Southern China has always had a tradition of dining on dogs—people from other parts of the country even joke that Southerners will eat anything with legs but the dinner table. But despite becoming more prosperous in the 1990s, Yulin has maintained the unique tradition of holding a canine banquet every summer.

Animal rights activists across China and the rest of the globe have increasingly condemned the Dog Meat Festival, calling for an immediate stop to eating man’s best friend. They say the dog meat trade is illegal, unregulated, and cruel. Many claim that numerous dogs that end up in cooking pots are stolen pets or diseased strays.

In 2013, the Yulin festival gathered so much negative press that this year, the local government denied the Summer Solstice dog-eating tradition ever even existed. But that hasn’t stopped locals from celebrating—nor has it stopped die-hard activists from flooding the town to try and rescue dogs before the slaughter.

VICE Reports headed to Yulin this year to get to the bottom of the most controversial festival in China.

Image via Wikicommons

As long as there are governments that don't want young people to go around indiscriminately hoovering up drugs, there will be chemists tirelessly working to create new ones that haven't been declared illegal yet.

Research chemicals, or RCs, are often sold as legal highs. They are drugs whose chemical formulas have been altered just enough so that they're not illegal according to analogue laws, which make entire groups of drug illegal because they're checmially similar to a known narcotic. So you take an illegal drug, switch a couple of molecules around, and—presto!—it's a different drug that theoretically will no longer get you in trouble with the police.

RCs are often developed by government-funded projects for medical research. But the formulas for these drugs are published in publicly available scientific journals and seen by people looking to make a quick buck. They go on to mass-produce the new drugs in labs and sell them to people who want to get out of their minds for fun. Unfortunately, because they're altered, people are never quite sure what they are and what effects they will have, which can make them pretty dangerous.

I got in touch with my friend Mathias, who's been developing and synthesizing RCs based on 2C-B as part of his masters thesis to find out exactly how dangerous these new drugs are.

VICE: Hey, Mathias. What's up?
Mathias: Not much. I just finished my thesis, so right now I'm in job limbo.

What was your thesis on?
Synthesis of potentially selective 5-HT2A agonists.

You're going to need to dumb that down for me.
Pretty much all hallucinogens, like mescaline and LSD, have something in common, namely that they activate a protein in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor [a serotonin receptor] along with several other similar proteins. What I've been doing is trying to make new chemical compounds that only activate 5-HT2A, to maybe tell us a bit more about what this protein does and how it works, because it's obvious that this particular protein is quite important in processing sensory information and emotions.

Think of the 5-HT2A protein as a lock, that can be opened by numerous keys. We're trying to make the best key for that particular lock.  

The chemical equation for 2C-B. Image via Wikicommons.

So what, you are developing new forms of narcotics?
Well, that's one way of putting it. I worked with the chemical “skeleton” of 2C-B, a synthetic hallucinogen, making small alterations to the chemical structure. The ultimate goal would be to make a drug without the psychedelic properties of the hallucinogens but with the self-insight and mood changes. However, we generally only test the compounds on the protein itself to see whether they actually activate it and how “well” they do it, so it's hard to say how they actually work with humans.

Recent studies in the US have actually shown that drugs like MDMA, which isn’t technically a hallucinogen, could potentially be used in conjunction with psychotherapy to treat conditions like PTSD. They have also found that psilocybin, which definitely is a hallucinogen, might reduce death anxiety in terminally ill patients. I don't think the compounds I made during my project would be particularly good as drugs in psychotherapy, but then again, nobody knows. The correlation between chemical structure and activity is a bit of a hit-and-miss process at the moment.

So these are published in scientific journals?
Yes. A PhD student I worked alongside with just published an article about how a new class of drugs—the NBOMe class—might be metabolized in the body. That came about because some of these drugs found their way to the gray market and a lot of people who tried them wrote on internet forums that they weren’t active if you swallowed them. Instead it should be ingested sublingually, meaning you have to place it under your tongue.

How do these types of drugs end up on the gray market then?
We make compounds to learn about the brain and to maybe discover new types of medicine. We don't think, This would be a wonderful drug to take when we're making them. Somewhere along the line, some guy with access to a lab sees some scientific article about a new, interesting class of compounds that has some effect on the body similar to a recreational drug, and he realizes that this particular class is not yet illegal. If he can make a huge batch of this before it's made illegal, then he could potentially make a lot of money selling it as incense or bath salts or something innocuous like that.

Where is this stuff made?
That's impossible to say. The best guess would be somewhere without strict laws on recreational drugs. It's then moved into Europe and distributed around the world.

So why are these research chemicals so dangerous?
First of all, only a fraction of them have ever undergone toxicological tests in any animal, including humans. Most of the people selling these compounds don’t really have an interest in the safety of their clients. On the products, they write that it's not for human consumption, so technically they are in the clear if someone drops dead. I know that some of the research chemical vendors have expressed an interest in performing toxicological tests, but those could cost millions of dollars, so I'm not sure how seriously it has been taken.

What's the current trend in RCs?
Besides a lot of chemical variations of amphetamines and cannabinoids, some new classes of hallucinogens have made it into the wild. The group I mentioned earlier, the NBOMe group, was found to activate 5-HT2A selectively and quite potently. They are generally easy to make from the parent phenethylamine compounds—like 2C-B or 2C-T-2—so in a simple chemical process, you can increase the potency by several magnitudes.

For researchers this was extremely interesting, but for the chemists supplying the gray market, it could be a way of increasing income. Just stick on some carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to 2C-B, and voilà: You have a completely new, more potent drug which could circumvent some analog laws.

Image via Wikicommons.

So if you had a batch of drugs worth $80,000 you could simply go through this chemical process and end up with drugs worth $800,000?
In theory, yes. I wouldn't put it like that; I don’t know if hallucinogens are the biggest moneymakers, but that's the gist of it. You can vary the specific chemical structure almost indefinitely by changing the formula a little bit. But as a scientist and someone with a bit of common sense, I would never recommend actually using recreational drugs, and especially not research chemicals. Nobody knows what they can do in the body.

There have already been deaths caused by the NBOMe group—something that hasn’t been reported with phenethylamines like 2C-B as far as I know. We don’t really know exactly how these people die. Some people have a certain reaction, almost like a psychotic episode, and then they die.  

Pharmacologists talk about something called the "therapeutic window." How much do you need to take for the drug have an effect, and how much does it take to have adverse effects and, in turn, overdose? These new compounds seem to have a very small window. For one because they're so potent, active in micro- or milligram scale, and thus seem to be quite easy to overdose on. Anecdotal claims from some people who have used them, say that they are also somewhat boring drugs to take. Sure, the walls get a bit wobbly and the colors change, but there's none of the insight that you get from LSD or mushrooms. This, of course, varies from person to person, but I don't think it's the best drug class for use in therapy.

What is then?
What I find really interesting is psilocybin [the psychadelic compound found in magic mushrooms]. It’s been proven to be quite safe to use, it only lasts a couple of hours and its potential use in psychotherapy is being investigated. The problem is that it also works on other proteins besides 5-HT2A, and we are generally looking for something that works specifically on the target to avoid side effects.

Is it safer to take classic drugs?
Technically, yes. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been assessed to be one of the safest recreational drugs. There's basically no addiction, you can't really overdose, and we know what it does in the body, due to decades of research. Yes, bad trips are known to occur, but the realistic bad trip would basically involve hiding under the covers for a couple of hours—not jumping in front of a bus because you think you’re Superman.

We don't know how the body reacts to the new drug classes. Even small chemical variations of known drugs can drastically change how they are processed in the body. Take Spice, the cannabis substitute which was actually shown to contain synthetically-made compounds that worked on the same receptors in the brain as THC. Even if it chemically doesn't look much like THC at all, I don’t think anyone who ever smoked Spice would really describe the experience as pleasant.

In general, most of the well-known classes of hallucinogens are relatively safe if you take precautions. Although they have been somewhat ostracized in medicine for some time, the newfound interest could potentially be of great worth to the treatment of a variety of psychological disorders. But we still need that one golden key that only unlocks 5-HT2A.

Thirty years ago, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. As is still true in parts of the neighborhood today, it was a predominantly Puerto Rican community, and people danced in the streets to Caribbean beats while musicians played drums, palitos, maracas, and güiros. The younger crews held public breakdancing competitions, and everyone felt like they knew each other. At the same time that this culture was flowering, the neighborhood was also experiencing high unemployment rates, dilapidated housing, and inadequate public resources. Drug use was rampant and many wanted to leave the area for fear of violence. 

Diego Echeverria documented this era in his 1984 film Los Sures, which screened last week at the New York Film Festival after being restored by Union Docs. Echeverria was born in Chile and grew up in Puerto Rico. He came to the US in 1971 to study film at Columbia University. After completing a graduate degree, he started a career in TV. When he wasn't working his day job, he hung out on the streets of South Williamsburg shooting what would ultimately become Los Sures, which means "south side" in Spanish. Over the course of ten months, he filmed the lives of five Puerto Ricans living in the Brooklyn barrio. The film illustrates how single mothers, workers, immigrants, and young kids battled poverty and survived in the hood. 

Today, South Williamsburg looks very different than it did in Los Sures. While parts of the neighborhood are still largely inhabited by Puerto Rican residents, the area has also become a mecca for moneyed young people all across the globe, forcing rents to skyrocket. Today it’s not uncommon to see young banker dudes with Hitler Youth haircuts enjoying boozy brunches at overpriced restaurants on the south side—a sight that would have been unheard of back in the 80s. But a few vestiges of the era of Los Sures remain, like the bodega on Division Avenue and Berry Street that still serves hot mofongo and empanadas while old men play cards or dominoes outside.

In light of the recent screening of Los Sures, I gave Diego Echeverria a call to talk about his documentary, rapid gentrification, and the ways in which the historic culture of South Williamsburg can be carried on. 

VICE: There are so many people in your film who talk about wanting to leave Williamsburg. I can’t imagine people saying that today. Why did they want to leave?
Diego Echeverria: There was a high level of unemployment. Economic survival was difficult. The services were lacking. Schools were going through a tremendous crisis. Young people were dropping out at a high rate. There was also no housing renewal or support.

When was the last time you visited Williamsburg? 
I was there three or four months ago. It has definitely transformed. It’s a more prosperous area. Even physically, it has changed. But at the same time, there are still signs of what used to be. Just last year, for example, you saw the Latino community participating in the streets with some wonderful festivals. 

Did you witness any violence during the filming of your doc?
No. That was not what the film is about. In fact, I would have avoided it. My film is about how people cope in very difficult situations and make the best they can out of their lives. 

When did the neighborhood really start to change?
The late 80s. I remember that by then there were several artists moving in. This is not something that happened from one moment to another. There were many people in the film, like Cuso the construction worker, who saw the change as well. 

One of the things that struck me was how graffiti functioned in the film versus how “street art,” as it’s called now, functions today. What was the point of graffiti back in the 80s?
I remember in the early 80s when graffiti was all over the city. It had to do with asserting a sense of identity. There were lots of names and commemorative elements that had to do with culture and ethnicity. It was something very unique to New York in subway stations, bus stations, and out in the streets. It was a way of actually saying, here I am. Today graffiti has a different sense—at least the stuff I’ve seen in Dumbo and areas of Williamsburg.

What other cultural markers have you seen take on completely different meanings? 
The break dancing that was going on in the streets. When you look at the dancing that takes place in Los Sures, you find this urban culture evolving. That was the beginning of a whole movement that later on, throughout the 90s, took over the country. Young people came together and participated in these cultural manifestations that really gave them a strong sense of identity, while the older generation was still dancing salsa. 

The film does a great job of depicting fashion trends of the 80s—plastic aviator glasses, feather cut bobs, side ponytails, etc... Some of the most weird and trendy folks still seem to reside in Williamsburg. Despite its evolution, the neighborhood still seems to have retained that stylish characteristic. 
It’s different. There was actually a cultural cohesiveness in Los Sures, which is no longer there. It is part of our cultural cohesiveness where you see break dancing, murals, and cultural manifestations taking place. They are tied to traditions that are part of your own kind of cultural roots and they are different. What you are seeing today is a manifestation of a different kind of varied community. Also, because it is now a community of artists, it doesn’t have that raw kind of expression. Back in the day, it was a force that was really at its first stage. 

There seemed to be a greater sense of community in South Williamsburg back then.
I sensed that when I started hanging out on the streets. People were truly connected. They knew each other. They would say hello—connecting, making jokes, remembering things. And people would hang out in the streets, especially in the summer. 

What is the feeling you get when you go back to Williamsburg?
It’s definitely different. What happened in Williamsburg is what you see in most other cities in the country. The immigrant groups who settled there in the 40s are definitely not there. They move away. They die. It’s also because the socioeconomic situation has changed. When I went to film there, it was in the midst of Reaganomics, when support for immigrant groups started to diminish. 

Do you have a particular opinion on the people who have taken over the neighborhood?
With any change, there are positive and negative aspects. You can’t say that it’s surprising. Very often, neighborhoods have to transform. That’s the story of most urban centers in the US. Nothing remains static. It was only natural that as New York City became more expensive, people would look for neighborhoods that had proximity to the city and inexpensive housing. 

