Kids stand with their hands up over the memorial to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo by Alice Speri, courtesy of VICE News

After Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, the cops’ reaction provided a neat snapshot of just about every dangerous aspect of policing in modern America.

For starters, there’s the reliable archetype of the racist cop. Brown, though he allegedly stole cigarellos from a convenience store not long before he died, was not stopped over a theft report. The weak jaywalking excuse for a police stop adds a flavor of profiling which angers people further, and makes the racial element of the shooting more pronounced. In Ferguson, the numbers suggest that black individuals are targeted for police stops more than whites. A few of their cops also once beat a 52-year-old man, then charged him for damaging their uniforms with his blood. Brown himself may have been a dumbass teenager who committed a strongarm robbery, but now he can never grow up to be better than that.

The police showed up like an army, thereby antagonizing the mostly peaceful crowds, both before and after looting began on August 10. This reaction, where store owners often got screwed by the mob but the peaceful, pissed off folks got their First Amendment rights violated, underlined another major problem with the police: Aren’t they violating Posse Comitatus by now? Men in SWAT gear that resembles paramilitary garb may bust down the doors of various suspected drug criminals at night, but that mostly goes without video evidence (when there are exceptions to that, people tend to be shocked, even when it’s a normal drug raid). Seeing a roadblock that belonged in the Middle East during a weekday afternoon in Missouri was jarring to people just starting to grasp its new normalcy.

Yet another strike against the Ferguson Police was their incredible opacity after one of their own killed. They enforced a curfew, and then took six days to release the name of Wilson. They did everything they could to block media attention. On Sunday night, a SWAT officer screamed “Turn off that light! Get down!” and then “Get the fuck out of here!” at a student who was broadcasting live radio. The officer, allegedly pointing a gun, also yelled what sounds like: “Get that light out of here, or you’re getting shot with this.” Some outlets—including Mediaite—thought the cop yelled “or you’re getting shot in the face.” Others say the cop might have been yelling “getting shelled with this” instead of “shot.” Regardless, it was bad.

The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly and the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery were detained on August 13. The same night, an Al-Jazeera American crew was teargassed, and fled, and then cops were seen taking down their camera equipment. On the evening of August 17, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was threatened with a macing if he crossed a police line. Reporters with Sports Illustrated, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times were cuffed for a few minutes by Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, a man who some had cheered as a good cop when he took command of law enforcement in Ferguson. That same good cop’s underlings also lied about using teargas while they were using teargas over the weekend.

And though the Ferguson PD has two body cameras and two dash cams, none of them are installed yet—reportedly due to the high cost involved. Four cameras for 18 cruisers and 53 officers is unacceptable even without that additional fuck-up.The police department does, however, have a Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected vehicle and a whole bunch of other gear that was made for the streets of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The mainstream media has been taking multiple angles on the Ferguson backlash, and the militarized police one seems to be the easiest to swallow. Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Hank Johnson, and a few other politicians are now demanding an end to the Pentagon’s 1033 program that helps even small police departments get war gear. But in June, a suggested amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act could have done just this, and it was soundly rejected by most Democrats and Republicans alike. Both parties apparently prefer things the way they are.

The drama of protest-porn photography tends to distract people from serious policy questions. So, indeed, do the folks who always think those damn hippies/anarchists/thugs—meaning black people—deserved it, so there’s no need to hold police to a higher standard. News is easy, and fixing things is hard. We’ll see whether Ferguson’s anger can continue to sustain itself, and whether the attention span of the public, who really do lead (while politicians follow when it’s safe), is good enough to turn this outrage into reform.

Check out the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-VICE News has been all over Ferguson in the past week, with livestreams provided by Tim Pool and Alice Speri. Forget cable news, and tune into a VICE stream tonight in case any more horrible stuff goes down, or more rights to assembly get violated. (They probably will.)

-It’s not exactly "Changes" by Tupac or "Fuck Tha Police" by NWA, but G-Unit has provided fans with the extremely topical “Ahh Shit,” which references both Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the man who died last month after being put in a chokehold by the NYPD.  

-In Salt Lake City, police fatally shot an unarmed 20-year-old on August 13 after he supposedly reached for his waistband. Dillon Delbert Taylor had felony warrants (for robbery and obstruction of justice), and had violated the terms of his parole. However, his brother claims that Taylor was wearing headphones and got confused when police began barking orders at him as they searched for another man with a gun. Taylor was not their man and does not seem to have been armed because police have declined to say he was, and they tend to stress that whenever possible.

-On August 11, the Los Angeles Police Department fatally shot 25-year-old Ezell Ford. Ford’s family says that the man was mentally disabled, and was shot while he lay on the ground. Police counter that there was a fight over an officer’s weapon after Ford was “suspicious” and unwilling to speak to them without hiding his hands. On Monday, VICE contributor Charles Davis reported on the protests against the killing of Ford, and provided the distressing fact that 39 people have been killed by the LAPD or the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in the past year. This includes the homeless man shot for waving a stick, whose death warranted only a credulous LA Times blurb—and a VICE investigation.

-An internal review found that two officers on a Tampa SWAT team were in “fear for their lives” when they fatally shot Jason Westcott on May 27, making their actions justifiable. Perhaps they were in danger, but that was their own damn faults. Officers Eric Wasierski and Edwin Perez shot Westcott, who was holding a pistol, after busting down his door in a pot raid. Wescott, 29, purchased the gun after being robbed, and had reportedly been urged by police to get a weapon to defend himself. Approximately $2 worth of pot, and some paraphernalia, was found in the home. One hundred dollars in sales of a plant to an informant lead to cops “justifiably” shooting a man down in his own home, in front of his boyfriend. That’s your drug war.

-Speaking of a lack of accountability, the May 28 Georgia drug raid that sent a 19-month-old into intensive care provoked shock and outrage, but it might not lead to much else. Little Bounkham Phonesavah is out of the hospital now, but his parents say they need help with the medical bills that came from repairing the hole in his chest and the burns on his face left by the drug task force’s flashbang grenade. Unfortunately, Habersham County looked into it and decided it would be illegal for them to pay those bills. So a) that law is bullshit, and b) if what the county is saying is true, cops had better reach for their personal checkbooks.

-Earlier this month, a North Augusta, South Carolina mother was arrested for disorderly conduct after she said the word “fucking” in front of her children—possibly more than once. The swear was reportedly addressed to Danielle Wolf’s husband, but that didn’t stop a traumatized bystander (who later apologized) from reporting the incident to the proper authorities. And the authorities, in the form of Officer Travis Smith, obliged by cuffing and bringing in Wolf. North Augusta, by the way, is the very same town where they arrest mothers for letting their children play in the park. Not sure what’s going over there, but there must be some really square drugs in the water supply.

-VICE’s good cop of the week goes to every single cop who didn’t shoot anyone or teargas anyone while they tried to protest. Good job, everybody.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

A Seattle police officer pepper sprays people during the 1999 WTO protests. Photo via Wikimedia

In recent weeks, incidents of lethal police violence against unarmed young black men have occurred in cities across the country, not just Ferguson. But in Ferguson more than anywhere, police doubled down on their role as a hostile occupying force in the community, showing off their massive collection of military-grade equipment and weaponry in a crude (and so far unsuccessful) attempt to intimidate the local population it purports to serve.

This isn’t the first time a local police force has turned an American city into something resembling a war zone in the name of civilian crowd control. In 1999, during the “Battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization, national headlines were accompanied by images like what we’re seeing out of Ferguson today: prrotesters being tear gassed and beaten by men in uniform. The Seattle chief of police was forced to resign in the wake of that debacle.

Since that time, former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper has made an astonishing political transformation, not only owning up to his own mistakes at the WTO protests, but becoming a staunch advocate of reforming the police and legalizing and regulating drugs. I got in touch with Stamper to get his take on modern police culture and the militarization of law enforcement in Ferguson and across the country.

VICE: The images we've seen coming out of Ferguson over the last week are reminiscent of the ones we saw 15 years ago at the WTO protests in Seattle, when you were the police chief there. At that time, you almost immediately regretted your decision to use tear gas, flash bang grenades, and other military-grade hardware against the protesters, and resigned the day after the ministerial ended. What comes to mind as you watch the Ferguson police make essentially the same mistakes that you made?
Norm Stamper: A whole lot of heartbreak, and I have to admit to some irritation, and some righteous anger. It seems like the rest of the country is hell-bent—I think back to the Occupy movement, for example, and the May Day demonstration—that so many police departments seem to outdo themselves in not paying attention to the lessons of WTO. I made, personally, the biggest mistake of my career that week. If you’re looking for a prescription of what to do wrong, you need look no further.

I think with the advent of the drug war, which certainly preceded WTO in 1999, and, for that matter, 9/11, we still see something that is extremely troubling to me, and that is that in the name of the drug war, we continue to uniform, equip, and arm police officers as soldiers, and then commit them to early morning, sometimes pre-dawn drug raids, in which the target is somebody alleged to have a half a baggie of marijuana in the family home. And of course we’ve seen tragedy after tragedy result from that kind of mentality.

And then we get 9/11. I was retired roughly two years when 9/11 struck, and one of the things that was most unsettling to me was while we had a president who was saying “Bring ‘em on,” and talking tough and so forth, we were very slowly but surely sending a message to local law enforcement that this can happen in your community. Well, of course it can, but it hasn’t, nor is it likely to. That’s no reason, obviously, not to be prepared; it’s no reason not to do training exercises; it’s no reason not to have proper equipment on hand.

But what are the chances that it’s going to happen in Morven, Georgia, for example, which, as I understand it, is a department of about three people, who have acquired millions of dollars of federal military surplus? There’s a small town in Texas with one officer. He’s the chief, he’s the patrol officer, he’s the traffic officer, he’s the homicide investigator, assuming that jurisdiction ever gets a homicide. He’s it. And yet that small town has been given somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 to $4 million. Billions of dollars overall are portioned out to small departments with no provision for training, no provision for maintenance. And that’s a recipe for disaster. I’ve heard the expression that this is a situation very much akin to “boys with toys.” You give them this military equipment and they want to play with it.

Seattle police during the WTO protests. Photo via Jade Getz

You've written that, "simply put, white cops are afraid of black men." You depict that phenomenon as not solely one of officers coming into the department as bigots, but also as a process in which the cops are learning prejudice and discrimination on the job. Can you explain what this looks like up close from your experience?
Let’s assume for a moment that a department wants to create diversity, sets out to do it. It has to make its organizational climate inviting. It has to make it hospitable to people of all races and ethnicities, to both genders and all sexual orientations. Whatever screening can be accomplished to help block those with racial or other prejudices is essential. And I think, all in all, law enforcement has done a fairly good job at the entry level.

But what happens to, let’s say, the average police candidate once he or she becomes a police recruit, and is going through the academy, is that they get exposed to the culture. And as professional as many police academies are, there are cops on the streets. And the cops on the streets are fond of saying things like, “Well, kid, forget what they taught you in the academy; you’re in the real world now.” And that’s really problematic. What’s being said in the real world and what’s being said in the academy ought to be the same, and it ought to be reinforcing non-discriminatory policing.

Let’s assume for the moment that you’re white, you’ve grown up in an all or predominantly white community, you’ve had little interaction with African-Americans, and you are now a police officer. And you’ve been told either in the academy or upon graduation from the academy, sea story after sea story of tales from the streets. You’ve heard about dangerous people. You’ve heard about individuals who have threatened or attacked police officers, pulled a gun on a police officer. Almost always, in police departments that are not thoughtful, those stories are situated in the black community. So what’s happening at a very subtle level—you don’t have to even express a racist point of view, you’re just simply telling a story from your point of view, as factually as you’re inclined to relate it. But what you’re doing, the meta-communication of all of that is: If you’re going to get hurt as a cop, it’s going to be at the hands of a black person. It’s going to be a male.

Nobody wants to get hurt, everybody wants to get home from their job everyday without suffering great bodily injury or worse, so it’s important for outsiders and insiders to recognize that officer safety is a legitimate and very important responsibility of executive leadership, and middle management, and first-line supervisors; indeed, it’s a responsibility of peers. So that if, for example, I’m scared of young black men that I meet on my beat, but with fear being a socially unacceptable emotion in police work, I can’t really express it, then I’m going to sublimate the fear, and I’m going to compensate in my behavior. In other words, because I’m scared, I’m going to act tough. I’m going to become the bully. Officers don’t say that, not even to themselves, but it is in fact, I’m convinced, what happens when fear is operating among white cops in black neighborhoods.

Cops in Anaheim during a 2012 demonstration against police brutality. Photo via Chase Carter

These recent events would seem to suggest that this culture of institutional police racism has not changed much since you began your career. Would it be a mistake to assume that?
It has changed a lot. That doesn’t mean it’s changed necessarily for the better. If it has become a sub-rosa problem, if it has become a hidden problem, in some respects, that’s even worse. Because if you get serious about improving race relations, one of the things you need to say to your cops is, “If you use racial or ethnic slurs, if you are trigger-happy, if you are heavy-handed in working in the African-American community and we document that case, you’re history. You’re out of here.” So one of the things that happens is, the tougher the talk gets, the smarter those forces within the ranks—not everybody, but those forces within the ranks who are for whatever their personal reasons, committed to a campaign of racism—will become more subtle and discreet. But if the phenomenon is still operating, it is going to affect the way cops behave toward the community.

Follow Leighton Woodhouse on Twitter.

Sovannora leng should be dead. Just before his 14th birthday in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over his hometown Phnom Penh. Civilians were evacuated from cities and put to work in the countryside, as part of an “agrarian socialist” revolution targeting the educated and wealthy. After surviving a severe illness, teenage Sovannora was enlisted to “report” on his neighbors, friends and family—something that could lead to their death. "The only way I can explain it is that people had no choice,” said Sovannora to VICE.

In the next few years, Sovannora escaped reporting duty and went onto survive a stint in a prison camp, an execution attempt and an unfathomable journey over a minefield near the Thai border. His family eventually wound up as refugees in Australia in 1980. Not everybody was that lucky. An estimated 1.7 million—21 percent of the population—died as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s four year reign in Cambodia, either through starvation, forced labour or execution in Cambodia’s now infamous “Killing Fields.”

Further explaining this period—now known as the Cambodian genocide—can be difficult, especially because Pol Pot’s regime essentially killed its own people and race. In the words of Sovannora, it was “a revenge against one and another.” In Cambodia’s darkest moments, mothers even ate their children’s dead bodies. Now, 40 years later, survivors are still waiting for answers despite the recent final sentencing of two Khmer Rouge officials. VICE interviewed Sovannora about surviving “Year Zero” and what the world has learned from genocide.

VICE: What your life like as a young boy before the war?
Sovannora Leng: I always dream about going back to life before the war. It was peaceful. You went to school and played. Maybe I was just young, but I didn’t think about politics. I was a student from a working class family, and I always wanted to try something new. Once I got bigger, I got a part-time job and generated income to help my family. My mum passed away when I was six. I had a stepmother, but the love and the bond was slightly apart. It learned to stand up for myself and fight for my life.

Sovannora standing second from left (big grin). That's his father in the back.

What do you remember from the very early days of the war—when you and your family were still at home in the city?
The war started in the countryside, but not on the outskirts of Phnom Penh until the end of 1974. Then there was a lot of bombing. It worries you and we started to build a bomb shelter, but we didn’t know what war meant. We’d only heard of the WWI and WWII, and now we were wondering if that was happening to us? But I was still young, so I didn’t think that much. I was still thinking about playing and life as a child.

