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Oil tanker spill south of New Orleans. Photo via Flickr user DVIDSHUB

Do you have any good ideas on how to prepare First Nations, western Canadians, and the nation at large, to deal with the millions of litres of oil seeping onto their coastlines?

If yes, then the federal government would love to hear from you. Because it needs to convince British Columbians—and especially First Nations—there's no real risk from the Northern Gateway oil pipeline project.

In a Request for Proposals posted to a government tendering site, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans announced that it was seeking a private company to produce an information guide that, according to the request, "would be used as a communications tool for informing Aboriginal and coastal communities and the general public" about how Canada plans to deal with the possibility of oil spills off the coast of Canada.

While it's a competitive bidding process, the government expects the whole thing to come in under $90,000.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which is responsible for this part of the plan, told VICE the information guide is being designed to "improve understanding of Canada's ability to prevent, prepare for, and respond to ship-source oil spills."

Since shipping traffic in all of Canada's three bordering oceans promises to pick up drastically in the next few years, it's probably good timing. Just five years ago, the Commissioner of the Environment warned "the federal government is not ready nor prepared for a major [oil] spill."

Now, the government contends, it is ready. And it wants the world to know.

Ottawa has been piecing together a strategy for the past few years, lamentably dubbed the "Ship-source Oil Spills Preparedness and Response Regime" (or, if you'd rather, SOSPRR), which is looking to create a framework for how tanker traffic travels along Canada's coasts, and how the government will respond if one of them leaks oil. Part of the recommendations for the government's strategy includes an information document to inform coastal residents.

The communications plan the government is looking to embark on is centered on three objectives: let the public know about the risk of oil spills, tell those affected what the government is doing to prevent a spill and what they'll do if one occurs, and inform the public about measures it's taking to reduce tanker-created pollution.

While that may sound pretty altruistic, some of the fine print of what the government is looking for might give environmentalists pause.

For one, whoever gets contracted to produce the guide will do so with the understanding that they'll need to "outline the low level of risk of a ship-source spill in Canadian waters," and that the government's strategy for preventing and dealing with them is "comprehensive."

Perhaps it's unavoidable that a government education program would verge on self-promotion.

"The root of what's coming out here is positive," said NDP Environment Critic Megan Leslie. "It makes sense to educate people what is in place."

Especially, Leslie says, when the government's oil spill and tanker safety plan is such an about-face from what was previously in place—nothing.

"There's nowhere to go but up," she said, but added that it's hard to read the tender notice without "a healthy dose of skepticism."

Who the education plan is targeting is particularly interesting.

The request reads that "the contractor needs to take into consideration that although the Guide would first be distributed to Aboriginal and other coastal communities in northern British Columbia, it will be national in scope and disseminated across Canada."

It's interesting that the government plans on targeting northern British Columbia since the report notes that most tanker traffic is in the southern half of the province. It would seem to suggest that Ottawa is looking to launch an education plan with the Northern Gateway pipeline in mind.

Leslie says that raises her eyebrows.

The Harper government, of course, approved the Northern Gateway project amid controversy in June, though it did impose hundreds of conditions on the project. Northern Gateway will see supertankers enter the Douglas Channel in northern BC—moving tar sands crude to Pacific markets.

The government is no doubt aware of the recent Nanos poll showing more than a third of BC residents fear the Northern Gateway project could lead to an oil spill. That's a fear fuelling opposition to the plan, with only 29 percent of British Columbians wanting approval—the rest of BC's population is split between wanting a decision delayed and having it killed outright.

Interestingly, nearly half of the province says the Harper government's support for the project would make them less likely to support the Conservatives. When it comes to credibility, more British Columbians trust Enbridge, the company building the pipeline, than trust the Harper government (49 percent versus 46 percent), while First Nations and environmental groups are viewed as significantly more credible.

Other parts of the request suggest that a prospective contractor should consider identifying "potential risks and opportunities (e.g. environmental, social and economic risks; employment and economic opportunities.)"

Ottawa posted the notification last Thursday and will decide on the winning bidder in February. After that, the contractor will have seven months to do the research, draft a guide, tour communities on the country's east and west coasts to workshop the document, then present it to government bureaucrats before editing and finalizing the guide. It's about as breakneck as things get in the public service.

Coastal residents, especially First Nations, will be able to see the plan sometime early next summer, when the company will be required to present its nearly-finished document in half-day sessions run by the government to, as the tender puts it, "seek input from usability testing groups participants." In other words: they'll be running focus groups.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The Nintendo Entertainment System was everywhere in the 1980s. It was the best-selling console of its (third) generation, with over 60 million people worldwide welcoming the system into their homes. It had Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Bionic Commando, Punch-Out!!, Metroid. It revolutionized the gaming industry. Today, you can find NES-themed branding adorning T-shirts, pants, drinks, cans... anything: The system, and so many of its titles, are completely iconic.

One company wants to turn the NES tide back to its roots, though—away from all the cutesy imagery, and centering on the pure gaming experiences the system had to offer. And it's doing this by bringing out a NES all of its own.

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The Nt is compatible with the old NES Zapper, but it'll only work on CRT screens

Analogue Interactive is launching its Analogue Nt in 2015 (pre-orders have been running since the spring of 2014, with shipping due to commence in February). The Seattle-based company has a record for reviving old systems in no little style, with its Walnut Analogue CMVS, housing an authentic SNK MV1C motherboard inside solid hardwood, a $650 home console based around the early-1990s Neo Geo Multi Video System.

But while the Neo Geo was always a machine out of financial reach for most kids, many of us had a NES to call our own. They never cost the best part of $530, though.

That's what the Analogue Nt is selling for—but if you fancy one, it's worth knowing that you're not simply getting a contraption for emulation. The Nt plays original games, for the (American, NTSC) NES and also the Japanese Famicom (as the NES was known in said territory) and Famicom Disk systems. And it runs them in high definition, on today's big-screen TVs. It can also display your old games in crisp RGB on an old-school CRT TV, if that's what you're into. Some might deem that the purist's way. On the outside, the Nt is incredibly sleek—it's formed from a single block of 6061 aluminum. But it's what's on the inside that's going to pique the attention of retro-gaming enthusiasts.

"For us, the quality and aesthetics of a product should be carried all the way through," says Analogue Interactive founder Chris Taber. "The Nt is designed and manufactured with an extraordinary focus on quality, through the entire product." To achieve this, Analogue built its own motherboards for the Nt—which you can gawp at below (VICE is the first place you'll see these images).

Says Chris: "The Nt's motherboard is an exceptionally beautiful and high quality PCB (printed circuit board) crafted from true black substrate, produced through a careful step-by-step process to achieve a pearl-like sheen. You'll notice visible and raised copper traces. This is the real material it is manufactured from.

"Our lead designer, Ernest Dorazio, hand-routed each and every connection on the board. The electrical signals are painted on the PCB like a piece of art, integrated tightly with the Nt's design. Putting this much effort into designing something that most customers will never end up seeing may seem superfluous—but we couldn't imagine making something any other way."

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The Nt's motherboard: both bespoke and throwback, and wholly unique

If it all sounds like a love letter to the system Chris grew up with, let me stop you there, because the man behind the Nt didn't have a NES at home. "I grew up as a Sega kid," he says. He did play some of the Nintendo console's classics, though—the likes of Zelda and Contra. It proved inspirational enough: "I wanted to fully explore this entire piece of video game history, with no compromises."

Chris considers the Nt to be "something so good that it's almost unbelievable," a "legacy product," which "could be appreciated from virtually every angle, from its features to its design and quality." That it plays the original cartridges, rather than digital downloads of the titles in question, is of vital importance to the whole project, as he explains:

"For those that grew up with physical media, it's painful to pay for a digital copy of music, or a game. You can't hold it in your hands, let a friend borrow it, or even resell it. It sort of feels like you don't even own it.

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"Maybe that's why vinyl is having such a big comeback. I think a lot of people really do love owning the real thing, in any medium. The thing that makes owning vinyl appeal to people is the exact same thing that makes owning NES games appealing. Just like there's a genuine satisfaction to sifting through your records and placing one on your player, the same feelings exist for looking through your NES collection and plugging a real cartridge in, powering up, and playing a game. You're playing a real, physical thing.

"And just like vinyl, there really is something to be said about hunting games down—it makes you appreciate it that much more. I prefer the approach of learning about the games and developers, hunting down original cartridges—and when you get that game you've been looking for, it means that much more to you. You are going to treasure it. You'll sit down and play it and experience it right. It's a purist's way of looking at it, but it's worth it."

Exactly how many people feel the Nt is worth its asking price of $500 remains to be seen—and that's before you add extras, like an HDMI adapter for $78, or a (new, original) NES controller for $50—but the press for the system so far has been terrific. "We've been humbled by the amount of interest there's been," says Chris, "and we couldn't be more excited to get it into everyone's hands."

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Ars Technica called it "a perfect, no-compromises aftermarket NES," and Eurogamer wrote that it's "the NES James Bond would buy." Which is great, but James Bond isn't a real person. You are. So, really, why should you care?

"You don't have to deal with the virtually incessant updates that are unfortunately the norm today in digital gaming," says Chris. "The Analogue Nt is not a media centre to surf Facebook and watch Netflix. It's just a video game system. There is no downloading, updating, or installing. No patches or DLC. No bullshit to deal with. It's made to play games. That's it. Sit down, plug in a game, press start, and play."

Which sounds like some kind of sweet relief from the hours spent waiting for my PS4 to finish downloading whatever it needs to run the game I wanted to start 30 minutes ago. With thousands of games playable on the Nt, you might look at $500 as pretty decent value for money. But then, of course, comes the hunt. Best hope that fucking dog doesn't show up and laugh at your weak eBay game.

Find more on what Analogue Interactive is up to at the company's website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Domestic fascist news now, and a group of English Defence League (EDL) supporters took time out from painting "FUCK HALAL" on St George's flags to gatecrash a Newcastle book group meeting because they mistakenly thought Russell Brand would be there.

As the Chronicle reports, about 15 EDL fans rushed the meeting at the city center's Bar Loco after discovering the group would be discussing Brand's Revolution. It's not known where the EDL got the idea that Russell Brand goes from book group to book group to thank them verbosely for reading his book, but it turns out he doesn't.

"It was an open book club to discuss Russell Brand's new book," bemused reader Dan Jenkins told the paper. "But the guys from EDL clearly thought he was going to turn up himself so had gathered a group together from all over the North East to come and disturb the meeting.

"I got there a bit late so I was sitting among them at the back and I could hear them talking about it and asking when he was coming, and then 20 minutes in they realized that he wasn't coming so they decided to be disruptive."

The group then got antsy so started chanting stuff like, "No surrender to the Taliban," and "With St George in my heart / keep me English."

"When they were heading out, one of them just shouted defiantly, 'And now we're going for a curry' and they had just been singing these songs about the Taliban," Dan added. "It was bizarre."

EDL regional organizer Alan Spence said they'd decided to crash the party because one of their recent meetings had been targeted by left-wing activists, who were rude to the EDL's favorite barmaid or something.

