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Photos by Jake Lewis

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Just over a decade ago, while dads dressed as Batman climbed Buckingham Palace to get their kids back and people still bought Dido albums, the Countryside Alliance were in their prime. They had always campaigned on a number of rural issues, but by 2002 the name had become synonymous with an opposition to the fox-hunting ban, something—bizarrely—the Tories have said they'll try to repeal if they win this year's general election.

However, since the glory days—when Otis Ferry was attacking hunt monitors and protesters were storming Commons to defend their right to watch dogs maul foxes to death—the Alliance has faded from public view somewhat, begging the question: what exactly has become of them?

To find out, I decided to attend a Countryside Alliance fundraiser, which took the form of binge drinking in a Chelsea nightclub.

As I sorted tickets and planned the night I became even more curious; what would the attendees look, act, and sound like? Would they all be arthritic UKIP supporters, or is there a new generation of countryfolk hoping to shed the Alliance's image? To drag it into 2015, an age where hamlet-dwellers have shed the tweed and cords in favor of Pyrex and Hood By Air?

Before heading in I assumed there would be some party-specific decorations, or at least an allusion to a rural theme: some hay bales, perhaps, or a sparrow, or a complimentary blooding booth. However, on arrival, everything was much as I'd imagine it is every other night of the year—leather sofas, rum cocktails, and men wearing scarves inside.

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I also assumed there might be a guest speaker—someone spouting the kind of fiery rhetoric needed to revitalize the now-ailing Countryside Alliance. There was none of that, either. In fact, the closest thing I saw to anything I'd imagined I might see was a man wearing red socks, two guys under 30 smoking cigars, and a few people in that waistcoat-pointy-shoe-jeans combo popularized by indie bands at the turn of the millennium and adopted by aspiring pick up artists.

I suppose it's not too much of a surprise that, in the internet age, 13 years on from when every member of the Alliance had a common struggle to band them together, there wasn't much sense of unity—or even identity. Instead of having a distinctive vibe it kind of just felt like a normal night out in Chelsea, only with an extra early exodus so everyone could make it to the last train home from Victoria.

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AP Photo, Jeff Roberson, file

On February 26, Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich, had something he wanted to get off his chest. Two days prior, he'd try to call a press conference about the fact that his political opponents were spreading rumors that he was Jewish, but his advisors had convinced him to back off. So taking matters into his own hands, the 54-year-old called both the Associated Press and the St. Louis Dispatchhimself to request a set of interviews. "This is more of a religious story than a politics story," he told the local paper in a voicemail.

But Schweich never met with any reporters. Seven minutes after asking to be heard out, the Republican candidate for governor shut himself up with a bullet to the head.

The suicide—already one of the more bizarre political news stories in recent memory—took a turn for the even-weirder Sunday evening, when Schweich's spokesman, Robert "Spence" Jackson, was also found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gun wound. Now, people in Missouri really want to know what Schweich was trying to get off his chest last month -- and if it was even related to anti-Semitism after all.

In the wake of Schweitz's death, former US Senator John Danforth blamed political bullying and Missouri's dirty politics for his friend's suicide. In a scathing eulogy, Danforth noted that Schweitz had believed that other Republicans, including state party chairman John Hancock, were behind the rumors that he was Jewish, and claimed that a hurtful House of Cards-themed attack ad mocking the auditor's appearance may have pushed Schwietz over the edge (it compared him Daniel Knotts).

"Politics has gone so hideously wrong, and the death of Tom Schweich is the natural consequence of what politics has become," Danforth told the stunned audience. "I believe deep in my heart that it's now our duty, yours and mine, to turn politics into something much better than its now so miserable state."

But the news of Jackson's apparent suicide raises questions about whether dirty politics is really to blame. After all, could Missouri politics—as bad as they are—really drive two people to suicide in a month?

Schweich's friends weren't convinced that the whisper campaign about the state auditor's religion even existed. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Schweich identified as Episcopalian, although his grandfather was, indeed, Jewish. After a career serving in George W. Bush's administration, he was elected as Missouri's state auditor in 2010, and won a second term last year, after which he decided to throw his his hat into the governor's race.

Danforth claims the gubernatorial bid was his protege's undoing. In his eulogy, he explained that he initially thought Schweich was too "easily hurt" for politics, and that he was -- tragically --proven right. "I last spoke with Tom this past Tuesday afternoon," Danforth said. "He was indignant. He told me he was upset about two things, a radio commercial and a whispering campaign he said were being run against him." He noted that the campaign for governor started a full two years in advance of elections, which was a sign that state politics weren't exactly what they used to be—and that the new tactics drove away people who were "normal," "sensitive" and "decent."