Then Khmer Rouge officers told everybody to evacuate the city. In your book, Surviving Year Zero, it feels like either people didn’t understand what was happening or they just didn’t want to think about the worst scenario. What did you think was happening?
Well, there was the propaganda. A Khmer Rouge statement loudly spoke out from the street speakers that Americans are going to bomb, and everybody was so anxious looking at the sky and seeing if there are any planes, and then we started to move. I don’t know if this is for everybody else, but after we left Phnom Penh, I was still always thinking about going home. It happened from when we left to when I was almost about to die, and I then realized there was no return.

One of the strongest memories in your book is when you arrived at a rural work camp and you accidentally stumbled into a Killing Field while you were sick. You described walking over things that you thought were fruit but were maybe bones or bodies in retrospect. It felt like your father knew what that field was for, but you didn’t quite understand yet?
That’s correct. At that time, I don’t think much. I only tried to focus my energy on fighting for my life. Nothing else. There was nobody else in my head, except for my mother, who I asked for strength. I feel very emotional now talking about this. But she tapped me and she said ‘you are not ready’. I just kept walking and never saw anything else, and thought about how to stay alive.

In your book, you talk about how some of the Khmer Rouge officers were sometimes nice or calm. Some of them were married couples. How do you explain how people can be nice, and then turn around and kill each other?
For all human beings, I think you would first say “I want to stay alive.” Do you want to live or you want to die? There’s no other solution. Some children even reported on their own parents. They were indoctrinated and they’d say “yes, my father was a professor and we had a house.” When they heard that, the Khmer Rouge would arrest their parents. Then they’re executed and it’s too late. The children sometimes did not realise that what they’re saying, as they’re miles away from village in the rice field. Then they’d come back and they can’t find their parents.

Sovannora's family at their home in 1975

You wrote a lot about having no food and physical survival in the camps. But how did you psychologically survive?
Oh, what can I say? I wished I was a God. But I realized it was all happening and it did take place. I don’t know why, but the feeling of my mother kept on coming, and she gave me the strength to guide me. It gave me some confidence, but I was also in a dream. Until one day, when I just got up and grabbed my stuff and walked out of the teenage camp. Then they arrested me, put me in a dark prison and locked me up for weeks before they sent me back to my village. I never thought I would be released.

So why did you decide to get up one day and try to leave?
I give you a story. It’s like I was a fish in a river, and the water starts to drain out. It’s getting hot and you know there’s a dolphin right in the middle that will snap you, but you know behind the dolphin is a big pond and the water is flowing. You know if you stay, you will die definitely. So you make up your mind to take a chance and move.

After you fell asleep while guarding the camp, the Khmer Rouge took you to be executed. What were you thinking?
They tied up both my hands very tight. In my mind, I only knew that I had been disobeyed the Angkar’s rule by falling asleep, and I knew nothing else. At that time in my spine, I can already feel the nerves. I couldn’t even walk properly. They took me to a place in the early evening, and we knew this place as Killing Field forests. I keep asking them “what’s going on?” and they said nothing. Until we get to the end and they ask me to confess to something I didn’t even know about, like stealing rice crackers. Then they told me to kneel down and they kept saying “you have contact with enemy.” I had no idea what enemy. In a way, I think they were trying to get me to confess about my father doing something. And then that was it. They started the execution.

What happened after they hit the back of your head with the stick?
I never cried so loudly as that time. I fell down into a grave filled with many dead bodies and said “okay, mum, I am coming to you,” and I did not even want to live. When I fell down into the grave, I thought that was it, but the guy somehow did not hit me 100 per cent. I still have a question mark about that. I’m asking myself why? It was a one in a million chance that I stayed alive. Then they pulled me back with my hands still tied. The executioner guy said “should we finish him off?” and the other man—who was a good guy—said no. And that was it. They gave me a second chance and put me to work in the rice field.

You eventually escaped the camps to get to a refugee camp in Thailand. To get to the border, you had to go through a minefield. What were you thinking as you ran?
When I ran through the minefield, I had a little boy with me. The only way to make sure I ran is to make sure I didn’t lose him. We just kept running. I saw bombs blowing up everywhere, and I thought to myself “if you blow me, make sure I die. Don’t just take my arm or my leg. You take my head and then I die. Hit me and I die is all that I ask.”

How did you feel when you got to the end of the minefield?
I felt alive, exhausted and happy! But after I checked the boy, and he’s okay, I looked at myself and I have a cut from bombshell through my leg. I did not know what to do with it—only split my saliva over it and put on some dirt to stop the bleeding. And then people just saying, “we must keep going, they are coming” —meaning the Khmer Rouge. We had to keep walking, until I reached people calling far away to get onto a truck.

Leaving Victoria's Wiltona Centre in 1981

What was it like to go from genocide to a Thai refugee camp to finally a new life in Melbourne, Australia?  
When we got on the plane, we could not describe how wonderful we felt, but we were also worried about the big airplane. It was like “wooooo” and “wow!” We were so tried and exhausted after the flight. And then we got to Wiltona. I thought “we are in heaven now.” It was a heaven country that was so cold—even in November! We were so exhausted and we slept on a bed. We had never had a bed! And we slept on the bed on top of the blanket because we didn’t realise how to sleep. And then the toilets! In our country, we had flat toilets on the ground. And it was like my god? We have to stand on the top? It was shiny and slippery. And my brother didn’t not realize that it was a toilet and was washing his face with the water! So we sat down and we had breakfast, and we just laughed.

I once met another man who survived the Cambodian genocide. He said 30 years later, he still has nightmares every night. Do you think about the genocide a lot or have you found a way to move on?
No. No more. It’s all gone. It’s finished, once I returned to Cambodia and I touched the soil in 1992. When I landed, I kissed the ground, and then spent a night in a very expensive hotel! And that night I was peacefully in sleep. No dreams. I only dreamed back in Australia about life in Cambodia. You question if I had bad dreams? It’s very rare. And when I dream I always go back to life before the war. I don’t know why.

You never met Khieu Samphan or Nuon Chea. How did you feel when they were found guilty of war crimes last week?
I’m not surprised at the verdict. I knew they were going to be found that the first day they were arrested. For me, it was only a matter of whether they be executed or be given life in jail. I think to some extent, we’re happy they’ve been sentenced, but that is not what the people want. I asked other people in Cambodia about the verdict and they were also not surprised. But is it fair and is it justice? Is it true that just a few people—Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea—made the whole of Cambodia into a genocide?

So what would be justice for Cambodia?
For me, so many of the perpetrators are now dead or old as it’s 30 years later. And do we really want to find them and put them in jail? No, we want to know why. Why has this happened? Why did those people not originally tell the truth? They all say they take orders. But who gave you orders like that and for what purpose?

Do you think you will ever know the answer to the question of “why” or have you given up hope?
I think it’s a hidden agenda. I think they know answer, but they don’t want to show. I am also disappointed with the United Nations. They should have started with a clear agenda and plan of activity. If we don’t know, then what have we learned from this? Unless the people—I mean Cambodians and the whole world—understand why genocide happens, there’s nothing significant for the world to learn from it.

What do you think the world has learned from Cambodian genocide?
Unless the people know the truth about the genocides—they have to understand what is the meaning of genocide and why does it exist—there is no significance for the world. To me, I think the world only learns the diplomatic outcomes. The world has not seriously paid attention to this issue.

Prime Minister Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge leader and so are many others in power today in Cambodia. After the Rwandan genocide, people had to learn to live next door to the killers of their loved ones. Is that what it’s like in Cambodia today?
Yes, but that is because they did not get the truth. Benefits and power seem to cover those issues. It seems to me like the truth is always hidden. There’s always something to hide. I think maybe it’s to do with power and greed. 

Follow Emilia on Twitter.

An estimated 120,000 landmines still litter the Bosnian countryside since the end of the war there in 1995, making daily life a challenge for hundreds of thousands of people. In May, the worst floods in over a century dislodged countless mines and deposited them in new locations, from farm fields to the back yards of local residents. The flooding also unearthed previously undiscovered mass graves, making some citizens hopeful that they may finally be reunited with the remains of their lost loved ones.

VICE News traveled to northern Bosnia to tag along with the team in charge of de-mining the countryside, and met residents still reeling from the horrors of war.

The "Dark Souls II" launch trailer

According to Metacritic, action role-player Dark Souls II is the best game released so far in 2014, for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC formats. But have the critics got it wrong? Matt Lees reckons they might...

People who argue that games can’t be like art clearly haven’t spent much time in a gallery. Go to the Tate Modern and glance past those thoughtfully propping up their chins while spouting wisdom stolen from the Guardian, the foreign tourists who are there because a guidebook told them they should be and the kids using it as a makeshift playground, and you’ll usually find at least one person whose eyebrows are furrowing into a dismissive brow. A brow that seems to be saying, "What is this awful shit?"

Nothing whips up pointless partisan wankers quite as easily as art. I think the work of Jackson Pollock is fantastic; you genuinely think it’s a load of old spunk. There’s no middle ground here, so let’s have a fight, the problem being of course that "You Don’t Get It" versus "It Is Shit" is the most tedious war in cultural history. It's also one that manifests itself in the worst way possible when you’re looking at video games.

Because unlike other mediums, a degree of baseline competency is requisite with video games. You don’t have to have a degree-level qualification in Vests ‘n’ Bombs to appreciate Die Hard, but most games tend to strictly insist that certain neural pathways aren’t firing blanks. It’s a fairly token requirement, but one regularly blown out of proportion by tedious numpties who seem to believe that you can’t truly appreciate games unless you’re amazing at them.

Video game snobs might be the worst variety, but it’s impossible not to quietly admire the construction of their dickhead-filled ivory tower. There’s nothing stopping me from just watching Citizen Kane if driven to the edge of madness by a film buff, but I’ll never have the ability required to complete most games on the highest difficulty setting.

There isn’t much merit in chasing the acceptance of bitter teenagers, but it’s impossible to avoid the reality that hints of this mentality run right through gaming. It’s telling that while in the UK most refer to “finishing” or “completing” a game, in the US the most common phrase is “beat”. You didn’t like the game? Oh. Did you beat it?

For reviewing most games, this isn’t a problem. My experience with BioShock Infinite proved to be such a tedious drag that, in the end, I was happy to just bump it down to "easy". But when you’ve got games that are inherently designed to be very bloody hard, the situation gets complicated. Suddenly, you’re back in the gallery, doubting your own intelligence, feeling anxious.

Because the problem is, there is a chance you might get it wrong. Clover Studio’s masterful God Hand was described as “awful” by an IGN reviewer who clearly wasn’t able to appreciate that while the game was tough as old dick, it was also an incredibly well-oiled machine. The niche community quietly exploded, with the critic involved left looking like a muppet.

Reviews are supposed to represent a widely diverse set of opinions, but it’s an area in which games have yet to mature. Polar opinions are swiftly labelled right and wrong, and enforced with brutal pack mentality – as seen by the frankly insane reaction when Eurogamer had the audacity to give Uncharted 3 a mere 8/10.

But it’s Dark Souls II that for me represents the clearest flaw in game review culture. A game that was knowingly very difficult, but also a direct sequel to one of the biggest cult hits we’ve seen in years.

A still from "Dark Souls II"

Because, fuck me, 2011’s Dark Souls was a brilliant game. Blindly refusing to behave itself and play nicely with the other video games, it dished up a devilishly challenging adventure that ripped up the rulebook in a beautiful way.

To the outsider, games have evolved to become a practically indecipherable language. We hide secret buttons in our controllers and dismissively tell people to “press L3”. We know that orange feathers bring people back to life. Gamers are impeccable encyclopaedias of mostly useless shit, and I cheerily take an odd sense of pride in that.

But the language we’d learned had no place in Dark Souls, a game that consistently defied expectations, frustrating many in the process. The “Prepare to Die” tagline was a warning that was fair, but it wasn’t a game that was difficult in a traditional sense. Booze-frazzled neurons will scupper your chances of ever becoming a Call Of Duty champion, but Dark Souls is a game that anyone can beat providing they’ve got the patience and focus.

Dark Souls wasn’t a game that felt like a game, and routinely punished you for treating it as such. It was strange, esoteric, unique, and magical. But the same can’t be said for the sequel.

A disjointed cardboard world full of barely memorable characters. Locations stuck together in a seemingly random fashion, with an elevator at the top of a windmill taking you straight up to an iron castle submerged in lava. Fragments of interesting ideas teased loosely throughout and then abandoned with a shrug. Dark Souls II as an overall package felt like a present wrapped by a dog – a mess of visible tape failing to hold the whole thing together.

A still from "Dark Souls II"

The enemies you faced and the world you explored largely came across as trite, embracing the slightly lazy tropes that Dark Souls – and spiritual precursor Demon’s Souls before it – had narrowly managed to evade. Dark Souls II wasn’t a terrible game, but it was evidently no more than a decent one, serviceably jumping through hoops left behind by its predecessor.

Crucially though, it wasn't a game that was hard for the right reasons. Dark Souls II was a game that relied on a small handful of cheap tricks for when it wanted to kill you. There was no nuance or learning curve to the challenge you faced, just occasional moments when it decided it was time to hurl six monsters in and watch you crumble.

Despite evident differences between the two games, most reviews discuss them with identical language – as if taking the opportunity to talk about the virtues of the series, rather than the piece of work itself. Rallying against established critical darlings is a practice that gamers fiendishly relish, but strangely won’t tolerate when it comes to reviews. Criticism after the hype dies is encouraged, but disrupting the wave of excitement won’t do.

Piss On Your Peers isn't a game I aim to play, but I honestly can’t think about Dark Souls II without wondering if those who showered it with praise found themselves mentally stuck in that gallery – surrounded by the pressure of chin-propping pricks while desperately trying to work out if what they were looking at was genuinely a bit shit, or if – horror beyond horrors – they simply didn’t get it. In a world dominated by savvy, smarmy kids, admitting the latter is a bit of a death sentence.

You didn’t like Dark Souls II? Oh. Did you finish it with one hand tied behind your back, and with a character that wasn’t wearing any trousers?

No? Fuck off then, granddad.

@Jam_sponge

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Jay Adams (left) and Rodney Mullen. Photo via Getty

Jay Adams, a guy who had really good balance on his skateboard and, as a member of the Z-Boys, helped to define skating as we know it, died from a heart attack on Thursday while vacationing in Mexico. Although he lived most of his life outside the spotlight, he was brought into mainstream consciousness in 2001 thanks to the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, and then again in 2005, when he was portrayed by Emile Hirsch in Lords of Dogtown. Adams's death was picked up by most major news outlets, almost all of which used the words "legend" or "legendary" in their headlines and went on to describe him as a bad boy who pushed the sport away from dance-y, ballerina-style contests and into the more aggressive street and pool skating that birthed modern-day skateboarding. Less discussed was the gay-bashing Adams initiated in Los Angeles that left a man dead.

While I appreciate Adams's contribution to skateboarding as much as the next guy, it seems odd that virtually every obituary published over the last four days has glossed over or completely failed to mention that one time in 1982 when he helped kill a guy. Adams, describing the incident to Juice magazine in 2000, said, "After a show at the Starwood we went to a place called the Okiedogs and two homosexual guys walked by and I started a fight." One of those homosexuals was named Dan Bradbury, and, as mentioned above, was killed in the brawl. Although Adams was charged with murder, he claimed that he had left the fight by the time the man died, and was convicted of felony assault. He served just six months in prison.

Scanning through the barrage of celebratory obituaries, one could be forgiven for missing that rather large blemish on Adams’s resume.