"The last time we had a North East meet-and-greet some of the left wing went down to the pub and abused the barmaid prior to us getting there," he said. "So we thought it was time we returned the favor." Because you know where you'll find a left-wing activist, don't you? At a book club. If they're not there, then go and racistly flip cheese stalls over down the farmer's market, or wag middle fingers at a library or something. Take a defiant shit outside an electric car showroom. Tie a soccer shirt around your mouth and kick over the avocado stand in Whole Foods. No surrender, lads.

"We got told Russell Brand was going to be there too," Alan added. "He's a joke. I would love to give him a piece of my mind if I saw him." So, open invitation, Russell Brand: If you want a nice chat about the state of modern Britain, Alan's up for it. He's probably banned from going to Bar Loco now, but there's a Nando's just around the corner you could meet up in instead.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Marco Gomes

Last week, the government said it would take action to clamp down on a torrent of misleading copyright infringement letters being sent out under Canada's "notice-and-notice" copyright regime. The law, which came into full effect at the start of 2015, obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver notices of alleged copyright infringement to customers.

Ministry of Industry spokesman Jake Enright responded to public pressure by saying officials would get in touch with ISPs and rights holders to ask them to cut it out.

Digital policy expert Michael Geist had previously published a letter from rights holder BMG and copyright troll Rightscorp, sent to him by someone else, threatening the recipient with $150,000 liability per infringement and asking for payment up front.

Canada's copyright law caps non-commercial liability at $5,000, so the letter's claims are clearly bogus. Given that letter recipients haven't even been proven to have committed the alleged infringement (only your IP address is accused, essentially), the letters are borderline extortionary.

Amid the threats of lawsuits and life-ruining financial penalties, the Rightscorp letters direct frightened recipients to a page that offers them a way to make the charges go away for the low, low price of $20. "Pay up now, or we'll take you to court," the message implies.

Here's why you shouldn't jump at the chance to potentially save $149,980 by settling up with Rightscorp.

ISPs are only obliged to deliver the notice (usually by email). They are not required to divulge any personal information that could identify alleged pirates without a court order, and so far there have been no reported cases of ISPs spilling the beans.

The copyright troll sending the letter doesn't know your identity, only the IP address associated with the alleged infringement. They can't take an IP address to court—assuming it's even worth it for them to try to win the case and collect $5,000, which is far from guaranteed.

Right now, if you're accused of downloading copyrighted material, the only way you could get dragged into an aggravating scenario is by responding to the letter or by contacting its sender. You could also end up losing some cash by visiting a settlement site and paying up. But so far there doesn't appear to be any real, significant legal risk posed by these troll letters. They're designed to frighten people, and in the US, firms like Rightscorp are already in hot legal water for incessant robo-calling or public, porn-shaming threats.

As Geist pointed out in a recent blog post, this mess is partly of the government's own making. ISPs and Industry Canada officials offered two copyright law reforms back in 2012 that would have prevented notices from threatening absurd penalties and lawsuits, and from demanding payment.

Civil servants had sensibly offered the option of a letter template for all copyright notices to follow, which the government declined. Industry Minister James Moore also quashed an idea that would have released ISPs from liability if they declined to forward misleading notices.

It's nice that Moore's office quickly indicated its displeasure with Rightscorp's sleazy schemes to threaten Canadians with pre-emptive penalties for crimes they haven't been proven guilty of. But as Geist argues, merely asking them to stop won't cut it. After all, the trolls are playing by the rules.

Commendably, ISPs have reacted by appending their own messages to the letters to try to inform people of their rights and privacy protections.

If the government wants to win some hearts and minds on the internet, it's time for Moore to take two actions: first, to put a regulatory stop to misleading copyright notices before any more Canadians get scammed by shakedowns like these. Second, the minister must modify Bill S-4 (the new digital privacy act, which is currently going to committee) to make it harder, not easier, for internet users' personal information to be shared.

With a federal election coming this fall, perhaps privacy-minded voters might light a fire under Moore by sending a few letters of their own.

Follow Chris on Twitter.

"This is how we shake hands here," Enrique Morones told me as he pushed the tip of his finger though the mesh of the 20-foot border wall.

I reached up and pinched it. The immigration activist was in the US and I was in Mexico. We were both in Friendship Park, a shared space between San Diego and Tijuana. Twice a week, families separated by immigration issues are allowed to meet here, pressing their faces against the rusting bars and corroded wire, straining to get as close as possible.

From the park, the wall runs down a hill, and through a beach, before finally disappearing into the ocean. The American side is always deserted, but even in January, plenty of Mexican families were strolling along the shore. When they reached the wall, they all stopped and stared. A recent storm had carried away part of the barrier's chain-link fence, leaving just the closely-spaced support beams. The shifting sand had moved two of them a little farther apart than the others. I watched the families laughing and pointing, and I waited. Before the boundary could be crossed, everybody had to cross another boundary in their minds. It didn't take long.

A man ran up and threw a ball through the gap onto the American beach. His two dogs shot off after it, easily passing through. The US border guards raised their binoculars and watched from Friendship Park as the dogs returned. Next, a five-year-old kid slipped past. He kept close to the gap in case the border agents ran after him. They only honked the horn of their Land Rover, but it was enough to send the boy scurrying.

The next kid was bolder. When the horn blared, he stood his ground, defiantly writing his name, "Luis," in the forbidden sand. His parents cheered. "You're an American now!" they shouted in Spanish. The next kid ran a couple hundred feet down the beach to chase the foreign seagulls.

Every family discovered the fun for themselves. They crammed into the barrier for pictures. They laughed if they could make it through the gap, and they laughed if they couldn't. They played at pushing each other. They sang "Born in the USA."

Occasionally, things took a more serious tone. One of the fathers, Jose, spoke in perfect English about his childhood in California. He had been deported for drunk driving in his teens. "One way or another," he insisted, "this wall is going to fall." In the meantime, he could watch his four-year-old son Patricio crossing the invisible border, again and again, almost as if it didn't exist at all.

Follow Roc's latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

Seattle-based rapper Nacho Picasso has churned out a ton of material over the past five years—he's collaborated with Danny Brown, Cam'ron, and Gucci Mane, and released three albums with the production duo Blue Sky Black Death. This new album, Stoned and Dethroned, via Surf School Recordings, is the fourth in the collaboration and the combination sounds sicker than ever. BSBD's cloudy beats are an ideal backing for Nacho's slow flow.

The first time I heard Nacho he was rapping the line, "I'm going balls in like I'm stuffing cannons." His lyrics are a little darker this time around, but he's still got a certain way with words. The album title is also stolen from a mediocre Jesus and the Mary Chain record, so take that as you will. Listen to the whole album above.

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Photo courtesy of Daniel Yoo

Until just before Christmas break, Daniel Yoo taught at Ánimo Venice Charter High School, run by the LA-based Green Dot Public Schools. But after a December meeting with school administrators, he got suspended indefinitely with a "recommendation of termination," an odd sort of limbo in which he's not allowed to work, but he's also not allowed to leave. "They're going to fire me, but this process is a formality," he told me.

What elevated this suspension to news was that earlier this month, Yoo's students staged a walkout in response, gathering outside the school to wave signs and shout slogans. "He taught in this way that would make us understand, and would connect to us... I want to be a teacher like him," one student told a local news station.

The 598 students who participated believe that his firing was related to his use of a poem by former US poet laureate Billy Collins as a teaching tool. "He got in trouble for a poem, and it was considered offensive by some of the parents," one student said.

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School officials would not comment for this story—representatives told me their lawyers had advised them not to comment on personnel matters—so it's unclear why Yoo (who, full disclosure, is a friend and former colleague of mine) was placed in this position. But it would certainly be odd if he were disciplined over the Collins poem. Titled "Victoria's Secret," it isn't obscene or even particularly sexy. It's a comedic piece about advertising.

Here's an excerpt:

The one in the upper-left-hand corner
is giving me a look
that says I know you are here
and I have nothing better to do
for the remainder of human time
than return your persistent but engaging stare.
She is wearing a deeply scalloped
flame-stitch halter top
with padded push-up styling

In an interview, Collins told me his intention in the work was to "make fun of the overblown language of advertising." The winner of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry told me that his poem is a satire, and that it is "in no way erotic." He added, "It's too comic to do that. If you're offended by this poem, I think you're simply offended by lingerie itself."

The school administrators' report, which Yoo provided to me, says that "the 'Victoria's Secret' poem, standing alone, does not appear to be entirely inappropriate for tenth graders," but added that "the theme of sex in Mr. Yoo's curriculum cannot be ignored and is concerning."

The other thing that had Yoo's bosses worried was a mock trial he did that centered around a rape case—but according to Yoo, the content of that lesson had been reviewed by administrators and approved. "The appropriateness of the mock trial is consistent with all of the other texts that ninth graders are using," he said. He added, "Parents knew about it, and the assistant principal knew I was using it the previous academic year." Administrators eventually asked him to remove the rape-related content for the 2015–2016 academic year, which he agreed to do before it came up as a reason for his "recommendation of termination."

The report also includes an eyebrow-raising claim that "a ninth grade female student had given Mr. Yoo a letter that expressed friendly and romantic feelings toward Mr. Yoo." Yoo disputes that account, however. "I did get a note written on the back of a homework assignment," he told me, "and it said 'I think of you like a big brother.'" He added that he discussed the note with school staff, told them that he would watch out for students behaving inappropriately, and that had been the end of it.

Yoo was extremely popular, and the complaints in the report reflect that. The report ends by saying he "cannot distinguish the line between being a professional teacher and a mentor; and cannot separate being a teacher from the close bond that's built with students."

Yoo denies any impropriety. From the beginning, he told me, he never knew what the organization expected of him in terms of "controversial" material, and that at no point did he ever violate common-sense guidelines—such as the "keep the door open" rule of thumb—about interactions between teachers as students.

He does admit to using a non-work email address to communicate with his students, which the school told him to stop doing in 2012. He later set up an email account solely to help seniors with college applications—it was work he did in his spare time, and accessing his school email from home was difficult. He was aware the administrators would frown on that, but, he told me, "I wasn't consciously aware of the fact that one violation of using my personal email could get me fired."

Yoo says that he allowed students to ask him for normal kinds of advice and emotional support, but that this was categorized by Green Dot as somehow inappropriate. "I think that [their] definitions of legitimate closeness that students and teachers create and develop and maintain over time are ill-defined, and taken with a perspective of paranoia and conservatism," he said. "That anything I do, they can interpret as inappropriate."

Yoo is bracing himself for his official firing. "I tried to resign, but they said the recommendation of termination would stand. I am technically still employed there."

Many people in his position would be looking elsewhere for work, but having worked with some of his students for all four of their high school years, he would, if nothing else, like to see them through to graduation. "I made a promise to them," he said.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Systemic police brutality directed at blacks has galvanized the American public, causing people to take to the streets in protest and to social media with displays of solidarity. Artists of all sorts have lent their gifts to the cause as well, and jazz and hip-hop vocalist José James has done just that with the release of his new music video, "Peace Power Change."

The clip features prominent African American men and women like Robert Glasper, Fab 5 Freddy, Feminista Jones, Ray Angry of the Roots, and many others holding up handwritten messages that epitomize the struggle and their hopes for change. The video is directed by Talia Billig and the music is James's enthralling acoustic cover of Sam Cooke's Civil Rights anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come."