And the negative aspects?
New York became very expensive, very fast. There is a population that feels left out of the transformation that is taking place. But at the same time, it’s a regular process. You can’t change economic forces. Very often politicians are not sensitive to the feeling of loss that takes place as a vulnerable population has to deal with a whole set of challenges. Moving out of the place you grew up in is very difficult. Having to re-root yourself and your family and break away from what you’ve known for years is very painful.  

Do you think the divide between newcomers and long-time residents is a problem?
You’re witnessing the community going through a process that has been very drastic for people who have strong roots in that community. It’s only natural that they have some level of resentment. Their rents have gone up tremendously. It has become a different neighborhood.  

Do you think there’s any solution?
It’s not a question of finding a solution. Neighborhoods change. Many of the people have already moved out. The community organizations are playing a role in giving support to the people who have stayed. Those organizations are wonderful. It is a question of creating the links and acknowledging the history as the neighborhood transforms. The one solution is making housing more available, creating the kinds of jobs that people can depend on, making schools better, and making sure those families who live there get the level of support they need.  

For more on the evolution of South Williamsburg, check out Living Los Sures, Union Docs' new short films project, which was inspired by Diego's Los Sures. The project aims to reunite the community by continuing to document the local histories of Williamsburg. 

An RCMP constable visits the Tahltan blockade on Sept. 29. All photos by Kieran Oudshoorn.

On Friday, Imperial Metals, the company responsible for Canada’s largest-ever mining waste spill, served an injunction application to First Nations protesters blocking roads to its Red Chris copper and gold mine near Iskut, BC.

A group of Tahltan First Nation elders known as the Klabona Keepers have blocked access to the mine for the second time in two months, over concerns that Red Chris is too similar to Mount Polley, a sister mine that spewed 24 million cubic metres of toxic sludge and wastewater into one of the province’s biggest salmon spawning lakes on August 4.

“As a result of the blockades and the conduct of the blockaders, no person and no vehicle are able to access the project site along the access roads,” reads Imperial Metals’ injunction application, which was delivered yesterday morning. “Red Chris has been forced to severely limit its construction activities at the project site, and if the blockade continues, will be forced to halt them altogether.”

Injunctions get filed for lots of different reasons—some delay marijuana laws, others stop resource development. Resource companies can use injunctions to break up protests that impede economic activity. For example, if we rewind to October 3, 2013, that’s the date a company called SWN Resources was granted an injunction to remove Elsipogtog First Nation protesters from a shale gas exploration site north of Moncton, New Brunswick. Two weeks later, RCMP enforced the injunction with an over-the-top display of force including beanbag guns, police dogs, snipers and plenty of pepper spray. Needless to say, shit escalated quickly.

Last time the Klabona Keepers blocked the mine’s two entrances, British Columbia’s mines minister and high-ranking execs from Imperial Metals came out to the blockade to negotiate a deal. The company offered to pay an independent contractor chosen by the Tahltan to conduct a safety review of the “tailings facility” (translation: the man-made lake where they’ll dump more sludge containing arsenic, lead, and mercury). BC’s provincial government agreed not to issue the mine’s final permit until that independent review was complete.

The Keepers agreed to these terms on August 23, but returned to the mining roads on Sept. 29 and set up camp. What pushed them back to the blockade? “A few women came up from Secwepemc territory and did a presentation about what happened at Mount Polley,” said Klabona Keepers spokesperson Rhoda Quock, reached by phone on Saturday.

One of those women was Kanahus Manuel, Secwepemc Women’s Warrior Society member and co-founder of a resistance camp I visited at Mount Polley’s entrance road in August. She brought photos and testimony from the spill site—claiming virtually nothing has been done to contain the metallic sludge and sediment in Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake and Hazeltine Creek. “The elders cried,” Manual said. “That first day we spoke it was like a funeral.”

One of two roadblocks at Imperial Metals’ Red Chris mine.
“If Imperial could just walk away from the disaster at Mount Polley and the government is not doing anything about it, it could happen again and nothing would be done,” Quock said of her renewed opposition, adding the community of Iskut is 18 kilometres from Red Chris. “This became a major concern for our elders—that's why the blockade was put up again.”

Instead of higher-ups, this time the company sent security and Red Chris mine manager Tim Fisch, who coincidentally managed Mount Polley’s operations when the massive spill happened in August. “He just got transferred in September,” Quock said. Fisch confirmed his transfer to Red Chris on camera last week. “We’re very concerned—Fisch was at Mount Polley for a very long time.”

When asked why Imperial is pursuing an injunction this time, VP corporate affairs Steve Robertson said the Klabona Keepers have made “no reasonable request” this time around. “Both [Imperial president Brian] Kynoch and I attended the blockade that took place in August, and our efforts at that time were fruitful in that we were able to negotiate an agreement with the Klabona Keepers and Tahltan Central Council that resulted in the blockade coming down,” he wrote in an email. “We have a negotiated agreement with the Klabona Keepers and we are continuing to live up to our obligations under that agreement. There have been no further reasonable requests from this blockade so negotiating with the people on the blockade is not an option.”

The Tahltan have a history of protecting their territory and making industry listen. They stopped Shell from drilling around the headwaters of the Nass, Stikine and Skeena rivers (another important salmon habitat) in 2012 and kicked out Fortune Minerals with a similar blockade last year. The fact that energy and mining minister Bill Bennett actually showed up to their August protest suggests a unique standing within the province.

As the campers continue turning away trucks and workers, they aren’t ruling out a full-scale RCMP raid. “We’re coming up on the anniversary of the Mi'kmaq protests in Elsipogtog, which is significant,” said blockade camper Anushka Nagji. “We’re expecting a full force [RCMP] moveout… that’s definitely what we’re expecting for a few reasons. At Dease Lake, when the Klabona Keepers were occupying a drill, the RCMP detachment came out with snipers and everything.”

The injunction signals an escalation, which they’ve met with calls for support from Secwepemc, St’at’imc and Tsilhquot’in allies. “There’s really a heightened sense of urgency,” said Manuel, confirming a convoy of Secwepemc elders and warriors were heading up to the camp Sunday.

Imperial Metals’ injunction case will be heard in Vancouver on Wednesday morning. The request also includes an enforcement order, which according to Imperial’s lawyers “is required as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have taken the position that they will not enforce a court order for an injunction without an enforcement order.”  

When asked if the RCMP were concerned about physical altercation at Red Chris, Corporal David Tyreman in Prince George declined to comment. "All I can say at this time is that this is a civil matter that is before the Supreme Court of British Columbia and it would be inappropriate for us to comment at this time," he wrote in an email. 

A press release from blockade organizers states no government, company or police force has jurisdiction on unceded Tahltan territory. “There has been no treaty, no purchase.” With a history of standing up to industry and RCMP without violence—in 2004, in 2006, in 2009, in 2013, and most recently in August—if anyone is prepared to peacefully respond to potential police aggression, it's the Klabona Keepers.

ImperialNoticeApplicationOct.3 by vicecanada

@sarahberms

Earlier this year, we ran a story on the rehabilitation and release of Vince Li, the man who decapitated and cannibalized a man on a Greyhound bus—needless to say it caused a bit of a shitstorm in the comment section. Turns out a lot of people believe that anyone who cuts the head off a stranger on public transportation, and then proceeds to eat parts of their body, should pay for their actions by being locked up forever, or handed the death penalty. Society already has a tough time dealing with people with mental health issues, when you add a violent offence to the stigma and discrimination they face everyday, it’s no surprise that keeping them locked away seems like a good idea to most of society.

But Emmy award-winning Canadian documentary director John Kastner may prove those people wrong. Kastner has spent much of his career delving into the lives of the darker, forgotten sides of society, and finding the emotional nuances to what may seem a black and white issue on the surface. Films like Life With Murder (2012), Hunting Bobby Oatway (1997), and The Lifer and the Lady (1984), all deal with the aftermath of convicted criminals coming to terms with their actions, and the very human drama that affects the people around them.

His latest films NCR: Not Criminally Responsible (2013) and Out of Mind, Out of Sight (2014) (both of which will be screened this week at Toronto’s Bloor Hot Docs Cinema), deal with yet another section of humanity that many have written off: people with mental health issues who are found not criminally responsible after committing violent acts.

NCR documents Ontario man Sean Clifton’s release back into society after eight years of treatment, following a psychotic episode in which he violently stabbed a woman in a Walmart, whereas Out of Mind, Out of Sight focuses on four patients’ struggle to return to society, including the story of Michael Stewart, who killed a family member and is tormented by crippling guilt. To shoot the film, Kastner spent 18 months with unprecedented access to the Brockville Mental Health Centre. We called him up to talk about the experience, and to learn why the films are being seen as a game changer in the mental health world.

VICE: What do you say to people who think mentally ill people who commit violent crimes should never be released?
John Kastner: Well, it’s a good question and of course we have heard it. It’s almost impossible to imagine what these guys are like in real life, what the institutions are like. But you can’t turn people around simply by words. It’s the great power of a documentary, of an observational doc. It’s one thing that we can do really well, because you know what happens in life when these terrible offences are committed—you see these sinister images of the guy and then they disappear and you never hear from them. So the image that’s left with the public is that they are the act they committed that dark night—they’re monsters, they have to be. We said no. You’re going to have to meet these people properly. You have to be introduced to them. You have to hear them talk. You have to look into their eyes. You have to see the way their minds work and you judge for yourself if somebody has committed a monstrous act is, of necessity, a monster. It’s an illness.

What was your perception of mental illness going into these films?
I had the same stereotypes everybody else did. But Dr. Lisa Ramshaw of CAMH was my muse and my mentor—it was her idea completely. She’s a forensic psychiatrist and she came to a test screening at the Film Board of an earlier film of mine called Life With Murder. I’ve made a number of films trying to help de-stigmatize somebody—often criminals. Lisa asked to see a couple of my other films and said, “You know, if there’s any group of people that need de-stigmatizing, it’s sufferers of mental illness, especially those who’ve committed serious violent offences.” They’re kind of seen as monsters by the public. It was almost impossible to get into these institutions. Look at the media—nobody gets in for more than five minutes.

That’s what struck me most: your unrestricted access to these institutions, or at least the access that you had, was amazing.
It’s unprecedented in this country. I was there for over three and a half years. Both films together took place over 18 months. And people said,  “Oh boy, you’ll be lucky if you get three or four patients to cooperate.” They’re so demonized by the Canadian public. Well, there were 59 patients at that hospital and we ended up filming with 46 of them and over 75 staff members in the two films.



John Kastner, speaking on "The Agenda with Steve Paikin." Screencap via YouTube.

What was it actually like once you got behind the scenes?
I’ve had much experience in prisons. I’ve dealt with a lot of dangerous people. I’ve been threatened by a lot of people who you don’t want to have threaten you, people with notches. I had no idea what to expect and I was absolutely spooked the first day I came in. But it’s fear of the unknown. I was relieved to find when I got to know the staff that most of them were also spooked when they came into this place. I had this one nurse in the film who said, “When I first came in, I just kept my mouth shut. When I walked down the corridor, I kept my back to the wall.” I just did not know!

How challenging was it to make these films?
The overarching goal was a nearly impossible task: could you take someone who’s committed a horrific act of violence and A) Make people just understand their illness, that they’re not evil, that they’re ill. B) Could you then go beyond that, beyond simple understanding and actually make them feel for these people, care about these people? And C) Could you do all of that without in any way diminishing the ordeal of the victims? It’s a very tall order, but you be the judge of whether we succeeded or not.

I think what helped make it work was how the films are structured, particularly NCR, when you follow Sean Clifton’s rehabilitation after stabbing that girl nine times.
We’re telling the story twice; it’s kind of like Rashomon. You hear about the crime, the way you would hear about it as a layman in the news reports to begin with and all the prejudices that we bring with it. My God, it sounds like he’s a monster. Then after you get to know him, we dare to retell the story of the crime from the perspective—not only his perspective, but we actually take you into the mind of a quote-unquote madman in the midst of a psychotic break as he’s trying to commit a murder. Amazingly, he remembers.

His change in demeanor from the beginning to end is astonishing.
Yeah, I call it the Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation. It’s almost like he took a potion. The evil Mr. Hyde took a potion and became the kindly Dr. Jekyll again. That is the first thing I saw that made me decide I have to make this film. In the research process, I saw guys coming in, in what they call a floridly psychotic state—not long after they had committed some terrible violence.

Once they start giving them injections of the antipsychotic drugs and talking to them (what they call cognitive-behavioural therapy)—within a couple of months—you could see these guys returning to planet Earth. First they would not be violent and the restraints were no longer necessary (which they often were when they’d first come in), and they’d be talking gibberish when they first came in, and you’d see the gibberish slowly start to recede. After two or three months, you could begin to have a conversation with that person who came in look like a “raving lunatic.” For a layman to watch such a transformation, let me tell you, it’s almost magical to behold. I say people have got to see this, they’ve got to understand how there’s help for these people, there’s hope. There’s much that can be done for them.