The initial New York Times obituary on his death failed to mention that Adams, who, as their headline says, "changed skateboarding into something radical," participated in what looks an awful lot like a hate crime a few decades ago. A more in-depth follow-up story published Sunday with the title “In Empty Pools, Sport’s Pioneer Found a Way to Make a Splash” devotes one sentence to it: “In 1982 he was convicted of felony assault for involvement in the stomping death of a gay man at a concert in Hollywood.” The Associated Press acknowledged the incident in which the "colorful rebel" started a fight and then helped beat a gay man to death by writing, "At the height of his fame in the early 1980s, Adams was convicted of felony assault, launching a string of prison stints over the next 24 years"—with no mention of the fact that the victim was a gay man, or that he died as a result. The Los Angeles Times, who called Adams "legendary" and "one of the edgy Z-boys of the sport," devoted one sentence to the incident, also with no mention of the fact that Bradbury was gay, summing it up neatly: "He served six months for his involvement in a fight in Hollywood that resulted a man's death." [sic]

BuzzFeed, ever the bastion of editorial integrity, called Adams a "lord" but didn't bother mentioning the event at all. The Washington Post, which pretty much just jammed everyone else's takes into one, cited the AP and said only that Adams, whose "legacy […] lives on," was "convicted of felony assault and served jail time…" CNN, for its part, called him a "legend" and added him to what appears to be a bizarre, continuously-updated slideshow of people who have died in 2014, but didn't mention the assault. Gawker, a celebrity gossip website, republished a chunk of the AP article with a few extra sentences thrown in, called him a "legendary Dogtown skateboarder" in the headline, and tied it up with this quote from Stacy Peralta: "He was like the original viral spore that created skateboarding. He was it."

When Adams was asked about the incident in an interview just last month with Wildland magazine, he denied the fight had anything to do with Bradbury's sexual orientation: "The trouble we got into that night had nothing to do with the fact the people we got into a fight with were gay. It was during the Punk Rock days in Hollywood and it was a violent time. […] We weren’t bashing gays, we were just out to bash anyone who we came in contact with."

It's hard to say whether or not that's true. There is precious little information online about Bradbury or the night of his death. What we do know is that sometime over the last decade or so, Adams turned to Christianity—like a lot of old people do when they realize they are going to die soon. And, as of last month at least, Adams didn't have a terribly progressive outlook on gay rights. "As far as how I view gay relationships and gay marriage," he told Wildland, "I am 100 percent against them, however I do respect gay people, I just tell them what the Bible says."

Having been a skateboarder for the past 17 years or so, I appreciate the things Adams did to further the sport’s progression. I also understand the knee-jerk reaction from the skateboarding community to defend and lionize one of our own, and am fully prepared for the tidal wave of hate that will flood my Twitter feed after this article is published. But we're doing a disservice to everyone—especially the friends and relatives of Dan Bradbury—when we push the uglier parts of Jay Adams's life under the rug in favor of promoting the "bad boy skateboarder" trope. If we want to acknowledge the fact that Adams was stylish as hell and influenced the way future generations of kids ride on wooden toys, let's do that. But when we make him out to be skateboarding incarnate, as Christian Hosoi did when he told the Times, "Jay embodied our culture and our lifestyle all in one," or as Stacy Peralta implied when he told XGames.com that Adams was the "purest form of skateboarder that I've ever seen," we hitch our sport to the coattails of a guy who probably wasn't as great a person as he was a skateboarder.

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Inside Medreleaf, a licensed producer of medical marijuana in Canada. Photo via the author.

I’ve spent a sizable chunk of 2014 documenting the ups and downs of Canada’s medical marijuana program. In our new video series, Canadian Cannabis, you can check out the inside of two different legal marijuana factories, visit a compassion club that sells oils and extracts (products that are prohibited under Canada’s medical program), which has since been raided by Vancouver Police, and learn about patients who have been alienated by Health Canada’s program—the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR)—for a variety of reasons.

One of the stories we tell in the third episode is of the Pogson family, whose daughter Kate suffers from Dravet syndrome, a “catastrophic” form of epilepsy. Luckily for the Pogsons, cannabis that is very high in CBDs (rather than THC, the psychoactive ingredient in weed) dramatically reduces her seizures. Kate is a toddler, so smoking high-CBD marijuana is quite clearly an absurd proposition. That’s why the Pogsons turn the high-CBD weed, a strain known as Charlotte’s Web, into an oil.

But here’s where it gets tricky.

Health Canada’s MMPR only offers patients dried weed buds. Meaning there are no cannabis juices, oils, extracts, hashes, or any other byproduct available for sale. This tells patients who are unable to smoke, because of previous health conditions, that legal weed isn’t for them. And, the process of turning legally-obtained dried buds into an oil or extract at home has been, up until recently, legally ambiguous.

That changed on August 15th, in the BC Court of Appeal, when Owen Smith, a dude who was arrested for baking weed edibles at a compassion club in Vancouver, won a constitutional challenge against Health Canada, which has made it definitively legal for medical marijuana patients to make extracts with their dried  “marihuana” (as Health Canada so annoyingly calls it).

In the court’s decision, which was voted on 2-1, the message sent to Health Canada is quite clear: “Where the state interferes with an individual’s capacity to make decisions concerning the management of those health problems by threat of criminal sanction, the state is depriving that individual of the power to make fundamental personal choices”

Sadly, Health Canada has had no issue in the past with threatening sick people with law enforcement intervention, for not abiding by their absurdly restrictive cannabis policies. Earlier this year, they tried to force all patients who were registered under their old program, the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations (MMAR)—which allowed people to grow their own plants—to destroy the weed they had cultivated. This unsurprisingly resulted in a lawsuit—and the patients won.

"Canadian Cannabis" host, Damian Abraham, at the Pogson family's dinner table. Photo via the author.

So, Health Canada has now lost two court cases, which have chipped away at the absurdities of the MMPR, but meanwhile they continue to act like political buffoons regarding medical weed in the media. The latest controversy surrounds an ad campaign Health Canada is running to purportedly warn children about the dangers of cannabis—instead of, you know, making cannabis medication more accessible to epileptic children who need it to survive.

The Liberals, namely Justin Trudeau, have taken this ad campaign personally, as he’s referred to it as a thinly-veiled attack on his platform, which aims to sensibly legalize marijuana once and for all. Rona Ambrose, our Conservative Minister of Health (who has absolutely zero medical background), refutes the allegation that her anti-weed campaign is somehow political: “Telling kids not to smoke marijuana is not politics, it is good public health policy and it's based on science."

The irony of Health Canada preventing kids like Kate Pogson from getting reliable access to cannabis oil is, I’m sure, lost on Ms. Ambrose.

And that’s largely why it’s irrelevant to discuss whether or not the Conservatives are using a good ol’ fashioned anti-drug campaign to fuck with the Liberals. They are already blatantly attacking Trudeau on his weed policy, outside of Health Canada campaigns, and if the current polls are any indication, the Conservatives won’t have a leg to stand on in 2015 in the first place.

Rona Ambrose may not like marijuana, but her department, Health Canada, has authorized a broken medical marijuana program anyhow. They have allowed corporations to get into the weed-growing game, and they have tried to strip the privilege for patients to grow their own plants in an aggressive, authoritarian fashion. Now, by stepping out and actively advertising against the drug, at a time when a federal election that partially hinges on the marijuana legalization conversation is around the corner, they look confused and desperate.

Two-thirds of the country want marijuana laws softened. Doctors are apprehensive about medical marijuana, mainly because it’s hard to determine dosages without more research, but they at least recognize that Health Canada’s latest ad campaign is nonsense, stating they wouldn’t endorse it because it has become a “political football on Canada's marijuana policy.”

While this annoying political squabbling continues, obviously higher bodies, like the BC Court of Appeal, recognize that many of our restrictions around medical marijuana are unconstitutional. And so even with a person like Rona Ambrose in charge of Health Canada (she also opposed the Kyoto accord, while she had her ‘environmental hat’ on as the Minister of Environment), marijuana laws will inevitably be loosened and made more rational, with or without her support.

It’s especially problematic, given that in the same speech about Health Canada’s newest anti-weed ad campaign, Ms. Ambrose declared drugs like Oxycontin would be given “stronger warning labels” to try and curb addiction. With 410,000 Canadians admitting to having abused pharmaceutical drugs in a recent survey, you would think maybe that would warrant an ad campaign too?

Regardless of the inane controls that Health Canada has tried to place on medical marijuana, sick people who know that cannabis makes them feel better are going to continue using cannabis, because good weed is luckily everywhere in Canada. So hopefully articles like this won’t have to be written for much longer, because with weed legalization spreading throughout America, it’s only a matter of time before the marijuana industry really takes off here.

And once Canada does have a legalized, recreational, corporate weed industry, we’ll probably reminisce over the days when it was contraband, maybe because it was more fun to buy from a dealer than order from a government-approved grow-op. But at least we won’t be locking up 70,000 people a year for holding some kush.
 

@patrickmcguire

A "cuddle party" is exactly what it sounds like: a social event where complete strangers join together to squeeze each other in an absolutely non-sexual way. Because complete strangers can't be trusted, there's usually a clear list of rules posted on each event's website. For instance, at Berlin's largest cuddle party—which took place a couple of weeks ago—touching "erogenous zones" was a no-go, drunk people weren't allowed in, and each participant reserved the right to say, "No."

What wasn't mentioned, however, was drugs. This presumably meant that anyone coaxing the serotonin out of their brains with substances whipped up by amateur Dutch scientists was very welcome. So we thought it would make an interesting social experiment to attend the cuddle party while one of us was on MDMA, in the hope that it would teach us something more about intimacy than we've so far managed to pick up from reading Cosmo articles and watching internet porn.

The event turned into a bit of a blur, but below is our attempt at recounting the evening as clearly and chronologically as possible.

8:00PM

Charlotte
It was incredibly hot outside. We walked through the backyard of a dark factory in Neukölln. Soft, relaxing music came from one of the windows, but I felt scared. We entered a room where a few lonely people were looking for human contact; my heart was beating out of my chest. I was completely sober, but excruciatingly hungover, and I'd had three hours' sleep, so I really wanted to just get out of here.

Ilona
Charlotte and I had gone out the previous night, so it's a miracle I even managed to reach the second floor, with what felt like half a bottle of champagne and 50 cigarettes forcing their way out of my throat. We were asked to take our shoes off. My holey socks were revealed to the world. I took a dab of MDMA. My cold sweat told me it was a huge mistake.

Charlotte
We stuck heart-shaped nametags on our chests and entered a room full of pillows and mattresses. About 30 cuddlers were gathered in front of us, despite the fact that it's a Saturday night in the middle of summer. Most of them were over 40. Not all were unattractive, but I wasn't exactly raring to wallow with one of them on a mattress.

Ilona
We were late. They were all already sitting in a large circle and looked at us a little disapprovingly. A cross-shaped pillowcase was being passed around and whoever was holding it had to tell the group why they were there. My heart was racing when the pillowcase got to me, and I mumbled something about how I was curious to see what cuddle parties are all about. A lot of them seemed to be there for the first time and everyone was excited.

Charlotte
After the cuddle instructor explained the rules, she moved to the DJ booth. People held hands and started to dance around the room to "Oh Happy Day." I was under the impression that we'd be lying down. I turned my back on the bald, pot-bellied guy offering me his hand, turning instead to two kind-looking mothers. I took them both by the hands and we skipped around to "You Can Be My Lucky Star."

Ilona
A middle-aged dude dressed head-to-toe in turquoise swayed alone in the middle of the room. I wondered if maybe I should just hide in the bathroom and try to enhance the whole experience by rubbing chemicals all over my gums.

Charlotte
I thought about my friend Henry, who'd rather have lost every one of his limbs than come to something like this. No one I know was going to see me, but I still couldn't deal with it for much longer. Ilona danced past me. She looked as if she was actually having fun. I stared into her huge black pupils with envy.

Ilona
I stood awkwardly at the side of the room and watched the people relaxing around me. Charlotte threw me a panicked look, but I couldn't return it. People could not be allowed to know why we were there.

Charlotte
A woman who looked like she washed her face with a pumice stone approached me. To my surprise, it wasn't to take me in her arms, but to angrily inform me that she believed I was "from the press." How did she know? Did I seem that out of place?

Ilona
Paranoia took over. Oh God. They know. Every one of our awkward, forced movements makes it even clearer that our intentions were not pure. I was confronted with the realization that it wasn't the cuddle enthusiasts I had a problem with; it was me.

8:30PM

Charlotte
It was time for the first exercise, in which we had to stand back-to-back with a partner of our choosing. I felt dizzy and nauseous from all the skipping around I'd done. My partner wasn't wearing a shirt, which was probably because his thick bush of chest hair provided enough protection against the elements. He leaned forward and I fell backward. I thought I'd broken my backbone. On the next slope, I spotted the time. We had two and a half hours left in this place. 

Ilona
As I stood back-to-back with a woman whose back I could feel enveloping my body, I thought for a moment that this experience really did have nothing to do with sex. Glancing up, I saw that the man standing in front of me had an erection.

Charlotte
We were told to close our eyes and move around with our arms outstretched, trying to touch the others. I felt a few people's body parts. Hopefully it wasn't their forbidden erogenous zones. I felt the hands of at least three different people on my lower back. It's almost comforting that I can't see anything.

21:00

Ilona
I took a bathroom break for another dab. As I washed my hands, a woman breathed something directly into my face about "feeling" me. I'm confused and not in the right condition to react appropriately, so I walked back into the main room, lay down on a mattress, and played dead as two strangers groped me.

Both strangers were women. Women who did not know how to touch people in an enjoyable or relaxing way. Is this how it feels for men when they receive an eager yet ultimately shitty handjob? This thought made me sad. A faceless voice asked me where I wanted to be touched; I didn't care.

Charlotte
Ilona sat blindfolded on a mattress. The scene looked like the beginnings of a bondage party. A blonde woman was stroking her belly. I put on a blindfold and lay down on one of the mattresses next to her.

Ilona
The blindfold came off. I was now with another woman and it was my turn to "spoil" her. The MDMA fog in my head was triggering more agony than ecstasy, but my sense of competition kicked in: I'll fondle this complete stranger better than she's ever been fondled before. "It was perfect," she sighed after several minutes. The guy whose naked back had been rubbing against mine patted my head.

Charlotte
I wanted to sleep, but thanks to the massage I was receiving from my cuddle partner, that was impossible. It felt like an elephant was trampling over my legs and my back. I was trying desperately to think of something beautiful.

Ilona
Charlotte was lying blindfolded to my right and looked very relaxed. Maybe because she didn't know that her head was resting in the crotch of the half-naked man massaging her scalp. I thought for a moment that I was at a point where I questioned nothing. But then a question intruded: Where's all the synthetic love? Why don’t I feel any of that stuff running through my bloodstream?

9:30PM

Charlotte
I sat out the next round and watched what’s going on from the safety of the break area. In front of me was the pot-bellied man from earlier, repeatedly stroking the area around his partner's drooping breasts. Everyone seemed incredibly tense, but maybe I was just projecting 

Ilona
The corners of my mouth started to twitch. It must have been obvious that I was high. I'd lost all sense of time and space. A thought popped up that was both absolutely out of place and very revealing: I would now really like to have sex. With anyone under 40, or Roger Sterling from Mad Men.

10:00PM 

Charlotte
It was time for the highlight of the evening: the group cuddle. Our cuddle instructor encouraged us to crawl on all fours onto the mattresses, which had been pushed together, and make ourselves comfortable. I didn't want to do it, but I knew I should. People hooked themselves together and tangled their limbs together without the slightest hint of an inhibition. No one wanted to cuddle with me. Fine. I saw Ilona, also sitting alone at the edge of the cuddle puddle. We were outcasts.