Credits:
Executive Producer - José James
Director and Producer - Talia Billig
Director of Photography, Editor, and Producer - Sachi Maclachlan
Graphic Design - Hayden Miller

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Image via Wray Grimaldi

Since the 1950s, ecotourism in Antarctica has been a big, complicated business. Although taking people to the giant icy hunk of land at the bottom of the world brings attention and awareness to the area's environmental issues, there are risks involved for the continent's avian inhabitants. In 2006, 400 gentoo penguins died of avian pox, and two years later another outbreak moved through the same colony, this one with a mortality rate of 60 percent. Both incidents have now been linked to human pathogens. And thanks to the growth in Antarctic ecotourism, this trend could continue, warns an article in the New Scientist last month.

Penguin populations have been so isolated for so long that they haven't built up resistances to common diseases, and some experts say that as more humans show up on the shores of the seventh continent, the flightless birds will be at greater and greater risk. Wray Grimaldi of the University of Otago in Dunedin told the New Scientist, "The effects of both a growing tourism industry and research presence will not be without consequences."

Present protection and monitoring programs have been put in place by the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IATTO). There are various ways tourists can avoid introducing dangerous pathogens to vulnerable species, with the IATTO website supplying pages on decontamination guidelines and pest reduction. And various restrictions for ships and tourist numbers are in place under the Antarctic Treaty—but they're not sophisticated enough to cover the increasingly obvious biological threats. There is currently also no plan for disease emergence monitoring. As "last chance" or "doomsday tourism" has seen ship-borne tourism activities in the area increase by 430 percent in 14 years, and land-based tourists by 757 percent over the past decade, there have been no adjustments to policies to protect wildlife from the resulting additional biological threats.

Change isn't easy, especially when any amendments to regulations need to be be agreed upon and enforced by all countries with a presence in the Antarctic. Phil Tracey, a policy officer for the Australian Antarctic Commission told VICE, "Questions associated to the environmental impact of tourism are under active consideration among all the Antarctic nations, including Australia, to make sure tourism is managed appropriately." Currently, he wasn't aware of any proposals to further protect Antarctic flora and fauna.

Michael Lueck, an associate professor of tourism at Auckland University of Technology, said that ecotourists can help Antarctica by acting as ambassadors for the continent after their trips, providing a boost in activism and donations. But he's mindful of the environmental consequences if tourism is poorly handled. "There are certain operators that are members of the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators and they're usually doing a pretty good job," he said. "The main concern is for non-members, because there is no specific regulation, that they can go there and there is potential risk. It's too vague over all."

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Sergey Galyonkin

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

In truth, 2015 is likely to be much like the year before it in terms of the way we play video games. You have a controller, a console, and a TV. And maybe some friends—be they in your home or at the other end of a broadband connection. And away you go. Don't expect anything particularly radical in the next 12 months.

... unless. So far as home tech goes, there might be a couple of interesting developments. Firstly, we might finally see the full market release of Valve's Steam Machine(s), gaming computers built by various manufacturers but that run all games on the same Linux-based SteamOS, designed to fit beneath your TV like a PlayStation. Secondly, virtual reality—be that the Oculus VR-developed Rift, Sony's Project Morpheus, or Samsung's already available Gear VR—may finally find a place in the mainstream after several botched attempts.

"If you look at the PS4 and Xbox One, the only real technical differences between this and the previous generation are better processors, more RAM," games developer Brianna Wu, co-founder of Boston-based indie studio Giant Spacekat, tells me. "These are very iterative differences—which makes Oculus a really big deal. But there are still problems to solve. I watched a lot of people play with Oculus, as it existed at the time, at the Boston Festival of Indie Games [held in September 2014]. It was making people nauseous, and its interface needed more work. I do think that it is going to be more mainstream—but I don't think that 2015 will be its year."

Mike Bithell's forthcoming Volume, Gamescom 2014 trailer

Another indie developer, Mike Bithell, feels that the leap from playing in front of high-definition boxes—or even on our phones—to going full-VR really isn't that big of a deal.

"What a lot of people miss is that VR technology, today, is actually relatively cheap," he tells me. "It's basically some very good lenses, some very smart software, and high-resolution screens—which is like mobile technology. It's a very clever repackaging of technology that's already received a lot of investment, which has brought prices down ridiculously. Before, VR was bulky, and expensive to produce, but now it's basically a mobile phone with some nice glass, in terms of its manufacture. It can be made at scale. So I think it's got a chance. It needs a low price point, but I think VR has the chance to do what the Wii did, and bring this amazing, sci-fi tech to a mainstream audience. I'm excited about it."

As is Sam Watts of Brighton-based Tammeka Games, whose Radial-G: Racing Revolved is designed primarily for the Rift. "Of course, we're hopeful for a commercial release of the Oculus Rift CV1 [the consumer model] in 2015. Oculus have said we're months, not years, away from launch, so I'm sure we'll see something. With more than one VR headset in the works, there will likely be more than one coming to market in 2015. But we see Oculus's plan as akin to Apple's: get the most popular, best-known device out there so that everyone refers to a VR headset as an 'Oculus Rift,' like how an MP3 player is generally called an iPod, whatever the manufacturer."

Watts agrees with Thomas Was Alone developer Bithell when it comes to the technological advancement offered by these emerging VR headsets—it's really not so removed from what we already have. "The technology isn't too far fetched or outlandish to not be accepted by the mainstream in homes," he says. "Have the people who are strongly against VR actually tried it? We find that when people try it, they are immediately hooked and want to try more demos and experiences. There are a small number of people who find it a bit too much, but there is a scale of comfort with all software and experiences. Like all new technology, there will always be the luddites who dismiss and show disdain; but this time around, the market is ready and the hardware is available for those who want it.

"We've seen well over 2,000 people play the demo of Radial-G: Racing Revolved, most of whom have never used or experienced VR or the Oculus Rift before, and we are still counting fewer than 30 who have had to stop and remove the headset within 30 seconds. All we can say, and this is what VR will need to do to become mainstream, is: Have a go, try it, and find out for yourself. But this is the crux of the problem facing VR and hitting the mainstream: you have to try it to understand it. You can't watch a video of someone else using it, and you can't watch a dual-channel split-eyed view of a game running on Oculus Rift. You have to try it, so there will have to be a lot of demo pods in high-street shops for it to become a success with the everyday punter."

Tammeka's Radial G: Racing Revolved, designed for Oculus Rift

VR seems likely to be the only significant hardware development in 2015—it'll be "the home of the most spectacular new games and ideas," games journalist Jon Hicks tells me. But that's assuming it does happen in the next 12 months—Mind Candy's creative director, Michael Acton Smith, isn't so sure: "The new Oculus is completely mind blowing, but while I'm bullish on the potential of VR to transform multiple industries, not least entertainment, it won't be until 2016 that it truly starts becoming a viable consumer success." As for the boxes you're fully familiar with, even those that have been around for a decade now, don't expect them to go anywhere in 2015.

"I think we'll see a more concerted focus on the newer consoles in 2015," says Bithell, who's currently developing the Robin Hood-themed stealth title Volume for PS4, Vita, PC, and Mac platforms, "but the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will still be around. They'll stay under TVs for many years to come."

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Wu agrees: "I'd bet every penny on those consoles being around for the whole of 2015. What we're seeing a lot of, right now, is developers being unwilling to fully bet on this new generation—they choose instead to split the difference, and then you get pretty much the same game on both 360 and the Xbox One. Take Forza Horizon 2: play it on the One and you get some prettier shading, some higher-resolution textures, and some particle differences, but it's just scaling. That's why I'd tell people that, if they were buying a new console right now and you already had a PS3 or 360, get a Wii U, because all the major games are still coming out for the older systems."

Nintendo's Wii U, loved by its owners (hello!) as it is, has had a hard time, underpowered compared to the PS4 and One, and more pertinently outsold by Sony's current console. With the One now digging in—sales of Microsoft's machine were greater than Sony's in the run up to Christmas—could Nintendo be at risk of falling behind completely in 2015, and in even more trouble should the Steam Machines genuinely impact on the console market? The way Bithell sees it, nobody should be all that concerned.

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"I don't see them as being in direct competition with anyone," he says. "The Wii U is an amazing device for playing some absolutely fantastic games. So I don't think they're in the same race—for me, they're not competing with the PS4 and Xbox One. The Wii U is a lovely piece of hardware for a very specific type of game." Wu—whose projects for 2015 include an interactive fiction title "similar to Danganrompa, a story you play and have agency in"—isn't quite so confident, but doesn't see the Steam Machines as playing much of a part in any current competitor's (mis)fortunes:

"Nintendo are underdogs right now, but 2015 has games like Splatoon coming for the Wii U, which could be really great for them," she tells me. "As for the Steam Machines, I have to be honest, I think it's a suicide mission. When you look at the added cost of developing in Linux, it's completely impractical. The low cost of the games on Steam is also a problem—here we have to develop for a new operating system, at great expense, when the consumer is used to paying rock-bottom prices. I just I don't see a marketplace for the machine. I'd love to be wrong, but it does seem like a suicide mission." Bithell's more optimistic, and will be bringing Volume to Steam Machines "later down the line."

Monument Valley: Forgotten Shores trailer

One of the biggest mobile hits of 2014 was Monument Valley, made by London studio ustwo. But it received a great deal of angry user reviews, as its makers dared (!) to charge a whopping $2.25 (!!) for its extra Forgotten Shores levels in November. Which is less of a comment on the game's quality—it's wonderful, by the way—and more an indication of the mobile audience's growing expectation to have something for nothing, a result of the "free"-to-play model's success, as seen in games like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga.

"We can't completely blame the consumers for their behavior," says ustwo's director of games, Neil McFarland. "The economics of app stores are strange but they're also fluid, which means developers have the opportunity to try new models, new ways of engaging with players and finding new ways to charge for games. The music industry has suffered at the hands of piracy and has changed because of streaming, and the same is true of cinema. Games now face similar challenges because of historically under-charging and, more recently, free-to-play models. All of this just means we are living in interesting economic times!"

So, will 2015 see more of these microtransaction-littered casual games for the mobile market? Obviously, yes, because the model works. But the likes of Monument Valley, Simogo's output (including The Sailor's Dream) and even the Square Enix-produced Hitman GO show that "premium" mobile games can sell in large numbers, encouraging greater creativity in the market.

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"I live in hope that more ambitious projects will be undertaken," says McFarland. "Developers need to feel that they can count on mobile to deliver a realistic financial return on their game to truly commit to more ambitious titles, and I'm hoping to see growing confidence in 2015. I think we're all hoping we are making meaningful statements and see ourselves as serious creators in an incredibly exciting and important medium. The mobile game has many potentially unique properties; it's an incredibly stimulating and vibrant art form."

Mind Candy has form in the F2P area, having put out Moshi Monsters Village in May 2014, and their recent iPad hit World of Warriors also features a wealth of real-money purchases, available after you acquire the game for free. "Mobile gaming is a brutally competitive market," says Acton Smith, rightly enough, before outlining how World of Warriors will reach beyond touchscreen devices in 2015: "The franchise has a digital heart but will also expand offline as trading cards, books, toys, clothing, and so on. I think we'll see more mobile games grow into on—and offline franchises."

