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We Caught Up with the Guy Who Has Survived on Pizza Alone for the Last 25 Years

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We Caught Up with the Guy Who Has Survived on Pizza Alone for the Last 25 Years

VICE News: Nowhere Safe in Gaza: Rockets and Revenge - Part 2

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The death toll in Gaza continues to grow as both the Israeli military and Palestinian militants show no signs of backing down. VICE News spent a few days in Gaza City surveying the damage and seeing how local residents were coping. 

Weediquette: T. Kid's Big Haircut

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Photos by the author

Despite society’s increasingly progressive mindset, regular people continue to freak out over weird haircuts. Since my teen years, I’ve experimented with a variety of weird haircuts, discovering that unconventional hairstyles attract negative attention from strangers, police, security personnel, and pretty much everyone else who doesn’t have a weird haircut. Although I learned this early in life, I continued to rock weird hair until very recently. For years I had hair down to my elbows, which I often kept in a bun on the center of my head—I like to think that I looked like I was balancing a ball. Now the ball is gone, and though I miss it, it’s nice to finally have strangers look at me like I’m a normal person. I had forgotten what this is like. I’ve rocked a ridiculous haircut for most of my life.

In eighth grade, I discovered hair bleach and went nuts, bleaching a different pattern onto my fresh buzz cut every week like Dennis Rodman. I quickly learned that weird hair attracts negative attention. Every cop that hassled my friends and me made a point to say something about my hair—a couple of times, it’s what made them stop us in the first place. After I got into trouble one too many times, I dyed my hair black and left it that way until my hair's natural color grew back. When I briefly gave my hair a break, I started experimenting with facial hair. If you keep a beard neat and trimmed, no one will look at you sideways, but if you let that thing go wild, it’s easy to start looking like a maniac. But people didn’t give me weird looks during my beard phase until I stopped cutting my hair. This time cops and old white people weren't the only people giving me dirty looks—everyone looked at me. 

People veered their kids away from me when I walked past them on the sidewalk. It didn’t bother me much, so I let my hair continue to grow. One Thanksgiving, my mom told me she hated my Neanderthal look, so I lost the beard. For the next few years, beards came and went, but my hair kept growing, quickly becoming difficult to mange—I had to brush my locks regularly and find the right kind of shampoo, which I didn’t even know existed.

I did what I needed for my hair because it was more a botany project than anything else. I wanted to see how long I could grow my hair before I was over it. For the first couple of years, I never even had a trim. I looked like I had a two-foot mop on my head, so I started keeping it in a bun. Around this time I started writing Weediquette. As my career started shifting towards weed journalism, my hair made me look like Ron Slater from Dazed and Confused—the stereotype of a pothead.  

Coincidentally, this was also the time that people started telling me I look like Chicago Bulls forward-center Joakim Noah. Hundreds of commenters made the comparison, many calling me “the Stoner Joakim Noah.” I would like to refute that by reminding everyone that Joakim Noah is the stoner Joakim Noah

Anyways, one day I shaved off the sides and back to make my long hair more manageable. The result was the most ridiculous haircut I’ve ever had: a monkish bun that I rocked for nearly a year. In that time, strangers laughed directly at my hair and facetiously told me it looked great. One guy even said, “Dude looks like he has a bird on his head,” when I walked past him in the park. 

I retained the haircut when I started editing a clothing company’s website. Using my employee discount, I collected of bunch of clothes, including floral-patterned pants and crewneck sweatshirts decorated with prints of cartoons smoking weed. The job made me pick clothes like a colorblind nine-year-old, but the garish outfits went well with my haircut. If you scanned me from head to toe, you would get to my haircut and be like, “Oh, that explains the rest of the outfit.” I thoroughly enjoyed that era of my life, but it had to end because it’s 90 degrees in New York.

I couldn’t handle my mop of hair any more, so on a recent Sunday morning, I decided to chop the bun off.

I had been awake the entire weekend for no good reason, and in my sleep-deprived state, I possessed enough gusto to finally get a haircut. I went to a local barber who unceremoniously buzzed off my locks while I giggled in the chair. As soon as I arrived home, I basked in the pleasure of showering with short hair. When I went to get dressed, I realized that my entire wardrobe only works with my previous haircut. With normal hair and a trim beard, I look like an insane person when I wear floral-patterned pants and weed sweatshirts. For the foreseeable future, I will face this problem—I’m definitely not going to discard all this wacky shit and get new clothes. No, I’m going to rock weird outfits in public and continue to look like a 30-year-old who mugged a high school kid for his clothes. Feel free to laugh at me if you see me on the street. 

Follow T. Kid on Twitter

Flawless: Coming to Terms with the On the Run Tour's Painful Perfection

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Flawless: Coming to Terms with the On the Run Tour's Painful Perfection

The State of Black Subcultures in 21st Century America

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Photos by Maurene Cooper

Earlier this year, DJ and party organizer Venus X announced she was ending her long-running club night, GHE20 GOTH1K, partly because mainstream public figures like Rihanna had manipulated and discredited her creation. This wasn’t the first time someone accused Rihanna of stealing a subculture. Two years earlier, she appropriated the seapunk microculture, but her dedication to seapunk, which really only included an aqua-celestial backdrop during a performance of “Diamonds” on Saturday Night Live, was as short-lived as the aesthetic movement’s lifespan. GHE20 GOTH1K proved to be a completely different—and long lasting—subcultural source for the singer. Once Rihanna embraced the subculture, she kept embracing it.

Long before Rihanna began adopting the GHE20 GOTH1K aesthetic in her numerous, and fabulous, Instagram photos, GHE20 GOTH1K existed as a life force in New York City nightlife. Most importantly, it was a sustainable and physical night existing in an actual nightclub. Hundreds, if not thousands, of young people—especially young people of color—embraced the club night's aesthetic. 

In an interview with The FADER, Venus X described GHE20 GOTH1K as encompassing art, fashion, music, and nightlife. Aesthetically, she noted, “It’s a combination of what people consider to be very white and very black. There are staples: North Face jackets, Timberlands. And then staples of the traditional punk and goth.” It was a mix—or rather, a birthing—of something born out of her two distinct interests: the ghetto of where she grew up and the aesthetics of goth. “GHE20 GOTH1K is extremely political. It’s not about expensive clothes,” she told The Fader in the same interview. “GHE20 GOTH1K was one of the first places that successfully created nightlife around music that was just on the internet, like alternative rap music from gay people and a lot of different club and bass music that didn’t have a home in mainstream, house, or disco.”

The subculture was more than something of their own, something that helped define their multifaceted interests and identity as young people of color—it was a response to mainstream culture's ideas. Like GHE20 GOTH1K, hood futurism, another subculture, was also a response to the images and sounds of the mainstream. Hip-hop and R&B musicians developed hood futurism in the 90s. In a Tumblr post by the creator of a hoodfuturism.tumblr.com, a popular blog documenting the style, the author writes that Afro Futurism inspired hood futurism, which “is centered around contemporary black artistry combined with themes like sci-fi, science, and other components that have futuristic elements.” Think spaceship-like rooms with sleek lines and coppery bodysuits that feel at home in our predictions of the future. The most definitive image of this is Michael and Janet Jackson’s “Scream” video, which literally takes place on a hospitable, livable space ship.