It was weird how by the end I was actually kind of rooting for the guy, and how I felt the victim and her family just had to meet him and to forgive him, which sounds crazy before watching the film.
In the second film, Out of Mind, Out of Sight, the main guy’s name is Michael Stuart—he killed his own mother. And his brother addresses this point at the end of the film—and he will be there at the second screening at Hot Docs this week. I asked “Was it hard to forgive him?” And his brother said, “Look, to raise the question of forgiveness... You don’t forgive people who are ill. You don’t forgive somebody who has cancer; it’s an illness, that’s what it is. We all understand that. Unfortunately there are two victims in this case: my mother, who unfortunately lost her life, but there’s another victim and he still is suffering.”

You see a film like this and hopefully, finally, the lightbulb goes on. You meet the guy, you say, “My God, he’s a smart guy, he’s a likable person, he could be me, he could be my brother.” They often are very intelligent people suffering from schizophrenia. It’s a cruel, horrible, tragic disease.

Finally, why has it taken so long for a film like this to be made and what do you think should be done moving forward?
I wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail saying it’s time for psychiatrists to stop hiding their patients from public view. It’s been a well-intentioned idea, they’re afraid of stigma, they want to protect their patients, and it’s done out of kindness and concern. But you know what? It’s been a disaster.

People think of them as monsters. You cannot de-stigmatize anyone by hiding them from view. What happens, of course, is into that vacuum, people will take their images from scary movies like Shutter Island or whatever, and it sends a terrible signal to the public. What you’re saying to them basically is, “We think that these people are such freaks that we dare not let you look at them.” So it’s a failed policy and without meaning to do so, they actually, for the kindest of motives… have enabled some of the stigma.

The films will be featured at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema on October 8 and 9, starting at 6:30PM. 

@katigburgers

Illustration by Jonathan Tune

It’s a small miracle that cartoon porn artist Kadath has managed to stay afloat in the adult entertainment industry. Since 2011, he's been tossed from online vendor to online vendor, struggling to find a URL where he could peddle his drawings of humanoid animals engaged in hardcore sex. He used to sell porn and collect money through the marketplace Gumroad, but one day, the people who ran the site contacted and said they were giving him a week to delete his content and transfer his funds out of their system. After that, he went through Ribbon—before once again being abruptly ordered to pack his bags. Even though Kadath says he was led to believe that Ribbon was cool with adult content, they froze his account and forced him to beg for two months to extract his funds. And he was one of the lucky ones: Other artists weren't able to get their money back or were banned from these sites altogether.

“The impression I got,” Kadath told me, “was that Gumroad and Ribbon were forced to drop adult content because their payment processors didn’t want to deal with ‘high-risk’ material.”

Kadath's impression is correct—banks and credit card processors don’t want to be associated with types of businesses that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in 2011 labeled “high-risk,” an arbitrary, morally loaded term referring to industries that run the risk of facilitating fraud. By charging outrageous fees, freezing accounts, seizing unpaid funds, or rejecting business outright, these financial institutions are choking out the indie porn business.

The attack isn’t just directed at independent illustrators, either. Patreon, a well-known Kickstarter-esque fundraising service for artists, had hundreds of thousands of dollars frozen by PayPal, which notoriously does not process fees associated with adult entertainment; Patreon founder Jack Conte told me the dustup had something to do with a project that involved a "lizard who had a naked butt.”

Kadath found refuge and solidarity when he was introduced to Richmond-based entrepreneur and programmer Brent Conn, who had started devising ways to bolster the struggling indie porn industry after noticing how many erotica artists were being deprived of a livelihood. Because banks and processors were sticking their noses up at adult entertainment, Conn turned to that famously unfettered payment option: Bitcoin.

“Many people see [Bitcoin] as just another way to accept money. I see it as something that could change the industry and really bring in sustainable money to small content creators,” he explained. Conn is on a mission to proselytize alternative payment solutions to struggling adult entertainment businesses. Bitcoin, he says, won’t drop anyone because it’s decentralized—there’s no company behind it and there’s no way for a prudish government to shut it down.

“It’s like gold," Conn said. "Even if you made gold illegal, you couldn’t stop people from trading it unless you were sending cops into everyone’s homes.”

When Conn was getting started in the porn industry, he quickly found out how ridiculously difficult it is to collect money selling erotica. “I spent like two months calling processors, even the sketchiest ones in Australia,” he told me. “None of them wanted anything to do with my kind of work. They wouldn’t touch it, or I’d have to pay $3,000. It wasn't looking sustainable at all for a small content creator.” He hopes that one day he and others in his field will convince enough adult entertainment companies to use cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to make it possible to drop credit cards altogether.

The FDIC pressured financial institutions to closely monitor e-commerce processors like PayPal three years ago, but the real crackdown on porn came last May, when the Justice Department launched Operation Choke Point. The goal was to combat traditionally seedy businesses like tobacco merchants, escort services, online casinos, firearm sellers, and adult entertainment companies. Banks and payment processors acted as the enforcers, refusing to deal with or strictly regulating these apparently sordid businesses.

Does that persecution of legal businesses sound like a violation of due process? The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sure thinks so. “The goal of this initiative is to deny these merchants access to the banking and payment networks that every business needs to survive,” the congressional committee wrote in a report, adding that these “blanket prohibitions on entire industries are wholly inconsistent with the Department’s repeated assertion that it is merely pursuing fraudsters.”

Fraud does occur in the adult entertainment industry: When seduced on a porn site to sign up for a $1 or $2 “free trial,” often the fine print notes that a user will be billed in full a month after their first view. Sometimes the fine print is too fine, and the “free trial” actually costs a few hundred bucks. Other times, users forget it altogether and contest the charge when it appears on their account. That, or they’re embarrassed to have a porn-based charge at all. When the charges are contested, it looks like fraud—and sometimes it is. 

Maria Sparagis, the President of DirectPayNet, which helps medium to high-risk businesses diversify their payment options, said fraud often happens through—but not necessarily because of—porn sites. When credit card information is stolen from big companies like Target, the fraudsters sometimes validate those credit cards by making small purchases on porn sites.

As a former employee of MindGeek, which owns PornHub, Sparagis has seen it all. She said that despite fraud’s prevalence, the choking out of indie adult entertainment businesses is an issue of social justice. “There are barriers to entry when you’re considered high risk,” she said. “Ten years ago, when we were at the infancy stage of e-commerce, it was much easier to get something off the ground. Right now, to get an adult entertainment company off the ground would be very, very difficult. When getting a merchant account, you’ll have to have very good credit, put up a lot of money up front—and they might keep 10 to 15 percent of your settlements per month.

“A lot of the time, it isn’t worth it,” she told me.

The alt-culture erotica site BlueBlood claimed to be the first such place to accept Bitcoin in April 2013. Part of the allure, the blog post that announced the move said, was that “you can also choose to be 100 percent anonymous when you purchase a membership via Bitcoin.”

According to Conn, more and more adult entertainment companies have been turning to cryptocurrency in recent months. Obviously, it wouldn’t be financially viable to only accept payment through Bitcoin at this stage. Not many people know how to use the stuff, and credit card transactions still constitute the majority of porn sales. Additionally, most porn sites are subscription-based, which works with credit cards but not with Bitcoin—you can't set up recurring payments with the currency.

But creating the infrastructure to accept Bitcoin has already taken some of the financial pressure off high-risk businesses. And it's not like Titcoin, a rather obscure porn-inspired cryptocurrency, is going to be anybody's barely-legal tender of choice any time soon. 

Conn’s adult entertainment site—or as he calls it, his “digital-goods marketplace”—can offer discounts to Bitcoin-carrying users, because the adult entertainment–friendly credit card processors his site uses skim off 10 to 20 percent of every transaction. His current site supports just a handful of artists right now, but when his new erotica network launches in a few months, he’ll be working with about 50 porn illustrators, he said.

Independent porn artists are desperate for this kind of network. “I've gone to conventions and worked within the community to get people on board with the idea," Conn said. "Many of them have reached out to us themselves out of desperation for a place to sell their material.”

Patreon also hopes to accept crypotocurrencies like Bitcoin soon. Conte, the founder, says it’s a matter of ethics: “We like the idea of collapsing the gap between creator and consumer. I feel like Bitcoin is aligned here because any time there are no fees for transactions—that feels really good. When people give a chunk of money, they know that the entire chunk of the money is going to the person they’re giving it to.”

The downside of Bitcoin, of course, is that it could be used to pay for all sorts of truly indefensible stuff, like child pornography. That said, thanks to aggressive government actions like Operation Choke Point, the livelihoods of legitimate, independent erotica artists are under fire. Kadath, grateful for Conn’s drive to innovate payment solutions, has turned a corner.

“I’m able to have a steady flow of income that allowed me not to stress as much about finances.” he told me.

Follow Cecilia D'Anastasio on Twitter. 

Photo by Truthout via Flickr 

Bernie Sanders is angry. In fact, he’s furious. He’s mad about income inequality, and about the decades of economic policies and trade agreements that he says have gradually eroded the middle class. He’s mad at Republicans in Washington, DC who want to gut spending for entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. He’s mad at House Speaker John Boehner for suggesting last week that the US might have “no choice” but to send ground troops into Syria. He’s mad at everyone in Congress for not doing more to address climate change, or to rein in the financial industry after the 2009 economic meltdown. He’s mad—really, really mad—about the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, and about the overwhelming political influence of corporate campaign contributors. He’s mad at Democrats for not being mad enough. And he wants you to start getting mad too.

It’s for all of these reasons, plus a couple of others, that Sanders, the independent US Senator from Vermont and a self-described “democratic socialist,” is seriously considering running for president in 2016. While Democrats quietly wait for Hillary Clinton to declare her presidential plans, Sanders has publicly made it clear that he plans to challenge the party’s heir apparent from the left, tapping into a growing wave of populism among liberal activists upset about issues like income inequality, climate change, and corporate cronyism. Already he’s making moves that threaten to complicate Clinton’s presumptive White House bid, popping up at events in Iowa and New Hampshire, on Meet the Press, and at progressive rallies like last month’s Climate Change March to build support for a grassroots “revolution” that he sees as a progressive response to the Tea Party movement.

Of course, Sanders knows that he has little chance of winning anything in 2016, and not just because American voters don’t tend to take kindly to candidates who embrace “Scandinavian-style socialism.” A 2016 poll released by McClatchy/Marist over the weekend showed Sanders with just 4 percent support among Democratic voters, trailing Joe Biden, who came in with 15 percent, and also Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Cuomo, who both came in at 8 percent. (Clinton, of course, was the overwhelming favorite, leading the other candidates by nearly 50 points.)

But long-shot presidential candidates have a way of influencing US elections in profound and interesting ways, forcing frontrunners to talk about issues that they might have otherwise liked to ignore. So I called up Sanders last week to find out more about how he wants to change the national conversation. 

VICE: You’ve been sounding the alarm on inequality and the decline of the middle class for quite a while. Do you think people are starting to pay attention? 
Bernie Sanders: Absolutely, I think the overwhelming majority of the American people are deeply concerned about the collapse of the middle class, about the fact that tens of millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, and that the gap between the very very rich and everybody else is getting wider and wider. Everywhere I go, people are outraged that 90 percent of all new income generated in this country since the Wall Street crash is going to the top 1 percent, while the vast majority of the American people are seeing a decline in their incomes. So yes, there’s outrage out there and people want a government that represents them and not just the top 1 percent.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you’re thinking of running for president in 2016. Have you come to a closer decision on that?
I was just in New Hampshire and I’m going to Iowa next week, so I am going around the country just trying to hear from as many people as possible about if they think that the agenda I would run on—which is basically to protect the interest of working families and take on big money interests—really has resonance in their areas. So we’re still doing a lot of talking but I haven’t made a final decision yet.

Do you think it’s possible to channel your messages into a political campaign for 2016?
I believe so. One of the problems is that while the Republican Party has become a far-right extremist party controlled by the Koch brothers and other billionaires, and the Democratic Party has not been as clear as it should be in making the American people aware of the fundamental economic issues facing this country and their willingness to fight on behalf of working families and take on Wall Street and corporate America. All I can tell you is that in my political life there is virtually no special interest, whether it’s Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, coal companies— you name it— I’ve taken them on. 

Basically, my view is that the American people are hurting, they are angry, and they worry very much about what’s going to happen to their kids. So, if the question is, “Do I believe that a strong, progressive agenda can motivate many millions of americans to stand up and fight back, yes, I do believe that is the case.”

It seems like there is often a disconnect on the left between a progressive, anti-corporate agenda and the political reality that it takes a lot of money to run a political campaign. Do you think it’s possible to become president of the United States, whether it’s you or someone else, without becoming beholden to some kind of interest group?
You have to define what the “interest groups” are.

Anyone who has a lot of money and an interest in influencing policy. 
I think that’s a good question, especially since this disastrous Citizens United decision, which now enables billionaires to spend unlimited sums of money. It’s a very legitimate question to ask whether the billionaires can be beaten, or whether their money and power are such that it is impossible to take them on. My view is that I think we still can beat them. I think we have to overturn Citizens United and move to public funding of elections. What is going on now is an absolute disgrace.

I think it is possible, if one runs a well-organized campaign and if one is able to mobilize millions of people to stand up against big money and trust that they can be defeated. But you raise a legitimate question. It may well be that at some point in the not-so-distant future, these guys who own the economy may be absolutely able to control completely the political processes with their money. It’s certainly what the Koch brothers want to do, and it remains to be seen whether they will be successful. 