World of Warriors, game trailer

On the topic of franchises, there's no doubt that 2014 didn't see any new ones of note emerge for the PS4 or Xbox One. "We still haven't seen anything as novel or influential as Gears of War was for the last generation," says Hicks, "but 2015 could be the year that changes." We already know there will be another Assassin's Creed game in 2015, the Victorian London-set Victory, but could this production-line-like servicing of the biggest existing franchises actually be their undoing? Wu feels that Assassin's Creed's makers, Ubisoft, face an uncertain 2015.

"I'm really worried about Ubisoft. It was successful at making money in 2014, but I think they really damaged some of their biggest franchises. They brought Watch Dogs out, and most people acknowledged that it really didn't represent any innovation. Assassin's Creed in 2014 was a disaster. So I'm severely worried about Ubisoft for 2015. They really have to get their teams off these ridiculously tight production schedules, and get back to basics—which is shipping good games. Look at EA, too—they've damaged the Peggle brand with Peggle Blast. 2014 was when some of these big studios damaged their most important brands."

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Wu, Bithell and Hicks can all see the middle ground between the major studios like Ubisoft and smaller set-ups shrinking in 2015. "The rise of independent developers will continue, and the definition of 'indie' will be put under increasing strain," says the latter, currently working on March's Rezzed event. "Indie teams will continue to edge into the space that bottom—and mid-tier publishers used to occupy ten years ago."

Bithell has seen his own production budget increase after the success of Thomas Was Alone, allowing him to pull together a bigger team for Volume. "You're going to get more teams of ten or 20 people making games that aren't like these massive, open-world Ubisoft affairs, but are very substantial, and good looking and they push the hardware," he says. "But I think people always want the big games, as well as the weird, esoteric ones that the bigger studios won't take a risk on."

No Man's Sky is already one of the most hyped indie titles of 2015

"The axis of game development isn't indie versus triple-A any more," says Wu. "It's a 20-person team versus a several-hundred-person team. Look at No Man's Sky—the team is very small, compared to the size that shipped Call Of Duty. We'll continue to see a real bifurcation in the amount of risk studios are willing to take. I liked Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, but it's not a game that took any chances. So it's the smaller studios that will continue to embrace innovation, and bring bold mechanics to the forefront, and to experiment. Going forward, I think the message is clear: if you want enjoyable, proven gameplay experiences, that you know will offer a certain baseline of fun, look to triple-A, to Far Cryand Grand Theft Auto. If you're looking for games to push the industry forward, look to indie developers. We're the ones taking the chances."

While there's plenty of excitement for new games and new gaming opportunities in 2015, one thing the industry has to get over is GamerGate.

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"I was doing a radio interview in New Zealand," says Wu, who was among the most prominent targets of the hateful abuse associated, fairly or otherwise, with the GamerGate movement, "and it was clear that the woman interviewing me was not a gamer. In the questions she was asking me, it was very clear that the attacks on myself, and Zoe Quinn, had really reinforced every negative stereotype of gamers for her. And that really hurts me, because I passionately love video games, and want them to be treated with respect, as an art form. There's something very sad about that, so the actions of GamerGate have actually pushed the reputation of gamers back at least a decade. I think that's really unfortunate."

As Bithell sees it, GamerGate is a "growing pain," albeit a pretty significant one, something that was always going to happen as gaming becomes a true mainstream concern. "The vast majority of people are gamers now," he says. "We've got a gamer in the White House. It's happened, it's mainstream and that's only going to spread in 2015. It's part of culture. People who thought games were silly died, and the kids who loved games became adults. I think GamerGate is interesting because it's a reaction to something very positive, and very cool, but I don't think it's done any lasting damage."

We can but hope. Gaming in 2015 might well be mostly as it was in 2014, but we could sure do with less hate and more love as we look forward to a year that, among other titles, will bring us a new Zelda, Bloodborne, The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Uncharted 4, Scalebound, Batman: Arkham Knight, Rime, No Man's Sky, Ori and the Blind Forest, Final Fantasy XV, Volume, Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, Halo 5: Guardians, Persona 5, Splatoon, a new Star Fox, and... Well, there's a lot to be excited about.

Call them toys, call them culture, call them a distraction while you wait for the bus—whatever your take on video games, they're only going to be bigger than ever in 2015.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

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The Burke pocket book. Photo via Surgeons' Hall, Edinburgh

Last June, Harvard University conclusively confirmed the existence of a book bound in human skin (also known as anthropodermic bibliopegy) as part of their collection at Houghton Library. The book is a 19th-century copy of Arsène Houssaye's Des destinées de l'ame. Houssaye provided the manuscript to his friend Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a well-known physician, and, according to the Houghton Library blog, "Bouland bound the book with skin from the unclaimed body of a female mental patient who had died of a stroke." The 19th century, everyone!

The book contains a note in French by Bouland that says, "This book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance." There were two other books at different Harvard libraries that were thought for a long time to also be bound in human skin, but tests revealed the material to be sheepskin, making Des destinées de l'ame the only confirmed such book at Harvard.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris is a medical historian who is currently a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author and creator of the Chirurgeon's Apprentice website and the YouTube series Under the Knife. Anthropodermic bibliopegy is one of her research interests, and the Wellcome Trust's library is home to another book bound in human skin by Dr. Bouland that she examined in the course of her work. I reached out to Dr. Fitzharris to find out more on the subject.

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Dr. Fitzharris with a dissected skeleton at the Museum of London Archaeology

VICE: Why would anyone ever bind a book in human skin?
Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: It's really done for three reasons as far as I can tell. The first reason is punishment, and that's something that we can all understand to some extent. There's plenty of examples of this happening. There's a great example of this in Surgeons' Hall in Edinburgh: the Burke pocketbook. Burke and Hare were two serial killers in the early 19th century. They killed 17 people. Essentially they were posing as body snatchers, but actually they were just killing everybody and selling the bodies to anatomists for dissection. So they're caught, and Hare turns King's evidence and Burke goes down for the crime. As added punishment, he is publicly dissected.

This was really common because there was something called the Murder Act in place at the time which meant that if you murdered someone and you were executed for it, you were also dissected publicly.

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An illustration of William Burke's execution from the Wellcome Collection, London

And then what?
They also took his skin and created all of these objects from it. One of the objects is a pocketbook, which is essentially a wallet. I held this object up in Edinburgh. Burke is such a part of medical history, and he's so much a part of my research, so it's kind of weird to think that I might have been touching his arm at one point—or wherever this skin was taken from.

The second reason [books were bound with human skin] is just collector's items. Whatever you collect, everybody kinda wants to have that really strange object. And so there were people who collected books bound in human skin. Sometimes they collected books bound in tattooed skin because they made particularly beautiful covers. And in fact there's a lot of preserved tattoos in anatomical collections, and sometimes they're used for these bound books.

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16th-century book on female virginity, rebound in human skin by Dr. Ludovic Bouland in the 19th century. Photo via the Wellcome Collection, London

There's a really good example in the Wellcome Collection here in London. I've held this book, it's really strange. It's a book on female virginity and reproductive organs, and it's bound in the skin of an unknown woman—a patient who died in this doctor's care. I guess it's so strange to me because it's kind of a fetish item. It's a book written by men, about women, about very intimate parts of women. It's bound in the skin of a woman. We don't know her name; we don't know anything about her. And we know that the man who bound this book, this French anatomist, really coveted it. He would carry it around, he would say it's very precious, he would tell people about how it was bound. So it was definitely sort of a collector's item at that point.

The third historical reason why it was done was for memorialization. So there's a famous book in Boston that is bound in the skin of a 19th century highwayman. Again, that seems really odd to us.

[Note: A scanned copy in high resolution is available at the site of the Boston Athenaeum library where it is housed. A good summary on this book's background can be found from Dr. Fitzharris's site.]

How willing were the participants? Sounds like not very.
The one thing I would stress, because I am a historian, is that concepts of consent don't really start to evolve until the 20th century. We can't really judge the past when these things were happening. There was consent in the memorialization examples for instance; clearly no consent when it was used as a punishment, which was part of the thing. I mean, I come across all kinds of horrible stories, especially letters of people who are condemned to die, and they are writing their families begging them to come to their execution so that they can claim the body so the bodies don't fall into the hands of the surgeons who will then dissect them.

When did anthropodermic bibliopegy stop being practiced?
It definitely goes into the late 19th century. One of the reasons was just views on capital punishment. Eventually the Murder Act is overturned, so that means that murderers aren't dissected. Suddenly the concept of donating one's body comes in. And since I would say a lot of these skin books are usually criminals and their skin is used to bind books about their crimes, I think that leads to a decline in it. There's probably a lot of different reasons. But I definitely see skin books as part of the history of crime and punishment.

You mentioned that you've held them. Do these book covers look or feel different from more traditional forms of leather?
It looks very much like leather. It doesn't smell funny, it doesn't look different than any kind of leather book. But on it, it says in gold lettering, "Burke's skin pocket book" and then the execution date. And it has been tested. It's definitely human skin.

Although I think people say that the book in Harvard looks "spotted," like the skin of a banana, which is kinda gross when you think about it. I had taken video of the one at the Wellcome collection. We got in so close with the camera that you could actually see a wrinkle in the skin. Again, this could happen with animal hide but there's something really horrible about it when it's human skin, and you think of it coming off some woman and we don't even know her name. So I think the imagination plays a role, but you can definitely see up close with the camera some identifying marks that it's human. But other than that I think it's really hard to tell without scientific testing.

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A notebook allegedly covered in human skin from the Wellcome Collection, London

Seeing as how it's hard to tell the genuine object without rigorous testing, have there been fakes that people fell for?
There's a really good example at the Wellcome Collection, and it's a black leather notebook. The cover is purported to be—and this is a direct quote within the book—"made of Tanned Skin from the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence." Presumably, this was [alleged] to be the skin of a man named Crispus Attucks who was the first casualty of the Boston Massacre. And he becomes an American martyr who gets held up as a symbol of American independence. I think the book was tested in the 1990s by the Wellcome and it turned out not to be skin. But what I find really interesting is that it was held up—it was important at the time—that this was kind of like a relic, and that people believed it was the skin of this first victim, and it became a symbol of American independence. So to me, it's still a fascinating object even though it didn't turn out to be human skin.

How might one go about making leather either from their own skin or perhaps from that of a willing donor? Is being dead a requirement for human skin to be used for bookbinding?
I definitely think you'd have to be dead. There's instances of people being flayed alive, although you do die at some point from blood loss. Tanners and people who worked in those kinds of crafts, they rarely leave written records behind. So it's difficult to know how these things were done. I would imagine it wasn't that different from working with any animal hide, except for the fact that the skin is a lot thinner, so you can't stretch it as well. There's one book where they wanted to bind it in human skin, but they didn't have enough so they had to split the skin. But again, we don't have any modern examples of tanners working with human skin, and we don't have written records of this process. So we can only assume it must have been treated rather similarly.

Are there people who make things out of human skin today?
I did come across a website here in the UK that claims that they make all kinds of things out of human skin, like belts and wallets... just weird.