Although hood futurism is more driven by aesthetics, its sound—a clinking, clattery array of sounds and samples that shouldn’t make sense, sounds that seem as contemporary now as they did ten years ago—can be traced back to its biggest purveyors: Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, and Timbaland. The aesthetic felt like the first visual response to hip-hop’s mainstream imagery and aesthetics. If hip-hop was the mainstream and the storytelling of “right now” in the 90s, hood futurism was the musical landscape of a future that was—cheesy as it sounds—out of this world. Today, both small rappers (Azealia Banks) and large artists (Nicki Minaj) embrace hood futurism, proving the subculture’s relevancy as a viable alternative to the mainstream.

Hood futurism and ghetto goth’s names connect them to black culture. Linguistically, these terms are most frequently shared through the prism of rap and hip-hop, if we can embrace the terms hood and ghetto as terms of places—and not just as derogatory terms employed in times of insults.

In a series of essays for Vulture about the current state of hip-hop, The Roots’ Questlove broke down the mainstreaming and dominance of hip-hop culture: “Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere,” he writes. “What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant.”

Stealing and commodifying from these subcultural movements feels especially wrong. If these are movements By Outsiders and For Outsiders (or by The Other and for the Other), taking them from people of color is cruel. In some ways, despite an artist’s race, mainstream success begins to deteriorate racial identity. A celebrity can transcend the limitations and community inherent in racial and cultural identity. For many people, to live within the experience of race or a minority status is to actively and automatically embrace those who are like us. To appropriate without citing a source is a slap in the face to traditional solidarity. A black or brown celebrity becomes nothing more than another cog in the machine of capitalism, another person buying and selling back to us the things we created in the first place.

In her book Implications and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film, conceptual entrepreneur Martine Syms writes about the visuals and visibility of blacks in images. In the last chapter, Syms asks, “Why not subvert the charge of being Black into an identity that we own and explore the possibilities of such a platform?” And soon after she writes, “For these possibilities to exist, the Black viewer/spectator must sit comfortably with the tension of “bad” portrayals, “unrealistic” experiences, and/or a non-diasporic stylistic approach. Black audiences are also complicit in constructing race... because the viewer/spectator is instructed to read the images and situate them in reality.”

Although Syms speaks about blacks in films, this theory translates to many aspects of black culture—in particular, black identity. Creators and members of subcultures have wrestled with the experiences of the limiting mainstream and have created something that speaks to their individual interests and needs. Syms explains how she too has embarked on this cultural journey on an individual basis: “As a child nerd, a teenage punk, an art student, and beyond, I’ve always had eclectic interests. Somehow my parents created the perfect symbiosis between forcing me to be a token—introducing me to disparate sounds, styles, and conventions—and rooting me in Blackness,” she says. “I learned who “we” are, what “we” eat, how “we” talk, but I was encouraged to renegotiate that construction to better fit me.”

The ubiquitousness of hood futurism as a viable alternative to the mainstream, and the end of GHE20 GOTH1K, reminds me of other subculture movements. On my Tumblr dashboard, I’m often treated to a number of surprising yet enjoyable images and ideas: black people shrouded in flowers on Black with Flowers, young black women riding bicycles on Bicycles and Melanin, and the sort of raw vulnerability and pursuit of connections otherwise known as Black Girls Feels. All offer alternatives to many ideas of blackness and black culture; they are at once feminine and joyful. Although they don’t specifically talk about responding to the stereotypes and limitations of hip-hop culture, I see them as pursuits of alternatives and multiples. Maybe all of this can exist together. As one subculture ends, people give birth to other ideas and images—waiting for new voices to embrace them and a celebrity to copy their look at an award show.

Follow Brittany Julious on Twitter

VICE Profiles: Matthew Lesko's Life Lessons

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VICE meets Matthew Lesko, the self-proclaimed federal grant researcher and infomercial personality who made it big in his "question mark" suit. He has written more than 20 books telling people how to get money from the US government.

Protesters in London Are Pissed Off About America's Proposed Trade Agreement with the EU

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Protesters at Saturday's anti-TTIP demonstration in central London

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade agreement being negotiated between America and Europe. Described as “a game changer” by the European Commissioner for Trade, it’s been sold on the familiar premise of economic growth and job creation, promising an extra $167 billion a year to the EU and $134 billion a year to the US.

But amid the assurances of all that lovely extra cash, the agreement presents a number of issues that, weirdly, the business lobbyists and multinational corporations behind the deal aren’t so excited to promote. For one, the TTIP will produce “prolonged and substantial” disruption to European workers, as corporations will be free to exploit the labor market in America, where unions are communist terror cells and labor standards are an attack on freedom.

The TTIP’s real aim is to reduce “non-tariff” barriers to trade, otherwise known as European laws. In order to boost trade, markets will be further deregulated and standards will be “harmonized”. This could result in GMOs appearing in European supermarkets, the eradication of data privacy laws and the lowering of environmental standards, as well as whatever’s contained in the secret parts of the deal, which won’t be brought to light until they’re agreed upon by the European Commission and US officials.

The most worrying element of the TTIP, however, is the concept of investor state dispute settlements. This will allow corporations to sue countries for creating laws that aren’t beneficial to businesses—and not only for loss of profits, but for loss of future profits. That might sound like the kind of hypothetical horror story you’d see posted on the Infowars forum, but this kind of thing is already happening the world over thanks to older free trade agreements, such as the much criticized North American Free Trade Agreement.

A company called Lone Pine Resources, for example, is suing the Canadian government for $250 million after fracking was temporarily prohibited in Quebec; tobacco giant Philip Morris is suing Australia for making plain packaging mandatory on cigarettes; and when Ecuador tried to re-nationalized their oil industry, Occidental Petroleum Corporation sued them and won $1.7 billion, more than the company’s net income for any of the three previous quarters.

And these aren’t cherry-picked cases; corporations are becoming increasingly willing to seek investor state dispute settlements. In 2012—the last year with available data—514 cases were filed, the highest number on record. Not only do these settlements cost governments huge amounts of money, they also have a detrimental effect on legislation, as countries are forced to consider how new laws will impact corporations rather than their own citizens.

All of these causes for concern are compounded by the secretive nature of the discussions. So far most of the significant information about the negotiations has come from leaks, and the EU’s chief negotiator has confirmed that all documents pertaining to the discussions will be out of the public’s reach for 30 years.

On Saturday thousands took to the streets across the UK in protest against the TTIP. During the march speakers described the TTIP as “the fourth wave of attacks on post-war benefits”, which would affect “every aspect of our lives”. Reflecting the far-reaching implications of the TTIP, the assembled crowd was a mix of campaign groups, unions and activists. Here’s a taste of what they had to say.

Melinda St Louis is an American activist and member of the consumer rights group Public Citizen

How are people reacting to TTIP in America?
Melinda St Louis: TTIP is a bigger issue in America because the NAFTA agreement devastated the middle class of the United States, and people recognize that TTIP is a very similar thing. There’s a large coalition of people going under the banner of the Citizen’s Trade Campaign, which includes family farmers, trade unions, faith groups, etc, who have been mobilizing to educate people on the dangers of this failed neoliberal trade model.