Democrats have also been able to get plenty of billionaires donating on their side. Does that present similar issues? Or is it a case of Good Billionaires vs. Bad Billionaires?
Let me respond in two ways. I think the media has said, “Both sides are getting money from the very rich.” The answer is yes and no. The truth is that the Republicans are receiving a lot more money from the very wealthy, from the Koch brothers alone—who I understand will put $400 million into this campaign—not to mention many other people. So it is not a question of equivalence. One side is getting far, far more from the very rich than the other side is.

On the other hand, I personally, very strongly, believe that we have to overturn citizens united. I don’t think that any billionaire, regardless of his or her politics, should be able to play a significant role in a campaign. It’s not what democracy is about.

The third point that I would make is that when people say, “The Democrats are getting money from very rich people,” is that it’s true, though the Republicans are getting a lot more. Then you have to ask yourself, “What are the rich people donating to the Democrats concerned about?” You have some billionaire out there who’s legitimately concerned about global warming. You know what? Global warming is one of the great planetary crises that we face and it must be addressed. What are the Koch brothers concerned about? Their concern is that we should use more and more fossil fuels, that we should build the Keystone Pipeline, that we should significantly weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, and, by the way, that we should cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education. It’s not enough to say that there are billionaires on both sides. You’ve got to ask what they want.

At the end of the day, I personally want to see all billionaires unable to heavily influence campaigns. I want to see Citizens United overturned, and I want to see public funding of elections.

Do you think it’s possible that Congress would pass a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United, or is that just a pipe dream? 
Well, as you know, although it didn’t get much media coverage, we debated that issue a few weeks ago in the Senate, and every Republican voted against proceeding to a legislation that would overturn Citizens United. I think that the overwhelming majority of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—understand that Citizens United is a disastrous decision that is having a profoundly negative impact on American democracy. I believe that if we are capable of mounting the kind of strong grassroots effort that we need, which means getting state legislatures on board, city councils on board, millions of people on board, then yes, I do believe we can overturn it.

Congress has been bogged down recently by a lot of vague philosophical arguments about the size and role of the federal government, and consequently hasn’t been able to get anything else done. One instance in which that wasn’t the case was in passing the Sanders-McCain Veterans Bill, to expand healthcare options for veterans and also hold the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) accountable for hiding long wait times. Can you talk about how you got that done? I’ve heard there was a lot of shouting involved.
Well, you’re right. The VA bill will provide $17.5 billion into the VA for healthcare and deals with some other important issues including affording educational opportunities to Gold Star Wives [spouses of veterans who have died in service] and helping young veterans be able to go to college. It was an important piece of legislation and I’m glad we were able to get that passed. I think the reason we were successful is that, in terms of veterans issues, across the political spectrum, whether you’re progressive or conservative, I think one understands that it would be grotesquely immoral not to address the problems facing people who put their lives on the line to defend this country. And that was the reason I think we were able to bring people with different political ideologies together around this bill.

I’m afraid that on many other bills the ideological divide is so great that I am not optimistic. The Republican agenda is pretty clear. They want more tax breaks for the very rich and for large corporations. And the end of the day, they’re going to want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, nutrition programs—that’s their agenda. I think they are way out of touch from where the American people are. I think they may be in touch with where the Koch brothers are, but not where the average American is. And that’s the problem that we have. I think you have a lot of people in Congress who are not reflecting the views of the vast majority of the American people.

What we need is a political revolution. We need to end the situation where, in this coming election, the estimate is that 60 percent of the people are not going to vote. We need to change that and get people much more actively involved in the political process than is currently the case. 

How do you think that happens? 
It ain’t easy, that I can assure you. It means a lot of grassroots organizing. It means knocking on millions of doors and educating people as to what the right-wing Republican agenda is about. We just sent out a Facebook post talking about what the Koch brothers’ agenda is. It’s an extreme right-wing agenda that most of the American people do not agree with, but people don’t know it. So we have to do a lot of educating, and one of the problems we have is that the corporate media is not particularly interested in doing that, so we have to do it for them. We need to educate, organize, and make it very clear to working families that there is a war going on against their wellbeing, and they’re going to have to fight back. 

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

I think photography is an expression of a lust for life, and is a way to almost immortalize beauty—to freeze a slice of time forever. I try to take pictures of the world as I see it. That world is colorful and I want to convey that as much as possible. I’m always observing the day-to-day instances of form, color, and life—and when they align in just the right way, that's when I know that I have to capture it.

Photography for me, (and life for that matter), is a constant state of observational awareness. I photograph anything that captures my eye, often focusing on people—but not always. There’s life in everything.

I began the way many others seem to. I picked up a film camera and started shooting anything and everything. Over time, I developed a taste for what gives a photo a certain level of artistic quality, drawing much inspiration from the likes of William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, and the legendary Vivian Maier.

See more of Marley's work here.

All photos courtesy of Dimitris Xygalatas (left)

On October 2, the ALS Association announced that they would be spending the first $21.7 million of the $115 million-plus raised from the Ice Bucket Challenge, as they continue to search for ways to treat and cure ALS. While people like bioethicist Peter Singer may complain about Americans’ emotional giving habits, the challenge's financial success is indisputable. Still, the question of why so many people decided to participate in public displays of suffering remains. Could it be the same impulse that gives us the more elaborate and seemingly masochistic rituals seen in other cultures?

Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropology professor at the University of Connecticut who has extensively studied extreme rituals. His current work focuses on the Hindu Kavadi ritual in Mauritius, a small part of the larger festival known as Thaipusam. Kavadi is famous for the painful experiences of practioners who impale themselves with thick rods or hang items from hooks in their skin. The more devoted participants attach a six foot tall altar to themselves using more than 100 hooks. However, not all participants engage in such feats of physical endurance and many simply carry a jug of milk or another offering for the five to six hour procession. Kavadi is celebrated by Hindus in many countries and according to Xygalatas, “might be the most widespread extreme ritual that we know of.”

During his research in Mauritius, Xygalatas' team conducted an experiment whereby they gave participants a small sum of money after the Kavadi had ended. Then, they gave participants the opportunity to anonymously donate to the local temple. In a piece for aeon.co a few weeks ago, Xygalatas summarized the results thusly: “The more pain devotees felt, the more money they gave to charity. And this was true even among observers: the more painful they perceived the ritual to be, the bigger their donations.” He concluded the article by rhetorically asking if a "drink a cup of cocoa challenge" would be as successful as the Ice Bucket Challenge in raising money for ALS, which seemed like a good question.

In an effort to answer it, I reached out to Xygalatas.

VICE: Anthropologically, is the Ice Bucket Challenge an extreme ritual?
Dimitris Xygalatas: In the sense that it is a social practice which has no causal relation to its purported outcome, then yes, it can be considered a ritual—and in most of its versions, a pretty extreme one too.

Why did you set out to study the extreme rituals of the Kavadi in Mauritius?
As an anthropologist, I was always fascinated by rituals, because they are one of the most puzzling aspects of human behavior. Think about it: All societies, without a single exception, are awash with a variety of rituals, so much so that we take them for granted. And I am not just talking about religion. Our life is permeated with ritualized activities that have absolutely no causal relation to their purported goals or contexts: from raising our glasses to toast or our hands to swear in court, to laying a red carpet for an important arrival or holding a graduation ceremony.

The reason I chose to study “extreme” rituals is that they are inevitably even more puzzling, as those who perform them spend not only time and resources, but actually subject themselves to pain and suffering. Mauritius was an ideal place for me because its tremendous ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity offers ample opportunities for studying such rituals. Among the various religious groups that make up its population, one can find ceremonies that involve, for example, walking on burning coals, piercing of the body, self-flagellation, or walking on nails or knives.

Why test for charitable impulses?
The idea behind that study was to examine the effects of ritual intensity on prosocial behavior. Now, obviously, "prosociality" is a general term that can cover a very wide range of human behaviors and attitudes, which means that in order to understand it more precisely, we need to look at some of its more specific expressions. In our study, we chose to use a charity as a measure of prosociality, because it is an activity that everyone is familiar with and it carries real cost to the participants. A lot of previous studies had simply relied on asking people about their behavior, but the truth is that we have no way of knowing whether people's pronouncements correspond to their actual behavior (in fact, we know very well that they often don't). So by using a task that felt natural and involved real monetary costs, we were, quite literally, asking people to put their money where their mouth is. 

Do you think the Ice Bucket Challenge was successful exactly because ALS wasn’t highlighted as much during the ritual?
In part, yes. There are many other ways to raise public awareness, but this particular campaign was so successful precisely because it challenged people to suffer. We should always keep in mind, however, that large-scale phenomena always have complex causes. For example, the fact that the campaign was endorsed early on by a number of celebrities certainly didn’t hurt.

How has the Kavadi festival changed over time?
This is a very good question and actually something that I would like to investigate in the future. I suspect that a historical study might reveal what is called “runaway selection” process, which means that the intensity of the ritual might increase as people continuously try to compete and keep up with each other.  

Do you anticipate the Ice Bucket Challenge will evolve in a similar way?
Oh, I think it already did. People have clearly been trying to top each other. For example, one person held an ice bucket over her head while horseback riding (and fell off the horse), while another used a crane instead of a bucket (which hit him on the head and killed him). All sorts of things happened.  

Have people died during the Kavadi?
Not to my knowledge, no. 

Participants in the Kavadi seem to be looking for unique ways to stand out. Also, there seems to be a great diversity in terms of what the people are doing.
Yes, that’s correct. There is great diversity in the Kavadi. First of all, there are people who simply follow the procession. Then there are people who carry a pot of milk instead of a Kavadi. There are those who have one needle through their tongue or cheek, and those who have hundreds of needles. Last year, my team and I were running some biometric measures using an armband the size of a wrist watch, and there were some people who had so many needles through their skin that we couldn’t find a patch of skin with two inches of free space to place the armband.

Does peer pressure play into the Kavadi?
Peer pressure is always a factor in such rituals. In some cultures there are initiation rituals which people are virtually obligated to perform, otherwise they won’t be able to have a social life. Rituals like the Kavadi are entirely voluntary, but peer groups set examples and create norms that can be powerful motives for participation.

Might somebody of a lower status use this as a way of pointing out that they are more devoted than someone of a higher status? Do higher status folks feel a bit put on the spot?
Though my ethnographic work it became clear to me that this is indeed the case. People who are better positioned within the social network and possess other forms of social capital are less motivated to perform the more extreme versions of the ritual. That role is typically occupied by people who have a more peripheral position in the social network. For them, ritual intensity is a form of signaling commitment to the group and thus increasing their status. We’ve been running a project for a year now to see whether we can quantify this, by measuring the size of the Kavadis and mapping them onto the social network of the area.

The Ice Bucket Challenge was similar in that there’s the lower intensity version where people forego the ice bucket and just donate—which many people certainly did. Did we see a similar dynamic there?
In a way, you could apply this to the ALS challenge. For example, Obama didn’t do it, but he did donate. Same with Tony Blair. He was nominated, but he didn’t do the Ice Bucket Challenge—he donated money. There are different forms of participation, and people can signal different things by engaging in one or the other version. A president is a powerful figure, so he has no need to demonstrate that he is a “tough guy.” Instead, he signals his generosity.

Based on the pictures you supplied, it seems like the higher intensity rituals tend to be performed mostly by men. Why might that be?
There are women who do it, but they almost never do the really intense stuff. They carry smaller Kavadis and have one or two small piercings. I’ve never seen a woman pierce herself with rods or have 100 needles. There is no formal rule against it, they just don’t do it. We see this in many domains of life. Men are more prone to risk-taking. One possible explanation is that for men this is a way of competing or signaling qualities like bravery, strength, healthiness, devotion, or all of the above to their peers and potential mates. That might also explain why younger men are the ones who raise the stakes even higher.

The fundamental question: Why do you think extreme public voluntary group suffering leads to more prosocial behavior?
That’s a very complex question. And to tackle it, you have to look at it from multiple perspectives. For example, on an individual level, such rituals can trigger physiological mechanisms that trigger the brain’s reward systems by inducing pleasurable feelings, which are then projected to the group. Research also shows that when we pay a higher price to join a group, we value group membership more. Another view is that such rituals function as costly signals to the community—if you are willing to put a rod through your cheeks to participate in the ritual, this shows that you are really committed to the group and thus makes you a more trustworthy member of the community.

One difference between the Kavadi and the Ice Bucket Challenge is obviously that most participants weren’t together geographically. Rather, they were connected via social media. Could the same group effects occur in this way?
No. In this respect I wouldn’t compare the two. It’s hard to argue for a group effect here. Having said that, though, I don’t doubt that in some local settings it might have functioned very similarly within the group, e.g. if your buddy is doing it then you also have to do it. Since these things are transmitted virally on Facebook in small networks of people, then we can’t compare them directly.

Would you say that analyses like those done by Peter Singer for Batkid or the myriad charts comparing ALS donations to other causes/diseases are a bit narrow, then, and miss the mark?
It depends on whether we are talking about individual behavior or government policy. I would like to see my tax money spent based on a careful, rational, priority-based analysis. For example, if cancer kills more people than ALS, the government should direct more funding toward researching, preventing, and treating cancer compared to ALS, because public agencies have limited budgets and must play a zero-sum game: For every extra dollar you spend here, you have to cut one there.

