pro-gun rally at the memorial site for the victims of 1989 École Polytechnique massacre.

Morin told VICE he believes there’s too much emphasis on controlling “objects” i.e. guns and not enough on detecting the potential perpetrators of murderous acts.

“The van attack demonstrates that even if we had registration, permits and a bunch of stuff like that, it would never prevent a [sick person] from committing the act,” he said.

“If we ban firearms for instance, we see that they’ll use a car. If we ban cars, they’ll find another object. They’ll always change objects, no matter what they will always find a way.”

The Canadian government has already announced plans to tighten up gun control through bill C-71, which includes a permit requirement for transporting some restricted firearms, record-keeping measures for gun sellers, and enhanced background checks.

Morin told VICE he is against the additional transportation permit.

“There is no law or restriction that we could add, that would somehow help with the problems related to firearms.”

A.J. Somerset, the London, Ontario-based author of Arms: the Culture & Credo of the Gun, a book about North American gun culture, told VICE there’s an element of truth to the idea that attackers may find another way of carrying out a rampage if guns aren’t available, but that’s not a justification for lax gun control.

“The argument that if you take away guns, people will just vehicles is like saying if you take away bombs, people will just use guns. Nobody would agree that we should have no controls on explosives,” he said, noting that while restricting guns, such as the AR-15 commonly used in mass shootings in the US, may force some people to adapt, it will also likely prevent some attacks from occurring.

“Throwing obstacles in people’s way will stop them.”

Another example often cited by gun enthusiasts who don’t want to see gun laws change is the 2014 train station massacre in Kunming that left 29 victims dead after four people stabbed them with knives.

Somerset said these types of attacks aren’t all that common, and that it is easier to run away from a knife than a gun.

Kris Brown, co-president of US-based Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told VICE the arguments about how vans and knives can be just as deadly as guns amount to a red herring because the vast majority of mass murders that take place on American soil are carried out with guns.

“It is statistically a much lower risk associated with these kinds of attacks, horrible as they are,” she said. “What really kills people in the United States, in any kind of mass attack, are guns.” She also noted that there isn’t a spike in van and truck attacks in countries with tighter gun control.

The Brady Campaign is advocating for three pieces of gun reform currently before congress—a requirement of private gun sellers to do background checks; the ability for law enforcement or family members temporarily seize firearms from people who pose a risk to themselves or others; and an assault weapons ban which would mean the AR-15 would no longer be sold in the US.

“The AR-15 is modelled after a military grade M16 assault weapon. It’s designed to be able to shot at a long distance, with high-capacity magazine attachments that can spray many, many bullets in rapid fire, at a velocity that’s three times that of a regular pistol and can shoot the front and back through a helmet,” said Brown.

“It’s designed for combat. And it’s being used… in an undeclared war against our own American citizens in schools, at concert halls, at baseball fields, in movie theatres across this country.”

A trauma surgeon who spoke to the New York Times said the exit wounds from a AR-15 bullet can be a foot wide and shatter multiple organs.

The Parkland, Florida school shooting that recently took the lives of 17 people has ratcheted up the gun control debate in the US, mostly because many of the student survivors have been calling out politicians and the NRA head on.

Brown told VICE the kids’ voices have added a sense of urgency to the issue. If congress doesn’t push through the reforms, “we have something called an election in November,” she said.

Airports are a terrifying place to be an animal. They can be barred from flying right before boarding—a hangup that, for hamsters, can be fatal—and even if they manage to clear security, there's a risk that they won't make it through the flight alive. Perhaps sensing that leaving the ground on a large metal tube wasn't worth the risk, a cat traveling through New York's JFK Airport decided to bail on her trip last-minute, escaping from her crate, leaping into the rafters, and sending the cops on a week-long rescue mission to hunt her down.

According to CBS New York, Pepper the cat was about to get dragged onto a flight to China when her owner dropped her crate, and the door to her small prison popped open. The Tabby made a break for it—sprinting out into the hellscape that is JFK, jumping onto a checkout counter, and scrambling up into the rafters, far out of reach of her human pursuers below. Port Authority police scoured the airport, and Pepper's owner ditched her flight to search for the cat—but the cunning beast refused to show herself.

Eventually, Pepper's owner had to give up her hunt for the cat, and—"devastated," according to local ABC affiliate WABC—she caught a flight to China, leaving Pepper behind. Meanwhile, the Port Authority's pursuit escalated into a full blown search-and-rescue operation. Hoping to lure the cat to them, the cops put food in humane traps, scattered in strategic locations all across Terminal 4. But try as they might, even after a few close calls and sightings, the cops couldn't catch Pepper.

Officer Kameel Juman—who once rescued a German Shepard from the edge of the George Washington Bridge—was put in charge of the investigation, the New York Daily News reports, but was close to giving up hope.

"I really thought nothing was working," Juman told CBS New York. "We had one other option."