What brought you over to the UK?
I came over to England to give a speaking tour in order to stress that this issue isn’t America vs the EU; this is people around the globe standing up against the largest companies in the world.

Nick Dearden is the press coordinator for the World Development Movement, the global justice campaign group that organized the protest.

VICE: How would you describe TTIP?
Nick Dearden:
TTIP is part of a massive trade offensive that's going to hand over massive amounts of power to corporations to rule over our society. It's the worst corporate offensive we’ve seen for 20 years. Four months ago nobody had heard of the agreement; now, we’ve reached the stage where people from across the political spectrum are getting involved. It chimes with a feeling people have that our democracy is being taken away from us.

Do you think those involved are starting to notice the resistance?
Pro-TTIP groups are definitely feeling the heat. I think that’s partly why they came out yesterday and said the National Health Service would be exempted—not that we believe them. They're starting to feel that they need to justify themselves now.

Where do you go from here?
I really see this as the beginning of the next big push against corporate power, and I hope by beating TTIP we can give back activists the idea that they can win. However, there’s still so much work to be done because there are agreements lined up behind TTIP called the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trade In Services Agreement.

Thanks, Nick.

Paul Murphy is a council worker and a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party

What brought you out here today?
This agreement should be a huge deal for everyone. It would make re-nationalizing industries like the railways impossible and decimate our NHS. Can you imagine having our country sued for loss of profits? The thought of it makes me sick.

What more needs to be done?
We only have a very short space of time to raise awareness—in six months it will be too late. We need to force politicians to take notice. It’s shocking that Labor are still keeping quiet about TTIP, it should be the perfect issue for them.

What do you make of today’s protests?
It’s encouraging to see so many people out here today, but even if we beat TTIP you know the fat cats are going to keep coming back for more, especially when we’re in such a protracted recession. I think our side needs to do a lot more to stop them in the long run.

Saoirse Fitzpatrick is the coordinator of the Students Stop AIDS Campaign.

Why is your group involved in the protest today?
TTIP will give big pharmaceutical companies more power to charge us more money for drugs. At the moment the NHS survives off generic drugs, which saves us around $34 billion a year. But TTIP will give companies the ability to extend patents, meaning generic forms of drugs can’t be produced.

Not being able to afford healthcare in America is the number one cause of bankruptcy, and we don’t want that to be the case here. Our main concern, though, is that TTIP will set the global standard for all future free trade agreements. This means countries in the global south, which already have limited health budgets, will have to abide by these strict patenting rules if they want to trade. For most people living in developing countries the price of healthcare won’t be an issue of bankruptcy, it will be an issue of life and death.

Mark Thomas is a comedian, journalist and activist

What do you make of the media coverage of this trade agreement?
What media coverage? That’s the whole problem. There's been no media coverage worth anything on TTIP. Most major newspapers are offshore in some form or another, and so they are the corporations who seek to benefit. They clearly have no interest in promoting democracy.

Do you think the complexity of the issues might also be a factor?
If Nigel Farage can go around talking about sovereignty and win over masses of voters, we can get the message out. This isn’t complicated, it’s simple—democracy is the most important thing and TTIP puts it in danger.

Jean Lambert is a member of the Green Party and has been a Member of the European Parliament since 1999

How do attitudes towards TTIP differ across political groups in Europe?
The four main political groups in the European Parliament aren’t willing to establish their positions at the start of the new parliament, and I think that’s because there are one or two parties that might be wobbling. They are really concerned about the way public opinion is moving in certain countries, in particular more socialist countries. A lot of countries are also concerned about transparency and what this deal is really going to mean for their public services. I think there’s going to be a lot more internal discussion going on because of the movements all over the world.

Thanks, Jean.

Follow Alex Horne on Twitter here and Lily Rose Thomas here.


Sarah Shoenfeld Makes Art by Dropping Drugs onto Film Negatives

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That big photo in the middle is a sample of speed. It was mixed with water and then dropped from a pipette onto an exposed film negative. It was then allowed to react with the light sensitive silver halide particles to create a visual impression of its own chemical make-up. These almost photos were made by the Berlin artist Sarah Schoenfeld, who says she's been interested in depicting the undepictable since she was a child. “First I wanted to be a musician,” she told me over the phone. “But then I became more interested in how things look. Now I'm always looking for ways to make the internal, visual.”

These are lofty words, but then how do you render a narcotic event visually, without resorting to tacky drawings? Looking at it this way, her drug series All You Can Feel, nails the line between artistic depiction and scientific analysis, while somehow capturing something of the drug's psychological effect. So I called Sarah up to say well done, and ask how she got the feelings so right.

VICE: Hi Sarah, that image of speed somehow looks the way speed feels. How did you do that?
Sarah Shoenfeld: Well, I didn't think that when I first produced the work, but after I published the book (also called All You Can Feel) a lot of people said yes, this is how it feels. And what was really interesting is that I got a call from a drug rehabilitation center and they said that they had run their own little experiment. Without explaining the images, they had shown the book to their patients and asked them to pick a favorite. Every single one of them chose their drug of dependence, with 100 percent accuracy. Even the secretary who only ever drank coffee chose caffeine.


Caffeine

Wow. So how do you explain that?

Well if I had to say, maybe it's that our understanding of reality is already shaped by our technology. We have these feelings, but don't realize that they're created by the things around us. So we think our feelings are our own, but here we recognize where those feelings came from. But I don't know. I also like the idea that it's not explainable.

Do you get asked to explain that a lot? Your answer felt suspiciously accurate.
No, most media people just ask where I got the drugs. And it's like come on. I live in Berlin, I just buy them. Do we need to talk about it? Because you know, LSD was legal until everyone started talking about it.

Do you take drugs yourself?
Yeah sure, but something I also learned through this is that you don't need to. We have these abilities and chemicals within us. It's just consumerism that says you need to buy something to feel this way.

Is that an advertisement for meditation?
Yes, but then I also just like to work. I think working can create a high.

But have you taken drugs since you did this project?
Sure. Yes.


Sarah's exhibition in Berlin

Do you have a favorite image?
I don't have a favorite image. In the beginning it was ketamine because the effect wasn't predictable at all. It's like this 80s airbrush flower, with worms in the middle. But now, I don't know. I can't choose.

Talk me through how you came up with this technique. Did you invent it?
I think so. I haven't heard of anyone else who has done it. It happened because I was always working with negatives, because my work has always been in photography. I wanted to look at how drugs react with things and people, but at first I thought, nah, this idea is too simple. But then it worked and I was really excited. I wasn't even doing it very well. At first I didn't clean the negatives and they had dust all over them. But then I started being more careful. I used alcohol sometimes with the drugs instead, if water didn't dissolve them. And then I experimented leaving them to dry on the negative for different lengths of time. Usually it's about a week, but the chemicals continue reacting. The same drug looks different after a month than a week.