Ilona
I realized that I had been right to be scared. I had a feeling nobody here liked me. I could almost physically feel their rejection. A man of about 60 waved at me. He, a blonde woman and someone with gelled grey hair moved aside. I lay down between them and felt their respective limbs and hair brushing against me.

Charlotte
A large woman with a friendly smile asked me if I wanted to lie down in her lap. I leaned back. It was as soft as it looked, and my head sank slowly between her huge breasts. Before me, a man in his mid-forties hugged a tanned, blonde woman and pushed up her shirt in the process. Did he not pay attention to the rules? The two rubbed their faces against each other ecstatically. Someone moaned. Ilona giggled. Meanwhile, a grey-haired guy made himself comfortable on my legs. I wanted very much to be alone.

Ilona
The cuddle instructor reminded us again and again to get in touch with other people. I stayed put. My arms were heavy, my eyes shut tight, and it no longer bothered me that a stranger's hand was on my ass. For the first time in three hours, I felt something resembling relaxation. The guy with the gelled hair stroked my face over and over, while I absently rubbed his head. People around me were moaning, sighing and rubbing against each other. I closed my eyes even tighter than before.

11:10PM 

Charlotte
We got out before the three hours were up. I used to enjoy touching people, but now I never wanted to cuddle again. 

07:00AM

Ilona
At 7:00AM I was sitting wide-eyed on a bank of the river Spree and slowly came down. The relaxation described by many of the participants at the end of the meeting, which manifested itself as a kind of inner paralysis for me, was gone. I felt dirty and uncomfortable, even though the people were really nice. Maybe too nice. Mentally broken, I thought about when I would be back to normal, ready to touch people and have sex. Probably never.

Lisa Lee looks on as Sha-Rock, the first female rapper ever, drops some 2014 freestyle bars. Photo by Lexi Tannenholtz. 

It’s easy to forget that before Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj... Before Missy Elliott, Eve, and Gangsta Boo... Even before Lil Kim defined a certain type of American icon, there were pioneer female MCs who fought to make hip-hop a safe space for women to express themselves through rhyme. 

From August 8 through 11, those founding females of hip-hop and some of the most important women in the rap music biz descended upon Martha’s Vineyard for the second annual Summer Madness Music Festival & Conference. With a guest list that included everyone from Monie Love to MC Lyte, it made perfect sense that this year's festival bore a "Ladies First" theme. According to Sean Porter, one of the event’s co-founders, the event was a "celebration of all genres of black music" intended to "counterbalance all of that negative imagery surrounding African American women."

The time felt right. There's a lot to celebrate and discuss when talking about women, race, and hip-hop these days. In 2013, no black artists topped the Billboard 100 charts, while a white artists like Macklemore nabbed the Grammy for Best Rap Album. This year, magazines claimed that Aussie newbie Iggy Azalea and her interpretation of a Southern black drawl "run hip-hop" after dropping a couple hot singles. Not to mention, we've seen skinny white asses in Sports Illustrated get celebrated like the Super Bowl, while an album cover featuring a single bulbous black ass wearing a pink thong caused controversy and uproar across the web.

VICE will be rolling out a new installment of my conversations with the mother's of hip-hop every week in a series called "Ladies First." Check out my inaugural chat with hip-hop's first female MCs, Lisa Lee and Sha-Rock, below.

VICE: Lisa Lee, you were the only woman to rap in Wild Style. What was it like being a part of that?
Lisa Lee: At that time, we didn’t know it was going to be history. We were just young kids and they gave us some money. It was Charlie Ahearn and it was amazing for somebody to be interested in us coming out of the Bronx. We were just out there rapping for fun. We thought it'd just be a movie played in the neighborhood or something and it turned out to be history. It was an amazing thing years later to see what we did as children.

And Sha-Rock, you were the first female in a rap group—the Funky 4 + 1.  
Sha-Rock: I was the original part of the four. There were three other guys and myself. We are the original Funky Four.

As the pioneers, the people who basically invented MCing, do you think there are rules to hip-hop?
Lisa Lee: There are.

Sha-Rock: Absolutely. And there should be.

Like what?
Lisa Lee: Keep the truth the truth. Don’t try to change history. A lot of people try to do that.

What do you mean?
Lisa Lee: There used to be a lot of people who used the word pioneer. A pioneer is someone who originated something. There’s not that many of us who originated stuff. That’s why Sha-Rock speaks on the first thing that she did. The first things that I’ve done are not the same as her, otherwise it wouldn’t even make any sense for me to speak on it. When people say they are the pioneers, as some people do, I ask, What did you begin? What did you start? Sha-Rock was the very first female. No one can take that away from her. She’s going to hold that title way past when she’s gone and I hold the title of the first female and only female of the Universal Zulu Nation. No one can ever take that from me. When people use certain phrases, they should do their history and learn what these words mean in the hip-hop culture.

Sha-Rock: For me, when we talk about the culture, we’re not talking about rap music. We’re talking about respecting all elements of hip-hop—the culture. There’s a code of ethics that these things are followed by, especially being a female. You’re supposed to uphold that culture and the relevance of what it’s supposed to mean and that means that you are a queen. You go out there and you represent your culture of hip-hop. You represent rap within a culture, but you’re respecting yourself and you’re showing your skills. You need to say, I don’t have to do this or do that. You keep the attention on I’m going to show them what I got with my rhyming. You have to respect the culture and not just rap about partying. That’s disrespecting everybody. That’s where a lot of people get it wrong. You have to celebrate hip-hop for hip-hop. Hip-hop is about peace, unity, and having fun—because it wasn’t always like that. We had to step over dead bodies, bullets, children, people sticking other people up—but we were trying to get away from that. This is why we’re so adamant about the culture being about having fun. Why would you want to go back to that negative environment? That’s not what it’s about. There’s a code of ethics we’re supposed to live by when you say that you represent hip-hop culture. As far as rules, if you want to share your story, by all means share it, but do your homework.

Sha-Rock pops off her sunnies to talk Iggy Azalea with the author. Photo by Lexi Tannenholtz. 

These days white rappers like Macklemore and Iggy Azalea reach commercial pop success in what seems like an instant.
Lisa Lee: Well you’re talking about hip-hop, but you have to separate that. Iggy Azalea is rap music. I know the way she raps, I know that it’s marketed with T.I. and you can’t take that away from her. Rapping within hip-hop is for everybody. I don’t know if she celebrates hip-hop culture, but say rap. That’s all I’m saying.

Sha-Rock: You can’t take nothing away from her because rap music is made for everybody. You have the right to express yourself. People go all off into oh she’s this, she’s that. The rap culture is different. It’s just one element of hip-hop. People understand that it’s a different type of music that you can’t put that hip-hop culture thing around. Iggy Azealia has the right to express herself. The same for everybody. There’s a level of respect for the hip-hop culture.

Does she have that level of respect?
Sha-Rock: It’s not the same thing because she’s rapping a different culture. Rap music is a different culture. You have a right to express yourself. It’s not just for African Americans. It’s for everybody.

What role did other races play in the beginning of hip-hop? Like Charlie Ahearn with Wild Style.
Sha-Rock: Well you’re talking about the 80s. Charlie Ahearn saw me on stage at a theater in the Bronx up in the valley. So yeah, Charlie Ahearn did come, but he came in the 80s. He did have a part with Fab Five Freddy and making the first hip-hop movie, but if we’re talking about the inception, it was African Americans and Latinos. That’s the truth. 

If people like Iggy and Macklemore get popular so quickly, does that take away from opportunities for young black artists?
Sha-Rock: You should say commercialism of rap music. That’s not representing hip-hop culture. The hip-hop culture is about peace, unity, and having fun rap within that. It’s not disrespecting the next man, not disrespecting the next female, it’s not calling the next female a bitch, a ho, a this, a that. Rapping is an element and people have the right to say what they want to say, but hip-hop includes everything too. When you say commercialism, it is what it is. But rap music within the culture is not just for African Americans, it’s for anybody that decides that they want to bring a message. It’s whatever. If it wasn’t Iggy and it wasn’t L. Boogie, then it was Nicki Minaj. 

Do you think Nicki Minaj is true to the culture?
Sha-rock: I think that she’s a businesswoman. I think that she has skills. I do like her. I know that she could go raw as an MC. But I also think that there’s a level of respect that we’re supposed to have and to me you have to be responsible for your own actions. What do you think?

I would say she’s the best rapper right now.
Sha-Rock: Nicki is good. She’s good, but there’s a lot of underground women that you have not heard of either. People want to just say Nicki Minaj and I’m sick of it personally. You’re not hearing nobody else, really. There’s a lot of women that’s out there that are so good.

Why don’t they get noticed?
Lisa Lee: You had Trina, you had MC Lyte, you had Sha-Rock. Everyone has a time to shine. There will always be someone coming after that person that we’ll be able to say, you know, this person is good as well. People have their time to shine.

For female MCs, does it always have to be one after the next?
Lisa Lee: When I started it, I didn’t have to deal with the craziness of the one-at-a-time because I was just one of the dudes. I didn’t have to show myself off. I could have been eye candy because I was young, but I also had to show my skills. So they never looked at me as a female MC. They looked at me for my skills. We inspired women to also think about being MCs. When I look at the rap culture, I’m looking how you're MCing, how you're engaging the crowd with your lyrical flow, and not just something that’s pre-written.

It seems that white rappers like Iggy Azalea or Macklemore don’t need the talent that Nicki Minaj has to go platinum. Does that just reflect the buying power of white people? Or is it the record labels that are perpetuating this?
Sha-Rock: What I would say to people within rap music—if they’re mad at people like Iggy because they’re getting brushed to the side—is that you cannot concentrate on the next man. Hip-hop is supposed to be a culture that is accepting. You should not be out there disrespecting the culture by selling drugs and killing and this and that. Guess what, record companies are putting that out, but they’re pushing other people. Iggy ain’t out there talking about that. She’s not out there disrespecting her race. Iggy’s not being disrespectful as a woman. Macklemore’s not out there disrespecting his race. So are you mad because he wants it more? Then step your game up. Be respectful of the culture and then don’t worry about it. Macklemore, I like his music. He ain’t out there making music about selling drugs and mollys and all that stuff. He’s making music that people want to hear. That people will buy for their kids. I won’t say it’s all positive, but no mother wants their children to hear negative rap music.

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Tom Barlas Jr.'s police mug shot. Photo courtesy of Cerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office

On the evening of July 18, 2013, Kathy Barlas returned to her home in Mason City, Iowa, to find her adult son waiting in the garage in his underwear, dripping with blood. "Mom, I killed Satan," Tom Barlas Jr. said to his mother. Did he mean he hurt the dog? "No, Mom, I killed Satan," he repeated. Kathy entered the house, heading toward her bedroom where she found her husband, Tom Barlas Sr., lifeless on the floor, bleeding from multiple stab wounds. He was dead.

When she returned to the garage, her son was gone. Calling 911, Kathy told the emergency operator that her son might be headed toward the Greek Orthodox Church of Transfiguration. The police eventually found Barlas, who resisted arrest, repeating "God and Jesus Christ," over and over. The cops used their tasers to subdue him, eventually arresting Barlas for the first degree murder of his father.

Last Thursday, a little over a year later, I drove through Mason City, Iowa—which, along with neighboring Clear Lake (the town that killed Buddy Holly), remains my hometown. I'd just flown in from Denver, attempting to begin a week-long vacation, when the news came over the radio that Tom Barlas Jr. was found not guilty of the murder of his father, due to his suffering a "psychotic episode" that prevented him from understanding the consequence of his actions.

It was a humid, grey afternoon—and drastically cold for August.

Adjusting the radio dial, I happened upon an Evangelical sermon, delivered by what sounded like a cranked-up auctioneer. I could almost feel beads of his sweat misting out of the speakers as he spoke with the urgency of being burned alive. "We are locked into a SPIRITUAL WARFARE!" he shouted as I drove past endless rows of lush cornfields. "The forces of darkness remain around us at all time, attempting to tempt us, trick us, trap us into arms of Satan. But the foot-soldiers of the Looooooord will be at your back in a moments notice. All you have to do is reach out!"

Putting these two things together, I couldn’t help but wonder: If this is a community of Bible-believing Christians (as I know it to be), who think that "Heaven Is For Real" and demons walk among us at all times, then shouldn't they have at least considered the possibility that Tom Barlas's father really was possessed by Satan, and that his son had sacrificed his old man in order to heroically save mankind from the Prince of Darkness?

As a former resident of this area for 22 years, I am ultra-familiar with the preacher's use of the term "spiritual warfare." Ask any refugee of the Evangelical movement, and they'll tell you what it was like growing up believing there were angels and demons literally around us at all times, albeit inhabiting a spiritual realm we cannot see. Typically, children are reassured that their closets are free of monsters and the shadow on their bedroom wall is not a witch. But we children of Billy Graham Crusades are not only told that monsters are real, but given instruction on how to spot The Devil when he (inevitably) attempts to infiltrate our thoughts.

"Satan disguises himself as an angel of light," I’d read in Corinthians as a child, convincing myself that not even angels can be trusted. Many of the miracles Jesus performed throughout the gospels were exorcisms, and in Ephisians 6:12, it says, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against ... spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

As a coveted battleground in any political fight, Iowa is definitely a place that swings both ways. While it's the only state in the Midwest to have legalized gay marriage, it's also the winking bellybutton of the Bible Belt, with an above-average religious affiliation. In 1957, Mason City native Meredith Wilson wrote a musical about his hometown called "The Music Man." It was the story of a con man selling an invisible product, and when the town eventually catches on, a woman comes to the man's defense by suggesting it may have all been lies, but it made everyone so happy and optimistic for the future. In other words, who cares if it isn’t real?

Despite having no historical evidence to support it, I’ve always had this theory that "The Music Man" was one long commentary on religion.

I have no shortage of dark memories associated with this state and its Christian Right communities. And so it struck me as odd that a court in my hometown would give Tom Barlas Jr. a not-guilty verdict—despite the universally accepted fact that he at least physically committed the crime. This type of thing is rare in Iowa, as well as the rest of the nation. According to the American Academy of Psychiatry, less than one percent of all trials end in a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict.

But with Barlas, the process of establishing insanity was remarkably easy. There wasn't even a jury trial; only a "trial by minutes," where a collection of reports and testimonies are presented to the judge, who then decides what to do based on the information given to him.

"Once the prosecution's psychiatrist agreed with our psychiatrist on Barlas Jr.'s condition, they couldn't reasonably continue to pursue this as a first-degree murder case," his attorney, Aaron Hamrock, tells me over the phone. "At the time, Barlas Jr. could not tell the difference between right and wrong. In his mind, he thought he was killing Satan."

Crazy, right? Believing that an ethereal Devil can inhabit a person's body? Who would believe such a nutty thing?

But the younger Barlas’s behavior is not out of step with celebrated characters of the Bible. In Genesis, Abraham hears the voice of God instruct him to murder his son (spoiler: at the last minute God peaks his head out of the clouds and says "kidding!") Later, Abraham's grandson, Jacob, physically wrestles an angel.

When the prophet John was tripping out on the island of Patmos, his visions lead him to write the following in Revelation 19:18:

"So that you may eat the flesh of kings and the flesh of commanders and the flesh of mighty men and the flesh of horses and of those who sit on them and the flesh of all men, both free men and slaves, and small and great. And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assembled to make war against Him who sat on the horse and against His army."