Juman tracked down Nuan Tang, a former roommate of Pepper's owner, and asked her to come down to the airport for a last-ditch rescue effort. Armed with a bowl of Pepper's favorite food and a clutch piece of tactical knowledge—the cat's Mandarin name, which roughly translates to "little dork"—Tang started calling for her, the Daily News reports. The cat finally crept out of the bowels of JFK, ate a little food, and found herself swept into Tang's arms. Within seconds, she was locked back in her crate.

"I grabbed some duct tape and sealed up the cat carrier," Juman told the Daily News."We were not losing this cat again."

After climbing all over what was presumably the Disneyland of cat towers, Pepper is now living at Tang's place until her owner can fly back from China and bring her home, CBS New York reports. Meanwhile, Gotham's finest can get back to doing some real police work, like trying to teach New Yorkers the difference between a tiger and a raccoon.

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Related: NYC Cops Get Roasted

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On a recent episode of Desus & Mero, the VICELAND hosts discussed a wild video clip of a pit bull latching onto a woman's foot on an MTA train in New York City.

According to local ABC affiliate WABC 7, the canine conflict started because of a disagreement about a subway seat, and, as you can see, it all went downhill from there. Though the pit bull's owner Ruben Roncallo claimed his animal was a service dog and that the woman started the fight, he was charged with reckless endangerment and assault, and later charged on an unrelated harassment charge that also involved his pup.

The whole thing, as Mero has argued before, just goes to show why you maybe shouldn't bring a dog on the subway. Although Desus might have a point—pretty much anything goes nowadays.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

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After dazzling viewers with his hot dog recipes and cheese-melting skills on Queer Eye, it looks like the show's food and wine expert, Antoni Porowski, is heading back into the kitchen to create his very own cookbook, Entertainment Weekly reports.

According to EW, the cookbook will be Porowski's first and feature 100 different recipes aimed at beginner chefs. In a statement, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Rux Martin said that the cookbook will reflect Porowski's ability to "connect instantly with newbies in the kitchen," and the Queer Eye star said he "could not be more thrilled to be writing about the recipes I love and think are essential to any novice home cook, professional, and somewhere in between."

If the cookbook's recipes are anything like what Porowski's taught men to cook on the show, we already have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Perhaps he'll figure out a slightly fancier way to make a PB&J, or nail down the perfect ratio of milk to cereal. Maybe he'll keep it very simple and go over the basics of how to peel a banana. If anything, we can certainly expect a handful of different ways to incorporate avocados into our diets—even if that means peeling one, dousing it in store-bought dressing, and eating it with a spoon.

The cookbook is slated to come out next spring, likely after the show's upcoming second season debuts, where we'll probably get to see some of his new recipes in action. Maybe he'll step up his game next time around, or we could be in for some rousing tutorials on how to cook scrambled eggs, spaghetti, and peel a tangerine.

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Ahh, toilet graffiti, the great saviour for all of us who let our phones die and still need to drop one off in a public washroom.

If there was ever a portal to give us a glimpse into the dark chasm that is the human soul, it’s what we write in secret when we’re pooping (or peeing). With this in mind, it’s no surprise that somebody rose to the challenge and decided to study these historical artifacts.

That person is Scott Kelly, a designer and advertiser in London, who decided to wade deep into the turbulent waters of washroom art. Kelly said that he was struck by the fact that he had never seen what women write on walls and that bathrooms are rather interesting public forum, one similar to the internet.

“You can be completely anonymous and be as destructive or racist as you want,” said Kelly. "I kinda realized that actually while it's a pretty weird and strange topic, it's actually a pretty unique way of looking at how the genders behave in a private way."

Kelly enlisted the help of a female friend to photograph the women's bathroom and they went to work documenting the messages left in 100 bathroom stalls. Kelly said that, as one can imagine, it wasn’t the most fun way of gathering data—it was a method that garnered him many a weird look.

"It was gross, it really was," Kelly said with a laugh. “There were times I would go in there and somebody was using the bathroom and I would just kinda linger until they finished up their business and then I would take the photos."

After photographing all these messages Kelly and his team had more than a 1,000 shit posts to work from. In what he described as a “labour intensive” process, Kelly started pulling data points from his collection of bathroom photos—what is mentioned, if it was aggressive, if there was an illustration, if they mentioned a name, and so on.

Kelly then went about comparing his findings. By doing so he found some interesting tidbits—one found that out of the 40 times the term “love” was invoked men only used it once—women tended to use it to express “affection for people, ideas and even pop culture idols.” Men used it… uh, differently.

“Alex loves pussy,” reads the one time the word appeared in a men’s washroom. VICE could not confirm if it was indeed Alex who wrote this message or just a person familiar with his pussy-loving ways.

Oddly, the study found that the spelling and grammar of the bathroom Picasso's was rather good. There were only 13 spelling mistakes (10 by men) and almost all of them were corrected by some good public washroom Samaritans.