Did all the images look good?
No, there were probably five that didn't look like anything. I didn't use THC for example, because it didn't make a good effect.

So what have you learned from this?
It's really reinforced everything I've thought about images. We're totally into images. They make us able to control and manipulate ideas, and provide a type of power over reality. It's like images let us control something defused and indescribable.

So now you've harnessed that power, are you feeling pressure to do a follow-up?
Well yes, I do feel like this has been this big stone and it's like, where to from here? But my friend says the artistic process just goes on and on, and sometimes things come out. I'll just keep asking the same questions—what is magic? How do we perceive reality? And how can I make something internal, visual?

Follow the author on Twitter.

Scientists Predict a Never-Ending Drought in Australia

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Scientists Predict a Never-Ending Drought in Australia

Here's How to Be Healthgoth

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Here's How to Be Healthgoth

How the Financial Sector Is Making Life Miserable for Sex Workers

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Photo via Flickr user Vincent Desjardins

In a recent article, VICE News speculated that the Department of Justice’s initiative Operation Choke Point may be putting pressure on banks like Chase to terminate the accounts of several high profile porn performers, including Teagan Presley, Stoya, and Chanel Preston. On Twitter many other porn performers claimed that their accounts were being closed, and that they had been offered little explanation beyond being labeled “high risk.” An insider at Wells Fargo responded, “We encourage these industry workers to come to us," according to TMZ. By the time Mother Jones was pushing back with a “Chase representative” claiming that Choke Point was not singling out people in the porn industry, I was exasperated.

By and large, these articles failed to mention the fact that sex workers like myself are shut out of institutions every single day. Whorephobia, the fear and hatred of sex workers, is one of the very first things every single sex worker learns how to navigate.

Whether the work we do is criminalized or legal, all sex workers are subject to judgment. This judgment usually stems from sexist double standards, transmisogyny, and a general moral panic about sexuality. Ironically, we are often punished as we attempt to assimilate into “legitimate” society.

After clients pay us in cash, many of us declare the payment, filing taxes as freelance entertainers. Some strip clubs give us W9 forms, and some porn companies send us 1099s. If we are shut out of banks, we must go to check cashing middlemen who charge exorbitant fees. We can’t book plane tickets or sign leases, putting that money back into the economy.

Many of my friends in the sex industry have faced these issues. Lorelei Lee, a published writer, has worked in the porn industry for 15 years as a performer and producer and seen these problems first hand. “A lot people have seen these bank account closures as something remarkable or surprising,” she said. “The truth is sex workers are discriminated against everyday—fired from their jobs, passed over for jobs that they’re qualified for, turned down for apartments.”

Some sex workers experience worse problems than others. Sex worker activists have called this phenomenon the “hierarchy,” and unfortunately some of us perpetuate it to feel less stigmatized about our own work. I have heard some dominatrices say their work is “less dirty” than working as a full-service escort, and seen many porn performers consider themselves “less whorish” than strippers.

Examples of a sex worker being a person. Photo courtesy of Stoya

“Because porn performers have had the benefit of working legally, and because our work is recorded and thus has this proximity to celebrity, I think performers sometimes make the mistake of identifying as a separate class of sex worker,” Lee said. “Even though sex workers in different industries face different kinds of intersecting discriminations, our goals must ultimately be aligned. If you're going to fight for Chanel Preston, you need to fight for Monica Jones.

These hierarchies often follow the same lines as many other power imbalances that favor white, middle-class, cisgender people over people of color, trans people, and the economically disadvantaged. Many Americans, for example, view a white woman working as a dominatrix as glamorous, whereas they consider prostitutes who work on the streets unworthy of basic human rights.

Siouxsie Q, the producer and host of Bay Area-based podcast The Whorecast, takes a patriotic stance on this issue: “In American,” she said, “the only folks who are perhaps more despised than sex workers are banks and big business. Sex workers are small business owners. Banks, who are supposed to be the people who help us go further towards the American dream, are actually standing in the way of that.”

Q observed that people who do legal sex work, such as porn performers, don’t push back when instituitions unjustly deny them resources. Often it’s not worth sex workers’ expense or time to go to small claims court over several hundred dollars, even if that money could represent a month’s worth of groceries. In April, on her SF Weekly column The Whore Next Door, Q also noted a pattern of “exclusion, scrutiny, and sometimes theft from crowdfunding organizations.”

Activist and writer Maggie Mayhem had one such experience with Paypal.

Back in 2010, she had used a Paypal button on her personal blog, collecting donations to fund a flight to Haiti for post-earthquake relief community service. After a month of successful fundraising, Paypal closed her account and froze the money.

“It was the worst customer service call ever,” Mayhem recounted. “They were distinctly rude to me. I was ready to break down in tears. They were a breath away from calling me a slut on the phone. It was very clear; ‘We don’t care about your business or your content.’”

On her blog, Mayhem had written about her experiences performing in porn, but her volunteer work had nothing to do with her occupation. According to Mayhem, Paypal’s terms of service led them to conclude that the fact that she had done sex work was sufficient cause to deny her the money she had raised. Neither Mayhem nor her donors have been refunded.

Kate D’Adamo, a Community Organizer with the Sex Workers Outreach Project NYC, and Sex Workers Action New York, is concerned about Paypal’s actions. She said, “Paypal has for several years made the decision that if they assume someone is involved in the sex trade, they will shut down that account, and in every case that I’ve heard, keep the money.”

Shakti, a porn performer based out of the Bay Area, was also recently denied her crowdfunded money by a credit card processor. In April, Shakti attempted to raise $500 to finance a trip from California to Toronto to present at the Feminist Porn Conference. She publicly expressed her outraged when she was unable to collect her donations, which were hosted by the crowdfunding platform Fundly. It turns out that WePay, the credit card processor that Fundly used, was the one with a policy against Shakti’s line of work. She was refunded, but not without a considerable amount of grief.

“Sex workers are coming out left and right as multi-faceted individuals who are also in law school, in college, writing books, speaking at schools. I think this is a last ditch effort by the powers that be to try to shut us down,” she suggested.

It wasn’t long before WePay was in the news again, coming under more serious scrutiny. In May, several friends of the porn performer Eden Alexander launched a campaign to raise money for her emergency medical expenses. Alexander had a bad reaction to a commonly prescribed prescription drug, which triggered a slew of symptoms including a skin infection, staph infection, and hypothyroidism.

They choose GiveForward, another WePay platform, because it is specifically designed to crowdfund for medical expenses. The initial GiveForward page was carefully worded to support Eden the individual, not Eden the pornographic persona (cache from May 17th is here). Of course, Eden is a porn performer, so it made sense to appeal to her fans and colleagues through her professional social networks. It also made sense for her to retweet messages from supporters, including tweets written by some adult production companies who were offering perks to donors.

WePay considered these retweets a violation of their terms of service, and those of their processor Vantiv, since the original tweeters were “offering adult material in exchange for donations.” They flagged and shut down Alexander’s account. This was more than an inconvenience for Alexander—this could very well have been a matter of life or death.