It's true that Missourians play dirty politics, perhaps none more so than Jeff Roe, the guy behind the House of Cards ad. Known as the "Karl Rove of Missouri," he got his start in politics in 1994, according to Mother Jones, and helmed successful campaigns for Missouri Republican Congressman Sam Graves. Opponents have described Graves' campaign staff as "evil;" other phrases used to describe Roes's campaigns include "intimidating" and "very, very bad." It's also worth noting that while Missourians are trying to figure out what to do about Roe, he's taking his hardball talents to the big leagues. Late last year, Ted Cruz, the Republican senator who no one really likes, announced Roe would be heading up his presidential campaign.

The question remains, though, whether political bullying actually drove Schweich to take his own life. Plenty of politicians have offed themselves in the past, although typically they were nailed (or about to be nailed) for some sort of embezzlement or fraud. Perhaps the most famous was R. Budd Dwyer, who was the treasurer of Pennsylvania and had been caught accepting a bribe for a lucrative government contract. On January 22, 1987, he shot himself in the head during a live press conference.

The number of politicians who have killed themselves over dirty politics is much, much fewer. The first was actually a Missouri governor, Thomas Reynolds, who was the subject of harsh criticism from the Whigs and Soft Democrats that apparently drove him over the edge. In February 1844, he shot himself in the executive mansion and left a note that read, "I have labored and discharged my duties faithfully to the public, but this has not protected me from the slanders and abuse which has rendered my life a burden to me...I pray to God to forgive them and to teach them more charity."

Then, almost 100 years later, in 1953, Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette killed himself, reportedly because he was afraid of being called out by Senator Joseph McCarthy over rumors that communists had infiltrated a subcommittee he'd headed. The next year, Lester C. Hunt, a Democrat from Wyoming and bitter McCarthy opponent shot himself after several political opponents threatened to publicize his son's arrest for soliciting a male prostitute if he continued his political career.

"Lester Hunt, a much more sensitive soul than his colleagues realized, just could not bear the thought of having his son's misfortunes become the subject of whispers in his re-election campaign," a journalist named Drew Pearson wrote at the time.

Whether or not Schweich joins this list remains to be seen. The key to unlocking what happened could lie in the suicide note of Spence Jackson, the spokesman. However, the contents of that final missive aren't being revealed to the public just yet. As the week goes on, we're likely to find out if we have another McCarthy-level bully on our hands, or if something else entirely is to blame. Either way, it's clear that whatever is going on within the Missouri political scene is absolutely nuts.

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There's not all that much to do in the boondocks of picturesque Duscae. A rustic pit stop on the road to Cauthess for Final Fantasy XV's Prince Noctis and his entourage of Harajuku street models, its landscape slopes downward to a marshland encircling a murky reservoir basin. Wild chocobos canter through the lowland scrub nearest the swamp; tusked garula graze among patchy vegetation, oblivious.

On higher ground, a rough ring of cracked asphalt byways hems the valley in, its horizon crisscrossed by remote rock archways stretched end to end. The only signs of civilization are one truck stop service station, a secluded chocobo ranch, and the occasional wayward car, just passing through.

"It's a nice place to visit," remarks Noctis's ridiculously named road trip pal Prompto, "but I wouldn't want to live here."

Duscae is a nice place to visit, which for rabid Final Fantasy devotees must finally feel like some good news considering the long and bumpy journey FFXV took to get to this point. Countless delays, a platform change to make way for current-gen hardware, and original director Tetsuya Nomura leaving the project almost a decade after it first saw the light of day all took a toll on development, among other roadblocks.

Anyway, here we are. Duscae. A good place to go camping (or to sleep in an RV, if that's more your thing) and where, in the dark, you can take a moment to get lost in endless, dense fields of starlight just by titling the camera up.

Of course you can't get through FFXV's demo (aptly named "Episode Duscae") by some backwater sightseeing alone. But—with the exception of FFXII's massive connected maps lending Ivalice a somewhat worldly scale—tramping around what can be seen of the Duscaen region might be the first time Final Fantasy has really extended an invitation to wander.

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'Final Fantasy XV', "Episode Duscae" trailer

You could go scouting for wildlife, disrupt traffic, or try to warp-dash your way on top of an abandoned shack just for the hell of it, all more or less to scale. This isn't the barren 3-D expanse of the PS1 era, where all that lay between the dots of interest on the shrunken world map were invisible randomizers dictating how many enemies you'd encounter before reaching the next landmark. In Duscae you might find a trinket blinking in the reeds, traversal a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.