The team of bathroom sleuths also investigated what art was drawn on the walls of washrooms and they found that surprise, surprise, dicks were drawn the most (they were followed by drawings of hearts.) Women also drew dicks, in fact, they drew them more than their own genitalia—using a ball-to-shaft ratio, Kelly actually found female-penned dicks were actually larger than the male drawings. Dicks weren’t number one for women though, that would be drawings of hearts.

That wasn’t the only difference—men referenced politics far more than women and were also more likely to mention religion (in a shitty manner). Men used violent language at a far higher degree than woman (four times) and there were even two death threats. In terms of love notes—something like “I

"I found that a little surprising actually, the only time there was statistical similarity is how often humour was used which was used equally by men and women,” said Kelly. “However when it came to things about the commentary about sex or tone the genders were far apart."

At the end of the day though, maybe we shouldn't focus on the scientific aspect of toilet scrawlings but instead on their artistic merit. When asked if there was one particular shit post that stuck with him after all his research, Kelly—who is assuredly the world’s greatest living expert on toilet graffiti—chuckled and said yes.

"There was one drawing of a penis that kind of had wings and it was playing the trumpet. I thought that was quite novel."

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The most famous scene in Michael Mann’s 1995 cat-and-mouse heist caper, Heat, is neither a heist nor an apprehension, it’s a conversation. Immediately following a tense traffic stop that could have left either, or both of them dead, LAPD lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) sits down for a cup of coffee with Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), the master thief he’s trying to pin.

“You know, we are sitting here, you and I, like a couple of regular fellas,” says Hanna, Pacino ever feline in the evenness with which he bares his claws. “You do what you do, and I do what I gotta do. And now that we've been face to face, if I'm there and I gotta put you away, I won't like it. But I tell you, if it's between you and some poor bastard whose wife you're gonna turn into a widow, brother, you are going down.”

“There is a flipside to that coin,” replies McCauley, De Niro never colder nor more calculating—not as Vito Corleone (The Godfather Part II), Jimmy the Gent (Goodfellas), or Max Cady (Cape Fear). “What if you do got me boxed in and I gotta put you down?” he asks. “‘Cause no matter what, you will not get in my way. We've been face to face, yeah. But I will not hesitate. Not for a second.” Minutes later, he will have disappeared into the night, leaving Hanna and his detectives scratching their heads. Two shots, two cameras, two takes, and no rehearsals, as the master actors later recalled. But in those six minutes a collision happens between two perfect strangers both moving with such force that time itself seems to slow on impact. As viewers, we want them to stay inside the safety of the once-legendary, now-defunct Beverly Hills restaurant, Kate Mantilini, forever. But like it’s a robber’s job to rob and a cop’s job to try and catch them, we know what they must do. The cinematic art reaches its apex in Heat, which is, without a doubt, the absolute-best movie on Netflix right now.

And that’s no small feat, because there are a lot of really good movies on Netflix right now. The entire Godfather trilogy, for instance, Francis Ford Coppola’s crowning achievement. Two of Scorsese’s finest Mafia movies, Goodfellas and Casino, are available for streaming, as is the Oscar-snubbed epic Gangs of New York. And Kubrick? Take your pick between the gritty Full Metal Jacket and debonair Eyes Wide Shut. Even David Fincher’s sado-noir fantasia, Seven, is there for the not-squeamish. But if you have three hours to spare and have yet to settle into Mann’s masterpiece, you’re really not doing anything to improve your overall movie taste.

Heat is a perfect film in the way it delights each one of the senses. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti paints the underside of Los Angeles in the blue-green of opportunity and the marigold of consequence. You can smell the alchemy of caffeine and cocaine in Hanna’s blood when he boils over. It sounds like hope and desperation, the waves of composer Elliot Goldenthal's score shaped by soaring contributions from Moby (including a cover of Joy Division’s “New Dawn Fades"), Dead Can Dance chanteuse Lisa Gerrard, and Passengers, a supergroup comprising no less than U2 and Brian Eno. The metallic taste of adrenaline and fear—of McCauley, his crew, and everyone who cares about them—will creep up the back of your throat and settle there like the overcooked chicken dinner made by Hanna’s wife. The drum of bullets in the shootout scene hits like heartbeats. Not a single moment in Heat is without its sensory evocations, right up until the inevitable end.

It also just happens to have career-best performances from Val Kilmer, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, and Tom Sizemore, and unforgettable appearances by Natalie Portman, Ted Levine, Tone Loc, Jon Voight, Danny Trejo, Hank Azaria, Jeremy Piven, William Fichtner, Wes Studi, Dennis Haysbert, and Henry fucking Rollins. Literally everyone in this movie would go on to have a massive career, but Heat packs it all.