Perhaps because of the grave nature of her situation, Eden Alexander has become a poster child for whorephobia victimhood. After sex worker activists stoked a huge war on Twitter, WePay backtracked, offering to reopen Alexander’s campaign.

At that point, Eden’s support network had moved her campaign to Crowdtilt, another fundraising company. Crowdtilt has stated directly that simply being a sex worker does not violate their terms of service, nor those of their processor, Balanced Inc.

Porn stars aren’t the only ones losing access to economic resources. On May 5, NY Toy Collective, a legally registered “adult novelty” company, tweeted, “We generally aren't haters but Chase/quickbooks/intuit is closing our account because of (sic) we sell adult toys.” The following day, they offered a 25 percent discount code called CHASEDISCRIMINATES to anyone who wanted to purchase their products.

Without a merchant account, companies like NYCT are not ableto accept credit cards from individual customers or large retailers, making it nearly impossible to keep business afloat. There is a demand for erotic entertainment and services in this country. The fact that sex workers choose to produce that entertainment and supply those services should have no bearing on sex workers and adult entertainment companies’ access to resources or fair treatment as working citizens.

Follow Tina Horn on Twitter

Meet Rodeo's Most Successful Black Cowboy

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Fred Whitfield. All photos via the author.
Fred Whitfield meets me in ostrich skin boots, and a buckle that glows like the sun.

“I’ve won just about everything there is to win,” the veteran roper drawls. “Rodeo’s been great to me, and rodeo don’t owe me a thing.”

He stands at a big 6’2”, never stops moving, and keeps a dip of tobacco tucked in his lip. He’s got two horses hitched to his trailer, and when the colt gets testy with the mare, Whitfield pivots and hisses, “Hey! If you kick her, I’m gonna whoop your ass.” The colt calms right down.

We’re at the 102nd Calgary Stampede—Whitfield’s 24th—and he’s competing in tie-down roping: one of the Stampede’s six rodeo events. He’s turning 47 next month, yet the Texan is beating guys half his age.

“This is the 2005 World Champion buckle,” Whitfield says, pointing at the gorgeous piece of gold metalwork fixed to his custom-tooled ‘FW’ leather belt. “It’s the last one I won, so it’s the one I wear all the time. It’s worth about $18,000 if you had to replace it, and I’ve got eight of them.”

He started with nothing: a poor black kid from a broken home in the heart of white Texas bent on making it in the Lone Star State’s even whiter rodeos. He came and he won. People talked a lot of trash to Whitfield. He got it from both ends: white and black. Whitfield got into fights.

“You see this scar on my face?” he says pointing to the slender slash that runs down his left cheek from the top of his chin. “It happened in 1989. I was in a bar and some guys said, ‘We’re gonna whoop your ass—you better leave,’ and I said, ‘Well, I guess I got an ass-whoopin’ coming because I’m not going anywhere.”

A half-black, half-Indian man was lusting after Whitfield’s girlfriend at an all-black rodeo in Oakland, California. The guy slashed. Whitfield hit back with a lug wrench. And he hit back, again and again. Until the guy couldn’t walk.

“31 stitches,” Whitfield says. “About six inches lower, I wouldn’t be telling you this story—I’d be dead.”

Whitfield isn’t the first African American to make it in professional rodeo—he’ll tell you that—but he has been the sport’s most successful. In his 25-year career, he’s won eight Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) world championships, the PRCA’s coveted All-Around Cowboy award, and $3.2 million USD (a hell of a lot for the sport). He’s won at the Stampede three times, and made $12,500 in Calgary this year.

“I don’t consider myself a famous person,” Whitfield says, “but I consider myself a fortunate person because I’ve had a lot of success in a sport where the percentage of African Americans is less than five percent.”

Early cowboys like cow-biting Bill Pickett, and bull riders Myrtis Dightman and Charlie Sampson paved the way. They were seldom judged for how they really rode, and even in the 1960s, black cowboys like Dightman were being forced to do their events after crowds had packed up and gone home.

Whitfield has experienced his fair share of white trash ignorance too. Racism in rodeo isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it’s far from perfect. Ignorant creeps will still shout “Nigger” at rodeos in some parts of America. He used to fight back—now he walks away. But some parts of rodeo just won’t change.

“It’s still there,” he sighs. “I’d be lying to you if I told you it wasn’t… but nowadays, I think it mostly has to do with jealousy.”

I’ve seen him rope.

A scared little calf runs into the arena, and Whitfield comes after it on a horse, spinning his lasso in one hand with a tie in his teeth. He ropes the calf around the neck, flies off the horse, then flips the calf and binds three of its legs. He does this in 7.4 seconds.

“You know,” I say, with pathetic city-boy feebleness. “Some people find the sport cruel. They’re protesting and stuff.”

“We don’t ever set out to injure an animal,” he tells me matter-of-factly. “But there’s people who fight for what they believe is right, and who am I to say they’re wrong?” Whitfield grins as he says this last part, then lets out a long, dark stream of tobacco spit.

The world’s cruel, I guess. And Whitfield’s written a book about it. Published in 2013, Gold Buckles Don’t Lie: The Untold Tale of Fred Whitfield is as tell-all as they get: a violent alcoholic father who his mother leaves, takes back, shoots in the gut, then takes back again… Little Fred’s consuming rodeo obsession; roping dogs in the Texas sticks, then calves under flickering small town rodeo lights; winning and winning; then women, brawls, and even the rush of rodeo on cocaine. Calgary gets mentioned too: an injured horse, some big money, and a bar fight against redneck American bull riders with Vegas mob ties.

“The first time I read it, I cried my ass off,” Whitfield says of his book. “This is not fabricated shit… It’s gonna keep you on the edge of your seat.”

Whitfield’s married now. He’s got two daughters and he’s mentoring 22-year-old Cory Solomon: another black Texan—and the kid is good, too. But when the younger cowboys take the rodeo night by the horns, Whitfield now (mostly) stays in.

“I don’t need to be standing around where there’s ten thousand screaming women crawling all over you and all that good stuff—I’ve outgrown all that shit.”



I ask him about retirement. He’s one of the oldest guys competing in Calgary and he’s cooled down of late, taking some off for surgery on his neck and shoulder.

“Maybe I’ve lost a step speed-wise, but you can overcome that with knowledge and wisdom,” Whitfield says. “If I show up at a rodeo, I expect to win.”

Even if he’s slowing down, Whitfield’s schedule is still fairly crazy. On July 4, he drove more than eight hours from a rodeo in Montana to Calgary to compete on the same day. He then headed south of the border after competing on July 7 and hit four rodeos in three states—Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah—before coming back to Calgary to compete in the Stampede finals on the 13th. That’s 4,500 km in less than a week. And his whole summer is like this.

“I back in there and there’s 33,000 people screaming when they call my name—and if that don’t get your blood to boiling, then something’s wrong,” Whitfield says. “I don’t want to use the analogy of being on drugs, but once you get this rodeo shit in your system, it’s hard to kick it—man, am I telling you.”