You want to explore regardless. Noctis and the gang's ride remains broken down at the service station (no chocobo riding, either) throughout the demo. It's a smart move on Square Enix's part—you don't want players answering the call to adventure in this madly anticipated interactive road movie by flying down a stretch of pavement that cuts off after 15 seconds. Director Hajime Tabata put the decision simply: He didn't want players to think Final Fantasy had turned into primarily into a driving game.

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Besides, going it on foot means you can wring every last drop of life from the handful of quest hours up for grabs here on a micro level. How many people plunked down the cash for Final Fantasy Type-0 HD to get their hands on "Episode Duscae" in the west is still officially up in the air, but if a second place spot in its debut week in the UK are any indication (launching against the new Battlefield, no less) it seems that number might be quite high.

It wouldn't be the first time this happened. In the middle of the PS2's launch wasteland, 2001's Zone of the Enders enjoyed a similar reception as that other Hideo Kojima game, as it happened to come with a demo disc of the then-seizure-inducing Metal Gear Solid 2. An entire generation suddenly got busy shooting up bottles in the tanker galley.

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The absence of Noctis and company's convertible raises some thoughts of its own. Every road movie from Thelma & Louise to The Straight Story is really about the experiences had over the destination itself, a notion easily paralleled in your ability to pick through every pebble and blade of grass like you probably did in "Episode Duscae."

With as much riding on the theme of travel as there is here, there's no danger that Square will take away your freedom to scour the land for hidden secrets, even when you're zipping all over the planet in FFXV's proper final release. The question is, if you're then used to cruising down the highway (or, say, taking the train) from here to there, will you bother to ever slow down?

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Tabata has said that "Episode Duscae" was made to give players a taste of what a modern open-world Final Fantasy would look like. A continuous mass of earth is definitely the ideal of any such game, though for all the impact beyond scripted events that Noctis and his buddies can have on their surroundings—environmental interactions, affecting NPCs, going into random buildings and assumedly looting them—they may as well be ghosts.

No need to panic, as RPGs have been doing this for decades. They're the original open worlds, created for players to systematically quest through, town by town, dungeon by dungeon, narrative bits speckling the landscape as you further your progress. These are road movies, too.

As it stands, "Episode Duscae" is a very, very early work in progress, so it's impossible to know for sure what exactly an open-world Final Fantasy really is yet, let alone what we should expect one could be. Plenty of so-called open-world RPGs already exist in a vacuum that typically begins and ends with story, combat, and quest logs.

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The definition is fuzzy at best. Geralt of Rivia's horse doesn't beat down the terrain with its hooves if you tread over the same path hundreds of times in The Witcher. Dragon's Dogma won't let you carve your initials into an ancient crypt as a crude record stating that you once lived.

Yeah, I know this is probably way too much thought to be putting into what's ultimately a tiny tailored chunk of a much larger and more intricate game. Still, some of Tabata's more grandiose comments about FFXV's intended complexity—round-the-clock NPC schedules to complement the day-night cycle, the promise of seamlessly entering and leaving cities in real time, the general ambition of how closely he wants to mimic reality in a digital space—seem like stronger ideas than Final Fantasy has had in years. Probably not a bad place to start.

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Emefe is a huge band, population-wise. Eight members strong, they have collaborated with Sharon Jones, Antibalas, and TV on the Radio. They've also managed to carve out a nice niche in NYC, mainly because of their refreshingly positive and life-affirming attitude at a time when the generally accepted stance is nihilism. Emefe will release their first full-length album this May, and in preparation they are dropping a video for their song "Come Back to Me." The video takes the funky, pop-rock song and pairs it with creepy mental hospital visuals. Watch it above.

Preorder Emefe's debut album here.

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Toronto police cars. Photo via Flickr user Joseph Morris

For at least a decade, Toronto's police force has been quietly building a massive database of the black residents it is supposed to serve. This is not a catalogue of convicted criminals—most black people in the database are not suspected of any crime, at least not in any official sense. Police simply document us in case they ever need to identify us later.

In Toronto we use the term "carding" to describe the police practice of stopping civilians who are not suspected of a crime, and documenting their personal information. For years, this practice was a secret; now we know it exists, and that it has excessively targeted Toronto's black residents. The retention of information collected in such a dubious and discriminatory manner is an insult to black residents. Yet police plan to not only continue carding, but to keep the information from millions of individual contacts in a database for years to come—just in case.