There is surely a more complex analysis of Barlas in the psychiatric reports presented to the judge in a sealed envelope, possibly something about schizophrenia or temporal lobe epilepsy (believed to have been the cause of Joan of Arc's visions) leading to auditory and visual hallucinations of a religious nature. But private medical records like that are not available to the public in a trial by minutes.

The only thing the people Mason City know is that Tom Barlas Jr. was a successful 43-year-old restaurateur who destroyed his father in the name of spiritual warfare, and is officially not responsible for the murder—because anyone who believes the devil can possesses a person's body is clearly insane. And by all accounts, the people of Iowa have no objection to this.

"There was a ton of support for him," Hamrock says of his client. "Tom and his father were truly best of friends. They would play cards together, they worked in the restaurant business together. Their family has lived here a long time and is well known in the Mason City area."

Hamrock explains that it's a different situation when you have a family or group of families demanding justice for a murder. Had that been the case, Barlas Jr. may have gone to trial for this crime. But here the victim and the defendant's family are on the same page—and, according to Hamrock, they decided to support the younger Barlas’ defense.

"The outcome in this case was a huge step forward for people who suffer from mental illness throughout the United States," Hamrock tells me. "The state, and the government needs to help these folks, and prevent things like this from happening again in the future."

I do not disagree with the attorney on this. The US prison system is an embarrassment to the world, crippled in part by a justice regime that treats prisons as a de facto mental health care facility—with few ailments diagnosed and little to no treatment provided. Yet according to the American Academy of Psychiatry, more than 90 percent of defendants claiming insanity have a diagnosed mental illness, but only around 25 percent are successful.

After returning to Denver from Iowa, my first move is to call up crime reporter Alan Prendergast, who teaches journalism at Colorado College and has been reporting on the ethical dilemmas involved with mental illness and the justice system since the mid 90s (disclosure: he also used to be a colleague of mine at Denver’s alt weekly, Westword). Confused as to why more defendants aren't given similar treatment—it worked so gracefully for Tom Barlas Jr., and yet prisons remain jam-packed with crazies—I ask about the legal definitions of insanity.

"There are all sorts of people who could be observed to be psychotic or deranged, but they don't necessarily meet the legal definition of insanity," Prendergast says. This definition is often defined by phrases like "not knowing right from wrong," and "unable to distinguish reality from fantasy," states of mind that take on a fuzzy definition when placed in the context of religion and murder.  

"Clearly, people who are delusional, someone who kills their kids and says God told them to do it, they have a chance with an insanity plea," he goes on. "In weird family tragedies, where there's a history of bizarre behavior or claims of demonic possession or someone thinking their kid is Satan, it's more difficult for the prosecution to establish that the defendant had a culpable mental state."

Ultimately, we should take comfort in the verdict of Tom Barlas Jr. A tragedy occurred, but the courts have made a proactive choice in trying to help a sick person, avoiding the intoxicating and blind pursuit of justice. Technically, he will be incarcerated inside Oakdale Prison, but he will be in the psychology wing, where he will be medically treated until the time comes when he is believed to no longer be a harm to himself or others. And then he will be set free.

Still, I can't help but pull my hair in frustration at this verdict. We live in a country that is constantly embroiled in battles over whether to place the Ten Commandments on some courthouse lawn—a collection of states endlessly referred to as A Christian Nation—and yet many of us refuse to consider, even for a moment, the prospect that the spiritual warfare we believe in so deeply might occasionally spill over into the physical realm.  

Long ago I "put away childish things" like belief in angels and demons, and I wish the rest of our nation's spiritual leaders would shit or get off the pot as well: Either stop tormenting children and the mentally ill with their assertions about a supernatural plane of pixies and goblins, or else go all in and start defending those who take Biblical teachings to their inevitable conclusion. If you believe the Bible to be the literal Word of God, then you at least have to accept the possibility that Charles Manson really is Jesus Christ, The Heavens Gate members really did reach the spacecraft behind the Hale-Bop comet, and Tom Barlas Jr. is a hero who may have succeeded in killing Satan by taking his own father's life.

Josiah Hesse is a journalist based in Denver, Colorado, where he covers the local music, comedy, marijuana, and political landscapes. Follow him on Twitter.

The profile for TampaRob could be that of any dad. “I have two sons that are 13 and 10, and a daughter that is 11. We stay pretty busy with soccer, gymnastics, and music lessons.” But then there’s the pitch: “We are active and open-minded and enjoy each other and enjoy meeting others the same.”

Welcome to Family4love.com, the Facebook of incest. In the website’s lingo, an “active family” is one that embraces having sex with one another. “Enjoy meeting others the same” means “come join us.”  

With 3,086 members, this is a relatively small community, but one that is part of a larger subculture that uses the internet to get extremely nasty with their relatives—both as role-playing and what appears to be the real thing. Click around and you’ll find groups devoted to “Wisconsin families that love each other,” a wealthy gentleman with far from paternalistic intentions looking for a surrogate to carry his children, and even a page devoted to filthy confessions like “I love the smell of my husband’s cock on my toddler’s face when I kiss her.” 

Family4Love isn’t the only site of its kind. Incest forums are all over the web. There’s even a subreddit devoted to it. One competitor, Social-Incest.com, calls itself “The place that connects your family in more ways then [sic] one.” And you thought it was awkward when your mom added you on Facebook.

Family4Love flitted into the news last year, when Stephen Lewis, a marine at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, used the site to seek out sex with a father and his children. But the family’s profile was a set-up by Homeland Security and Lewis was arrested. He reportedly admitted to having sex with minors and owning child pornography on his phone. (Calls to the Department of Homeland Security in San Diego to check up on this case were not returned.)

Still, the site goes on, skating a very thin legal line. Sure, it bans users under the age of 18 and prohibits even talk of kiddie pornography. But blatant insinuations of illegal sex are everywhere. In the user MO1's album, photos of young children sitting on the patio had the following caption: “Just before the girls got naked and started the party :p.” The rest of the comments were equally stomach-flipping:

Like many Family4Love members, Ian, a 35-year-old who works in San Francisco’s tech industry, is distrustful of laws regarding incest. A devoted regular on the website, he’s also one of its most vocal members. After a few days of chatting over Family4Love’s private messaging system, Ian opened up to me about where he thinks the line should be drawn between incest and child abuse. It’s natural for kids to learn about sex through their families, he says, as long as the environment is safe and consensual. (Forget age of consent laws, which hold that children, by definition, can’t consent). 

Everyone’s different. Every child’s different,” he says. “If a human being of any age (is) made aware of the potential consequences beforehand, they can have a positive, healthy experience.” That said, he’s quick to assert that he’s not “active” with his son, and “can’t imagine a world where I would be.” He also says he is frustrated by the “assholes and imbeciles who try to talk about molesting children in public chat.”

To Ian, Family4Love is more than a hookup site or a hangout for child abusers. It’s a shelter for people who harbor a sexual fetish so taboo that to admit it to others is to risk almost certain social censure—and disgust.

“I would say the awesomest thing about being here is that, having a really intense, secret fetish I'm not out about in the world, this is the first time I've ever had friends who feel the same way,” he says.

He claims that his first exposure to incest happened at age nine, when a seven-year-old neighbor, who was in an actively incestuous family, made him and his younger sister “do things with each other.”

“It was actually kind of awful,” he recalls.  

“I don't know to what extent that effected [sic] me,” he says. But now, “even thinking about sex between close relatives turns me on… For whatever reason, the Westermark effect totally didn’t work on me.”

Recent studies have backed up the Westermark effect, the theory first proposed by a Germany researcher in the 1890s. It states that siblings who grow up in close proximity develop a sexual aversion to each other. Basically, all those rough-housing sessions in the playpen help you steer clear from your brother’s dick once you hit puberty.

“There seems to be something there, hardwired,” says Jonathan H. Turner, a professor at the University of California Riverside and co-author of Incest: Origins of the Taboo. But other factors, like parental or drug abuse or deep trauma, Turner says, may cause the Westermarck effect to not, well, take effect. Another way it might not work is if siblings are raised apart. (Let’s call that the Luke and Leia effect.)

Debra Lieberman, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, is a leading researcher on incest. She suspects that people on websites like Family4Loves might suffer from the kind of impairments—drug, alcohol, or mental—believed to erode ingrained aversions to incest. Others might be otherwise normal folks who don’t have close family members of their own—and so, feel no visceral disgust towards the thought of siblings doing it.

These people congregate in websites like Family4Love and Social-Incest to “normalize” their fetish by sharing links, talking about it, and posting photos that turn them on. “Suddenly there’s this whole group of people valuing each other for this kind of affiliation or predilection,” she says.

Lieberman, however, draws a categorical distinction between fantasies about incest and the act itself. Those games and fantasies, she argues, emerge because the brain lowers its gross-out thresholds everytime you have sex. Day-to-day, people steer clear of each other’s bodily fluids, she explains. But when it’s time for sex, and the inevitable exchange of fluids, “disgust ratchets down.” For some people, this disgust factor ramps down a little. For others, it might actually ramp down a lot—letting the floodgates open to golden showers and Cleveland steamers. “Certainly incest [fantasies] would be a part of that,” she says. “It’s biological, not just cultural.”

By arguing that we have biological systems that prevent inbreeding and its associated birth defects, Lieberman’s theory goes against the old Freudian party line that we all just secretly want to have sex with our parents. “You do see cases of incest… but they’re the exception, not the rule,” she says.

In other words, the users on Family4Love who are actually engaging in incest are giant exceptions to firm biological rules. The rest are using it as a playpen for fantasies that are actually more widespread than you would think.

Incest has a bum rep, but as a sexual fantasy, it also has a strong pull. In 2009, two real-life identical brothers known as the Peters twins became porn sensations after fucking and sucking each other on camera. Their first DVD, Taboo, sold over 15,000 copies worldwide, and Bel Ami, the Czech porn studio behind the release, saw its membership rates shoot up by 25 percent. The mainstream media even started calling what they did “twincest.”  

But Bel Ami soon faced a common problem that plagues porn studios trading in questionably legal content—credit card processing companies became wary of handling their financial transactions. According to a Bel Ami spokesperson, the company removed all the Peters Twins material from their website in 2012.

Regardless, incest themes in porn are more prevalent today than ever before—showing that America’s appetite for this brand of sexual deviancy is only growing. While major porn companies are skittish of depicting sex between (real or imagined) blood relatives, you can still find them easily through smaller studios and forums.

“I would say that [incest] is currently the most widespread theme in adult movie-making,” says Dan O’Connell, co-founder of the lesbian porn studio Girlfriend Films. One of their most popular series is called Mother/Daughter Exchange Club, where moms and daughters swap with other families for sex. Although it lacks actual incest, the series sells “like crazy,” according to O’Connell. “Just the mention will make consumers belly up to the bar and plunk down good money for titles that seem to promise blood-relative incest.” 

On the same note, Kelly Madison, an adult film star and director, says she has heard of other companies looking for unknown girls who they can market as being the real daughter of an older actress. But Madison herself prefers to only film scenes between step-relatives, like in her latest series, Dream Young—where a child-like pageant princess played by Halle Von gets reamed by her step-father (played by Kelly’s husband, Ryan Madison). “I would never do anything with real bloodlines because I don’t think that, as a society, we should glamorize anything that encourages abuse,” she says.

Ryan Madison and Halle Young in Dream Young

When asked why she thinks incest-themed porn is experiencing such a surge in popularity, Madison says it boils down to desensitization. “We’ve done everything. This is really the last taboo. People are chasing a high. You have to top it with something crazier each time.”

It certainly helps that incestuous content is really profitable, too. Accordng to Jesse Garza, a Senior Marketing Manager with Gamma Entertainment, one of their most successful niche sites is called Out of the Family, which features exclusively step-family and in-law scenes. “Right now, this kind of content outperforms our other sites by almost double,” he says. “Mother/daughter fantasies are by far the most popular—enough for us to build an entire site around it, called Mommy’s Girl.”

Jesse says porn companies are doing their best to court the market while staying within the restrictions put upon them by credit card processors and distribution channels. If legality wasn’t an issue, he is sure that many other companies would jump on the opportunity to monetize on the trend. Should a court ever successfully litigate a porn producer for depicting blood-relative sex, he warns, all of this content will suffer an instant death. But for now, incest porn continues to operate in the shady grey zones of legality.

Judging from the rising numbers of people who are pleasuring themselves to incest-themed porn—or going one step further by using sites like Family4Love to indulge in their fantasies, it seems like a little hanky panky with mommy and daddy is a bigger turn-on than we’d like to admit. Maybe the real taboo might be concluding that incest might not actually be that big of a taboo after all.

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Photo via Flickr user leandrociuoffo.
The Harper government is dragging its feet on filling a nearly year-old vacancy for a job to oversee Canada’s controversial mining industry. The position has already been widely criticized as an astroturfing effort to boost the damaged image of Canadian mining interests worldwide, despite its supposed mission of addressing the issues of our mining companies that are marauding throughout the Global South. But even though the job was panned for being ineffective, not having an overseer at all is clearly much worse than having a neutered one.

And things may soon get even more out of hand.

If you aren’t already familiar, 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada. Domestically, mining is a $50 billion a year industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of the world’s mining capital flows through Toronto Stock Exchange. Canadian mining companies are spending some $130 billion abroad.

So when reports spring up about mining companies behaving badly, which is a frequent occurrence, there’s a very good chance the company is Canadian.

But Ottawa has fought any attempt to slap regulations on Canadian companies, instead opting for an underfunded and barely-staffed overseer with no real powers. Marketa Evans, who was appointed as the Federal Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor, resigned abruptly last year. Her office was ridiculed as being, at best, ineffective and, at worst, a PR effort for Canadian mining interests.

Now activists and industry alike are on the same page—it’s time for the government to do something. The government, however, is slow to react, and is giving new powers to companies who want to go after uncooperative governments.

Miners behaving badly

Canadian mines have spent much of the last two decades getting a bad rap through resource-rich Global South.

Canada’s mining industry “stained Canada’s international reputation,” according to Human Rights Watch senior researcher Chris Albin-Lackey. That reputation was a big factor in Canada’s surprising defeat in its bid to win a seat on the UN Security Council, according to left-wing academic Yves Engler. One report cited the reputation of Canadian mining companies as “buccaneers at best and Ugly Canadians at worst.

That growing consensus is thanks to a spate of stories that make Canadian companies look more and more like they’re governed by Bond villains.

Human Rights Watch singled out Toronto-based Barrick Gold for ignoring repeated gang rapes at one of its Papua New Guinea mines. El Salvadorian activists raised the alarm after a slew of local anti-mining activists kept winding up dead, and they blame Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining. In Kyrgyzstan, Saskatoon-based Cameco drew the ire of the local government following three chemical spills and workplace accidents that may have killed half a dozen workers and nearby residents. The wife of one activist, shot to death by security forces employed by Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals and its Guatemalan subsidiary, came to Ottawa to put pressure on MPs to do something. She’s pushing a long-shot lawsuit in order to try and make the company pay.

Then there was the time that Montreal-based Anvil Mining facilitated war crimes in the Congo by arming, transporting, and paying soldiers to kill a half dozen rebels in a nearby town. In the end, they killed more than 100—mostly civilians. A UN report found that they also carried out summary executions, looting, and rape.

In many of the cases, it’s impossible to tell whether the reports are accurate, and just who is responsible, because of a lack of good governance in many of these countries’ rural areas.

Even a report by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), leaked to advocacy group MiningWatch, says Canadian companies are responsible for four times as many violations as other mining-heavy countries.