The film hasn’t yet been added to the National Film Registry, where the greatest films in American history are preserved, and its lack of Academy recognition in 1995 was nothing less than a McCauley-level swindle. But looking back, it’s the dignity that Mann gave every line, location, and character, that ranks Heat as one of the greatest films of all-time. “Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner,” McCauley tells Hanna at the restaurant, the first time their characters meet face-to-face, the first time in film history that De Niro and Pacino ever shared a scene. If I ever felt the film police closing in, I’d have a hard time letting go of Heat. And so will you.

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A yellow submarine was found floating near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after it was allegedly taken by seafaring thieves for an underwater joyride, ABC affiliate KGO-TV reports.

The Alameda County Fire Department crew pulled the empty sub out of the water after it was initially reported as a "downed aircraft." The groovy-looking sea craft, similar to the one from the Beatles' 1968 animated movie, was taken to a local marina where it was tagged by the Emeryville Police Department and taken to an Oakland towing yard.

Marine scientist Shanee Stopnitzky then turned up to shed some light on the strange affair. Stopnitzky said she owns the sub and claimed somebody "stole it and took it for a joyride" from Berkeley Marina where it’s normally used by her Community Submersibles Project to offer journeys under the water. She said the sub, known as "fangtooth," can accommodate two people, goes 30 feet below the surface, and only gives 30 minutes of air to its passengers.

"They had turned a handful of the valves on, so they were definitely trying to operate it," Stopnitzky told San Francisco's KPIX 5. "It’s really funny. I really wish there was film evidence of this happening."

Funny, but also costly. According to the Community Submersibles Project’s GoFundMe page, Stopnitzky will now need around $5,000 to get the craft out of its "submarine jail" and carry out all the necessary repairs to fix damage to the hatch, port, hull, and paint job.

"It’s actually a logistical nightmare," Stopnitzky told KPIX 5.

If aquatic bandits were responsible, it’s not clear how far they sailed before abandoning the vessel, since the thing was full of water when the fire department pulled it out. Perhaps they only intended to go on a brief trip around the marina or—in a Beatles-inspired daze—planned to head further out to find the "sea of green."

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He made it! After an entire year, graphic designer Pete Majarich completed his ambitious design project, A Movie Poster a Day, completing exactly 365 unique poster redesigns. An artist of impeccable time management, Majarich finished the final poster, a moody reinterpretation of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, on December 31, 2016.

To wrap up and toast his success in completing the massive effort, Majarich put together a video reel of all his works. Similar to binging a much-hyped TV series or film trilogy, the entire project is enthralling to view as a whole. Majarich demonstrates not only high-caliber discipline but also a keen creative spirit, embracing the project to diversify his practice and develop new artistic styles.

In a comment accompanying the Vimeo video, Majarich says he thinks "he tapped into something everybody loves—movies." Check out a few posters from A Movie Poster a Day below, along with the fast-paced video:

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Cults have always been good at making money. Generally, they do this by forcing their members to hand over huge amounts of cash and all of their worldly possessions. But some groups hustle harder. The FLDS scammed food stamps. The People's Temple sold merch. Heaven's Gate members built websites.

But one cult, the Twelve Tribes (who, it should be noted, rejects the "cult" label) has a relatively simple source of extra income: It owns and operates about 20 restaurants. The eateries, which are known by a number of names, have locations in the US, the UK, Canada, Spain, and Australia. Like their restaurants, the organization itself is spread across the world. Members live communally on farms and eschew a lot of the luxuries of the modern world, like TVs and radio and newspapers. The Twelve Tribes identify as Christian but endorse heinous practices like segregation (they say that multiculturalism is "just not reasonable"), misogyny (they believe that women were "created to complete man"), and some pretty questionable treatment of children (they've been at the center of controversies relating both to corporeal punishment of kids and underage labour).

But I didn't know any of this before I decided to spend a day working remotely from the two Twelve Tribes restaurants closest to my house, both in San Diego County. I decided not to read up on them before visiting so I could experience them through the eyes of an average customer, and open myself up to any indoctrination they might try.

And all I knew about the Twelve Tribes at that point was that they're kind of Amish-y and had maybe been involved in some kind of child labour scandal, and also something about some racism in their past that current members of colour were claiming was no longer an issue. All the details I had in my head were vague, though.

The first restaurant I visited was in a tiny town called Valley Center, about 100 miles south of LA.

It was beautiful in a way I wasn’t aware this part of California could be. To get to the restaurant, I drove for miles down windy canyon roads, past lush green fields, herds of cows, and brooks that were literally babbling. When I reached the restaurant, it, too, was stunning. The Little House on the Prairie as painted by Thomas Kinkade.

The vibe of the place is exactly what would pop into your head if I asked you to picture a cult-owned restaurant: Organic vegetables and long hair and vegan cookies and psychedelic paintings and herbal tea and a selection of homemade skincare products. There was an old-timey stove and lots of leather and reclaimed wood. I overheard two separate customers compare it to the Shire.