Yeah, I found articles about it but the links are all down.
There's also a website for a company that makes [things out of] synthetic skin, like purses and stuff out of it. So is there still an interest? If we were binding books in human skin, would we still be buying them or seeking them out? I don't know. But there's definitely a heightened macabre interest in these objects. And the fact that this company exists and actually makes synthetic skin purses is sort of a testament to that.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on VICE Sweden

In Sweden, the past few days have been all about penises and vaginas. Last week Bacillakuten, a children's show from Sweden's public service broadcaster SVT called released a music video for its "Snoppen och Snippan" [Swedish for "the penis and the vagina"] song to coincide with the premiere of its new season. Since the show chose to illustrate the bouncy, infectious track with a literal pair of dancing genitals, this video made headlines both in Sweden and around the world.

Bacillakuten deals with the body and our most common physical conditions, so it's not out of character for it to talk about some organs that everyone has. But after the video was posted to SVT's Facebook page on January 8, it was immediately met by criticism on social media. Some people were obviously concerned about little kids being exposed to genitals, but others complained that the video promoted restrictive gender norms and transphobia.

The video is about the "nice gang," i.e. the penis and the vagina. The penis wears a hat, and the accompanying lyrics are about how penises wear trousers. The vagina, on the other hand, wears makeup and has long eyelashes. In Sweden, where gender issues are often controversial topics, it's not surprising that displays of such stereotypical tropes upset some people.

The video—which YouTube briefly slapped with an "adult" label before SVT objected—has received plenty of positive reviews for its attempt to strip away the drama and stigma from our genitals. But Swedish activists were pissed off that the video featured cis-centric lyrics like, "Pee, pee with the penis / Or the vagina if you're a girl!" and imagery like this:

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After all, "girls have vaginas, boys have penises" might be an upsetting thing to hear for a person born with a vagina who identifies as a boy. And in a country that had "gender-neutral" preschools all the way back in 2011, linking gender to genitals can come off as a fairly conservative message.

Following the online storm, project manager of the show, Kajsa Peters, sat down and answered some of the harshest criticism on SVT's website. Among many things, she said:

There might be a pedagogic point to inform children that this is how it generally looks like; if you have a vagina you're regarded as a girl by others when you're born. If you have a penis you're regarded as a boy. To be on the children's side can sometimes mean to meet them in the reality they are living in. We would never stand behind a song that says that girls with penises aren't real girls or that boys with vaginas aren't real boys.

Obviously, this video wasn't intended to be transphobic or hurt anyone. But if Sweden is progressive and mature enough to handle a show about a dancing erection being shown to kids, it's probably mature enough to do so without throwing in some 50s-esque gender identity tropes—as adorable as that erection looks in a mustache and a hat. As Swedish blogger Lady Dahmer wrote this week, "There's no reason to point out that 'girls have vaginas' because no child on earth has missed that." There's plenty of reason, however, to point out that vaginas are normal, even fun—and that both boys and girls can have a vagina or a penis.

Follow Caisa on Twitter.

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_{Nick, a veteran of the Marines, chills in his room at the Sausage Castle with his service dogs and Sexy Sushi. Photos by Stacy Kranitz. For more pictures, check out our complete gallery of photos of the Sausage Castle}

In Florida, there are more than 1.6 million veterans, many of whom suffer from conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. Like vets all around the country, the retired servicemen in the Sunshine State face significant hurdles in getting treatment from the US government, so a few of them have turned to the Sausage Castle in central Florida for help. Although the pay-to-party house run by sex-crazed weirdo Mike Busey is known for stunts like shooting eggs into buttholes and housing ratchet strippers, it has become a home for more than ten veterans over of the last five years who have found the Castle's wild lifestyle helps ease their challenging transition back into civilian life.

I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand when I stayed at the Sausage Castle for a weekend. In between pool parties and pony rides, I met Nick, who was deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines. Since his service ended, he has struggled to cope with his PTSD and his return to America. But at the Sausage Castle, he found solace in the fact that it's pretty hard to feel like a weirdo in a house with residents named Ratchet Regi and Kinky Kace.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs, many say, has struggled to take care of returning soldiers, even as thousands of vets commit suicide every year. The horrible conditions veterans often face bother Mike, who makes sure that the Sausage Castle is always open to vets.

Nick has since moved out of the Castle (he used it as a halfway house), but when I stayed at the compound, he lived upstairs in a room with several giant service dogs he trained after war. On a warm Sunday afternoon, I sat down with Nick as he smoked pot by the pool to discuss the failures of the VA, how he's scared of himself, and how the Sausage Castle has helped him deal with his PTSD.

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_{Nick shows affection for his dog outside the Sausage Castle. Photo via Mike Busey}

VICE: How did you wind up living here?
Nick: Craigslist special, no bullshit! I bought a house in Colorado, and then I came back here and I was visiting family. I want them in my life more than anything, but it's hard because they don't see me as who I am right now. They see me as who I used to be [before the wars]. I don't know if I'll ever be that person again, but I'm trying.

I was looking at some property 30 minutes away from my parents' house—close enough, but out in the country. Twenty-one acres out in the middle of nowhere, private road, just an outlet where I can be away from civilization. I didn't end up closing on the property. When that happened, I had just came back into town. I had nowhere to stay, and I was living in a hotel, and I didn't wanna live in a fuckin' hotel. I'm not a transient, a crackhead. I was on Craigslist, checking stuff out, and I came across this place.

I first looked at his website before I came over here though, and I saw the crazy shit that he does, and I was like, That's pretty cool. Then I watched the video where [Busey] took a homeless guy out on the town and showed him a good time and gave him some money. That just made me more inclined to come over here. Seeing that side of somebody touched my heart. I have a soft heart, believe it or not.

Do you like living here?
There's a diverse group of people, which is what I'm used to, being in the military. I get a sense of camaraderie here. I feel like I'm helping these people out. It seems at the end of the day like a family.

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_{Last year, Mike spent roughly $500 buying veterans pizza on Veteran's Day. Photo courtesy of Mike Busey}

How has combat effected your health?
I think a lot of it is the nerve damages that I have in my back. I'm not a doctor, but it's not rocket science. If somebody knows that they used to be a certain height, and they've lost an inch and a half... an inch and a half is a lot on a person.

Has the VA given you decent care?
I went through a process a little bit differently than most. I stayed in [the Marines] for nine years, so I was a little more senior. You would really think, in the big scheme of things, the people who are already out right now and aren't getting the benefits they greatly deserve, they would be the first priority of the VA system. The people who are still active duty, they're not so important. As soon as they get off their orders though, why wouldn't they immediately rise to the top as far as taking care of them? But as soon as they get out, that's when they're lost.

I've been told that I was crazy by the VA, but not one person in the VA has called me up to see how I'm doing. They were quick to throw the money my way. But they're not quick to find these people that are out right now—whether they want to be found or they don't, which a lot of them don't. They have the same mindset that I did when I got out, which was "move as far away as you can." If you look at my orders, getting out of the military, it said I was going to Anchorage, Alaska. That's how far I wanted to get away from here.

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_{Nick plays with his dogs and Sexy Sushi}

Why did you want to live so far away?
To get away from people.

Were you afraid of what you'd do to people?
Yeah.

Do you think the VA been ignoring veterans' mental health issues?
I would say that they're not going at it at the pace that they should. I have issues right now that I actually don't tell anybody. I've lost 40 pounds since I got out. I'm still cut, still somewhat in shape, but I'm nowhere near as fit as I used to be. The nerve damage that I suffer with now—the tingling of the feet, sciatica, erectile dysfunction (on some real shit)—it's not anything that I want to deal with. I walk, and it looks like I limp because my knees give out, they buckle. I've been out for three years, with the same issue, and I still haven't been to a specialist. I don't see that. I don't comprehend that. But like I said, at the same time, there are people out there right now that need the help more than I do. They're the ones who don't even wanna wear a Marine Corp T-shirt or show up to the VA. They don't even wanna be in the system. They wanna be off the beaten path. Off the grid.

Does the government spend more time getting you ready for war and not enough preparing you for life after service?
They don't do anything with you afterwards. The suicide rate is what it is. And you got these people who are falling off the grid that will probably never be found—ones that are out robbing banks, doing heroin, and killing people because they need that rush. It's just the nature of the beast. The ones that I miss the most are the ones right now who don't wanna think about it, and they just end it. They end their lives.

Do many veterans use weed to treat their PTSD and suicidal and homicidal thoughts?
There's no doubt in my mind. Most of them are probably using harder stuff, but at the end of the day, a lot of the medications that they put us on tend to make us go more toward using opiates and stuff like that. You don't function properly. You're not who you were. You're more like a walking zombie.

Why did you join the marines in the first place?
I sat there in my class in twelfth grade and watched [9/11] on the news. I sat there the entire day just wondering what kind of savage would want to do that to people—not just America, but people in general. It was kind of a decision me and a friend of mine made immediately: We were like, "We're going to war." We looked at each other and we knew. So as soon as I could, I got out of high school and six, seven months later, I was in the Marine Corps. I was deployed twice: once to Iraq and once to Afghanistan—two totally different deployments.

Why were they different?
A lot of stuff was just different. In 2003 we went over to go kill everybody. In 2006 we started to respect people a little bit. Then in 2008, 2009, it was a whole different mindset of combat. Then the job that I was doing the second go around wasn't "seek out and destroy." It was more like "preserve and protect." I was a personal security detail marine attached to headquarters at ISAF, so I got to hang out with a lot of dignitaries and generals. I was actually over there [with] Petraeus and McChrystal. McChrystal spoke his mind, and then Petraeus came in there and got caught up with his mistress. I was over there when all that was going down. It was a whole other mindset working in that area.

Did you like McChrystal?
Yeah, I did. I thought that anybody that spoke his mind about how shit was going down is an honorable man to say the least.

Knowing what you did and what has happened in your life, do you regret joining the Marines?
Sometimes. I've gotten into a couple bickering matches [at the Sausage Castle] about, "You should be proud of your service! You should be fuckin' held up on a pedestal! You should be happy for what you did!" But they don't know what the fuck I did. They don't know what really happened over there. So it's kinda hard to hear someone tell you that you should be happy about it.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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The kind of equipment used in FGM. Image via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Khadija Gbla was nine years old when her clitoris was butchered with a rusty knife.

She was driven to a hut in the middle of the Gambian bush and told to take off her clothes. Her mother pinned her down while another woman took the blade to her genitals. She had no idea what was happening.

Seventeen years later, Gbla is married and expecting her first child, but the day she was subjected to female genital mutilation has never left her. "People don't understand the impact female genital mutilation (FGM) has on a woman," says Gbla, who recently said that, while she doesn't enjoy being the face of FGM, she knows she must break the silence. "I suffered because of it during my teenage years, I knew the effect when I was married, and am seeing another side now I'm pregnant."

Born in Sierra Leone, Gbla and her family fled their war-torn country for Australia in 2001. Her mother underwent female genital mutilation as a child and arranged for it to be carried out on Gbla before leaving Africa.

Gbla now lives in Adelaide and is the director of No FGM Australia, a charity that works to abolish FGM and supports those at risk. She is Australia's only outspoken FGM survivor and has had her work recognized by Amnesty International and the Human Rights Commission. Due to give birth in six weeks, Gbla's pregnancy is another, physical kind of stand against FGM.