Last week, outgoing Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair announced that he had, in partnership with the police oversight board, developed new rules about carding. The police have been conducting the practice without formal regulations, and only changed course after an eye-opening Toronto Star investigation exposed carding's shocking scope and bias: In 2013, 27 percent of the people Toronto police carded were black, even though we only represent about eight percent of the population. The public knows almost nothing about how our personal information has been stored, accessed, and shared.

Under the proposed new carding regulations, police can continue carding people. They do not have to inform civilians that an interaction is voluntary, and that we have the right to leave. Police also don't have to tell us why we are being stopped and documented in the first place. Under these conditions, the police force is free to expand its existing database, which reportedly includes children as young as ten.

The cops don't have to provide us with a receipt showing that they've documented us as gang members or uncooperative subjects, that they've labeled us "Jamaican" or "Somali" even though, if asked, we might call ourselves Canadian. Again, these subjective recordings of our identities will find their way into the carding database, and we will be forced to deal with any assumptions the people who can access it may make about us.

Mayor John Tory hailed the police's defiant plan as a necessary compromise when he spoke at a press conference last week. "It is yet another landmark where we here in the city of Toronto lead in showing ourselves, but also showing others around the world, how we can address difficult, complex issues which are at the core of how we live together," a tone-deaf Tory said.

As a police board member himself, the mayor seemed unfazed that Chief Blair had sidestepped his oversight group's major reforms and upheld the idea that the database full of recklessly obtained information about black people is still a legitimate policing tool. Instead, Tory spoke instead of "the absolute commitment by Chief Blair to bias-free policing."

This is the polite, sophisticated racism that strangles the spirits of black Torontonians. We are asked to accept a world where police classify us not as criminals, but as people who must be monitored in the name of public safety, as if there is a difference. We are asked to give up our legal rights and human dignity to make those around us feel more comfortable.

Black people are "known to police" simply for existing—we are over-documented in every single Toronto neighbourhood, regardless of its location, average income, or racial diversity. In fact, the Star's investigation revealed that the more white residents there are in a neighbourhood, the more likely a black person is to be carded there.

The Star also examined carding of black males aged 15–24 who were carded in their own neighbourhoods between 2008 and 2012: the number of black youth carded during that period actually exceeds the number of 15–24-year-old black youth in Toronto.

The police say the disproportionate cataloguing of blacks was unintentional, yet they'd like to keep all the detailed information they've collected throughout the process on our whereabouts, our addresses, our movements, our relationships—just in case.

In his remarks last week, Tory noted that "an unacceptable level of distrust has arisen between our police and communities of colour in this city over time." He failed to cite, as one obvious and relevant reason for this, the prevalence of thousands of innocent black people in a police database, the past and ongoing uses of which are completely unknown to the public.

The mayor expressed no remorse for numerous reports that carding has been used to evaluate the performance of individual officers, whose promotions and salaries were therefore based, in part, on the number of people they carded. Tory seemed unaware or unconcerned that police might understandably continue to monitor, stop, question, and document someone because they are already in the database, and because our police board allows for the continued use of that database.

Tory promised that the new carding rules, which don't even require cops to tell black people why we are being documented, will "begin the process of and re-establishing and strengthening that vital trust." In this distorted reality, the value of black life is measured not in love or justice, but in submission to authority. We are told to trust the same forces that have systematically abused us, to continue to submit to regular inspections of personal character—just in case.

On numerous occasions, I myself have been stopped and documented by our police. If they ask me from now on I will refuse, but my resistance won't erase the information that has already been collected about me. I may never really trust the police, but if that is their goal, I have some more appropriate first steps: the police should forward me a copy of all the carding data they have ever collected about me, and repeat this process for every Torontonian. Then our cops should delete the tainted contents of their carding database forever.

The Toronto Police Services Board will meet at 2 PM on Thursday at police headquarters, 40 College Street, to consider the new carding procedures.

Follow Desmond Cole on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Remember the bizarre public fracas the other week, where UKIP leader Nigel Farage called a bunch of fancy-dress wearing protesters that interrupted his pub lunch "scum" because they scared off his kids? Well round two happened last night, as a bunch of British fascists attacked a meeting of the organizers of the "Beyond UKIP Cabaret."

The 'Kippers have since tried to move on from the pub debacle, launching their election campaign, urging people to switch lights on to "strike a blow to climate hysteria," and preparing to kidnap Obama.

However, the fall out from the anti-UKIP conga lingers on. Since the carnival, one of the organizers has received death threats ("cry me a river" said Nigel) and last night, click-bait fascist street team Britain First, decided to take matters into their own hands.