The problem is huge.



Barrick Gold's reputation for poor international behaviour has sparked frequent protests. Image via ProtestBarrick.com

An attempt to regulate

Given the litany of horror stories, and the blowback they’ve had on the mining companies with spotless records, it seemed all but certain that Ottawa would be pushed to act.

The public relations fight finally coalesced around 2009. Liberal MP John McKay introduced bill C-300. The legislation would have required the Minister of Foreign Affairs to create an office to oversee Canadian mining companies and pull any funding going to companies that ignore human rights, environmental protections, or labour laws.

Canadian funding to these companies is not insignificant. As this journalist reported in 2011, government bodies like Export Development Canada, the Canadian Pension Plan, and the Department of Foreign Affairs have kicked in billions in investment and loans to these companies, including those who have been repeatedly flagged for human rights abuses. Meanwhile, the Canadian International Development Agency is shoveling huge sums of money towards helping mining companies clean up their act in their host countries.

McKay’s bill would have kneecapped any ne’er-do-wells operating abroad. It, however, faced stiff opposition from organizations like PDAC and the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). Nevertheless, the bill passed its first vote in the House of Commons. Conspicuously, however, a large number of opposition MPs skipped the vote—many of them have large mining interests in their ridings.

When it came back to a vote again, the lone Conservative supporter—Michael Chong—flipped his vote, and enough opposition MPs were no-shows to ensure its defeat.

But the government didn’t want to be seen to sit on its hands. That’s where Marketa Evans came in. She was appointed as the “Federal Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor.”

There was some cautious optimism.

Evans was a well-heeled player in the NGO and corporate world. She had been the Director of Strategic Partnership for Plan International, and had been a market manager for a decade at CIBC.

Fittingly, she had also spent six years heading up the Munk School for International Studies at the University of Toronto. While the school is regarded as independent, its patriarch is Peter Munk who happens to be the founder and chairman of the world’s largest mining company—Barrick Gold.

Optimism faded quickly. The new gig was so limited that, in its initial consultations with NGOs and representatives of the mining sector, stakeholders referred to the office and its mandate as “a joke.” One coalition called the post “hopelessly ineffective.”

Paradoxically, the office was not just for those affected by mining, but it also acted as an “avenue of recourse for mining, oil and gas companies who feel they've been unfairly targeted,” a spokesperson for the office told this journalist in 2010.

Basically, Evans was playing defence for misbehaving mining companies.

The core function of her role was to be able to intake complaints against Canadian mining companies abroad. That’s where the job’s power began and ended. From there, the office could invite the offending company to join mediation. If the company refused, the file was closed. If mediation began and the company withdrew, the file was closed. If the company stuck with it, the counsellor had no power to impose solutions, damages or sanctions onto the company. It played referee, but the company was always free to take its ball and go home.

In notes from the consultations held by the office, obtained via Access to Information Request, a handful of stakeholders lambasted the effort.

“Have $ for one complaint a year—goes to the seriousness taken of issue, is a joke—calls into question legitimacy of whole exercise,” reads a note about one participant’s objections regarding the office’s limited funds.

“Hopes—see [development] of procedure that is effective, genuine means of redress if rights negatively impacted. Fear—we won’t see it,” reads another participant’s complaint who didn’t see the office improving any time soon. They were right.

The names of all participations were withheld.

The documents obtained from the Department of Foreign Affairs include reams of flipcharts, which have been the hallmark of insufferable public presentations since the dawn of time.

“Office = white elephant -> mandate to protect reputations,” reads one piece of chart paper.

The office dropped about $58,000 to do a marathon of consultations in Canada and abroad, with the vast majority of participants coming from industry.

One note from the office, on the consultation documents, reads: “speaks volumes who is not here—already shows a lack of trust??”

In four years, the office received just five complaints. In four of those, the company either refused to enter into the process, or quickly withdrew from it. The fifth complaint is supposedly ongoing, with the last report coming out nearly a year ago.

The complaints show just how ineffective the office was.

In one, Excellon Resources brought in Mexican state police to inspect a copper theft at one of its mines. While investigating, police reportedly beat a number of mine workers, who were ultimately innocent of the theft. The workers complained and the company did nothing, so they went to Evans. As the counsellor notes, in closing the file, “Excellon stated that the process does not provide value to the company.”

In another request, indigenous groups in Argentina complained to the office after heavy rainfall led to local drinking water mixing with toxic runoff from Silver Standard Resources’ nearby mine. When they told the company, management ordered water testing—and subsequently refused to release the results. The company initially agreed to the dispute resolution process, until the counsellor suggested she conduct a field visit of the mine. Silver Standard refused and withdrew.

A 3-D rendering of the Silver Standards mine in Argentina.

In October 2013, Evans quietly resigned, a year before the end of her mandate.

Since then, the office has been in limbo.

No counsellor, no strategy

The Department of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Development (DFATD) say they’re drafting a new strategy to deal with wayward mining companies, and along with that will come a revamping of the counsellor’s job.

However, Minister of International Trade Ed Fast has been undergoing those consultations since December 2013, and no progress has been announced.

VICE asked Fast’s office to offer an update, strictly for background purposes.

“To answer your question for background information, a new CSR Counsellor will be appointed in due course,” wrote a government spokesperson.

VICE followed up, asking for details about the appointment process, the timeline, and the drafting of a new strategy.

“As previously stated, a new CSR Counsellor will be appointed in due course,” they repeated.

All other questions were ignored.

Ian Thompson, Program Coordinator at faith-based social justice organization KAIROS—the ones who had their funding unceremoniously re voked by then International Development Minister Bev Oda—isn’t too surprised that Evans resigned.

“Implementing that mandate had to be demoralizing,” says Thompson.

An alliance of groups, to which KAIROS is party, has been calling for more effective oversight for years. Amazingly, industry is getting on board.

“It really didn’t work. And I think that was clear to industry folks,” he says.

Now the only people left to convince are the government.

“They’ve heard the message, whether they’re going to listen…” Thompson says, trailing off.

Ben Chalmers, Vice President of Sustainable Development at the Mining Association of Canada, says it makes sense that they haven’t appointed a new counsellor while they finalize the strategy, but a beefed up strategy is much needed.

In what constitutes a come-to-Jesus moment for associations like MAC, industry is now getting behind a more comprehensive strategy to combat bad deeds done by the extractive sector.

While they’re not exactly pushing for the ombudsman that McKay envisioned, the mining associations are asking for a more effective system.

In a submission by MAC sent to DFATD, they recommend re-vamping the whole system, linking the dispute resolution with the trade department, and turning the counsellor's job into more of an advisory role. In other words, they want to give the powers to bureaucrats who can actually use them. And, most importantly—some of the process would be mandatory.

Both MAC and PDAC are also calling on the government to work to build capacity in resource-rich countries — an idea that PDAC says is “under-conceptualized, under-resourced and undervalued”in Ottawa’s current plan.

When industry gets behind an idea, the government tends to move a lot quicker. When the extractive sector backed an initiative to have mining companies make public some of their financial documents—‘Publish What You Pay,’ they call it—Ottawa made a big to-do about announcing it.

Presentation aid obtained via Access to Information Request from DFATD. Image via the author.

Indeed, bad press has pushed many companies to get more onboard with strategies aimed at ensuring that its various international operations don’t freelance when it comes to security, workers’ rights, and environmental protections.

The problem is, even if the big players like Barrick and their spokespeople at the various organizations get onboard with being good global citizens, that doesn’t mean that all of the various junior mining companies will play by the rules.

No oversight, no appeal

Enter Infinito Gold.

Thanks to Canada’s uber-fertile atmosphere for mining companies—made possible by the barely regulated venture capital markets where small mining companies can raise millions overnight—any wealthy psychopath with a plan can fly off to far-away places and plunder resources on the cheap.

Calgary-based Infinito Gold had set up shop in Costa Rica, with plans to open up a huge open-pit mine. The government of Costa Rica found some irregularities with the approval process—and, given that they banned open-pit mining in 2011—they rejected Infinito’s application.

So Infinito decided to sue Cosa Rica for a billion dollars.

If that sounds incredible, that’s because it is.

Infinito is making use of a little-known treaty that Canada ratified late last year—the World Bank-run Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID).

It basically serves as an international courtroom for companies who figure that a country isn’t respecting the provisions of all its trade deals. Technically, it’s ‘arbitration.’ But, realistically, it’s a forum for companies to sue countries. Decisions cannot be appealed or overturned by domestic courts.
 

Interview requests to Infinito went unanswered.

It has thus far been used by tobacco giant Phillip Morris to sue Uruguay for slapping anti-smoking ads on its cigarette packages. They’re demanding $2 billion. It’s also being used by Swedish company Vattenfall, whose executives are trying to squeeze over $4 billion from Germany, because they’re phasing out nuclear power.

ICSID should be something of a dream for small Canadian mining companies that don’t want to go through the messy business of actually winning approval for their projects. Instead, they can just sue the government and force their way in.

And, so long as dispute resolution in Canada remains a voluntary and ineffective regime, it’s so much easier to threaten a state for billions of dollars.

“It allows companies to bypass local mechanisms,” says Scott Sinclair, senior research fellow with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

And if this gaggle of judges on the Washington-based ICSID tribunals decide that a country isn’t respecting its trade agreements, it can force the country to pay. Even if the decision was made by a country’s democratic institutions.

Indonesia tried to tell the tribunal that it had no authority to hear a lawsuit against the country’s mining laws. The tribunal, unsurprisingly, thought otherwise.

“It’s a whole industry of lawyers who run around the world suing countries,” says Thompson. “It reduces governments’ space to implement effective programs around environmental protections or protection of worker or other things in the public interest.”

Now that Canada has signed on—it resisted doing so for years because the provinces hated the idea—things could move quite quickly.

“I do feel like the flood gates are opening—or are already opened,” says Sinclair.

Canada only ratified ICSID last December. On top of Infinito’s claim, it looks like Toronto-based Gabriel Resources will also be looking to take Romania to the cleaner’s for holding up its huge gold mine project.

Thompson says this is something Canadians should be worried about.

“If they can do it to Costa Rica, they can do it to us too.”

GIF by Dan Stuckey

Terence McKenna smoked cannabis for the first time during Easter vacation in 1965 when he was 18 years old. He had inherited “the programming,” as he called it, from his “middle class straight parents” that “the road to hell was paved” with cannabis. But he had also read Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others who had been more specific, informative, and curious about the plant. It took McKenna “a couple, or three” encounters with cannabis before he figured out what it was doing to him. As an adolescent, he’d been “what they call ‘a nervous child’”; now, as a young adult, it came to him “with the force of a revelation” that:

The mere smoking of a small amount of vegetable material could completely invert the structures of my personality and socialize me, as it were, into a reasonably functioning member of the community in which I found myself.

He said in “Cannabis Trialogue” (1991):

Within a few months, I had integrated [cannabis] into my lifestyle as really the central practice of my life. And it has remained so up until just two or three months ago when, under the pressure of my apparently dissolving marriage, I stopped smoking in order to see, really, what sort of effect it would have.

McKenna explained:

I was in sort of the absurd position of being in psychotherapy with a woman who I respected very much, and who seemed to be a very skilled psychotherapist—except that she had no sophistication whatsoever about cannabis, and the therapeutic process kept looping back to the issue of my cannabis ingestion.

This conversation would happen:

Psychotherapist: Well, now, how many times a day do you do this?

McKenna: Eh, ten to fourteen.

Psychotherapist: And how many years have you been doing this?

McKenna: Well, 25, 26, 27?

McKenna discerned that cannabis was “impeding the therapeutic process”—not due to its effects on him, but because of its effects on his psychotherapist’s attitude toward him—and so, “to remove this issue from the menu of issues we were dealing with,” stopped smoking it. He said:

And I’m happy to report that, though I was at that time the heaviest and most continuous cannabis user that I have ever known or ever heard of, it was no big deal: I simply stopped smoking it, and took up reading in the evenings, and it seemed to have no impact on my psychological organization at all, except that, I must say, my dream life became considerably more interesting in the wake of that decision.

After a number of months without cannabis, McKenna continued smoking again—every day for the rest of his life, except when his “access to cannabis was interrupted,” due to travel or other reasons. But he didn’t necessarily recommend this constant, daily cannabis use, as he explained in 1998:

I’m an inveterate cannabis user, and I wish in a way that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use, because I think the real way to do cannabis is like once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get, and then immense amounts of it.

Why Did McKenna Smoke Cannabis “So Assiduously Over the Years”?

He asked himself this question in “Cannabis Trialogue.” I’ve organized some of his answers into a list:

1. Cannabis Thins the Boundary Between the Conscious and Unconscious Mind

McKenna formed this theory, he said, just for his own edification. In his model of this theory, he imagined the unconscious as a system under hydraulic pressure. He said: “If you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication.”

2. Cannabis Seems to Dissolve a Local, Personalistic Perspective

McKenna explained:

If I don’t smoke cannabis, I worry about balancing my checkbook, the state of my immediate short-term career concerns. In other words, all the anxieties of the petit bourgeois pour in to claim my attention. If, on the other hand, I avail myself of cannabis. I’m able to rove and scan through a vast intellectual world that is composed of all the books I’ve ever read, all the people I’ve ever known, all the places I’ve ever been.

3. Cannabis Allows One to Be Surprised by One’s Own Knowledge

McKenna said: “What I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas.” Without cannabis, his creativity was “a kind of brick-by-brick, linear extrapolation of certain concerns.” With cannabis, he could “go in one moment from thinking about Goethe’s color theory, to in the next moment puzzling over a particular instance in Mayan historiography.”

McKenna felt that his experience in this was generalizable. He cited “the architectural and art historical motifs” of places in the middle east, such as Punjab and Bengal, where cannabis had been institutionalized for thousands of years. “Islam is a civilization, to my mind, that is largely, if unconsciously, under the influence of the visions and attitudes imparted by hashish,” he said.

4. Cannabis Allowed McKenna to Work Twice or Three Times as Long as Normal

Both creatively:

I find that when I’m writing books that I can only write for about three hours, and then either the day is finished for work, or I smoke hashish and twenty minutes later I’m ready to go two hours more at it—and I can do that twice in a day. If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity. Now if you just sit down and smoke into a stupor, you’re not going to be able to do this. But if you just stop this now tiresome and boring activity and have a couple of puffs, and then you sit and have a few interesting thoughts, and you feel completely revitalized and able to go back to it.

And physically:

For instance, if I’m stacking wood, I’ll stack half a cord of wood and then I’ll think, “Well, I’ll finish stacking it tomorrow.” And then I’ll go in and smoke some cannabis and a half an hour later I’ll say, “Well, why wait until tomorrow? I’ll just go and finish it right now.”

This has seemed true for myself, and I find it remarkable and interesting because cannabis, in my experience, doesn’t seem to steal willpower, energy, or motivation—or whatever it is that allows one to work longer—from my future self, like caffeine and other stimulants seem to do. Instead, cannabis seems to involve me, at least to some degree, in the generation of willpower via different means than self-theft.

5. Cannabis Improved McKenna’s Sexual Performance

McKenna’s early sexual encounters “were haunted,” he said, by the possibility of “premature ejaculation.” (He noted parenthetically: “And I think this is a problem of many young men, simply because they have so much juice going.”) Cannabis, he discovered, gave him “an incredible ability to control my ejaculation” while also increasing his “sexual stamina.”