"I was told I couldn't have babies because of my FGM, so it's actually a miracle," says Gbla, whose condition may mean she is unable to have a vaginal birth. "I don't take for granted that I'm pregnant."

FGM is the injury or removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons. You can see an animation of the various types of FGM here. Practiced in 28 African countries, as well as the Middle East and some part of Asia, the justifications for FGM vary. Some communities view it as a way to preserve girls' chastity but it can also be carried out as an initiation into adulthood.

"Even though women are the ones who propagate FGM, the benefits are all for men," says Gbla. "They do not believe women have the right to sexual pleasure."

According to the World Health Organization, as many as 140 million women and girls have been subjected to FGM worldwide. The immediate effects are dire: severe shock, pain, and bleeding—but it rarely ends there. Many FGM survivors grow up with chronic pain and menstrual problems, as well as myriad psychological issues, including PTSD.

While FGM is illegal in both Australia and the UK, there are cases of immigrants from practicing communities taking FGM to their adopted countries. Last year, a doctor was charged with performing FGM at a London hospital and, in Australia, police are investigating reports that a Brisbane man has taken his daughter to Africa in order to undergo the procedure.

Due to the secrecy that surrounds FGM, the true extent of the practice in Western countries is not known. There is no central data reporting of FGM in Australia but No FGM Australia estimates that three girls are at risk of mutilation every day. In the UK, NHS figures state that 66,000 women are living with the consequences.

Gbla says her determination to break the silence on FGM has upset certain areas of the African Australian community. She has a difficult relationship with her mother, who maintains that FGM is "empowering."

"My family feel like I am a traitor," she says. "My mother thinks this whole conversation makes her look bad and I try to explain that it's not about you or me. My story represents the story of the other girls—I'm just vocalizing it."

While Gbla has been able to tell her story, many women living with FGM find it more difficult. The Desert Flower Foundation, a FGM charity founded by former model Waris Dirie, discovered the importance of providing a safe space for FGM survivors to talk when they opened the first Desert Flower Medical Center in Berlin two years ago.

"We have learned FGM victims need holistic medical treatment as they suffer from various medical problems," explains managing director Walter Lutschinger. "Women treated in our center participate in the support groups as it takes a long time to overcome their trauma."

It's not just the survivors or those at risk of FGM who find it hard to speak. Despite the number of girls at risk, Australia is yet to have its first FGM case on trial. UK police have done "dozens" of investigations since 2011 but only one prosecution has ever been made.

"My family feel like I am a traitor." – Khadija Gbla

The hesitancy in reporting FGM could have something to do with its status as a "cultural issue." Teachers are aware of the racism accusations that may follow from discussing the subject with children from practicing communities and health care workers are unaware of how to question at-risk girls and women. For Gbla, these are excuses for not confronting what FGM really is: child abuse.

"I am all about celebrating my heritage," says Gbla. "What I do not celebrate is a culture that thinks it's OK to mutilate a little girl. That is child abuse and it can't hide behind culture."

It is hoped the New South Wales government's new FGM awareness campaign, which uses translated education resources to target at risk communities, will go some way in combating this. In the UK, a Home Affairs Committee investigation released last year highlighted the problem of "misplaced concern for cultural sensitivities" surrounding FGM, as well as the importance of agency coordination.

"Policy is currently far from joined up," says No FGM UK founder and sociologist Hilary Burrage. "The challenges of connecting various public services are being addressed only very superficially."

The coordination of public services stands at the center of Gbla's online petition to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, which calls for a united approach from child protection services, health care, immigration, and the police.

"FGM should be everybody's business," she says. "It shouldn't sit under one department or one person's responsibility, it is everyone's responsibility."

Follow Phoebe on Twitter.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/u_kqM0gn63M' width='640' height='360']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

David Cameron has made possibly the worst play in history if he's still hoping to hook in some of that cool youth vote: He's threatened to ban every young person's two primary junk photo communication tools, Snapchat and WhatsApp.

In a statement made yesterday, Cameron said that—should he somehow figure out a way to lead the country for a second term—he would crack down on forms of communication that cannot be read by security services even if they have a warrant. That means encrypted services like Telegram, Apple iMessage, FaceTime, all those massive WhatsApp groups you're in where everyone is planning a big awful holiday, and your primary form of watching videos that aren't quite funny enough for Vine: Snapchat.

"Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn't possible to read?" he said yesterday. "My answer to that question is: 'No, we must not.'"

Basically, it's a retool of the so-called " Snoopers' Charter" repeatedly blocked by the Liberal Democrats, with a bit of post-riots BBM communication fear thrown in to boot.

Cameron's main concern—and the news hook on which he hung this policy, in a very "let's push this thing we've been planning for a while through while everyone is getting sweaty-palmed over free speech" sort of way—were the attacks in Paris last week, in which the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked by extremists before a hostage situation in a nearby kosher supermarket led to four civilian deaths.

He argued that apps such as WhatsApp were being used by terror cells to plan their attacks, and stressed the need for secret services and the police to be given greater access to private communications. "The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face," he said, "and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe."

And yes, terrorists do use WhatsApp to make plans. But so do you. So does your mom. So do about 417 million people worldwide. So does my cousin, and he is the kind of throwback dude who spends most of his time looking at snakes and being angry at the concept of cities.

Encryption isn't just important when it comes to keeping your dick-pics or your terror plans safe and secure; it also stops people yanking your credit card details when you buy something online, or having your bank details ripped off wholesale with the kind of digital skills last thought of as cutting edge in the film Hackers. So when David Cameron is making a weak-punch swing at encryption, he's exposing the UK to more than just the threat of an isolated terrorist attack: he's having a massive pop at personal privacy, too. And he's doing it literally hours after traveling to Paris proclaiming the importance of freedom of speech.

And most of all, he's swinging at the fly of terror with the wrong rolled-up newspaper. Think about it: There are other forms of communication beyond WhatsApp. There are carrier pigeons, for example. Handwritten letters. And, encryption or not, there's nothing really stopping a terror cell WhatsApping the message, "Fancy popping down to 16 Handles, pals?" and setting their plans into motion—with their mouths, using unencrypted human sounds—over frozen yogurt.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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Photo of Boots Riley by Amelia Kennedy

I first met Boots Riley, frontman of the Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club, at a little café in West Oakland, which is how it should be. In hip-hop circles, Riley is a big deal—he was in a music video with Tupac, his album Party Music was Rolling Stone's "Hip-Hop Album of the Year," and Pick a Bigger Weapon is a masterpiece—but also seems like the kind of guy who still hangs out in Oakland. At first, I was unsure if it was Riley. He's grown a beard around his trademark muttonchops, but his huge afro and leather jacket gave him away.

Early last year, after running into Dave Eggers while walking around San Francisco, Riley sent Eggers a film script he had been working on. Eggers told him it was one of the best unproduced screenplays he'd ever come across, and the script, Sorry to Bother You, was released as part of McSweeney's 48 last November.

Riley's film is a dark comedy about Oakland, unionization, and the world of telemarketing. The protagonist, Cassius Green, finds himself as a rising star at a telemarketing firm right as his friends and girlfriend are organizing a work stoppage to protest wages. As we learn more about WorryFree, the telemarketing firm's most important client, the film takes a surreal turn.

Sorry to Bother You is funny, political, and more than a little bit bizarre, which is exactly what you'd expect from a Boots Riley production. After reading it, I met up with Riley at the San Francisco Film Society, which is tucked inside a half-constructed building in the heart of Chinatown. We talked about his history as a telemarketer, the state of Oakland, and whether or not his film can start the revolution.

VICE: What first sparked the desire to write the screenplay Sorry to Bother You? Has it always been a dream to write a film?
Boots Riley: Coming from more of an indie music thing—we started out selling our music out of the trunks of our cars—these weren't really dreams, they were just a choice. Do I want to do this or do I want to do that? I never looked at any of these things as some sort of unattainable goal. It's just about what you spend your time on.

While I was doing Street Sweeper Social Club, Marc Geiger from William Morris Agency was our agent. He said, "Hey, you should come in and maybe we can get you some acting jobs." I was in LA and went by there to have the meeting, but all the roles were like cops or dope dealers. Why would I want to spend hours and hours of my life fulfilling somebody else's fucked up vision of the world? I'd rather spend hours and hours of my life putting out my own fucked up vision of the world.

What did you hope publishing the script in McSweeney's would do for the prospective film?
Nowadays, there are no rules how a piece of art can come out. Having McSweeney's publish it is just one way. This is the script printed out in a tangible form you can hold in your hands—there's something to that. It will get some buzz going. But we are getting this movie made. Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and Wyatt Cenac have all signed on to it. We got some good people on the team.

You initially told me the inspiration for the film came from your personal experience as a telemarketer. Throughout the film, the protagonist, Cassius Green, switches between his natural voice and a white voice he has to use to be successful at selling over the phone. Did you feel that kind of pressure to "act whiter" while telemarketing?
I had so many telemarketing jobs, and if you could sound like you were white, you would sell a lot more. What I actually was doing a lot of the time was tele-fundraising, so it was ostensibly not as bad. But, in order to raise money for the LA Mission, we'd be calling Orange County and I'd have to go into this whole thing like, "Look, we're really worried about the homeless people in your neighborhood—there's been break-ins—and what we're trying to do is get them out of your neighborhood and all here to Downtown LA." I'd tell them, "We're going to solve homelessness by teaching them to do better in job interviews," like the problem for poor people is that they don't know how to do good in job interviews or what color tie to wear. Like it all could be solved with a good "How To" YouTube clip!

To do all that, you have to get in a different mindset and use all of your creative energy to lie to people or paint a different picture. You come away every time just feeling drained.

Was there actually a character like Hal Jameson, the idealized, top-selling telemarketer from your script? Was there an idea that if you do it just right, you could be that guy?
Oh yeah. You'd always hear stories about some guy with a real nice car who had paid off his mortgage, but you never really saw that. That's how it is in every job. If you sweep the floor good enough every day, you too can be a manager!

In Sorry to Bother You, you create this kind of dystopian Oakland, where people are living in RVs and everyone's out of work. Is it a reaction to the real-life gentrification of Oakland and to those who are getting left behind?
Actually, in West Oakland there are a lot of people on my street living in RVs. It's not some dystopian version, it's actually happening.

But gentrification is a part of capitalism, so the script is really talking about the system in general. I don't think you can fight gentrification by just being against it. The real thing that would fight gentrification is a combination of things, but number one would be jobs that pay enough. We need a militant union movement that made the jobs that do exist in Oakland pay enough so people could afford to pay rent. And combine that with a real rent control.

Those things are like the opposite of the "development" you always hear about. We always hear about "economic development" or "developing the city" and they're not talking about people—they're talking about the geographical boundaries of a city. Economic development is never for the people that are there. It's not bringing in jobs, they're bringing in people with jobs. And if it's not the people, then you're just talking about the buildings that are there. It becomes a better place for other people to live, better for the real estate developers.

Tell me about WorryFree—the corporation selling a sort-of chic slave labor in the story. It's clearly an evil company, but it has a little of the Silicon Valley feel to it, too. Their rent-free, live-in dormitories for factory workers are being sold as a way to "disrupt" the old offshore factory system.
I'm sure that some version of that is going to come up in the future. Like, you're saving money because everybody is living in the CEO's basement or something. It's not too far from Google, but at Google at least they actually get paid something.