But those who extend the same logic to individual charity would be missing the point entirely. A rationalist, utilitarian approach to private giving is both naive and inefficient. Humans are not rationalist decision makers. Our choices are based on emotion just as much as (and often even more than) utility, and if a campaign can successfully play on emotion to save human lives, then I am all for it. Besides, private givings are not a zero sum game. People who donated $100 to ALS would not have necessarily donated the same (or any) amount to another charity if it wasn’t for the Ice Bucket Challenge. In fact, such successful fundraising campaigns can create a surge in charitable giving across the board, by making charity a more fashionable activity. 

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Cloud Nine, a kind of e-cigarette liquid that people have been using to get high, is the latest nightmare drug making the rounds, in the process getting a bunch of TV news reporters extremely excited. A recent NBC Nightly News episode called Cloud Nine "legal, unregulated, and readily available at convenience stores" while informing viewers that the drug has sent almost two dozen young people to the hospital in Michigan.

Despite the entertainment value of freaking out over the possibility that there's a new way to get loaded, these sorts of reports don't contain much actual information for parents—it's scary and your kids are probably already addicted to it. What else do you need to know? Well, it might be good to note that it's a stretch to call it "absolutely deadly," as the segment above does, considering no one has died from it.

Still from the NBC Nightly News Report

So what's the deal with this new drug? First, we should note that the term "Cloud Nine" is a little like the term "trail mix"—a name for a general category, not a single product. It caught on two years ago when the Cloud Nine label was being slapped on an herbal synthetic product, and it might have added relevance today, since e-cigarette fans compete to have the biggest clouds. They're not the same thing though. Whatever the formula is that's been labeled "Cloud Nine" in Michigan lately, people are having a bad time on it, and some counties have responded by banning the drug.

The Detroit Free Press received a list of the drug's effects from Westland Deputy Police Chief Todd Adams that included "agitation, paranoia, hallucinations, chest pain, increased pulse, high blood pressure, and suicidal thinking/behavior," which is an odd range of effects for a recreational drug to have. I personally would not be interested in such an experience. Thankfully, there are explanations online about why the kids these days are putting it in their magic drug wands and shooting drug vapor into their young brains.

Fortunately, you can always turn to the internet if you want information on drugs. A redditor who goes by Aircoft did extensive homework about Cloud Nine. He or she has been posting about Cloud Nine e-cigarette liquid for months, and judging from the Michigan-centric news links in Aircoft's posts, the Cloud Nine in question appears to be the same stuff that's making people sick. 

Aircoft has provided dosage suggestions prospective users who want to smoke the stuff: "0.05ml-0.1ml (a few hits) of pure Cloud Nine," or alternatively: "mix 80 percent Cloud Nine and 20 percent flavored e-liquid, such as one of my favorites, 'Pluto' by Mister-E-Liquid," for improved flavor. Aircoft has also speculates about what's in it at the molecular level: "The active ingredient is a chemical of the JWH-family, such as JWH-018. I also more recently am thinking it contains 2C-B as well." In other words, Aircoft finds the experience the be reminiscent of both cannabis and ecstasy analogs.

Aircoft has even done some detective work on where the plain bottles with "Cloud Nine" on them come from. When a gas station stopped carrying it, he or she asked the attendant for the supplier's contact information. The reply was, "It's not like I can just give you the guy's number."

Aircoft also points out that after Cloud Nine disappeared from some stores, it was replaced by a similar product dubbed "Hookah Relax," the liquid that was banned in one Michigan county at the same time as Cloud Nine. For all the furor over them, these products might be the work of a single chemist who is constantly working on new ways to modify the chemical formula of recreational drugs in order to circumvent laws, standard practice for the makers of legal highs.

One story about Cloud Nine by MLive quoted a government official talking about how kids put the stuff in sports drinks, but the article doesn't mention that this is a terrible, terrible idea. Aircoft tried drinking Cloud Nine, and the results sound terrifying: "It was comparable to a deep mushroom trip, and it involved throwing up and dizziness, along with a very intense body high and deep mind high."

News articles about drugs like Cloud Nine often put reporters in an awkward position: Generally, they just parrot whatever they're told by police and other authority figures, but often those people are either uninformed about how and why users are taking the drug, or they're committed to scaring as many people as possible. Anonymous internet users aren't a reliable source of information either, of course—in one post Aircoft says "Cloud 9 is great"—but they might know more about the composition and effects of new illicit drugs than anyone likely to be contacted by a respectable media outlet.     

One thing seems certain, however: Even if you're the kind of person who likes drugs, you shouldn't be putting chemicals in your body if you don't know what they are, and you definitely shouldn't be drinking something that's designed to be smoked. Cloud Nine may not be deadly in the sense that it will kill you right away, it seems dangerous and stupid to ingest it.  But if you absolutely must, at least do a little research first.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

It started in the playground, where that sweaty bully dished out bad insults and made you feel like a putz. Years later, you're still being intimidated: on the street at night, in job interviews, at pickup basketball games, when someone says something nasty to you in the bar—in all these situations you're stuck being the victim rather than the aggressor, the one who has to back down while your tormentor grins that shit-eating grin at you. Don't you wish there was a way to shut him or her up, to force that clown into a humiliating retreat? Not by throwing a punch, of course, since that could end with you in a jail cell or badly beaten or both. You're going to win this fight without it ever becoming a fight.

The problem is, not everybody has a natural knack for intimidation. Practice makes perfect, but since firsthand research in this field can be slightly hazardous, I thought I'd get some pointers from a group of individuals who are skilled in getting the bullies of life to back the fuck off.

VICE does not advocate the use of violence or illegal activity, nor do we advise you to put yourself into a position of danger.

Click through below to read intimidation tips from:

The Gangster
The Homicide Detective and Hostage Negotiator
The Bouncer and Former Soccer Hooligan
The Supermarket Security Guard
The Drug Dealer
The Drag Queen

Jimmy Tippett Junior (right) with Dave Courtney (left) and Jimmy Tippett Senior (center)

THE GANGSTER

Crime family member Jimmy Tippet Junior counts some of Britain's most notorious villains among his drinking buddies. His dad, Jimmy Tippett Senior, presided over his turf as the "Governor of Lewisham" from the 60s to the 80s. Jimmy Junior got out of jail last year after serving time for his part in a £250,000 ($400,000) jewelry heist and is currently staying clear of the guns, money, drugs, and crime that have characterized his life so far.

Do you know what it is [that intimidates people]? It's being really nice. Now, I would be as nice as pie if I was trying to intimidate someone, 'cause the more horrible you are the more it doesn't work. People who scream and shout threats—"I'll shoot you! I'll break your legs!"—I laugh at people like that. I would be the most charming, nicest guy possible. That person will go home, google me and the people around me, and see all this bad shit.

When I was in my late teens I was a nasty, vicious little bastard. I wouldn't think twice about sticking a knife in somebody or cutting them. If I wanted to intimidate someone I'd find out who was the biggest, hardest man in that area and then use extreme violence on them so everyone knows who I am. I wouldn't do that now, but that's what I used to do.

"Forget brawn, confidence is number one"

All the bad things I've done have made me the person I am now. I'm very confident; I don't worry about anybody or anything, anytime or anywhere. Forget brawn, confidence is number one. That's why I'm nice when I do things. The history you've built up makes the person. I'd turn up and be like, "Listen, this is how it is. You know who I am." I'd do it that way rather than threaten somebody.

If I was going to see someone and they had a large sum of money and I had to recover that money, I would turn up on my own, buy them a coffee, and be really nice. But in the background there would be two big lumps—scary motherfuckers—just standing in the vicinity. So the person would see all this going on, go away, and do his homework on me. It breaks his brain down.

It's like Tetris—whacking away the bricks. I've always turned up with a result and it's never failed me. Life is a game. Every day you wake up and get dressed and you're going onto a stage—a platform—to do what you gotta do to better yourself.

I'm very headstrong. I refuse to lose. I'll go all the way. No one will ever beat me. If you beat me with your hands, I'll come back with a bat. If you beat me with a bat, I'll come back... well, now I don't get involved in things like that.

THE HOMICIDE DETECTIVE AND HOSTAGE NEGOTIATOR

Bob Bridgestock was a heroic cop who talked people down from the tops of buildings and persuaded maniacs not to shoot their captives. During his 30 years on the force he took charge of 26 murder investigations, as well as investigating drive-by shootings, kidnappings, and extortion schemes.

The golden rule is treat people how you want to be treated. But sometimes you have to take control. You are a person in authority. Some people will not listen to a single word you say. Whether they're in the right or in the wrong, they just won't listen. They try it on to start with, to test what reaction you have. Will you take a step backward? Will you stand your ground? If you stand your ground they've got a problem. It's talking to people, but you've got to be firm.

Hostage negotiation is a totally different level. In some respects, if they're threatening to kill somebody, it's like the person is threatening to jump off the bridge or stick the knife in their own neck. I've been to people where they're bare-chested, have a bandana round their head, and are leaning against a samurai sword, and they say, "If you come through the door I'm gonna push myself straight into this sword." You say, "Well look, I've got an ambulance outside. If you do that you're going to be in a lot of pain. You might not die, and if you do that I'll have to come in. I'm not going anywhere."

"He's got a firearm and he's shouting and screaming that he's gonna turn the gas taps on and kill himself and everybody else"

I've been in armored trucks where we've driven right up to somebody's window. He's got a firearm and he's shouting and screaming that he's gonna turn the gas taps on and kill himself and everybody else. You could easily give up, but you don't. It's a case of, "Look, we're not going anywhere; you're not going to do that; the gas has been turned off in the street so that isn't going to work. The truck is armored; you're not going to injure anyone in here." Eventually, you wear them down.

Fortunately, I've never been in a situation where I've lost somebody—whether to suicide or kidnapping or anything like that. I don't know how I'd have coped.

Interviews are different again. Part of the interview technique is silence. It makes people uncomfortable. I've known [lawyers] to kick people under the table when they start to talk to remind them [to shut up].

Illustration by Cei Willis

THE BOUNCER AND FORMER FOOTBALL HOOLIGAN

Part-time bouncer and ex-football hooligan Phil "just likes scrapping." He says that age, injuries, and the need to keep a steady job have taught him how to navigate conflict without resorting to fisticuffs—sort of.

Make it look like you're fearless and up for anything. A few years ago I saw a guy while I was on a night out who had a reputation for being quite hard. I was coked up so I started giving him shit.

I tried it on with his [girl] in front of him, and when he got pissy, I asked him what he was going to do about it. He left it, so a little later, when I saw him at the bar, I pushed him out the way, picked up his drink, and poured it all over his shoes. Then I just stood there, smiling.

He walked off again and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, until he smashed a bar stool over the back of my head while I was sitting down. He got dragged out before I could get hold of him, but I was shouting at the cunt that I was going to find out where he lived.

[At this point in Phil's story I remarked that his tactics seemed to have failed miserably. But he insisted that they proved the guy was scared to fight him face-to-face, and that I should shut up and just let him carry on with what he was saying.]

I saw him a few weeks later around town when I wasn't on drugs. I didn't feel like starting on him again so I walked over and told him to buy me a pint, which he did. When he handed me my pint I said that I was so happy we were friends I felt like burning my own house down. That seemed to do the trick.

If you're working the doors, you should get to the gym and make sure you're stacked. It's better to look big and have some power behind you. Learn some takedowns as well, and get in a few fights beforehand so you've got some confidence. Take up MMA or something. Don't be afraid to invade people's personal space, push them around, and stand in their way.

Freaking people out and saying weird shit can also help. Like if someone's arguing and getting in your face, ask them what their star sign is—but shout it at them. Then ask quietly how big their cock is.

Whoever was doing a security job in Woolwich Lidl circa 2007 was evidently doing it pretty well

THE SUPERMARKET SECURITY GUARD

Danny came to England from Nigeria on a student visa to better himself and now works in a supermarket in an overcrowded and impoverished part of London, where arresting shoplifters is low on the list of police priorities. The supermarket was a long way from the run-ins he had in Lagos, but after a short time on the job he realized his own brand of Nigerian justice would come in handy.

This fella, he come in every now and then, nicked a few things and run off. One day he got me into trouble, which I didn't find funny. He put a few things in his basket as normal—tomatoes, rice, and whatnot—as well as a bottle of whiskey down his pants. I was watching on the camera, and just as he went up to the till I came out of the office. By the time I arrived, he'd ran away. All the items were on the till except the drink. The manager was fuming, but I was like, "He'll be back again."

A few weeks go past and he shows up. Same old thing; he grabbed some whiskey. I didn't even wait for him to go by the till. As soon as he put it in his pants I walked up and was like, "Yo, can I get those things?" He was like, "I'm gonna put it back on the shelf." I was like, "Uh, uh, uh. Do you have the money to pay for the ones you took before?"

Me and the other guard took him to the manager's office. We searched him and he only had a couple of pennies. I said, "How you gonna pay for a bottle of whiskey with pennies? I'm gonna have to take something. If we get the money back, you get your stuff back." So I said, "I like your shoes." He was being a dickhead, so I said, "I like your trousers, too—with the belt on—and if I have to take them off you I'm gonna knock you out first 'cause I can't be struggling." I wanted to take his socks as well, but they weren't my type. He took them off and I was like, "Are you gonna come back with the money?" He said he'd be back in a minute. This is January and it's freezing cold. I'm like, "Off you go."