@dsotis

First Nations Communities Are Suing the Federal Government Over Third World Water Conditions

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Image via Flickr user eerror.
Four Alberta First Nations have filed a lawsuit against the federal government for what they say is Ottawa’s inability to ensure that safe drinking water is available on reserves. The Tsuu T'ina, Ermineskin, Sucker Creek, and Blood Tribe have faced persistent problems—perennial boil water advisories, mice found floating in cisterns, unusually high rates of cancer and hepatitis—that the bands believe can be blamed on the water flowing through the taps in their communities.

A statement of claim filed last month accuses the government of “creating and sustaining unsafe drinking water conditions,” and levels that substandard water treatment facilities were built on the reserves listed in the official court document. It asks the court to force the feds to upgrade antiquated water systems, provide servicing support to maintain the infrastructure and refund any money the bands say has been lost to the years of inaction. In short, the claimants are battling for parity—to see that aboriginal water and wastewater infrastructures are in line with that afforded non-aboriginal Canadians.

The water woes faced by the four bands are not isolated incidents, but more like case studies into a larger, uglier issue. In 2011, the National Assessment of First Nations Water and Wastewater—the most comprehensive independent assessment of its kind ever conducted by a federal government—flushed out some dire facts. Contractors evaluated the water systems in 97 percent of First Nation communities in Canada and found that 73 percent were at high or medium risk. Of the 532 wastewater systems inspected, 14 percent were classified high risk and 51 percent as medium, with only 35 percent considered at low overall risk.

Earlier this month Health Canada released data on some of the bands dealing with drinking water advisories (DWAs). The stats proved a cause for concern. Excluding British Columbia, there were 130 DWAs in 91 aboriginal communities as of May 31. On any given day, there are roughly 100 First Nations under DWAs and that number is sometimes upwards of 130. Nearly 30 reserves have been under water advisories for five-plus years, 14 for over 10 years, and three for more than 15 years.

Some of the advisories included orders not to consume the water in any circumstance, meaning that, even if boiled, it could still be harmful. The Kitigan Zibi reserve southwest of Maniwaki in Quebec has been under a do-not-consume order since 2004 because of high levels of uranium in the water.

Alberta’s AFN regional chief Cameron Alexis empathizes with the four bands in his jurisdiction that have pushed this matter into the courts, but sees the water issue as systemic, indiscriminately affecting reserves the country over. Remedying this problem, both in the province and elsewhere, he says, is atop the AFN agenda and something that needs to be of concern to all First Nations.

“Water is an issue across Canada, all inclusive. I think very simply it is evidenced this federal government has not done their fiduciary responsibility and at AFN we can advocate for the best interests of our people, relative to safe water management and wastewater disposal. But in order to do this, we need proper infrastructure and that is another key issue that the honourable minister has not addressed. This is a human rights issue.”

Emma Lui, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians, agrees. The issue, she says, is a grave violation of human rights. Governments, she continues, are bound to ensuring access to clean water, as the United Nations has declared that a basic human right. As such, she believes the present government continues to display a disregard and disrespect for the rule of law by “gutting environmental legislation,” among other missteps.

“The communities are stating that there has been a breach of Section 7 and 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that the federal government has a responsibility for indigenous lands, and so they do have a responsibility to provide clean water to indigenous communities. The Harper government is not fulfilling its obligation to provide drinking water to these communities.”

A spokesperson for Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, Michelle Perron, says the department is committed to addressing on-reserve water and wastewater issues. “First Nations should have the same access to safe, clean drinking water in their communities as all other Canadians. Investments will continue to support the comprehensive long-term plan to improve drinking water and wastewater systems on First Nation lands.”

That plan, she points out, is founded on four pillars: enhanced building and operator training, enforceable standards, protection of public health, and infrastructure investments. In addition to passing the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, the government has also agreed to an extension of the First Nation Water and Wastewater Action Plan, which will see $324 million earmarked for the cause in question.

While the figure may seem promising, it’s a drop in the bucket of what’s needed to effect lasting change. Neegan Burnside Ltd., the independent contractor responsible for conducting the aforementioned national assessment, projects it will cost $1.2 billion to get the shoddy water systems up to government standards, with another $4.7 billion needed for servicing the infrastructure over 10 years.

The four First Nation communities involved in the federal lawsuit say the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act, which was passed in 2013, has in fact not helped improve water conditions and argue that the bill merely grants the government protection from legal backlash. Jim Badger, Sucker Creek chief, says the court documents were filed only after years of diplomatic efforts proved pointless and sweeping omnibus bills dusted any hope of the water issue being resolved amicably.

“We’ve got legislation that protects the federal government from liability if someone in our community gets sick or dies from drinking water. This response is shameful,” he says, adding: “I would have to say [this issue amounts to] racism at the highest level. Why are they doing this to us? Is there a war going on that I don’t know about?” 

Mourning the Death of the World Cup with London's Weeping Argentines

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Photos by Lily Rose Thomas

Losing a World Cup final isn’t meant to look like this. With a minute to go in last night’s game against Germany, a game that only comes around once every four years, a free kick 30 yards from goal gave Lionel Messi a chance to equalize and force penalty kicks. Even though Messi booted it over everything, in Moo Cantina—a bar in central London's Pimlico neighborhood—hundreds of Argentine fans started clapping.

It was only minutes earlier that they’d seen their team go down 1–0. While still reeling from the shock and disappointment, they'd started chanting, "Vamos, vamos, Argentina!" (“Let’s go, let's go, Argentina!”)—helped by a pre-recorded version of the song that briefly replaced the match commentary on the normally pretty deserted bar’s PA.

After the game, fans poured out onto the street. Drums were banged, chants were chanted, people danced. There were some tears. A dozen or so police officers sat ready and primed in the back of a riot van. I poked my head in and asked if they’d expected the Argentine fans to kick up some trouble. While they didn't seem too happy about having spent the night locked in the back of a sweaty van and missing the World Cup final, they didn't seem overly concerned about things turning nasty.

This was the passion of Argentine football half-tamed and transplanted to central London. Years ago I stood on the terraces of San Lorenzo, a club in Flores, Buenos Aires, with their barra brava, the South American term for fanatic soccer fans. Just before the game they flooded into the stadium like a crew of orcs—hooded, carrying huge shredded banners and rockets, full of cheap speed and coke. They threw ropes up into the terrace; we held the ropes and climbed them, then spent the game staring into the crowd, dragging the support out of us, eyes barely on the match.

Pimlico’s a long way from Flores, though, and London isn’t known for its large Argentine community. “Most of the Argentines who make it over here are right wing, and they don’t hang out much together,” Adam, an Argentine wine-shop employee with a PhD in political economics, told me. Basically, they’re chetos—an Argentine term that roughly translates as “posh” and that calls to mind polo clubs and wearing white chinos while on vacation in Miami or the Mediterranean. These guys are better known for making money and being snobby about working-class Argentines and the rest of South America than they are for fraternal love.

But last night, football brought Argentines of all backgrounds together. And while they didn’t match the crazed, cokey intensity of the San Lorenzo barra brava, they were quite insistent that Bastian Schweinsteiger’s mother is a whore.