The staff were also exactly what you'd expect: beautiful, with long shiny hair and blank, smiley faces. Everything had a very Rajneeshees-before-the-poisoned-salsa-and-drugged-homeless-people look and feel. It was almost too on the nose. Like a Mad TV sketch about a cult.

I ordered a veggie burger, a coffee, and a grapefruit juice. It was all almost unbelievably delicious. The burger was one of the best veggie burgers I’ve ever eaten.

The second restaurant I visited was 15 miles away, in Vista. It was more of the same, except it was bigger, located in a more urban area, and the people working there were communicating with each other using those in-ear walkie talkies like the bad guys in The Matrix.

Both places were pretty busy, with a typical midweek day crowd. Some cops, a couple of meetings, some people who appeared to be part of a church group. Exactly the kind of vibe you'd expect at a relatively popular restaurant not owned by a cult.

Though I'd been expecting to be bombarded by their beliefs, both restaurants were pretty un-brainwashy. There were some free Twelve Tribes pamphlets and newspapers dotted around each location, but they were as easy to ignore as a concert flier or a missing cat poster or any other piece of paper you'd see in a normal cafe.

In the eight hours I spent between the two restaurants, the staff made no unprompted mention of their beliefs.

So desperate was I for a brainwashing, I even tried to instigate it myself at one point. The menu at both restaurants had a note on the front saying, “We serve the fruit of the spirit… Why not ask?” So I asked.

“It’s… uh... because we’re also a community, we don’t just serve food? We serve the spirit?” my server said before hastily retreating.

Some Twelve Tribes literature in a corner at the Vista location

I decided to read some of the free reading materials.

Through them, I learned the goal of Twelve Tribes communities is to recreate the church as it’s described in the Book of Acts. They like love, children, sharing, and togetherness, the literature explained. They don’t like technology, selfishness, drugs, or being labeled a cult (which they described as “something akin to the Salem Witch Trials”).

The pages were dotted with photos of smiling people of a variety of races pushing wheelbarrows full of apples and feeding baby goats and dancing hand-in-hand in nature. In keeping with the 70s hippie cult aesthetic, there were references to the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, and Haight-Ashbury.

Based on what I'd seen there, my overall impression was that this was a pretty chill cult that I would not hesitate to join were I in the market for a cult. Also that their ideology somehow results in incredible veggie burgers.

But when I got home, I googled them.

It seems the pill their restaurants serve is HEAVILY sugared.

Their attitude towards race is a far more extreme than they make it out to be—one tipoff is that “are you racist?” is included in the FAQ section of their website.

“The reality is that blacks function in responsible positions in every aspect of our communities,” reads their answer. “There are black elders, black apostles, black heads of households, black teachers, as well as whites. Race is not, nor has it ever been, an issue in the Twelve Tribes.”

Which is slightly at odds with other sections of the website. Like the part where they explain that they're pro-segregation because “multiculturalism increases murder, crime, and prejudice.” Or the bit where they say that politicians who “rally different races to be one are forerunners of the antichrist.”

Women aren’t viewed much more positively than race-mixing. They are expected to submit to the authority of all male members of the community, and shouldn't “say no to her husband’s physical needs.” Feminism, the Twelve Tribes believe, leads to adultery and homosexuality, and women should stick by their husbands even if they’re being physically abused.

In 2013, a journalist with Germany’s RTL channel went undercover with a Twelve Tribes group in Bavaria. He reported that children were woken at 5 AM for an hour of prayer and forced to spend their days doing farm work. He collected 50 video recordings of children being beaten. “It is normal to be beaten every day,” one former Twelve Tribes member told him.

A journalist who went undercover with a Twelve Tribes group in Winnipeg, Canada, a year later did not see any children being beaten, but reported seeing about 20 rods around the group’s property that he believed were used for hitting children.

“We know that some people consider this aspect of our life controversial,” the group writes of spankingon its site. “But we have seen from experience that discipline keeps a child from becoming mean-spirited and disrespectful of authority.”’

They are, you will not be surprised to hear, not into gays. On the site, they call homosexuality “a great evil” and say it will “lead only to misery and destruction.” They’ve also compared gay people to dogs, writing that “dog” is “the only name that the righteousness of God can call such people, for they have degraded themselves to the lowest of all creatures, dogs.” Which seems unnecessarily mean to both gay people and dogs.

You will most definitely not be surprised to learn they’re opposed to abortion. And probably only slightly surprised to hear that they’re anti-birth control, anti-divorce, and don’t allow their members to have TVs, radios, or newspapers. You might be a little surprised to learn that they’re opposed to children playing, short hair on women, and taking painkillers during childbirth, though.

After spending an entire day in their establishments, I hadn't come across any of this. Not just the stuff about child abuse that the group obviously doesn't want publicized, but the Twelve Tribes' core beliefs on sexuality, women, and minorities. I wondered if perhaps there had been some effort to conceal those beliefs from their customers.