Another guy came round a different day doing the usual—stealing items and threatening people. I got him back. In the office I said, "Have you got payment on you?" Obviously not. When I searched him all he had was his passport, so I took it. I think it still might be in the manager's office. I never saw him again in my life.

Photo by Giorgi Nieberidze

THE DRUG DEALER

Marlon is in his 30s and a career drug dealer. Intimidation has been part of his day-to-day existence since he started selling weed on the banks of London's Grand Union Canal in the 1990s.

If you’re dealing with a street punter [buyer], there is a balance of power. Intimidating someone who has already made themselves vulnerable by buying illegal drugs is easy.  

Most of the time, putting the shits up someone is more about the threat of violence than violence itself. It depends on who the target is. I used to have some right curtain-twitching neighbors but they were sorted out easily, I just told them to fuck off, keep your curtains closed, stay inside.

My business depends on controlling the lines of credit I give out to my customers, and I use different stages of intimidation. The first stage of getting to people is friendly. I’m just like a bank or a debt collector. It’s constant phone calls and text messages. This will normally nudge the average middle-class kid to pay up. Then, if that doesn’t work, I’ll threaten the fuckers with violence. That usually reels in the rest.

"If a dealer owes me money and he can't pay, he will expect a slap"

Most people freeze in the face of cold-blooded violence. Just a slap round the chops is well outside their comfort zone. It’s the speed and ferocity with which you turn from a friend to a foe that catches people off balance. I’ve seen grown men well up with fear.

If a dealer owes me money and he can’t pay, he will expect a slap. If someone steals from me, they can expect to get battered. It’s not as random as it might appear. But this doesn’t even come close to dealing with my rivals over turf. It’s not purely about numbers or firepower, but about reputation, acting with confidence—you need an element of surprise, that is what intimidates people.

Power is people knowing I won’t back down. The last time someone tried to muscle in on my game we went to war. Within hours we had kidnapped two rivals and blown out the windows of a house of a close relative of a third with a sawn-off shotgun. We just continued to hit them until they surrendered.

But intimidation is not just about violence. If you are holding personal information about someone you can dangle them from a thread. In this game it’s about threatening to tip off police or immigration services, or threatening families overseas. It’s dirty; we all know it.

This section by Max Daly

THE DRAG QUEEN

By day, Mercedes Bends supervises construction workers; at night she's part of the Brighton drag scene and has dealt with her fair share of leering drunks and horny men. She likes to deploy a non–gender specific array of weapons to combat haters, whether she's at her job or in the bar.

Drag queens can be really scary. I can do it. Obviously I don't do it for the sake of it, but I can turn it on if I have to. There's something unhinging about someone who looks so girly but has the physical aggression of a man. Women are good at mental torture, whereas a man will punch. The combination of the two creates a powerful effect.

I used to work in a bar in Brighton that catered to [bachelor and bachelorette parties]. Straight guys who would normally mock gays would come in. Without my drag, they would have the ability to intimidate me. The drag was like an armor that gave me the upper hand.

"I'll flatten you with one line, sugar-tits"

Building sites can be really aggressive places too. But it's just about baring your teeth bigger than they can. A lot of people who work in manual labor jobs and want to cause trouble are quite simple. All I have to do is use a word with a couple more syllables and they're mentally intimidated.

Mostly it's the delivery. I've got the sort of attitude where I'll go straight in for the kill. I'll flatten you with one line, sugar-tits. When I first started on sites I'd get a lot of comments, but I'd be so quick with the comeback that I'd kill them with humor.

When someone pretends to try it on with me, which has happened so many times, I just turn it round on them. I've never been retiring about it. "Come on then, darling. Let's go do it. Get it out." They turn into nervous little boys. For example, there was a black guy on site; he came up behind me and started touching me up. I turned round to him and said, "I've never been with a black guy before. Do you fancy it?"

I've caused whole pub brawls because people have been intimidated by the sexual element. Once, at the Brighton bar, a guy came in with a group of his mates. He ended up taking a real shine to me. Next thing I know, there's a brawl. His brother kicked off 'cause he was paying me too much attention. He was shouting: "My brother's not going home with a cock in a bra." The barman got involved and started lamping people, and I waded in there in full drag.

Illustration via Wikimedia User Евгений Ардаев

Last weekend Muslims around the world observed Eid al-Adha, which celebrates the conclusion of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. As with so many religious holidays, there are parties, reunions with family, renewals of community bonds, and stories that can give us pause if we spend too much time with them.

Non-Muslims might find it surprising that the central historical figure in both Eid al-Adha and the hajj itself is not Muhammad, but rather Abraham. In hajj, pilgrims perform rituals at sites associated with Abraham and his family. We run between the hills of Safa and Marwa in imitation of Hajar, mother of Abraham’s son Ishmael, as she searched for water in the desert. We circumambulate the Ka’ba, which Muslims believe had first been constructed by Abraham and Ishmael. We also reenact Abraham’s rejection of the devil. When I performed hajj in 2008, it was the devil part that gave me the most struggle. Throwing pebbles at three walls that signified the devil, we dramatized three instances in which Abraham shot down the devil’s efforts to tempt him away from obeying God’s command. The command was for Abraham to kill his son.

The Qur’an does not name the son marked for sacrifice, but Muslim interpretive tradition has favored Ishmael, rather than Isaac, the intended sacrifice in the biblical version. For Ishmael to be the sacrifice ties the rites of hajj together, doubling the miracle of Ishmael’s life. Ishmael was first saved when God commanded Abraham to cast him and his mother into the desert, presumably to die. However, the well of Zamzam in the desert bubbled up with water and saved them from dying of thirst. Ishmael’s second rescue came when God stopped Abraham from slaughtering him at the last second, providing an animal to be sacrificed instead.

We retell the story of Abraham nearly slaughtering his son to celebrate his unflinching faith in God. We also honor Ishmael, who apparently accepted his role and complied with the order. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice what he cherished most in this world becomes a gauge by which we measure our own attachments and whether we could give them up if God asked us to. Abraham picking up the knife represents a victory over the ego that only prophets and the prophet-like might achieve. 

However, there are other ways of reading the story, depending on the personal baggage that we bring to it as readers. Abraham’s sacrifice is challenging for me, because like Abraham, my father believed that he received communications from supernatural beings. Like Abraham having sex with his slave, my father conceived his son in a relationship defined by power and violence. Like Abraham, my father was told by the voices to subject his child’s mother to abuse and abandonment, and he complied. And like Abraham, my father believed he was ordered to put a knife to his son’s throat.

In my reimagining of the story, Abraham and his reported selflessness no longer occupy the center. Instead, I give my energy to reflecting upon Hajar the slave, her son born from rape, and their lives traumatized by God’s loyalty tests. During my pilgrimage to Mecca, I felt a more intuitive connection to sa’ee, our retracing of Hajar’s steps as she desperately searched for water to save her child, than jamrat, our imitation of Abraham stoning the devil. Abraham was given an unbearably hard choice. Hajar and Ishmael did not have choices. In Abraham’s divine trial, they were choices, and the wrong ones.

Among folks who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” I have heard it said that God is love. The Abraham story burns this down. God is not love. God is obedience. To claim love against obedience is a mere trick of the ego and the mischief of this world, another false idol that needs to be smashed. Abraham’s love for his child is what stands between him and perfect submission to his lord. Hajar’s love for her child’s life or her own stands between her and surrender to the divine chain of command: God, a man, a woman and child. We love each other for God’s sake alone, and God’s love is established by the fact that after this tortured family performed sufficient obedience, God allowed the child to live.

For those of us who care about locating or fabricating gender equality in our traditions, this narrative might be a problem—and not even because the patriarch is the only real agent in the story. Abraham’s willingness to slit his son’s throat tells us that a transcendent authority must be obeyed even when we are horrified by what it commands. Many of us reenact Abraham’s struggle when we attempt to negotiate with our traditions. Because we are human, our ideas about things like love, justice, and ethics are necessarily subjective and contextual. Against these flawed human constructions, some religious intellectuals would present the revealed word of God as universal and absolute, to be recognized and obeyed without question or challenge. This is where we repeat the story. We are commanded to always obey the divine words, even when they say the wrong things, even when they deny whatever we understand to be merciful and just.  

Islam is a big tradition in which we can find plenty of interpretive escape hatches—both premodern and modern—from the problems of the words. I will always be disturbed by the story of God telling a father to put the blade to his child, and the failure of my own ego is that I will always read this story as the abused son of an abused woman. My life as a Muslim, however, is not reducible to my sitting alone with the Qur’an in my house, trying to reconcile textual content to my personal needs. Beyond what the book might say, I experience Islam in a Muslim family and in relation to Muslim communities. In this context, the Abraham story doesn’t go away, but its meaning can move beyond what I find on the page.

In Mecca, I achieved some peace with Abraham not through acts of reinterpretation, but through walking as a pilgrim among my sisters and brothers, throwing the stones as a performance of love. Pop-atheist types who flip through the Qur’an or Bible and point at Abraham’s sacrifice to prove that religion is inescapably oppressive have missed the way that traditions actually work in the world. Traditions are not driven simply by “what the book says,” but everything in the real world with which our books must interact and negotiate.

This means that the Abraham story is only partly about a father agreeing to murder his son for God. It’s also about sparkly clothes, joyous congregational prayers, big family dinners, and performing the uncle/auntie-function of handing out Eidi money to children. At the root of these celebrations lies a possible darkness, but if I located meaning entirely in the origins, I would be terrified by my own skin.

Michael Muhammad Knight is the author of nine books, including Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing and his hajj narrative, Journey to the End of Islam. Follow him on Twitter.

Fashion Week is a misnomer. Like happy hour, no matter what day or time it is, it's happening somewhere in the world. Last week, it was happening in Paris. We sent photographer and filmmaker Steven Yatsko to PFW to snap some candid photos of Parisians as they showed the rest of the world how to dress like stinky, snail-eating know-it-alls. Here's what Steven had to say about the whole experience:

"During Fashion Week, Paris fills up with people dressed in black and Stan Smith sneakers. They wear their hair bleached and slick-backed. During the day, they haunt concept stores like the Broken Arm and Colette. And everyone carries around a camera for potential street style shots. The people who attend the shows are more avid than your typical New York Fashion Weekers, since it takes some actual effort to get into PFW. Unlike New York, the nightlife scene is free of obnoxious PR people and promoters. So there isn't as much human-trafficking of models in exchange for entry to parties, which makes the whole ordeal seem way less scuzzy. There aren't many VIP sections at clubs, either. And the exclusivity of the "tables" isn't worshipped. So everyone mixes it up on the dance floor. The best thing about the PFW parties are the smoking rooms, which are always filled to the brim. From what I was told, the Paris clubs once tried to ban smoking in all rooms, but the clubs began to stink because the odor of the people wasn't getting covered up with cigarette smoke. Needless to say, I found the smoking rooms to be a great place to take pictures and escape that French funk that smells like je ne sais quoi."

For more photos from Steven, check out his website.

Portrait by Matthew Leifheit

Celebrities typically refrain from addressing the gossip sites that taunt them. But earlier this year, after bloggers accused Lady Gaga of tweeting a picture of a Metallica concert, claiming it was a photo of the audience at her ArtRave: The ArtPop Ball show, the pop megastar broke the fourth wall.

“Here’s a proper pic,” Lady Gaga tweeted at a gossip site, along with a picture of a packed arena. “Maybe the Madonna fans on your site can use a microscope to count the fans.”

The tweet sent shockwaves throughout gay-and celebrity-oriented corners of the internet. After all, Gaga wasn’t tweeting Us Weekly, People magazine, or even her archenemy, Perez Hilton. She had tweeted at Oh No They Didn’t—a ten-year-old celebrity-gossip community on the archaic social media platform LiveJournal.

Oh No They Didn’t has a cult-like following. Users submit all the content on the website (or copy and paste material from other publications, including this one) to the moderators, who then decide whether to publish it. Despite the lowercase headlines, typos, and dated purple-and-white layout, more than 22,000 people follow the website on Twitter, and according to a source at LiveJournal, the site remains the network’s most popular online “community” in the US.

If the site sounds like any other gossip rag online, that’s precisely what makes it unique: It was started, in 2004, by three black teenagers—Erin Lang, Bri Draffen, and Breniecia Reuben—who were looking for a place where “Black ‘indie’ kids who felt out of place [could] talk about music (and life) with other Black kids,” blogger Rafi Dangelo has written about the teens. Youth of color contributed the majority of the comment threads. The site’s mission, according to its founders, was to create a safe space where members could discuss pop culture with an authentically black voice without being exclusively black. Because users of the site both created and read the content, site members believed they were reading gossip “by the people, for the people.”

This spirit resonated with fans, and Oh No They Didn’t soon surpassed its niche audience. O, the Oprah Magazine, named Oh No They Didn’t one of Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2007, and when Anna Nicole Smith died, that same year, so many users visited Oh No They Didn’t that the community’s server crashed.

But on the way to infamy, some believe, the community lost its original mission, becoming infamous more for its trolls than for its vision of a celebrity-gossip utopia. Today, few users even know three black girls founded the site.