Outside the bar, fans squashed together in front of a big screen. Inside, they squashed together in front of a number of small screens, covered in spilled booze, sweating in the intense heat. Argentina’s chant of the tournament was in full effect. It’s aimed at the whole of Brazil: It asks Brazilians how they feel about being bossed around in their own backyard (literal translation: “Dad’s House”), reminds them that Diego Maradona outdid them in the 1990 World Cup (but fails to mention Argentina’s alleged drugging of Brazilian player Branco), and ends by claiming that the man with the hand of God is far greater than Pelé.

The bar was switching between that and an old classic: a song that describes how being Argentine is a feeling you can’t stop. In fact, it was a feeling that had swept over a Spanish guy who told me he was supporting “the Latin team,” two hammered Aussie blokes who were weeping openly at the end of the game, a Polish woman with a Uruguayan husband, a whole heap of Brits, and a Napoli fan who regaled me with that story of how, when Argentina played Italy in the 1990 World Cup, half of Naples supported Argentina because they loved Napoli legend Maradona so dearly.

Player chants were pretty evenly split between those for Messi and those for Javier Mascherano. Messi will never be loved as much as Maradona—he’s still too clean-cut, not a flawed, incredibly talented street fighter like El Jefecito. But there’s no question that Argentina loves him. Whole groups of fans were screaming “your mother’s cunt” at the referee and the German defenders for the extra attention they were paying the little flea. There was a huge cheer when Schweinsteiger got a yellow card, followed by another round loudly insisting that the German midfielder's mother is a prostitute.

While Argentina fans have grown to love Messi, they’ve always loved Mascherano. “The little boss” is a man from the streets, a man who will lay down his life for his team. Every tackle he made, every close-up he got, prompted an eruption of cheering and singing. And why not? After all, this is a guy who “tore his anus” while making a goal-saving tackle against Holland in the semifinal. Since that performance, the Mascherano memes have rolled in: Mascherano would sort out Argentina’s national debt, he already knows the ending to Game of Thrones, he has the formula for Coca-Cola, he can take the Falkland Islands on his own, and not only that—he can drag them up into the middle of the Rio de la Plata.

One girl was wearing a “Falkland Islands Belong to Argentina” T-shirt, but bar that, the usual elephant in the Anglo-Argentine room was more of a mite. Argentines from all over Britain were here. One had come down from Newcastle because he “couldn’t watch it alone surrounded by Geordies.” Others were on vacation. Everyone was singing. When Gonzalo Higuain missed an easy shot on goal, having gotten a gift from an erroneous Toni Kroos header, one guy crushed a full beer can. When Higuain went on to put the ball in the back of the net a little later, the bar erupted and beer was all over everyone and the ceiling. It took us a few minutes to realize that the scores hadn’t changed and that Higuain had been offside.

Outside, caught up in my vicarious vibe chasing, I got my face painted as I watched a guy in an Argentina shirt sitting steadily by his girlfriend, not watching the game, just listening to the other fans. I wondered if he resented the situation or if they’d only just met and he was pulling some kind of Robin Williams in Good Will HuntingI gotta see about a girl” type thing, in which he ignored the big game and focused on what was really important (getting laid).

After the game was lost, most people stuck around, singing and dancing, celebrating the positive side of shared national identity. They were performing for one another, and I wondered what they were thinking and when they’d get tired. On the tube, two guys in Argentina shirts made out and got the chants going. I thought about what an unlikely sight that was and then had a word with myself for being such a fucking granddad.

The World Cup is over now, and we’ve all got to go back to our lives. The games were organized and marketed by one of the world’s most corrupt institutions in FIFA, and there are undoubtedly more important things we could be paying attention to. But watching the fans of a team that had just lost dancing, singing, and laughing together, it felt hard to remember all that, and as I got home I thought, What will I do now?

Follow Oscar Rickett and Lily Rose Thomas on Twitter.


Munchies: The Man Who Lives on Pizza Alone Is Still Very Much Alive

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A few months ago, a guy named Dan Janssen made international headlines after we interviewed him about his 25-year diet of only pizza, every meal. Or at least almost only pizza (with a few bowls of cereal every now and then).

We spent a few days with Dan in his hometown of Ellicott City, Maryland, and Baltimore to explore where the self-proclaimed “King of Pizza” finds the perfect slice. After watching him consume pizza after pizza, we couldn’t help but wonder, How is this dude not dead yet? 

Doctors have even given him a (fairly) clean bill of health, but according to Dan, “We’re all gonna die. I’m gonna die with pizza in my stomach.”

How the Pharmacutical Industry Is Making Money On Your Overdose

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Photo via Flickr user The Javorac

America has a prescription pill problem. According to a CDC report released this month, doctors wrote 259 million opioid prescriptions in 2012—which means that in some states, there are more painkiller prescriptions than people. Both doctors and pharmaceutical companies profit from overprescribing the pills that have led to the rise in America’s harrowing narcotic addiction, and now that opioid overdose is among the leading causes of death, they’ve also found a way to profit from the antidote, naloxone.

A new naloxone-injection device called Evzio was released on the market just this week, after receiving fast-tracked approved by the FDA in April. But it’s doubtful that Evzio will actually improve access to naloxone, and more likely that it will become a golden goose for kaléo, the pharma company that created it.

Evzio is a new naloxone auto-injector, about the length of a credit card and the thickness of a small cell phone.

Naloxone is basically like a magic cure for opioid overdoses: inject a dose of it into someone who has just overdosed, and it can literally wake them up. The drug blocks the body’s opiate receptors, reversing the effects of whatever you ODed on, whether it’s heroin or Vicodin or OxyContin. Naloxone works extremely well, but only if it’s administered within a certain time frame. To make this easier, Evzio claims to be the first user-friendly at-home naloxone injector, which doctors can prescribe at the same time that they prescribe opioids.

This isn’t the first time that the pharmaceutical industry has made money from opioid overdoses. Naloxone, which is an off-patent drug, has been available since 1971 and costs about $3 per dose. But a pharma company called Hospira, which was the sole manufacturer of naloxone in the US until this year, increased the price of the drug tenfold in 2008—the same year that opioid overdose was declared an “epidemic” by the CDC. Prescription doses of naloxone now costs a little over $30.

Evzio, by comparison, is estimated to cost is between $400 and $600.

Video via NBC News

Evzio’s representatives dodged my questions about exact pricing, but they made sure to emphasize that it’s different from the status quo because of its user-friendly design: similar to an EpiPen, all you have to do is stab the device into the ODing person. In April, when the FDA approved the device, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg told reporters that the “lack of a lay-friendly delivery system has made it difficult to make naloxone broadly available to the public and to foster its use in non-medical settings, where it is often most urgently needed.”

The thing is, that’s only half true. Naloxone is most essential in the non-medical setting, but administering naloxone isn’t nearly as difficult as she—or the makers of Evzio—suggest. A recent study found that people without training were able to use the syringes in a naloxone rescue kit just as easily as people who had been trained. Tessie Castillo, who works for the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, told me that at-home naloxone kits are so easy to use that “anyone with common sense could figure it out, even without training.” The New York Times once compared the ease of the process to “basting a turkey.”