I called the Yellow Deli in Vista and put this to one of their employees, a man who identified himself as Jacob Franks. He told me that while he was aware people found the beliefs of the Twelve Tribes to be objectionable, they were not attempting to conceal them. "I think we live and speak pretty openly about what we believe," he said. "As far as what I have in my heart, and what I’ve understood, is that we love all people. Every human being. Doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done or anything. We would be free to express what we have in our hearts if a customer would come in and ask specific questions on how we feel or what we believe."

He also told me that the money the restaurant makes goes towards funding the Twelve Tribes and their activities.

Which... doesn’t make me feel great. I guess if you want a nice veggie burger and are looking to financially support homophobia, segregation, the hitting of children, and the subjugation of women, then I would highly recommend this place. Everyone else hit up the Cheesecake Factory. Their veggie burger is better than you'd think.

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It’s been over week since a respected ayahuasca shaman was shot dead in a village in Peru and a Canadian tourist was lynched in a suspected retribution killing. Local authorities have since located a gun they say was purchased by Sebastian Woodroffe of British Columbia, in early April—a Taurus .380 semi-automatic pistol, the Guardian reports.

Woodroffe is now the principal suspect in the murder of shaman Olivia Arévalo Lomas, 81, though gunshot residue tests on his body came back negative, according to the Guardian report. His body was found in a makeshift grave about two days after he was killed, which, according to Ucayali region prosecutor Ricardo Jiménez, could have affected such tests.

A cell phone video captured part of the apparent attack on Woodroffe. In it, a man is seen being dragged on the ground with a noose around his neck amidst a crowd of onlookers.

It is currently unclear if ayahuasca had any role in either murders. But, the deaths have led to immense media attention, a spotlight that has extended to the world of ayahuasca tourism.

Woodroffe, 41, spoke of his intentions to become an addictions counselor in a YouTube video years ago. The man also set up a crowdfunding page for his travels to Peru to study plant medicine.

“I feel responsible trying to support this culture and retain some of their treasure in me and my family, and share it with those that wish to learn,” Woodroffe wrote on the page. “I feel this is my path of being a responsible, accountable human being.” He specifically mentioned that he would seek knowledge from the Shipibo, the tribe which Arévalo was part of.

"She's iconic, so this really stirred up a lot in the plant spirit medicine community at large" —Zoe Helene

Zoe Helene, of Amherst, Massachusetts, describes herself as psychedelic feminist. She has been participating in ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru for a decade and is the founder of psychedelic advocacy network Cosmic Sister.

Helene described Arévalo as a “master healer.”

"She's iconic, so this really stirred up a lot in the plant spirit medicine community at large,” Helene said. “We're grieving."

Helene said that foreigners with fantasies of becoming healers are too common, as well as unrealistic at times.

“You don't ever heal your family. You heal yourself,” Helene told VICE. "After years of personal immersion work, maybe, just maybe you will be in a position to begin to guide people to where they can go in Peru to work on healing, empowerment, and self-liberation.”

Helene said you can support other people, but without years and years of training, you are not a healer yourself. “It's not OK to just sort of declare that—and people randomly claiming that title is rampant right now because it's so trendy,” she said.

Chris Kilham, an ethnobotanist and medicine hunter who has traveled the world for over 20 years working with medicinal plants, echoed Helene’s sentiments. “Many people are in fact delusional about becoming healers,” he told VICE. Kilham, who is married to Helene, has drunk ayahuasca with over a thousand people and has been taking part in such ceremonies for over 11 years.

In the wake of the tragedies in April, the principal leader of the tribe Arévalo was part of, Ronald Suárez, has raised the idea of controlling ayahuasca.

“We believe [ayahuasca] is an opportunity for our Indigenous brothers because it generates an income, but after what happened it should be regulated,” he told the Guardian.

The death of Arévalo and Woodroffe has also highlighted tensions in Peru surrounding the treatment of Indigenous people. A local congressman, Carlos Tubino, initially called the villagers “savages” in a tweet about the incidents, later apologizing to the Shipibo people.

According to the Guardian, villagers claimed they brought Woodroffe to police on multiple occasions for strange behaviour before Arévalo’s death.

“He never spoke, he never explained what he was doing here,” Miluska González, a village leader, told the Guardian. “All he would do was open a can of beer and start drinking.”

Woodroffe had lived in Peru for periods of time over the last five years. A friend of his, Yarrow Willard, described the man as “a gentle person” to CBC when news broke about the tragedy. He also said Woodroffe had returned to Canada “troubled” after taking ayahuasca.

According to Helene, what is known as “integration” is a highly important aspect of taking ayahuasca. Without it, she said, some people can be left in a “danger zone.”

“Integration is how you handle coming home and putting these new teachings and realizations into your life: giving yourself time and space to really sort it out,” Helene said.