6. Cannabis Improved McKenna’s Verbal Facility

McKenna cited a memory he had of the second time he got stoned: “I was able to hold forth for an hour in a pseudo Melvillian style I created on the spot without hesitation—a short story in the style of Herman Melville that was dazzling, apparently, to my hearers. This is verbal facility of an extraordinary sort.”

*

“Cannabis Trialogue,” from which I’ve organized the above list, was one of the dozens of public discussions McKenna and his friends/colleagues Rupert Sheldrake (an English biologist) and Ralph Abraham (an American mathematician) conducted from 1982 to 2000. These three-way discussions, or “trialogues,” were recorded. Many of them, though not “Cannabis Trialogue,” were then published, in edited form, in the books Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness (1992) and The Evolutionary Mind (1998).

McKenna, Sheldrake, and Abraham (left to right) discussed light, vision, psychedelics, computers, fractals, the apocalypse, psychic pets, "human mushrooms," Riane Eisler, John Dee, and other topics.

The three thinkers shared an interest in—and an advocacy of—psychedelics, and seemed to agree on most topics, or at least disagree somewhat synergistically. In “Cannabis Trialogue,” Sheldrake and Abraham agreed with McKenna that cannabis was desirable for humankind and obviously much less destructive to society and the human body than tobacco and alcohol. But they did not agree with McKenna on the plant’s effects. Sheldrake said that, in part because it produces “a kind of physical relaxation,” cannabis “doesn’t produce a tremendous urge to go empty the dustbin, or do chores around the house.” He observed that “the mental expansion is bought at the price of a certain physical lethargy.” Abraham said (and Sheldrake concurred):

My impression, Terence, is that your experience is not typical, and I would say that most of the things you described aren’t typical of my experience, personally.

Why This Disagreement, Even Among Friends That All Enjoyed Cannabis, on Its Effects?

One reason, McKenna observed, could be that people are referring to different experiences. McKenna felt that, for purposes of testing cannabis’ pharmacological effects, the conversation “should almost” be restricted to “high-grade, Lebanese hashish, which is truly nothing but the compressed resin of the female cannabis plant.” He explained:

This question of does it make you lazy, does it give you energy, does it destroy your memory, does it enhance your memory—because I’ve smoked so many years, so many different kinds of dope, of cannabis, I’ve come to hold pretty strong opinions about its various forms, and I think that number one, charas is a debilitating drug. It has opium in it, it has datura in it, it has various additives and binders that are not good. Marijuana, which is how most Americans smoke their cannabis, involves the incineration of too much inert vegetable material, so that you are getting pesticide residues, carbon monoxide, tars—all of these things are complicating the question of what does cannabis do?

The discussion in “Cannabis Trialogue” sort of lost focus—digressing into legality issues regarding drugs in general—after McKenna observed the above, and so other reasons for why people disagree on cannabis’ effects were not explored. But I’ve organized a list of four more possible reasons, citing McKenna’s other work, below.

1. Every Person Is Genetically Unique (Even Identical Twins)

McKenna observed in “Appreciating Imagination” (1994):

Like your blue eyes, your height, your body weight, your intelligence—and everything else about you that makes you unique—your inherited allotment of drug synapses is unique. This is why some people are sensitive to drugs, some people insensitive, some people extremely sensitive.

An example of this is in a story McKenna told in “Hermeticism and Alchemy” (1992) about a course he took at Berkeley called “Biochemical Markers for Individuality” that was taught by Alexander Shulgin, “the great drug designer.” In the class, Shulgin brought in a vial of some kind of chemical and passed it around. One-hundred and ninety-eight of the 200 students couldn’t smell the chemical at all, but two people were so overwhelmed by the smell that they became physically sick. McKenna said:

And then [Shulgin] explained to us that these people were probably up to 50,000 times more sensitive to this chemical than most people, and that this is a gene you carry for sensitivity to this thing. Well, those kinds of compounds—aromatic compounds, compounds with an electronically active ring structure—are the very nearest relatives to drugs, and so it’s reasonable to suppose that there are genetic differences in the way we relate to drugs, which doesn’t mean racial differences, it means from person-to-person.

3. Cannabis Is a Both-and Substance

In Q&As, when asked if something was one way, or another way, McKenna often answered “both and“—stressing both words. He mentioned this “both-and” way of thinking in “I Understand Philip K. Dick.” Regarding the science fiction author, whose books he enjoyed, he wrote: “The logic of being that he sought, and largely found, was not an either-or logic, but a both-and and and-and kind of logic.”

Cannabis—unlike “downers” or “uppers” which could be called either-or substances—seems to be a both-and substance. At least some of its effects seem to be on a domain that includes both stimulation and relaxation, among other possibilities. Therefore it could be that people who say it makes them lazy/unmotivated and people who say it energizes/motivates are equally accurate in their descriptions.

3. People Have Been “Brainwashed” By ~80 Years of Deceptively Biased Information

McKenna observed in Food of the Gods (1992) that cannabis in the United States was “neither stigmatized nor popularized” until the early 1930s, when Harry J. Anslinger, US Commissioner of Narcotics, “created a public hysteria” at the apparent “behest of American chemical and petrochemical companies” that wanted to eliminate hemp as a competitor. McKenna wrote:

Anslinger and “the yellow press” characterized cannabis as the “weed of death.” William Randolph Hearst popularized the term “marijuana” with a clear intent of linking it to a mistrusted dark-skinned underclass.

This has arguably continued nonstop to the present. McKenna said in “Hermeticism and Alchemy” (1992):

Society misrepresents drugs tremendously. For example, we all know the stereotyped image of the pothead. You know—the pothead can’t work, can’t remember, it’s the inarticulate, dumb hippy image. Well, I’ve never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself, and, you know, I’m very proud of my memory, and my ability to get verbally organized almost under any conditions. So I completely violate the stereotype of what it is to be a pothead. Well, how many people are there like that? I mean, I’m always amazed when people say “no, I don’t want to smoke any pot, it will mess with my memory.” I mean really? How peculiar. So, what you have to do is just like every other thing: Everything you’ve been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what’s really going on.

Due to cannabis’ both-and nature, it may be the case that convincing people to any degree, even subconsciously—or maybe even simply by authoritatively stating—that it has certain effects will, for a number of people, actually cause the existence of those effects. But this might also mean that cannabis can, to a degree, have whatever effect its user wants—and knows how to sort of slyly convince—it to have. In this way, as with most or all psychedelics, cannabis has something of a “mind over matter,” or magical, element to it.

*

Due to “all of the above,” and probably many more reasons, people seem unable to agree on what cannabis does. But it is known, via research—mostly by institutions wanting to find something wrong with it—that, as McKenna said in 1987, “of the major intoxicants known to mankind, surely Cannabis must be the most benign.”

Like the two compounds he advocated most—DMTand psilocybin—cannabis has been “user tested,” McKenna observed throughout his work, by thousands (maybe tens or hundreds of thousands) of generations of humans, beginning since perhaps the emergence of the human imagination in the physical world in the form of musical instruments, cave/rock art, figurines, and other artifacts ~35,000 to 60,000 or more years ago. Plant of the Gods, a compendium of psychedelic plants written by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffmann, and Christian Rätsch, estimates conservatively, I think, that the partnership of cannabis and man “has existed now probably for ten thousand years.” Today cannabis, DMT, psilocybin—and many other psychedelic plants and compounds—are, somehow and absurdly, schedule I drugs. From the DEA’s website:

Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.  

Next week, I’ll examine McKenna’s views on why psychedelics are illegal. As he said in “Nature is the Center of the Mandala” (1987):

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Until then, here’s a 12-second video of McKenna smoking a joint in 1996 in the Valley of Rustlers, South Africa.

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Fukushima nuclear workers and their supporters raise their fists in front of TEPCO headquarters during a rally in Tokyo on March 14, 2014. Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images

Last month, when the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) announced it would move forward with its plan to construct an “ice wall” around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s failed reactors, it seemed like a step backwards. In June, the utility company in charge of decommissioning the plant—which was ravaged by a tsunami in March 2011—indicated that its initial attempt at installing a similar structure had flopped. Its pipes were apparently unable to freeze the ground, despite being filled with a -22°F chemical solution.

Similar techniques have been successfully used by engineers to build underwater car tunnels and mine shafts. But Dr. Dale Klein, an engineer and expert on nuclear policy, isn’t so sure it’ll produce the same results on a project of this magnitude. He says that although freezing the ground around reactors one through four might help corral the water that’s being used by TEPCO as a coolant, there’s little technical understanding of how the natural water sources surrounding the plant might respond. “As the water comes down the mountains towards the ocean, it’s not clear to me that [TEPCO] really know how it is going to move around that frozen barrier,” he said in an interview with VICE.

“But it has to go somewhere,” he continued. “It’s such a complicated site and problem, and I don’t know if they fully understand that yet.”

It’s worrying to hear doubt from someone like Klein, whose expertise ranges from politics to pedagogy. He was appointed to chair the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission by President Bush in 2006 and, after stepping down in 2009, he served as the organization’s commissioner in 2010. Now, in addition to being associate director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas, he’s part of an international TEPCO advisory panel and visits Japan three to four times a year to work with officials as they struggle to helm a largely ad hoc clean-up effort.

Aside from TEPCO’s unwillingness to consider other engineering solutions, his main point of criticism about Japan’s largest utility company is rooted in one that countless others have voiced since the earthquake (and subsequent tsunami): a suspicious disregard for keeping the public informed.

“When rumors start circulating, TEPCO needs to come forward right away and say, ‘This is what we know, this is what we don’t know,’ rather than staying silent,” Klein said. “They give off the perception that they’re covering up something, when that isn’t what they’re doing at all.”

But it’s hard to give TEPCO the benefit of the doubt when misinformation, lying, and a sub-par approach to safety culture have been central to this quagmire since before the natural disasters. While it’s rarely constructive to point fingers in a time of crisis, it’s worth noting that TEPCO has been reprimanded by the Japanese government, international scientists, peace-keeping organizations, global media outlets, and both anti- and pro-nuclear advocates for its unwillingness to disclose key details at a time when they are desperately needed. Coupled with the unmitigated radiation still pouring into Pacific waters, this helps explain why a Japanese judicial panel announced in late July that it wants TEPCO executives to be indicted.

This negligence can be traced back to the Fukushima plant’s meltdown. Just three months after the plant was crippled, the Wall Street Journal came out with a report culled from a dozen interviews with senior TEPCO engineers saying its operators knew some reactors were incapable of withstanding a tsunami. Since the Daiichi plant’s construction in the late 1960s, engineers had approached higher-ups to discuss refortifying the at-risk reactors, but these requests were denied due to concerns over renovation costs and an overall lack of interest in upgrading what was, at the time, a functioning plant. In 2012, it came to light that one such cost-cutting measure was the use of duct tape to seal leaking pipes within the plant.

A year after the Wall Street Journal report, TEPCO announced that the Daiichi plant’s meltdown had released 2.5 times more radiation into the atmosphere than initially estimated. The utility cited broken radiation sensors within the plant’s proximity as the main reason for this deficit and, in the same statement, claimed that 99 percent of the total radiation released from the Daiichi plant occurred during the last three weeks of March 2011. That last part turned out to be untrue—a year later, in June 2013, TEPCO admitted that almost 80,000 gallons of contaminated water had been leaking into the Pacific Ocean every day since the meltdown. As of today, that leak continues.

Relatives of tsunami victims offer prayers at the site of their house that was swept by tsunami at Namie, near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on the third anniversary. Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

This year marked the disaster’s third anniversary, but new accounts of mismanagement and swelling radiation levels continue to surface. In February, TEPCO revealed that groundwater sources near the Daiichi plant and 80 feet from the Pacific Ocean contained 20 million becquerels of the harmful radioactive element Strontium-90 per gallon (one becquerel equals one emission of radiation per second). Even though the internationally accepted limit for Strontium-90 contamination in water hovers around 120 becquerels per gallon, these measurements were hidden from Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority for nearly four months. As a response, the national nuclear watchdog agency censured TEPCO for lacking a “fundamental understanding of measuring and handling radiation.”

And last month, TEPCO told reporters that 14 different rice paddies outside Fukushima’s exclusion zone were contaminated in August 2013, after a large piece of debris was removed from one of the Daiichi plant’s crippled reactors. The readings were taken in March 2014, but TEPCO didn’t publicize their findings until four months later, at the start of July—meaning almost a year had passed since emissions had begun to accumulate at dangerous levels in Japan’s most sacred food.

The list, unfortunately, goes on. This is merely the abridged account of TEPCO’s backpedalling and PR shortfalls. It begs many questions, but the most perplexing one is: Why? Why has a crisis that is gaining traction as the worst case of nuclear pollution in history—worse, emission-wise, than Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Chernobyl—being smothered with internal censorship? If omission of information isn't intentional, like Dr. Klein suggests, why haven’t these revelations led to a stronger institutional effort to contain Fukushima and reduce the chance that irregularities go unnoticed or unreported?

When I asked past Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott these questions, she was quick to respond: “Because money matters more than people.”

Dr. Caldicott was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School when she became president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an American organization of doctors against nuclear warfare, climate change, and other environmental issues, in 1978. The organization, along with its parent body the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985, a year after Caldicott left.

Last September, Caldicott organized a symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine entitled, “The Medical and Ecological Consequences of Fukushima,” and has a book coming out on the issue this October. Her expertise on the subject is founded on academic research, but also her lifelong role as a doctor practicing preventative medicine in the nuclear age.

“Japan produces parts for nuclear reactors, like reactor containment vessels,” she said in an interview with VICE. “They’re heavily invested in nuclear power, even though they actually have access to nine times more renewable energy than Germany.”

Although Caldicott says what separates Fukushima from Chernobyl is the continuous leakage of radioactive material, in her eyes they’re unified by an institutionalized effort to keep the veil from lifting. “The Japanese government took three months to tell the world that there had been three meltdowns, even though the meltdowns had taken place in the first three days,” she said. “They’re not testing the food routinely. In fact, they’re growing food in highly radioactive areas, and there are stories that the most radioactive food is being canned and sold to third-world countries.”

“Some doctors in Japan are starting to get very worried about the fact that they’re seeing an increase in diseases but they’re being told not to tell their patients that the diseases are related to radiation,” she continued. “This is all because of money. Bottom line.”

The money she refers to isn’t only rooted in Japan’s export of nuclear reactor parts, or the fact that the economy is starting to reclaim its reign over Japan’s national consciousness. It’s threaded throughout a history of collusion and secretive deals that extend beyond TEPCO’s record. Late last month, a longterm vice president of the Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO), which sourced nearly 50 percent of its electricity from nuclear power sources like Fukushima before the 2011 accident, revealed to Japanese reporters that the company’s president donated approximately $3.6 million to seven different Japanese prime ministers and other political figures between 1970 and 1990. The amount officials received was based on how much their incumbency profited the nuclear and electric energy sectors.

And if it’s not money that lies beneath these multi-faceted attempts at obscuring information about Fukushima, it’s the fear of mass hysteria. When it was revealed that the United Nations-affiliated pro-nuclear group International Atomic Energy Association made a deal with local government officials in Fukushima to classify information that might stoke public concern (like, observers speculate, cancer rates and radiation levels), civilian fears of a cover-up campaign crept out of the mischief associated with conspiracy and into the gravity of a situation that feels more and more surreal.

Norio Tsuzumi (center, standing), vice president of TEPCO, and employees bow their heads to apologize to evacuees at a shelter in Koriyama. Ken Shimizu/AFP/Getty Images

Despite these efforts, plenty has come to light. As of August 2014, we know that radiation levels around the Fukushima area continue to rise, even after three years of containment attempts. We know that doctors have found 89 cases of thyroid cancer in a study of less than 300,000 children from the Fukushima area—even though the normal incidence rate of this disease among youths is one or two for every million. We know that Japanese scientists are still reluctant to publicize their findings on Fukushima due to a fear of getting stigmatized by the national government.