Photo via Flickr user intropin

The point here is that barriers to naloxone use aren't related to administration, but access. Naloxone is available via prescription in all states, but Castillo told me that “many people are afraid to ask their doctor for a prescription because it could potentially mean admitting to using illicit drugs or taking medications not as prescribed.” Combine this with confusing naloxone laws and some doctors’ reluctance to prescribe it, and you can understand why many users don’t have it. And although naloxone can save your life from an overdose, it only works if you have it with you.

Castillo told me that her organization has distributed more than 2,600 naloxone kits throughout North Carolina in the past year, which are free of cost and do not require a prescription. There are around 200 other organizations like hers that distribute naloxone at a subsidized cost or for free—but many of these organizations are grossly underfunded, and they can’t distribute enough naloxone kits to match the demand.

Evzio, which is both pricey and prescription-based, does nothing to improve these access barriers. In fact, it’s literally the opposite of what naloxone advocates say they need.

Photo via Flickr user Dylan Hartmann

When I asked her about Evzio, Castillo was unenthusiastic. “I wish that the FDA would have fast tracked over-the-counter naloxone instead of an expensive product for a private company,” she said. “Intramuscular and intranasal naloxone are already available, easy to use, and much less expensive than Ezvio, so I don’t see how the addition of a machine that talks will improve access for anyone.”

At worst, Evzio’s high out-of-pocket price could be a major access deterrent for the device; at best, it could create a two-tiered system of access, giving access to those who have good quality insurance and are legitimately prescribed opioids, while leaving out users who are uninsured, who get pills by illicit means, and or who use heroin instead.

Video via naloxone.org.uk

Tracey Helton, an outspoken naloxone advocate, told me she’s optimistic that “there may come a day when [Evzio] is required to go in compliment with opiate based medication,” meaning your doctor would write a prescription for Evzio alongside any opioid prescription, thereby mandating greater access to the antidote.

This is certainly what Evzio’s makers, kaléo pharmaceutical, have in mind. The company’s Chief Medical Officer, Eric Edwards, stated that the company wants Evzio “in every medicine cabinet of every person who might be at risk.” Most naloxone proponents would agree that this is admirable in terms of broadening access. But as Helton points out, while increasing access is the goal, this strategy also provides a lucrative opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry: if kaléo convinces doctors to write a prescription for Evzio alongside every opioid prescription, the device “could become a cash cow.”

Put plainly: pharmaceutical companies can now sell you the poison and sell you the antidote.

Photo via Flickr user David K

The problem is that this makes naloxone a part of the opioid economy—and that economy is booming. A study from last year confirmed that painkiller prescriptions doubled between 2000 and 2010—without any evidence of improved pain management or increased incidents of pain. In California, a lawsuit is underway alleging that pharmaceutical companies profit from doctors overprescribing opioids. Specifically, the suit alleges that in 2010, the sale of prescription opioids generated $8 billion in revenues for pharmaceutical companies. If Evzio (rather than generic naloxone) is sold in tangent with every opioid prescription, kaléo’s profits could well surpass that. 

To be fair, kaléo is in the process of developing a “patient assistance program” to subsidize the cost for eligible patients, and has agreed to donate devices to some harm reduction centers. But by so closely linking their product to prescribed pills, they have a stake in maintaining the gross over-prescription problem—arguably, the source of opioid addiction. In other words, kaléo needs you to stay addicted to opioids so that they can turn a profit on your potential overdose.

Access to naloxone is invaluable, but it isn’t priceless. If we want to prevent overdose related deaths, we need to provide low-cost, easy-access versions of naloxone rather than allowing pharmaceutical companies to cash in on opioid overdoses.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

VICE News: Rockets and Revenge - Part 2

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The death toll in Gaza continues to grow as both the Israeli military and Palestinian militants show no signs of backing down. VICE News spent a few days in Gaza City surveying the damage and seeing how local residents were coping with the continuous barrage from the air and from the sea.

We Visited Toronto's Slutwalk

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On Saturday, hundreds of women, trans folk, and a few men took to the streets of Toronto to fight for their right to dress as they please without expecting to face sexual violence.

Slutwalk was born three years ago, after a Toronto cop told a bunch of students at York University that: “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Women were like, “nope,” and Slutwalk was born. Now, it’s taken place in over 200 countries. And in Toronto, it’s an annual march in which people come out adorned in fishnets and lots of beautiful bare skin, shouting to the world that “Yes means fuck me, no means fuck you,” and “My body, my choice.”

The point of the march is that all people should feel safe on the streets, no matter what they’re wearing, what time of day it is, how much they’ve had to drink, whether they’re alone, or whether they are a sex worker, a woman, or trans. We all actively reject victimization, and the idea that we should meekly obey the policing of our bodies and choices in order to be safe.

“I’m here for myself and my friends,” Idil Hyder told me during the march. “[Sexual violence] happens all the time. Everybody has a story, and it’s fucked up.”

The messaging is nothing new, as MPP Cheri DiNovo said in her speech following the march. She said she’s been hollering, “My body, my choice” for about 44 years, and still, nothing has changed. But seeing the movement in action on Saturday was soul fortifying nonetheless—there is power in numbers and in taking back our streets. 

@sarratch
@galit_rodan

Germany Celebrated Its World Cup Win with Fireworks and a Lot of Honking

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Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Yesterday Germany won the 2014 World Cup in a nail-biting final against Argentina. In the 113th minute, during the second half of extra time, Andre Schürrle made a perfect cross to Mario Götze, who scored the first and only goal of the day with a left-footed ninja kick past Argentina’s goalkeeper, Sergio Romero.

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

In Berlin, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in cafés, bars, and public-viewing areas. Thirty-five million people tuned into the game, making it the most popular televised event in German history. After the win, fans flooded the streets and did the obnoxious things fans always do after winning a big sporting event: Fireworks were shot, car horns were pounded mercilessly, and vocal chords were pushed to their limits. For the most part the celebrations were peaceful, although one person died after being stabbed at a public viewing in Bremen, and about 100 teenagers in Berlin’s notorious Neukölln district attacked the police with fireworks.

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Twitter and Facebook naturally exploded. Posts by squad members—like Lukas Podolski and Bastian Schweinsteiger’s double kiss with Rihanna and Podolski’s selfie with Angela Merkel—ricocheted around the internet, helping to create the feeling that the whole world was celebrating with Germany. The chancellor, who had been following the game from the VIP stand all night, cheered the boys on like a proud mother.

While the general mood in Germany was one of euphoria, some locals were hesitant to show their national pride. To a small but vocal faction, everything about German stolze is distasteful and offensive, bringing back memories of just how far German nationalism has gone before. There were reports earlier in the Cup of spectators trying to exploit the celebratory mood by sneaking in little Hitler salutes here and there, and this fan who climbed on top of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial to wave a German flag will always be remembered as a total dick.

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

But for the majority of the partying masses around the country, nothing could dampen the spirit and camaraderie the biggest national event since Merkel’s (alleged) nude pics brought to Germany. We sent photographers Björn Kietzmann and Jermain Raffington into the streets of Berlin after the win to get a feel for how the country is celebrating.

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Björn Kietzmann

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

Photo by Jermain Raffington

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