“Vastly more people have gotten benefits than anything else from ayahuasca" —Chris Kilham

Helene said the integration phase can be helped along by talking with others who have had experiences with ayahuasca. She said she advises people to “wait” when they come home and not to immediately make life-changing decisions, such as quitting a job.

Kilham, who authored The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook - The Essential Guide to Ayahuasca Journeying, said that part of the responsibility people who seek out ayahuasca experiences have is to educate themselves. That education, he said, includes researching reputable healers and centres.

“Vastly more people have gotten benefits than anything else from ayahuasca,” Kilham said. He mentioned that in all the ceremonies he has been to, he has only seen one incident where someone went “nuts.”

Just as the case is with other medicines, not everyone is a candidate for ayahuasca. "Not everyone should do psychedelics,” Helene said.

Another Canadian was involved with an incident that is often referred to in the media as being associated with ayahuasca. In 2015, Joshua Andrew Freeman Stevens of Winnipeg stabbed a British man, Unais Gomes, to death in self-defence during a ceremony in Peru.

“I would really hate to see the media or anybody focus solely on the very, very few and rare negative incidents that have occurred when the greatest majority of people are getting benefits that are very valuable to their lives,” Kilham said.

A judge in Peru has issued arrest warrants for two men, José Ramírez and Nicolás Mori, apparently identified from the blurry cell phone video that circulated of Woodroffe’s lynching.

Helene hopes that some good can come out of the recent tragedies. “If you really want to honour Maestra Olivia's memory, the best thing you can do is give to what mattered to her. Reciprocity (giving back) is a core concept in Amazonian culture."

Helene said ayahuasca healed her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

"In the right set and setting, ayahuasca can be perfectly safe and wonderful, and a life-changing experience,” Helene said. That's not going away because two people were brutally murdered, however tragic and terrible that is.”

Almost immediately after it came out that alleged Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking had self-identified as a "sovereign citizen," Mark Pitcavage started getting phone calls. He's an expert at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism who's been studying the far-right clique for a quarter of a century, mastering the ins-and-outs of the complex conspiracy theory that grounds their beliefs. And while making sense of this specific brand of anti-government ideology requires a lot of specialized knowledge—among other things, learning to decode several unhinged dialects—he doesn't mind the effort. After all, sovereign citizens are his favorite group to study.

"I don't know if I'm supposed to have favourites," Pitcavage clarified in an interview. "But let me just say the sovereign citizen movement is this strange mix of bizarre or even humourous and incredibly scary."

Still, he sometimes struggles in presentations to illustrate telltale signs exhibited by sovereign citizens. That's because, unlike the alt-right, or neo-Nazis, for instance, their's is not a neatly-defined subculture. That is to say, though adherents of sovereign citizen thinking tend to follow specific gurus, they don't often have distinct memes or tattoos that pop in a PowerPoint presentation. Even so, when I called up Pitcavage for an insider's take on how to decode the signals and "tics" exhibited by these people, he offered a few ways to tell if someone you know might have been radicalized by their strange ideology.

VICE: Do people who are kind of flirting with this stuff actually associate with the Don't Tread on Me—a.k.a. Gadsden—flag, or is that a misconception?
Mark Pitcavage: I'm sure some do, but that's more of either a Tea Party thing or a militia movement thing. It's not, like, a specifically sovereign citizen sort of symbol. It's a patriotic symbol that a lot of different types of people—both extremists and not extremists—can use. Sometimes, you have people on one of those websites where you can put anything on a cap or a T-shirt—they'll put something, with like [the part of the Uniform Commercial Code sovereigns believe preserves their common law rights] UCC 1-207 or the sovereign citizen flag on one of those.

So there is a distinct flag associated with them?
The sovereign citizen flag is a variation of the American flag in which the stripes are vertical, not horizontal. And the stars are blue-on-white instead of white-on-blue. It's actually derived from a flag that allegedly used to fly over customs houses for a brief period of time, like in the 1820s. But some sovereign citizen decided it was actually the real flag of the United States. And so this is something that they came up with relatively recently—within the past ten years or so. Now it's become pretty common in the sovereign citizen movement, and sometimes it's called "the flag of peace" or, sometimes, a "Title Four flag."

The easiest way to ID sovereign citizens is through some of their written "tics." Can you talk me through some of them?
So the main thing is in the 1990s it became commonly accepted among sovereign citizens that people were doing their name wrong. And the way you should do your name was to separate your first and middle names from your last name with some sort of punctuation: a semicolon, a comma or a colon. And the reason that usually was given was that your first or middle names were your so-called Christian appellation, whereas your last name was a government-given name. Also, many people will put a dash between their first and middle names. I came across one sovereign citizen who put multiple commas between his middle name and his last name. I guess because he was a super sovereign citizen and the more commas you put, the more sovereign you are.