I think that it's also how slavery was described, right? We're taking care of them. You get meals, you get shelter. At WorryFree, they live and work in places that are like prison cells, but have a chandelier. What's the difference?

Near the end of the film, the telemarketing firm breaks the picket lines with a paramilitary escort. In the last few months, the issue of a militarized police force has been all over the news and your lyrics have focused on this militarized state for a while ("we have hella people / they have helicopters" from "The Guillotine," for example). How important is it for police forces to demilitarize? Do you think the horrors of Ferguson, Eric Garner, and the aftermath will finally start the movement toward a less-armed police?
I think the conversation I want to spur is not just about the fact that the police are militarized—Actually, I don't want to spur a conversation. I want to spur a movement. If we're not doing anything, but the police are demilitarized, is that going to be a better world? No. What makes it a better world is if there's a movement that has a chance of growing and actually changing material conditions in our lives. That is the reason that there's a militarized police force in the first place.

When I say, "We have hella people, they have helicopters," I'm trying to point out that they can have this technology, but we're the ones that have to operate it. They've got our eyes on the details of technology, but the truth is, this whole world is run through the power of the working class. We're who creates the profit and we can reorganize it. Helicopters won't matter.

The conversation needs to be about the fact that we can, through actually withholding our labor at strategic times, stop the system, cause negotiation around changing little things, and also organize for a bigger change. And that's the conversation that I would really rather have: the idea that these movements need to have some teeth behind them, and that those teeth need to come from withholding labor.

Right on. Thanks, Boots.

Joseph Bien-Kahn is a freelance reporter, part-time café worker, and roving intern in San Francisco. He's had articles published in the Rumpus and the Believer, and writes a hip-hop column for BAMM.tv. He's also editor-in-chief of the literary mag OTHERWHERES. Follow him on Twitter.

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Illustration by Tom Scotcher

This post first appeared on VICE UK

When we talk about the future of drugs, there are three certainties that cannot be ignored:

Certainty #1. Until the planet explodes, melts, or drowns, humans will want to get intoxicated.

Certainty #2. People who supply these intoxicants, particularly banned ones, will pocket a load of cash.

Certainty #3. We will be blindsided by a new drug phenomenon, a bolt from the blue, that everyone will pretend they knew was coming.

In 2003, a group of 50 eminent scientists and professors were gathered by the UK government's Foresight think tank in order to focus their collective brain power on the answer to one question: What will the drug world look like in 2025?

The answer was revealed two years later, in a series of 21 documents. The scientists' huge crystal ball revealed a Britain in 2025 awash with smart, lifestyle drugs—drugs to help people learn, think, relax, sleep, or simply to forget, a bit like the creepy, hangoverless pleasure drug Soma in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. So far, this prediction is not looking like a bad one; there is already a huge gray market in drugs that enhance performance, image, and mood—and it's a market that is rapidly expanding.

But what is interesting about the Foresight project is not what it got right, but what it missed. It failed to predict the biggest phenomenon to hit the drugs world since ecstasy: the explosion, a mere four years after their report was published, of new psychoactive substances sold on the back of a fledgling online drug trade. It opened the gateway to hundreds of untried substances, and crucially, it revolutionized the way illegal drugs were bought and sold.

Yet the future will not be about the endless procession of legal highs. A smattering of new psychoactive substances (or NPS) will always be around, and to an extent always have been, but they have had their day in the sun. An interesting sideshow, they have served a purpose. Yes, mephedrone is here to stay and maybe 2C-B will hang around too, but now that the ecstasy and cocaine markets have righted themselves, with the purity of both drugs up considerably, the old school drugs are back. Stimulant clones will still have an appeal to those who are broke, unable to get hold of decent drugs, or who want to avoid getting caught out in piss tests, but the imminent clampdown on head shops will stifle supply to teenagers and the homeless—two of the keenest buyers of NPS products.

The online drug trade, however, will be blazing a trail into the next decade and beyond, whether the world's police like it or not.

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A man being led away during a stop and search operation in Soho. Photo by Tom Johnson

I spoke to Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High, about how the online drug trade might fare over the next decade or two. "At the moment, the online trade in drugs is a minority sport, a good way of buying high quality drugs," he told me. "Even now it's tipping over from early adopters into the mainstream. It will get bigger, easier to use, and more widespread. There will be more sites and more people using them because it is the perfect business model: anonymous, commission-based, peer-reviewed, postal drug dealing. Online dealing is not a replacement for trafficking cartels, it's never going to work on that level, but if you've got a kilo of MDMA it's the way to go."

And what's more, predicts Power, it's a trading zone that will remain highly resilient to any attempt to destroy it. In November, the world's police—including the FBI, Europol, and Britain's National Crime Agency—closed down the biggest online drug market, Silk Road 2.0, in a blaze of publicity during Operation Onymous. But just weeks later, the dark market was back doing a roaring trade.

On "Cyber Monday," sites were offering 50 percent off LSD, buy three-get-one-free deals on liquid mushrooms, and ounces of marijuana reduced to $200. Customers couldn't get enough of it. "Observing the online trade, two weeks before Christmas, on the five or six sites that took up the slack from Silk Road 2.0's demise, was like watching Oxford Street on Christmas Eve," says Power.

Behind the FBI's hype, and its impressive claim of closing 427 sites, things looked pessimistic for the enforcement agencies trying to shut down this trade. "Onymous looked like a major shakedown," explains Power. "But what Onymous actually did was to make it far easier and safer to buy drugs online, because most of the sites it closed down were clone sites made by criminals to rip Bitcoins off drug users. Tor, the PGP message-encryption system, and Bitcoin—the dark web's holy trinity—remain un-cracked."

Beyond this holy trinity, the possibilities for buying drugs online while avoiding the attentions of future cyber rozzers are endless. Jonny Y, a seasoned online buyer, former psychonaut, and onetime online vendor, told me the internet now has a thriving number of close-knit online drug-trading communities who've gravitated away from the dark market and moved onto the clear web. Funded by monthly subscription fees rather than commissions from Bitcoin transactions, they're helping to make hiding in plain sight a new camouflage for the online drug buyer.

But for all its nifty encrypto-nerdism, the internet drug trade still represents only a tiny proportion of the global trade in drugs. Barring the mass return of polio or a totalitarian style curfew regime, most people will still be out and about buying their drugs from family, friends, friends of friends, junkie acquaintances, and blokes saved in their phone as "Johnny Coke 1" in pubs, clubs, colleges, house parties, street corners, crack houses, Audis, and off other moms and dads on the school run.

In the future, if the notoriously early adopting gay drug scene is anything to go by, this will probably be aided and abetted by mobile phone apps. London's ChemSex community hooks up with drugs by using apps such as Grindr, which inadvertently offers instant, location-based drug booty calls. David Stuart has run some of London's pioneering club drug and ChemSex support services. I asked him how he saw the mainstreaming of this kind of drug consumption panning out.

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A Screengrab of a gay sex-app drugs hook-up

"More than half of my clients do not use a dealer; they just put the word out on sex-apps, and they're sorted," says Stuart. "The shameless queuing in nightclubs for drugs has become the shameless sharing of them online. Whether the non-gay communities will follow suit... I assume they will. Tinder is right there, getting more popular by the month."

One of the most common profile names or sub-headings on Grindr has become "GMTV," which implies that the person is using, has to share, or has to sell, G (GBL) M (mephedrone), T (Tina, a.k.a. crystal meth), or V (Viagra). By using colloquial slang for drugs, and using search fields on certain sites, you can hunt for the drug you're after, or people who are using it who might be willing to hook you up electronically with someone who'll get some for you.

"Whether you're looking to buy, share your own drugs, or just shag some ugly bastard so he'll share his drugs with you, this is the modern way of scoring drugs," asserts Stuart. "Not a sniffer dog, drugs outreach worker, or needle-exchange bus in sight."

The need to keep it subtle won't matter if drugs are regulated. Over the next few years more US states—presumably including the big one, California, in 2016—will legalize cannabis. Because the policies have been voted for by the people and big business has jumped on for the ride, even a Republican president will find it hard to reverse or stem the tide.

Within ten years, more than half of Americans are likely to be living in a state where it is legal to buy marijuana, an ironic situation for a country that kicked off the global War on Drugs. Brand names such as Marley Natural and Humboldt Haze could be accompanied by Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Apache Gold, as Native Americans begin to produce and sell their own weed.

How much of an impact the American ganja revolution will have on the rest of the world is a hard call, so I spoke to Martin Jelsma, a political scientist and international drug policy expert from the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.

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The three Yale-educated entrepreneurs who have bought the rights to Marley Natural, the world's first cannabis brand

"I'm quite convinced the cannabis regulation trend will continue and gradually speed up in the course of the next decade, as it will be shown in practice that a legally regulated market can be introduced in a responsible manner.

"Within a few years, especially once California take that step in 2016, it is very likely that several countries in the Americas will follow suit: Jamaica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, and, yes, even Canada after the elections." 

Jelsma tells me that national and EU legislation will likely inhibit cannabis legalization in Europe, where public support for the move is patchy. He says that pressure for change is building up from below. "Numerous local initiatives are being prepared: 50 mayors in the Netherlands are asking for regulated supplies to the coffee shops; in Frankfurt, Berlin, Geneva, and Copenhagen regulation proposals are on the table; the Basque country and Catalonia in Spain are moving in that direction."

 He says these changes could have a domino effect on countries in Africa and Asia, with Morocco, Cambodia, or India (which campaigned to keep cannabis legal in the 1950s) being the most likely to spring a surprise and legalize weed.

Despite all this, and with the high chance of countries agreeing to disagree at the United General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the global drug problem in 2016, we are heading into an increasingly polarized world in terms of drug policy. While Hollywood A-listers will be sucking on spirulina and sensi lassis on Melrose, poor fuckers in Iran and Saudi will be swinging from the rafters after being caught with a dub.

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Photo by Amy Lombard

Where you happen to be on Earth when you are taking drugs will have increasingly contrasting consequences. With cannabis legalization in the US, the mantle of World Drug Policeman is heading in the direction of either Russia or China, both countries where users, addicts, and dealers are treated with almost medieval severity by the authorities.

But as mafia expert Federico Varese, a criminologist at Oxford University, points out, the Chinese authorities will likely be busy locked in a battle with the Triads as the country moves from being a transit country into a zone of high heroin and crystal meth consumption. "Although China is ruthless in terms of security and clamping down on dealers, it is also corrupt, so it will be hard to stop the rise of the Chinese drug gangs," says Varese. "There are already existing alliances between these gangs in Macau, Hong Kong, and China through gambling, and this makes shipping drugs and laundering drug money easier."

Varese also points out that for organized crime, which the world over has close links with drug trafficking, the online drug trade and US cannabis legalization are mere irritants that are easily compensated for by the rising global security focus on terrorism, rather than drugs.

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A flyer from the halcyon days of widespread British mephedrone abuse

Back in Blighty, our drug users will continue to play a leading global role in getting hammered. Yet whoever wins this year's general election, it's unlikely there will be any big changes to drug laws over the next decade. Radical drug proposals do not win elections or benefit political careers. Most MPs are too scared of the right-wing press to risk their careers by sticking their heads above the parapet to back anything that could seem remotely radical.