What’s more, according to Lang, Brenden Delzer and Elizabeth Carter, the two white adults who currently run the community, stole Oh No They Didn’t from her and the other founders.

“They locked us out of our own site,” Lang, who is now an aspiring actress and writer, wrote on her LiveJournal earlier this year. “i have tons of witnesses and screen caps. tons. but we cant take legal action. just spread the word that they are liars. im coming for their asses now.”

Lang’s accusations launched an online scandal this summer, when an anonymous user left a comment in an Oh No They Didn’t blog post on July 6 confirming Lang’s version of events.

“i used to be one of the original mods at ontd. yesternight [Lang’s username] started the community,” the comment began. “yesternight added brenden and ecctv [Carter’s username] to the community as mods. BIGGEST MISTAKE!”

The user described how Lang had taken time away from the site because her mother had died of brain cancer. She explained how Lang made Delzer and Carter moderators and then took a temporary leave of absence from the community. When Lang returned to the site after a year hiatus, she discovered she had been removed as a moderator.

“what kind of shit stains of a human being does that when someone is mourning a loss of a loved one?” the anonymous user asked.

Delzer denies Lang’s story and insists that Lang has exaggerated events to discredit his success in turning ONTD into a pop-culture phenomenon.

Did Delzer and Carter steal the community from Lang and the other founders, or was Lang a manipulative liar? We spent a year examining the many contradictory narratives about Oh No They Didn’t and found out the truth.

Archival image of the Oh No They Didn’t founders courtesy of Bri Draffen

Like many stories of whites allegedly stealing black culture, this story begins in the South. In the early 2000s, Lang lived in Mobile, Alabama, with her parents and brother. Her family had moved there from Los Angeles, where her father worked on television sets at ABC, and from a young age, she obsessed about the entertainment industry. But in the 1990s, after the Rodney King riots, they moved to Alabama in search of “a more calm, stable environment.”

“I wanted to be an actress,” Lang said. “I was really bored living in Alabama, so I would read about other people’s lives, and it was really cool to sit around and talk to other people about film and gossip—but it wasn’t always about gossip. It was about ticket sales and music videos, and it was about all types of things.”

When she was around 17 years old she started gossiping about Hollywood on LiveJournal. She wrote on a personal account and also on Negroclash, a community created for black “indie” teens, according to Dangelo. “It was pretty much just alternative black kids.”

Through LiveJournal, Lang met Draffen and Reuben. Like Lang, the girls felt like outcasts in their towns—Reuben lived in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Draffen lived in Kansas City, Missouri. Every day after school, the girls would read gossip and talk on AIM about the latest celebrity news.

“Being a person of color at schools that were predominantly white for most of my life,” Draffen said, “since I got older, I’ve definitely sought out those connections, but with people who could commiserate, so that’s where all that started.”

One day in 2004, Lang noticed a post of hers had received about 150 comments and thought, Hey, why don’t I start my own thing on the side? She spoke to Draffen and Reuben about the idea.

In the comments section of a post, Draffen asked Lang, “Erin, are we still doing that celebrity gossip community? HMM? Edit: I think we should call it ohnotheydidnt. Or not. Random thought. Sonic Youth & Le Tigre in Columbia next month? Anyone?”

Lang replied: “!!! le tigre!!!! we’re so there.”

Though the site was mostly made up of black participants, the trio also befriended plenty of people of other races on LiveJournal, like their white pal Sam Gavin. Lang made Draffen and Reuben maintainers and later added Gavin and other members. Maintainers can approve community members and posts, unlike community moderators, or mods, who can only approve posts.

Lang established the community’s conversational voice in the first post, which was, in true mid-2000s fashion, about Britney Spears’s relationship with background dancer Kevin Federline, or K-Fed:

hey guys you can start posting now. ignore the lack of layout and info.

lol @ Britney Spears buying her own engagement ring. They seem to be really in love. I was reading Entertainment Weekly (the most important magazine on Earth) and she in the interview they were jus so giggly and cute. She was the one that popped the question and he said no. then he turned around a few minutes later and ask her. Even though its really random and fast that they are getting married, i find it oddly romantic.

Users published scanned copies of magazine articles, lifted from other blogs’ content, and wrote witty commentary about celebrities. In the first few months, the community remained small. “Back then, we were probably 25–50 young people on the Internet, at least 80% Black, and just shooting the breeze with our friends about celebrity stories,” Dangelo wrote in a blog post.

The site became a full-blown online phenomenon when a user leaked Pete Wentz’s dick pics.

“I was the one that approved that Pete Wentz story,” Reuben recounted. “It was just some random girl that was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been talking to Pete Wentz, and he sent me these pictures.’”

Photo by David Keeler/Online USA/Getty Images

The community’s popularity coincided with a shift in celebrity media that gossip historian Anne Helen Petersen, the author of Scandals of Classic Hollywood, calls “monumental.”

“I always think there are two types of people,” Petersen told us recently. “People who want to believe exactly what the stars say they are and people who want to challenge those assumptions—and those people discovered how to display that in a way that’s never been done before. The stuff online was so much more flagrant than any of the stuff even in the National Enquirer.”

The new media revolved around Spears, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, and, most of all, Paris Hilton—America’s first reality TV star. Although Hilton’s detractors criticize her for being “famous for showing up,” Petersen points out that Hilton was far from our first socialite. New York gossip columnists, like Walter Winchell, covered the city’s socialites throughout the 20th century, and in 1961 the movie magazine Photoplay’s cover said “America’s New Star” was Jacqueline Kennedy. (If you subtract JFK from the equation, Jackie O was nothing more than a stylish socialite who married well.) Hilton changed American culture because, for the first time, Americans were talking about a socialite more than any movie star.

Few gossip bloggers or Oh No They Didn’t users saw Hilton and her peers as anything more than characters at their disposal, but Hilton felt their heat and understood the media world was changing: “It was like the first time people were writing rude things on the internet and lies about people,” Hilton told us. “I was a teenager, basically, and people who don’t even know me were writing lies, and just in the beginning, it was hurtful to read things that were just not true—but you can’t control it. Someone’s hiding behind a computer.”

Lang and the other founders soon learned what Hilton felt when bloggers attacked her. Oh No They Didn’t started with a utopian premise—gossip as a means for people to communicate, without the interference of advertisers—but quickly became a mirror for the way fame and money destroy people. As Oh No They Didn’t became more popular, Reuben said, users became jealous of the maintainers’ power and directed their jealousy at them in mean comments.

“People would just get jealous that we had that power,” Reuben said, “even though it wasn’t even a real power.”

Reuben and her co-founders worked long hours monitoring the community, but they never received a paycheck for their work. In the early years, LiveJournal never even sold ads to display on the community. A maintainer had purchased a permanent account for the site, meaning that, according to rules established by LiveJournal, users did not have to see ads when they viewed Oh No They Didn’t posts.

In October of 2005, less than a year and a half after founding the community, Draffen decided to stop monitoring it on a daily basis. She was now attending Kansas State University and had a job and real-life friends to socialize with.

“It became hard to keep up with the job of monitoring posts and keeping up with comments and dealing with people who were trying to hack the site,” she said.

At some point, Reuben decided to leave the community too. Lang eventually left as well—but for entirely different reasons.

In 2004, Lang says, her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died four months later. Lang moved around and started taking care of her younger siblings. In the midst of this personal crisis, working for free for a website seemed ridiculous.

“Obviously I’m going to be depressed [while] going through real-life family stuff,” Lang said. “I didn’t really have time to be online anymore.”

Two years passed, during which time Lang’s participation on the site slowed to a trickle, by Lang’s own admission. During this long absence, several users criticized Lang for failing to moderate the site on a daily basis. According to her account, Delzer and Carter, today’s maintainers, belonged to this angry mob of users. Lang told them, “I’m sorry. I was just really overwhelmed, and if you think you can do a better job, why don’t I add you [as maintainers]?”

They accepted the offer. Lang worked with them for several months, communicating with the other maintainers in a private group, but after she lost access to a computer, she stopped talking to them as often. Both Lang and Delzer say Lang occasionally emailed the maintainers to tell them she lacked a computer.

Lang didn’t return to the community until spring of 2009. Still without a computer, she lived in Birmingham, Alabama, with Brian, another community member.

Lang knew she had created a site with a huge cult following. As a kid in Mobile, she dreamed of working in the pop-culture sphere, and her creation—a site run by black girls that wasn’t exclusively for black girls—now belonged to that world. Done mourning, she returned to reclaim control of her baby.

I’m ready to start posting on this again, she thought.

But when she logged on, she said, she discovered that the passwords had been changed and the maintainers had removed her and Reuben as maintainers.

“It wasn’t like they were like, ‘Hey, why aren’t you posting? We really need you to be on it,’” Lang said. “They just blocked me out.”

Photo by J. Vespa/WireImage/Getty Images

What happened in spring 2009 doesn’t surprise many Oh No They Didn’t members.

“The crew that took over were all trolls,” Calvin Stowell, a notorious former Oh No They Didn’t member, recently told us over drinks at a gay bar in Manhattan.

Stowell would know this better than anyone. Today his face looks like a movie star’s, although he has the body of an everyman, and he works at the nonprofit Do Something, but as a teenager, he acted like a troll. A closeted teenager at a boarding school in Vermont, he spent roughly an hour a day on Oh No They Didn’t, approving posts during study hall.

Stowell never became a maintainer—he never surpassed moderator status—but he became popular enough in the community to belong to the Kewl Kidz, an exclusive community offshoot of Oh No They Didn’t that Stowell said was composed of the “popular kids,” whom he also called “the biggest trolls.”

“I was never an inflammatory troll,” he said. “There are people who think it’s fun to be racist or homophobic or sexist on the internet—I think that’s just gross.”

Delzer and Carter belonged to the Kewl Kidz and shined more than other members, according to Stowell. Only a few of the Oh No They Didn’t members we spoke to said they know what Carter looks like—and she would only speak to us via email or Facebook chat—but everyone in the community knows her for her Conan O’Brien avatar.

“She has had the Conan icon since as early as I can remember—literally since I was 14 or 15 years old,” Stowell said.

Carter and Delzer maintain that their actions on Oh No They Didn’t were for the best of the community. This belief led them to discuss removing Lang and Reuben from the community with the other moderators.

“It wasn’t my decision,” Delzer told us in a phone call. “It was me asking this group of moderators, ‘What should we do? Because people are getting hacked.’”

According to Delzer and Carter, numerous hackers had attacked the community. Lang rarely used her LiveJournal, and they believed an intruder could easily hack her account. On top of this, Delzer viewed Lang as unimportant: “Nobody understood why somebody who was gone, who literally did not log on for two years, could help out the community.”

“They hadn’t been doing anything in the community,” Carter said. “If their account had been hacked, ONTD could have been totally deleted. One of the other maintainer’s accounts had been hacked, but she was quick to tell me when it happened, and I removed her powers until she was back in control.”

Carter says she questioned from the get-go the decision to remove Lang and Reuben: “A big reason I was so hesitant, personally, was because I knew they had started it.” But she thought their accounts posed a security threat. In early 2009, she says, they removed them as maintainers, but Lang and Reuben could still approve and deny posts. On March 9, they removed Lang and Reuben as moderators.

Reuben learned of their decision when she tried to log in to the community that same day. She instant-messaged Draffen to tell her the news.

“oh hale naw,” she wrote, according to screencaps Draffen shared with us.

“What’s up?” Draffen asked.

“BRENDEN JUST REMOVED ME AND ERIN AS MAINTAINERS OF ONTD.”

Lang contacted the maintainers and asked them to give her role in the community back.

“They were like, ‘Well, you’re not contributing, so that’s that,’” Lang said. “And I was like, ‘Please.’”

Over a month later, on April 20, Delzer agreed to allow Lang back as a maintainer, but when she, once more, failed to participate every day because of her lack of a computer, he removed her again.

“I will admit that I could have been more active—totally,” Lang said. “I’m not going to say that’s not true.” Looking back, she wishes she had never chosen Delzer as a maintainer: “It’s my fault.”

Since her departure, racial issues have become a problem in the comments section. A user in the Midwest, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said racist tags aimed at black celebrities were an issue in the community. To solve the problem, maintainers banned tags about black celebrities, a decision that struck some people as racist in itself. The anonymous user told us, “People fought against that because they were like, ‘We still have a Latino tag and Asian tag.’”

Lang believes Delzer used the death of her mother, and the effect it had on her life, as an excuse to remove her so he could take credit for her creation. But Delzer and Carter didn’t take over the site until at least two years after Lang’s mother died, a time during which Lang’s contributions to the community dried up almost entirely.

“I lived with a single parent all of my life,” Delzer said. “I grew up without a father. My father died, and I would never, ever stoop so low.”

Lang nonetheless maintains she told Delzer about her mother’s death shortly after it happened, but he says he only found out on April 10, 2013.

“I had no idea Erin’s mother died until long after the fact,” Carter said. “I would have preferred it if Erin stayed an active member of the community as a mantainer. I joined ONTD as a fun community... but when there are tweets and emails making fun of me, calling me racist, threatening to kill my cat, it isn’t fun.”