The office of sovereign citizen Lee Rice of Idaho. Image courtesy of Mark Pitcavage

Where did this language come from, and how many different dialects, or syntaxes, are there?
Most seem to have emerged in the early to mid-1990s. I was never able to identify a patient zero who made it accepted wisdom that, in the sovereign citizen movement, you needed to write your name differently and dress differently. They all go off and do their own thing, so they've all created a million different varieties of how to write their name or punctuate their name or how to do addresses.

Their goal is to have their own sort of variations or improvisations or additions to the genre, but [also] to know they'll be similar. They tend to do variations on a theme that's already been established, sometimes years ago. Every once in a while, someone will come up with a totally new thing to do and then others will develop variations on that.

Is there a commonality all these different syntaxes or tics share?
First of all, a lot of the written tics of sovereign citizens are designed in some way to either explain or establish their status. Or to prevent them from unknowingly or unwittingly entering into a contract with the illegitimate government and thus enslaving themselves to it. So for example, sovereign citizens believe that if you sign something or if you get a fishing permit or a hunting permit or a driver's license or something like this, that you are actually entering into a contract with the illegitimate government. They give you some sort of privilege and in turn you surrender your sovereignty and once you do that you have to follow all of the laws, rules, regulations, taxes, court orders—you know, everything.

Some sovereigns sign their names next to their fingerprint in either red ink or blood. Image obtained by Illinois Secretary of State Dept. of Police

What a lot of them will do is they will put "UCC 1-207" or "UCC 1-308" or "all rights reserved" by their signatures, which they think will thus immunize them from entering into a contract with the illegitimate government. Similarly, they do funny things with ZIP codes, because many sovereign citizens believe they're a contract with the federal government. Some hardcore ones won't use ZIP codes at all, but a lot of them still want their mail delivered. So what they'll do is use ZIP codes but change them in some way, by putting brackets or parentheses around them or using the word "near." Instead of being in ZIP code 12345, it's "near" ZIP Code 12345. Or they'll refer to it as a "postal zone" or a "postal code" rather than a ZIP Code. And they believe if you do these sorts of things that that somehow makes it not a contract with the illegitimate government. It's magical thinking. They're sort-of like totems in written form.

It seems like there's different degrees of extremism here. What's on the furthest end of the spectrum—making one's own license plate?
Not necessarily. The most hardcore thing would be refusing to use a license plate at all. Some license plates are designed to pass, so they may create a fake Indian tribe or a fake British colony and create very realistic-looking license plates for those and then put them on their vehicle, hoping that law enforcement won't notice. And this way they don't have to use the illegitimate license plates that make them a slave to the illegitimate government.

Other sovereign plates are not designed to pass—they are designed to protest. They're very in-your-face and they look radically different from any other license plates and virtually shout off the rooftops that they are sovereign plates. So in that case someone who's doing it might be quite hardcore.

Any other telltale visual clues?
Some sovereign citizens believe that when you do your signature you also have to put your thumbprint or your fingerprint next to it. And some sovereign citizens furthermore say that when you do your signature or you do your thumbprint it needs to be in red ink. Some say it needs to be in blue ink. And then there are very few, and I only encountered this a couple of times, but I have encountered this, who will do a fingerprint in blood.

Example of a sovereign citizen No Trespassing sign. Image courtesy of Mark Pitcavage

A lot of sovereign citizens will also have No Trespassing signs on their property. But they're not regular No Trespassing signs. When you get up close and you read the small print you discover that they're primarily directed at government officials. I see some that make exceptions for mailmen because I guess they still want to get their Readers Digest. So even the residences of some sovereign citizens will have things up that can be a clue for someone who knows what to look for.

I'm also interested if there are Facebook groups that would be kind of red flags that, if you saw your friends following or sharing content from them, might indicate sovereign citizenry?
There's one called Right to Travel. There's another one called No License Plates Required. And you know, if you did a group search on Facebook on sovereign, on maybe commercial law or constitutional law, you might find something [like] USA the Republic, maybe. Now, a lot of these Facebook groups are really tiny, maybe only 12 people or something. If you search enough, you'll find the substantial ones. There are particular ones where someone may post bogus plates and other things like that, so I check them regularly to add to my collection of images.

A homemade sovereign license plate. Image courtesy of Mark Pitcavage

Some of the things sovereign citizens say or do may seem ridiculous or funny. And nowadays, watching sovereign-citizen traffic-stop videos is like, a thing. People post them to Facebook and to YouTube and talk about them on Reddit and so forth and laugh at the sovereign citizens. You know—as their windows get broken and they get Tased after they try to use sovereign-citizen arguments. And yet at the same time, some sovereign citizens have turned themselves into cold-blooded killers, gunning innocent people down for no reason whatsoever. And so they sort-of take you on this rollercoaster between the strange and the fascinating and then the scary-as-hell.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.