There may be the odd blip where the Sun comes out for reform in an editorial as it did in October, but will there be any end to the media's steadfast grip on the evolution of our drug policy? I put this question to Rich Peppiatt, a recovering tabloid hack and media campaigner who turned the tables on some of Fleet's Street's grubbiest editors in his film One Rogue Reporter. "I had a dream that Paul Dacre might get hit by a terrible bit of arthritis, only to find solace in a big joint," he jokes. "He'll experience an abrupt about-turn on cannabis decriminalization and stick the Daily Mail's masthead over a cannabis leaf. Then I woke up.

"But newspaper readership is dwindling, so the power the right-wing media has over policy will lessen. The spell will be broken, so you are more likely to have politicians standing up for more rational debate. I would love it if we got to the point of an MP standing up and saying: 'I do smoke weed—in fact I smoke it every night.' I'd vote for that guy. The dope-smoking MP would be great, but maybe twenty years' time is too soon."

Britain is facing another five years of austerity, and the effects will be felt for the next 15, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The more people become mired in poverty, social exclusion, and the trauma that surrounds it, the more likely their drug use is to become problematic. Meanwhile, local authorities are cutting back on the very services that can help them.

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Meth user photo by Matt Desouza

I asked Kevin Flemen, who has been advising drug services for ten years, for his vision of the future for Britain's most vulnerable, drug-addicted people. And it doesn't look good.

"As people are bounced out of the welfare system and pushed into less and less stable housing, they are pushed further adrift from mainstream society. So they will vanish into the weave of a frayed social fabric—sleeping in the woods, under bridges, outside of the urban areas and the key sources of help. Austerity will have an impact on the capacity and ability of agencies to respond to this dispossessed population. And if we do get an upsurge in problem drug users, we will be woefully ill-equipped to deal with it."

As police have already admitted, austerity will have an increasing effect on the war they are being asked to wage on drugs, as they won't be able to afford it. Over the next decade, cannabis grows will go undetected as thermo-imaging helicopters are grounded. Street drug dealers will be less likely to be arrested because there's too much overtime involved. To the horror of people like Peter Hitchens, the cutbacks could lead to the de facto creeping in of "de-penalization" of some drug offenses, which is a truncheon's width away from decriminalization. Carrying out the surveillance needed to catch the guys pulling the strings will become too pricey for many police forces, so while the gophers may get pulled, the bigger players will increasingly be left in peace to work out how to do that pesky laundering.

Not that the Mr. Bigs and drug trade monopolies will be too pleased about that, because they are gradually being replaced by what Dick Hobbs, a criminologist and author of Lush Life, calls a "community of practice"—"a trading zone that anyone can engage with... a complete democratization of drug crime.

"Basically, the old underworlds based on the industrial working class and the old working-class neighborhoods are gone, and the new market is open to everyone," says Hobbs, who has spent 30 years researching London drug crime.

"You don't need a 'family' background, ten years being staunch and stand-up in various prisons, or any special skills [to sell drugs]. The most unlikely people in terms of class, gender, and background can now get involved. Four mates having a beer over Christmas put their hands in their pockets and divvy up. One of them flies out of Stansted and is back from Amsterdam by 9 PM with a holdall full of pills. Next time, they take a transit van. Overnight they have become international drug dealers. This is the future of organized drug crime."

One last prediction. Although this might ruin my chance of a guest slot on the Gadget Show or Doctor Who or whatever, I'm willing to make the call that "chemputers"—which will supposedly print 3-D drugs—and electronic highs—which allegedly get people frazzled via their iTunes—are both bollocks, and that even by 2025, will be used regularly by fewer people than have been to the moon. And if this line comes back to haunt me, I'll be hiding somewhere in the dark market.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

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Protesters demanding justice for the more than 1,200 missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. Photo via Nicky Young

The RCMP is currently under pressure as aboriginal leaders have called for an independent inquiry after a discovery by the CBC of a shocking abuse of power that occurred in a Manitoba detachment.

The broadcaster obtained documents revealing that in 2011, constable Kevin Theriault took an aboriginal women home to pursue what he called a "personal relationship" several hours after she was arrested for intoxication and checked into a holding cell. The story, which went live on Thursday, further details how his colleagues provoked Theriault via text message to see "how far he would go" and goes on in detail about how the senior officer in the detachment at first said "it wasn't right" for Theriault to take the woman out of custody but eventually acquiesced, saying, "You arrested her, you can do whatever the fuck you want to do."

Subsequently two RCMP officers tailed Theriault home and reported him, and he was then ordered to bring the woman to her home. A disciplinary decision was not reached until last year, at which time the officer was reprimanded and lost pay for seven days.

This isn't the first time, even in recent history, that the RCMP has been criticized for its treatment of aboriginal women. In early December, a Smithers, BC RCMP officer was investigated for using excessive force on 61-year-old Wet'suwet'en elder Irene Joseph. Then there was 71-year-old NWT elder Loretta Edjericon, who alleged that she was elbowed in the face when RCMP officers pushed their way into her home. Most recently, a report surfaced of a Portage la Prairie RCMP constable who took a complaint from a woman who in 2011 was choked, beaten, stripped, and pushed out of a house naked by her boyfriend. The constable didn't interview any witnesses and tried to convince the woman not to lay charges.

Underneath all of this is the issue of the more than 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women that Prime Minister Stephen Harper says "isn't really high" on his radar.

Clearly there's a problem. And despite Harper's belief that the of murders of young aboriginal women like Tina Fontaine are criminal and not sociological, other groups believe that the problem is systemic. In fact, on Monday the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report in which they point to Canada's history of colonization, inequality, and economic and social marginalization as some of the root causes of violence against aboriginal women.

The report uses data collected by the Native Women's Association of Canada (NWAC). NWAC's goal, according to its website, is "to enhance, promote, and foster the social, economic, cultural and political well-being of First Nations and Métis women within First Nation, Métis, and Canadian societies." In August 2014, NWAC announced a partnership with the RCMP and the Assembly of First Nations on an awareness campaign aimed at preventing family violence and raising awareness about reporting missing persons.

VICE spoke with Dr. Dawn Harvard, vice president of NWAC, and someone who has been working closely with the RCMP to improve relations with aboriginal community, to find out how, if at all, we can repair the fractured relationship between law enforcement and aboriginal communities.

VICE: First off, what do you think this story says about the relationship between the RCMP and aboriginal women?
Dawn Harvard: In my opinion it's very saddening: the lack of appropriate response. I was quite recently working on developing a better relationship with the RCMP, so I'm really hoping that this doesn't damage the work that we are trying to do together, because obviously we need their cooperation and support to have a significant impact on the issue of missing and murdered women, and this kind of thing is obviously very damaging. Looking at that particular story, seeing that it was not just the one officer, but it was the others who turned a blind eye, in a sense condoning the behaviour. It's really very distressing. That there is a lack of holding each other accountable. It's something that happened three years ago. And I can only hope that this particularly tragic incident can bring light to what is, I fear, a much larger issue. We have heard about these kinds of incidents happening in the past. And I don't want to say specifically with the RCMP, but with police enforcement. Obviously any time you have somebody who is in a position of complete authority over vulnerable people, whether it be a prison, or social services, or children's aid, we have to be very careful, and they need to be held to a higher standard.

You've worked with the RCMP to foster a better understanding with aboriginal communities. Could you elaborate on what you think should have happened, and what you hope becomes more of a policy in the future?
I think some of the articles out there have pointed to the necessity of an independent review or investigation. That's where I think we need to look at systemic issues in terms of how we are investigating, and therefore, by extension, how we are responding to these kinds of things. Because in this position there is a tremendous power imbalance, and it's very, very concerning. And once again, I am a little concerned by the lack of what I think is appropriate response, even for the individuals who essentially condoned [Theriault's behaviour] by not stopping it. That's a classic situation of violence against women in general, right? If you know this is going on, and you're not stepping in, you're not stopping it, then you are condoning it. And that's the kind of message we need to get across. Not just for enforcement, but throughout Canadian society in general.

Let's talk about what you see as the roots of the problem.
This is not something new. This really is just the most current manifestation of a long-standing, historical problem. And the legacy of racist, sexist policies, practices, and history in Canada. The dehumanization of indigenous peoples in general has been going on in Canada for hundreds of years. What started out as a convenient excuse to remove people from their own territory and justify the breaking of treaties, and obvious historical abuses that happened. It was part of a larger mentality that allowed what one would hope are normally good people to justify their own behaviour by dehumanizing and degrading indigenous people. And that has been going on as part of the larger colonization project for generations upon generations to justify that abuse which, for the most part, has from the very beginning been about economics. It was about land, it was about justifying the extermination of a people because they were here first. So it's not something that is particularly a part of the police force. I think it's something that's part of, sadly, Canadian society in general. And North American society. We see it happen in the treatment of indigenous people in countries around the world. We see it in Australia, that kind of dehumanization. But the challenge is, for indigenous women, since you brought the question up, there is that additional layer of sexism. So even in a society that has historically oppressed and degraded its own women, you now have that double factor of the racism and the sexism, and that not only are they property, they're property of a lesser people. That goes together to make a situation where our women are the most vulnerable and that's what the whole thing about missing and murdered indigenous women is all about. People think indigenous women are less worthy.

How do you tackle something that seems so deeply ingrained?
That's exactly the challenge. My own field is specifically in education, and I think number one is, that's where we need to start. It is absolutely appalling the number of people in the country who just... their perceptions, their opinions, their beliefs about indigenous peoples are based on John Wayne-type movies. And have absolutely no connection to the reality of indigenous people in this country, the indigenous people right down the street, or that work in their own offices, in their own backyards. That's appalling. That [change] is going to have to start with the generation that's in kindergarten right now, and work its way through. I personally, if nothing else, am making a large effort in that particular direction. But that's going to take a couple of generations to start having that kind of awareness. Whether it's native women, whether it's the Assembly of First Nations, whether it's the media, there needs to be a concerted effort to look into these myths. And the media is right there: something that has been villainized for a very long time as continuing to perpetuate racist stereotypes, could be our biggest ally and champion in terms of ending those kind of myths.

What do you see as present, concrete things that can be done between aboriginal people and the RCMP?
They can see this as a black mark or they can see this as as a chance for really good change. Not to sweep it under the rug, not to say it's one bad apple. To say, "We're going to make sure this never happens again." You can never know 100 percent, but we can come out strong on this and say that we are putting in place efforts for more accountability on things like this, more transparency. They have to recognize that this is not something that only happens to indigenous women. This is, unfortunately, something that happens around the world, to whichever vulnerable sector there is. There are lots and lots of studies that show that. We have heard of this happening: women come into our offices for different programs, and they have complained [of police mistreatment]. So it's not unheard of. But here's an obviously clear case that you can take that you can deal with in a very proactive way, that you can show we're going to do something about it.

What do you think the chances of that happening are?
That I won't comment on. But I would like to say that if the sincerity of the RCMP members I was working with before Christmas means anything, then I do have a measure of hope that they will take the lead on some of this. We can hope. It's that ability to hope, even against all other signs to the contrary, that keeps you going and fighting and struggling for the change. And eventually things do change.