Photo by M. Von Holden/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Delzer and Carter were not necessarily humbled by the success of the community they took control of. The two enjoyed some major perks as leaders—for example, tickets to MTV’s Video Music Awards, which they covered in a September 2010 post called “Liz and Brenden’s Excellent Adventure.”

Controversy and jealousy over the two accepting tickets and press passes to the awards show erupted in the community, which Carter addressed: “I have heard a lot of people trashing my darling [Brenden] for going, but if he hadn’t have taken [the tickets], neither of us would have gotten it. It was a miracle we got a ticket in the first place and I told him to go. I forced him. So don’t hate on him for that, seriously.”

In a telling microcosm of the ONTD experience as a whole, Delzer got to enjoy the free ticket to the show, while Carter didn’t get one (though both were allowed on the red carpet). The two interviewed and interacted with the celebrities they so often covered from afar (their photos and interviews are a time capsule of the who’s who of 2010, with breathless coverage of the Situation and Jenna Jameson and Snooki) but also got to be the stars of their own post, covering their lives in the same tone they might use for their favorite celebrities. Carter ended the post by thanking the community members, saying, “I really want to take this time in the post to thank all of you guys for making ONTD what it is so that we could go to the VMAs.”

As ONTD’s success and popularity continued, LiveJournal decided to swoop in and take ownership of the community. During this time, Oh No They Didn’t still operated on a permanent account, although the community brought enough traffic to shut down the site. (According to Stowell, whenever there was a breaking celebrity scandal, the amount of users logging on to ONTD would crash LiveJournal’s servers, and NBC reported that LiveJournal’s entire site went down during the death of Michael Jackson as a result of traffic on ONTD.) LiveJournal’s corporate office complained to Delzer and the rest of the moderators and then took ownership of the community away from the moderators, seemingly so they could display ads. Reportedly in 2011, LiveJournal brought Delzer on in an official, paid capacity to stay with and moderate ONTD, meeting at their Burbank offices for the discussion.

Today, Delzer works full-time at LiveJournal in San Francisco. His job consists of multiple responsibilities beyond Oh No They Didn’t, including contributions to LiveJournal Prime (the company’s social media platform) and the company’s photo file, along with maintaining a LiveJournal community called LOLcats. He says that managing Oh No They Didn’t now consists of about 50 percent of his duties, but remains cagey about his work with the community for the company: “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s not everyday moderating activities so much as it is email requests and member requests and insights, and there are a lot of things I have to report to my boss that I don’t feel conformable speaking with you about.” Carter also continues to work for LiveJournal, in true beta form, as a volunteer, although she claims she has discussed working at LiveJournal in a paid capacity.

When we emailed LiveJournal for comment on Delzer’s employment, CEO Katya Akudovich personally responded, surprisingly, indicating that the company may be more of a mom-and-pop operation than it lets on—or that they’re nervous about the history of Oh No They Didn’t. Akudovich has been at the helm of the company for only a few months, and her résumé is a roster of libertarian activities, institutes, and think tanks, with internships at the Koch-sponsored Cato Institute and jobs at the Cato/Koch-affiliated Atlas Economic Research Foundation and Students for Liberty. Despite these illustrious credentials, Akudovich’s initial correspondences looked to be written by a Nigerian spambot account, and were riddled with emojis and exclamation points:

Thanks so much for your email and your interest in LiveJournal!!

I was wondering what prompt your interest to write about ONTD specifically? It’s just one of so many wonderful communities that our users engage in on LiveJournal platform!!

Oddly, she claimed that LiveJournal had not, in fact, hired Brenden Delzer:

As for Brenden, he has never been hired as a professional moderator. There is no such thing.

Moderating is a purely volunteer thing that our user all over globe do. We as a company have no oversight into when and how that happens.

We asked her why, despite her cheerful denial of his employment as a maintainer, Delzer had a corporate email account with the company, and she quickly became evasive and tried to stall communication before cutting it off altogether. After two phone calls, Delzer also stopped corresponding with us.

Are people profiting off Oh No They Didn’t? While much about the business side of the site remains cryptic, it appears that the answer is yes. In 2010, ONTD entered a partnership with celebrity-gossip network BuzzMedia (now called SpinMedia), which also published popular gossip blogs like Go Fug Yourself, Just Jared, and Celebuzz. BuzzMedia was excited about the size of ONTD’s audience, and ONTD was ready for the potential promotion and the wealth of development opportunities and advertisers BuzzMedia could offer. Delzer explained the decision to partner with the company in a post on ONTD:

So, what’s this Buzz thing about? Well, advertisers are fickle people. They saw ONTD and didn’t want to touch it with a 40 foot pole. Tits? Penis? Cunt, fuck, shit, bitch, whore on EVERY page? No sir, they didn’t like it. They wanted us to tone it down—I said no, ONTD is staying the way it is. I didn’t want ONTD to succumb to advertiser demands and change just because some mattress or tampon company didn’t like it.

Delzer defended the decision by arguing that monetizing Oh No They Didn’t would allow the community to protect itself from advertiser influence, but users didn’t buy this explanation and instead argued that selling the site would betray its premise as a gossip utopia where people could talk about celebrities as a means to escape real life.

“Exactly, why the fuck should i be excited over this?” commenter k0liverbby wrote. “Why should anyone be excited besides the moderators bc this means they can probably turn all this into a legit job. oh wow ‘i maintain a site, by having the members that are essentially lackeys make all our posts~~~~!@@ and they don’t make a fuckin dime.”

Meanwhile, founders of the site like Lang believe that Oh No They Didn’t’s reputation as a community is now just smoke and mirrors. LiveJournal has monetized their idea without compensating the founders or the users who generate the content, she believes. And she has a point. Delzer compares the user-generated content to YouTube, but YouTube gives users who create popular videos a share of ad sales.

Some members have undoubtedly managed to use Oh No They Didn’t to launch careers. Matt Cherette, a popular contributor, left Oh No They Didn’t in 2010 to work at Gawker, where he essentially wrote the same kind of blog posts he had perfected as an unpaid Oh No They Didn’t member. (He later left Gawker to become an early editor of BuzzFeed.) Stowell, meanwhile, has made good on his teenage hobby.

“I think being a troll really helped me with my career because you learn how to elicit emotional responses from people,” he said. “You can make someone happy; you can make them sad or angry.”

Stowell, Cherette, and Delzer have one thing in common: They’re all gay white men. Gay men are minorities, but like straight white men, they learn skills that schools, families, and the media, perhaps, rarely ingrain in young black women. Or maybe they were just more ambitious and smarter than the founders of Oh No They Didn’t. Whatever the reason, whereas Delzer recognized he could turn his after-school hobby into something bigger, Lang, Draffen, and Reuben never imagined they, or anyone else, could monetize their ideas when they created the community.

Over the years, the three founders have contemplated a lawsuit, but legal action would be difficult. Earlier this year, Lang spoke to a lawyer and was told she didn’t have a case.

“Even to this day, it’s hard [to pursue legal action] because it [takes] money that we don’t have,” Reuben said.

“I don’t want to be a paid LiveJournal employee. That doesn’t appeal to me,” Draffen said. “I [just] think that credit should be given where credit is due.”

Today, Erin Lang works as a waitress, and on one of her days off she stopped by the VICE office in Brooklyn to be interviewed for this story. She rocked pretty shoulder-length braids and an evil-eye bracelet, but looked beat from what she calls “post-traumatic Oh No They Didn’t disorder.”

“I’ve gone into boutiques, and the girls sit around the computer [reading Oh No They Didn’t],” she said. “We were just hanging out with [a Pixar employee], and someone was like, ‘Erin started ONTD,’ and [the Pixar employee] was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I was like, ‘You work at Pixar. Why are you excited?’”

At the restaurant where she works in midtown Manhattan, she sometimes sees customers reading gossip on the Oh No They Didn’t smartphone app. Lang imagines—if she had never made Carter or Delzer a maintainer, if she had the foresight to monetize her idea—that she might work at a large media company’s office, just like the one we were sitting in.

What bothered her most about the whole experience? I asked.

“Some of those people,” she said, “have no idea that I even existed.”

Follow Mitchell and Emalie on Twitter. 

A field of legal weed at Medreleaf in Ontario. Photo by the author.
In September, the College of Family Physicians of Canada published a set of guidelines for Canada’s doctors entitled: “Authorizing Dried Cannabis for Chronic Pain or Anxiety.” The doctors of the Great North are in a tricky position when it comes to prescribing weed, as Health Canada does not seem to care about putting any funding into research that would help uncover more information about a product they have not officially “approved” as a drug.

That said, Health Canada clearly condones the sale of medical cannabis, given their authorization of 13 legal weed factories known as licensed producers (LPs).

The College’s new document notes that Canadian doctors are dealing with “intense interest from patients (often accompanied by less interest in evidence)” who want medical marijuana, but without more research being published to indicate how much weed say, a chronic pain user, needs to alleviate their discomfort, doctors are being left in the dark.

As the document states, “Health Canada has not reviewed data on… the safety or effectiveness [of cannabis].” This leaves both chronic pain users and anxiety sufferers (two of the most common medical cannabis users) in an unfortunate position. They may believe that cannabis can help them feel better, but with their doctor being the only legal gatekeeper to obtain their medicine, tension can develop between doctor and patient.

For now, the College of Physicians has stated that “the only sensible advice for physicians involved with authorizing dried cannabis is the maxim ‘Start low, and go slow.’” They also have advised doctors to avoid prescribing weed to patients who show signs of abusing drugs; that is, anyone who admits to feeling annoyed at people who want them to cut down their drug use, or who has felt guilty about their own drug use, or who uses drugs or drinking to wake up, steady their nerves, or get rid of their hangover.

This methodology is in opposition to more radical uses for cannabis, like harm reduction for heroin and crack addicts.

If a chronic pain patient approaches a doctor and wants to obtain some chronic, the doctor has been advised by the College to “conduct a pain assessment, assess the patient for anxiety and mood disorders, and screen and assess the patient for substance use disorders.”

The College carefully notes that: “Many psychoactive drugs with abuse liability will temporarily blunt the patient’s perception of pain without improving function.” It also advises doctors to cancel the cannabis prescription if it’s not working (obviously) while reiterating that any signs of “cannabis use disorder” should result in a discontinuation of the prescription.

As far as anxiety goes, colloquially, most people know that weed can make anxiety worse. Just talk to anyone who turns down a joint because it makes them crazy or freaks them out. But there are plenty of people, like our friend Damian Abraham, who swear by cannabis as an effective treatment for their anxiety disorders. So who’s right?

Based on the information that the College of Physicians has to work with, they have concluded that “dried cannabis is not an appropriate therapy for anxiety or insomnia.” That said, they do state that: “An oral extract of pure cannabidiol has been shown to relieve symptoms of social anxiety.”

Unfortunately, Health Canada’s troubled medical marijuana program, the MMPR, only supports the sale of dried cannabis.

As far as dried cannabis and anxiety goes, the College of Physicians declares what many of us already know: “Acute cannabis use can trigger anxiety and panic attacks… studies suggest that high doses of cannabis actually worsen anxiety.”

There are, however, strains of cannabis that are low in THC (that’s the funky brain chemical that gets you high and stuff) but high in CBD (the more medically relevant, body-buzz ingredient), which has been shown to be much more helpful for anxiety sufferers. The College of Physicians has encouraged doctors to prescribe high-CBD strains, if they are prescribing cannabis at all. The College even published a guide of the most dank, anxiety-relieving buds available from LPs.

High-CBD, legal weed, as recommended by the College of Physicians.

The College also recommends that patients “ingest (that is, eat) your cannabis or take it using a vaporizer instead of smoking it.” This point highlights another shortcoming of the MMPR: Health Canada’s refusal to sell anything but dried cannabis, leaving the more medically safe alternatives like edibles and oral extracts to be relegated to a legal grey area.

I reached out to Health Canada and asked them if this document had swayed their stance on selling marijuana edibles through the MMPR. I received a curt answer from Sara Lauer, a Health Canada media relations officer, who wrote in an email: “the answer would be ‘no.’”

So despite the evidence of a thoroughly researched document by one of Canada’s foremost medical associations, which concludes that eating or taking oral extracts is safer than smoking dried cannabis, Health Canada, an organization that ostensibly cares for the health of Canadians, has no plans to revise their medical marijuana program, which only offers dried cannabis.

Wonderful.

My other questions to Health Canada (Will they encourage high CBD strains at licensed producers? Will that also include a mandate for LPs to advertise their strains’ CBD/THC content? Will they be funding any new research to see how cannabis can help chronic pain and/or anxiety?) were left completely unanswered.

Since the advent of the MMPR, organizations like Cannabis Advocates have popped up by advertising a service for Canadians in need of medical authorization to buy cannabis from an LP. Basically they’re around to fast-track the prescription process. While this may do the trick for people in need of weed who don’t want to deal with their family doctor, it indicates that there’s accessing cannabis is a big problem in the Canadian health system; despite Health Canada’s declaration that weed will soon be a $1.3 billion dollar industry in this country.

While they certainly seem to have a money-boner over all this legal weed, it would be great to see Health Canada get more in line with this country’s actual doctors, who seem to have a pretty firm grasp on what kind of weed is good for medical relief, rather than sticking to the MMPR; a set of arbitrary and largely unhelpful rules.

@patrickmcguire