We also know that US sailors who plotted a relief effort in Fukushima immediately after the disaster have reportedly been experiencing a well-up of different cancers, that monkeys living outside Fukushima’s restricted zone have lower blood cell counts than those living in other parts of northern Japan, and that the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’s thorough critique of a recent Fukushima report by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation shows how the international community is severely underestimating the effects of the crisis.

Whether or not TEPCO’s ice wall will be as successful as the company’s lead engineers expect is ultimately dependent on trial. But Dr. Klein, Dr. Caldicott, and others have their own ideas of what should have been done, and what might still need doing in the near future.

“I would like to see them try external pumps a bit more to see if they can slow the inflow of water,” said Dr. Klein. This would involve placing mechanical pumps upstream from the water sources and away from the plant, to collect and contain the water before it passes over the damaged reactors. “Before the accident occurred, they were moving about 27,000 gallons of water a day around the site.”

“The problem is that TEPCO has hardly invited in the international community to help to try and solve the problem,” says Dr. Caldicott. “A huge company like [Florida-based engineering group] Bechtol, which makes reactors and is a very good engineering company, should have been invited in by the Japanese government to try and propose a way to deal with these problems in an engineering fashion.”

At the same time, she recognizes that it’s not only up to Japan. “There should be an international consortium of global experts from France, from Russia, from the United States, and Canada, putting their heads together with the Japanese and working out solutions,” she said.

Others believe that Japan needs to look northwest, towards the Kremlin. Chernobyl gave Russia and Ukraine a level of experience in handling nuclear failures that stands apart from most of the world.

But even though the ecological effects of Fukushima continue to be hotly debated by scientific organizations and the public, Dr. Klein wants to take a step back from the conversation in order to move towards the endgame. “I’d like to see a completely safe operation. It’s complicated,” he concedes, “but we need to help support the Japanese clean-up efforts whenever we can.”

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Photo by Aaron Cantú

Last Thursday in New York City, thousands of people marched from 14th Street to Times Square to protest a very American brand of unhinged police power. The show of paramilitary suppression against mostly black folk the night before in Ferguson, Missouri, had pissed everybody off, from radicals to moderates, and the glowing embers of unrest needed only a breath of oxygen to spark their latent flame.

In New York, those oxygen breathers were actually a bunch of commies from the New York City Revolution Club, a local branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The party’s website looks like an old Maoist pamphlet gone digital, but its members were keen to seize on the outrage over police violence that has recently gone mainstream.

It started in Union Square, where activists affiliated with the National Moment of Silence for Victims of Police Brutality campaign (#nomos14) had planned to organize a vigil for victims of police brutality. While the vigil gathered, a second group began forming around members of the Revolution Club, who were joined by another leftist group, People’s Power Assemblies. They held a large yellow banner aloft and made incendiary remarks about mass incarceration, police violence, and capitalism.

The reason people knew to go to Union Square was the vigil, but as people gathered, it was clear many wanted more than just prayers. There was enough fury on the ground that it seemed like it could turn into a genuine uprising. 

Did communists hijack a vigil? Maybe, but who cares? The militant rhetoric was what many needed to hear, and demonstrating was cathartic. It didn’t matter that some of the people leading the crowd profess a cultish devotion to a chubby wannabe-Lenin named Bob Avakian; what mattered was that people of all backgrounds came together to tell the state that enough is enough. And the fact that so many were drawn to militancy suggests just how tired people are of the status quo.

Shortly after 7 PM, the Revolution Club and People’s Power Assemblies began leading a march down Broadway toward Times Square, while the vigil stayed to observe the planned moment of silence. The vast majority of people marching, many of whom were still dressed in business-casual attire, were unaffiliated with any of the groups, and few seemed to know who was actually directing the action.

Photo by Aaron Cantú

The swarm of marchers eventually grew to a few thousand, as onlookers joined and word spread on social media (one woman told me she left dinner at a nearby restaurant to join the march after seeing photos of it on Instagram). Demonstrators walked through the streets, chanting and halting traffic, while tourists on sightseeing buses snapped photos from above.

The NYPD tried to corral protesters in Times Square, but many circumvented the police and charged down another street. After cops kettled several dozen people for nearly an hour, most were freed, save for five people who were detained.

Jason “JJ” Woody, one of the men arrested for “disorderly conduct,” later told me it didn’t matter who was leading the protests.

“There were thousands of people,” he said. “It was the people who did it. Everybody—we were all part of it.”

The fervor of the night signaled more than solidarity with Ferguson: It revealed a groundswell of people tired of racist policing, in New York and beyond, and everything that comes with it: militarism, mass incarceration, dead black men and boys, immunity for killer cops and an aggressive, selective enforcement of a growing litany of laws. And unlike Occupy Wall Street, dominated at least early on by white people, many of those who gathered in Union Square were young people of color.

“This is a black issue, and we can’t be afraid to say that,” said one speaker in Union Square.

That’s a sentiment shared by more than just people on the street that day. Noel Leader, a former NYPD sergeant who leads the group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement, a coalition of black law enforcement officers who oppose racism, has publicly called for both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to be fired over the widely publicized death of a black man, Eric Garner, who was choked out by the NYPD for selling loose cigarettes.

The cop who killed Garner has still not been charged, another signal that impunity is the norm for NYPD officers, who have also killed Ramarley Graham, Nicholas Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and many others; all unarmed, all whose killers were given a slap on the wrist, if that.  

And with the NYPD still overwhelmingly targeting black and Hispanic men to enforce laws everybody breaks equally, not to mention laws that target poor people, there’s a sense that the begrudging, fear-based tolerance of racist policing is giving way to a youthful strain of resistance that no liberal mayor can quell.

This resistance comes in many forms, and where it goes will depend on what grassroots groups are doing right now.

Marco DeWalden, a 19-year-old New York native who performs on the subway with the dance crew 2 Live, says he’s been arrested or cited over seven times for dancing on the city’s trains, including three arrests since January.

“Once you get arrested three times, you don’t qualify for tickets, you go straight to the precinct and from there you go straight through the system,” he told me.

DeWalden spoke with me at a press conference organized by Busk NY, a group that advocates for arts in New York’s subway, as well as New Yorkers Against Bratton, which has organized past demonstrations against the NYPD. Arrests of train performers of all colors have jumped 500 percent since the election of liberal mayor Bill de Blasio.

Photo by Aaron Cantú

Josmar Trujillo, an organizer with New Yorkers Against Bratton, said his group is holding public education campaigns in communities of color about broken windows policing in order to build awareness of the strategy.

“I think if we don’t have a citywide conversation about broken windows policing, people are just going to be guessing as to why policing is closing down in and around their lives,” Trujillo told me.

“Broken windows” refers to the aggressive policing of low-level quality-of-life crimes, a strategy pioneered by current Commissioner Bratton. These offenses range from bike riding on sidewalks to dancing on subways. An investigation by the New York Daily News found that 81 percent of the people busted in the last decade for quality-of-life crimes—carried out under the broken windows policing strategy—were black or Hispanic.

Educative outreach was also the rationale behind a new mural in the Bronx for Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality. The mural blends commentary on police brutality and gentrification with QR codes and phone numbers that enable targets of police harassment to get in touch with legal counsel.

“The interactive part is the most important part of the mural,” said Raul Ayala, the lead artist of the piece. In total, a dozen young people painted the wall.

The coalition of activist groups who worked on the mural, which are united under the moniker Peoples’ Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability, also hosts Know Your Rights info sessions and cop-watch trainings for people in highly-policed communities, teaching members of the community their legal rights when dealing with and observing law enforcement.

“Everything we do to watch our communities is helpful,” said Aidge Patterson, a leader with People’ Justice, at a recent cop-watch training in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Photo by Caroline Yi

Yet despite activists’ efforts, there is a well-founded sense that those at the top are not listening. For his part, Commissioner Bratton insists that the NYPD is not a racist organization, and that his brand of quality-of-life policing targets behavior, not people. 

“Are there more minorities impacted by enforcement? Yes. I'm not denying that," he told Huffington Post. "But it's not an intentional focus on minorities. It's a focus on behavior."

An NYPD officer who recently ticketed me while I biked on a sidewalk in my neighborhood echoed this sentiment. I had been on the empty sidewalk for less than ten seconds, and was two blocks from my apartment, but it was a dangerous enough move on my part for police to bravely drive their car onto the sidewalk for the protection of the community.

Photo by Aaron Cantú

One of the cops acknowledged that his ticketing me was “bullshit,” but insisted he had to do it because of orders from up the ladder. As his partner ran my ID and wrote my ticket, we talked about Eric Garner, the protest in Times Square, and the unrest in Ferguson.

The author's summons ticket

“It’s been a hot summer, with all this stuff happening everywhere,” he told me. “It’s not a race thing. It’s because these are the neighborhoods where you have the highest rates of crime.”

For what it’s worth, 93.7 percent of the people in my neighborhood, including me, are either black or Latino.

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An abandoned fishing boat lies beached in the Tunisian port of Zarzis. This boat, like many around it, was used by migrants fleeing Libya when Tunisian fishermen encountered it off the North African coast. Overloaded and broken down, the fishermen rescued the migrants and towed it here. Photo by Nicholas Linn.

The sun blazed down upon Ahmed and three other leather-skinned fishermen as they sat cross-legged on the dock of Zarzis, the southeast Tunisian port 50 miles from the Libyan border. They toiled under the shade of a stretched canvas, mending nets for the night’s trawling run. Just a few feet away, other fishermen carefully folded nets. And on the other side of the dock, a wizened old man in a beanie and denim shirt sat in the bottom of his boat, slowly untangling yard upon yard of white fishing line. A huge wooden boat loomed behind them, beached in the sand. The fisherman claim the ship was used to smuggle illegal migrants to Europe. Now its white paint flaked in the breeze, slowly rotting, as feeble waves lapped at its hull.

For several years now, particularly since late 2011, Ahmed, 36, and his fellow fishermen have become accidental heroes, saving stranded illegal migrants from fleeing poverty or the recent upsurge in violence as militias battle for power in Libya. A clampdown in migration from Tunisian shores has led many migrants who wish to sneak into Europe to attempt to cross the Mediterranean sea from Libya instead, Ahmed claimed. Since the revolutionary uprising of 2011, Libya has turned into a kind of migrants’ Wild West. Ahmed and his colleagues claim that during their fishing trips into the Mediterranean, they bring back dozens—sometimes hundreds—of migrants abandoned at sea.

Gerry Simpson in Geneva, with Human Rights Watch, noted that the Libyan coast guard says that smugglers in Libya often try to cut costs by filling boat motors with just enough fuel to get migrants into international waters, where they’ll hopefully be picked up by the Italian navy and be brought to land. Further, evidence of torture and abuse of migrants by local authorities while detained in Libya abounds. As of August 14, according to the UNHCR, 100,000 irregular migrants have already reached Europe’s shores this year, with 90,000 of them believed to have set out from Libya. Large numbers of those making the crossing hail from Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, though it’s been reported that Syrians and sometimes Libyans themselves are among them.

It’s hard to get precise figures on the number of migrants leaving Libyan shores because of the lack of reporting of migrants rescued or bodies found, but the fishermen on the docks of Zarzis believe the number is rising in the face of increasing unrest.

“Say you have a boat full of harraga leaving Libya to [the Italian island of] Lampedusa,” said Ahmed, employing the local Arabic term for illegal migrants, which translates to “the burners.” “It’s overflowing. The motor breaks down. When we go out to fish, we find them. They have been out for days on the sea with no food, no water. So we give them milk and water to drink.

“They don’t know how to swim. If their boat capsizes, they die,” he added.

While Ahmed and his partners on the sea are now the unintended saviors of countless migrants on the open sea, Ahmed himself has been in their shoes. Hoping to find better paid work and refuge from the chaos in Tunisia after the uprising that ousted former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ahmed from the seat of power in Tunisia, Ahmed set off in May of 2011 in an over packed boat full of other harraga.

Ahmed’s brown eyes are sharp and intense, though they open wide when he tells his story. Married with a wife and two young daughters, Ahmed left high school at the age of 16 to study at Zarzis’s École de la Pêche (Fishing School). Though his father made do as a farmer in the Zarzis countryside, drought and unemployment enveloped the majority of young men around him in the early 1990s. So Ahmed saw the sea as a safer bet for a living.

“I didn’t want to stay unemployed. I live on the sea. Had I been living in the desert, I’d be a miner. You gotta follow what you have available,” Ahmed said matter-of-factly.

“The year the revolution broke out, the country was a mess,” Ahmed said. “No security, no one watching over you. The boats leaving [Tunisia] were filling up. I found a boat and ran.”

Ahmed caught a smuggler’s boat along the Zarzis coastline. He was aiming for Paris, where two of his brothers have lived for the past seven years. One went to France on a visa. The other made it to the City of Light illegally via the sea crossing. He thought his brothers in Paris could connect him with some better-compensated manual work.

The voyage took 17 hours and the conditions were “Five out of five,” Ahmed said. “Calm water, calm weather. We were alright.” The boat landed in Lampedusa, an Italian island 155 miles north of Zarzis. Then Ahmed and his band of fellow harraga were moved to Crotone, on the bottom of the Italian boot by an aid organization. From there he took the bus to Milan. And from Milan, Ahmed took a train to Ventimiglia, a small city on the French border. In Ventimiglia, he found a group of harraga with cars, who drove him to Nice.

Two or three migrants would move together, but no more, Ahmed pointed out. Larger groups risked being spotted by authorities.

On the way to France, he crossed paths with other North Africans like him: Tunisians, Moroccans, Algerians. “They were speaking Arabic,” he said. Afraid and all alone, he was tempted to try to make friends. “But I just pushed ahead. I didn’t speak to anyone.”

“From Nice I took the TGV to Gare de Lyon. From there, well, I was in Paris.”

He looked to his friends, the other fishermen around him still mending nets, some of whom also illegally migrated. They laughed loudly about their “cheap vacations” in Europe.

When I asked Ahmed if his laughter meant the harraga’s journey was easy, his smile faded. “Easy? No way.” he said. “It was really, really hard. It was so hard I thought I would lose it. [On the trip] you don’t sleep day or night. You’re always moving.” A “mafia” in Italy, Ahmed claimed, was always looking for ways to take advantage of harraga like him. He was constantly on high alert.

The dangerous journey across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat, through three countries, from the bottom to the top of Europe didn’t yield the opportunities he hoped it would. “I met up with my brother [in Paris], crashed with him.” Ahmed looked for work for three months. So did his brother. In the end, Ahmed said, “I didn’t work a single day.”

“I couldn’t find the work that I had hoped for. I thought I would save money. When I realized this was just empty talk, I got on a plane and came back to Tunis.”

While Ahmed has been able to return to his homeland, family, and a job, many other migrants don’t have that option and continue to pour out of ports in Libya. As they do, Ahmed and the other fishermen in Zarzis will continue to bring in migrants in trouble, when they can. With turbulent weather on the way with the coming fall, however, Ahmed fears the worst.

“How many times have I seen a corpse being brought in from sea, swollen with water?” he asked. “Sometimes there’s no face. Just bones.”

“Sometimes there are so many bodies, we just say the fat’ha [a verse from the Qur'an], and leave them.”

*Ahmed asked that his real name not be used in this article.

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