Around 25 Britain First activists headed down to Hoxton, where the organizers of the "Beyond UKIP Cabaret" were meeting. Their plan was "to give them a taste of their own medicine." Beyond UKIP's action had been in fancy dress, and likewise Britain First turned up in their paramilitary garb. They broke into the building where the meeting was taking place, intimidating everyone by shouting things like "lefty scum," and getting one of their number arrested for assault.

The above footage shows a Britain First activist screaming "Socialist scum off our streets" as a man in an orange jumper who works in the building tries to reason with them, standing in front of the door of the meeting.

"Why don't they come out and face us?," Paul Golding, leader of Britain First asks.

"Come out and face us, we're not here for violence we're here to talk," someone shouts in the manner of someone offering someone out for a fight.

Footage shot from inside the meeting room shows how freaked out the attendees of the Beyond UKIP meeting were. "This is so scary," says one.

"Britain First fighting back" shout the Britain First activists on the other side of the door, thumping the glass. Paul Golding leads the chants while making Churchill style "peace" signs. He also spends a lot of time calling the Beyond UKIP crowd bullies, while his large shouty henchmen try and break into a room of frightened people.

A further video shows Paul Golding making threats to one of the Beyond UKIP activists. "You overstep the mark and you'll find us on your doorstep", he says before the pair exchange tit-for-tat insults. "You're a stupid, socialist, lefty..." says Golding, struggling to marshal more disparaging ways to call someone left-wing.

The threats continue. In a piece to camera for a Britain First propaganda video, Paul Golding says, "This is a warning to the left-wing to the politics in this country. No longer will we take you harassing and confronting families and children. You've overstepped the mark."

As Britain First leave, Golding says, "You tell Dan Glass that Paul Golding is looking for him."

Dan Glass is one of the Beyond UKIP organizers. When I last spoke to him he was receiving death threats. He crashed at a hotel last night, not wanting to be at home.

According to Ray Malone, one of the anti-UKIP activists who was at both the protest and the meeting last night, "We were sat in groups chatting quietly. Then one of the girls went outside, and came running back in shouting 'Britain First are in the fucking building, shut the fucking doors'."

As they arrived at the center, Britain First leader Paul Golding asked where the beyond UKIP-cabaret meeting was. Thankfully, someone suspected these angry middle aged racist white blokes in uniform might not be here to gently mock Nigel Farage, so they sent them the wrong way, up a flight of stairs, to buy them some time.

Diarmaid McDonald, who is based at the center and appears in the videos in the orange jumper, followed Britain First for a while. "I did my best to politely encourage them to leave, hoping they wouldn't see the guys hiding in the room. But just as they were giving up someone saw movement in the room where everyone was hiding and they twigged they were in there."

"Suddenly I was standing between them and the door, barricading it closed surrounded by a dozen fascists trying to get past me. For the most part they tried to intimidate me into moving out of the way by shouting at me and chanting 'Britain First' and 'left-wing scum.'"

"But then they said, 'right if you think you're going to stop us getting in there let's see about it,' and they started trying to physically manhandle me away from the door and push me away. I stood my ground and after shoving me about for a bit they gave up."

Ray, a 16-weeks-pregnant teacher, was terrified. "They say it's like giving us a taste of our own medicine, but they didn't turn up with a conga line and fancy dress." I asked what she thought they might do if they made it in, "that's what we were afraid of, there were lots of them and they were angry, just the stress level was pretty scary."

After a while the cops turned up, one of the Britain First lads got nicked for assault, and the far-right group decided they'd made their point and left.

Britain First say their action was a reaction to the pub protest. If you're gonna freak out someone's children, maybe you're fair game for some shouting, some chanting, and a bit of common assault? Ray was having none of that. "We didn't see any kids at Nigel's pub, there were categorically no children," she said.

She continued, saying that the UKIP pub protest, "was a lively and happy event, very light and jovial. I was one of the first people though the door to Nigel's pub, and I could hear one of my mates saying 'please take a citizenship test' to Farage."

Britain First have produced their own account of what happened last night in a video complete with Hollywood style stirring music, watched over 150,000 times already.

There's something quite bizarre these guys standing up for Farage, when UKIP has banned them all from the party. A UKIP spokesperson told me, "UKIP has no relationship with Britain First. We do not communicate with them nor condone their activities." But whether they condone it or not, it seems that UKIP has picked up an unwanted gang of racists, going about like bouncers, threatening and bullying Nigel Farage's boo-boys and girls.

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Someday, somewhere, in the not so distant future, on a social media forum not so foreign from the ones we know, someone is typing "RIP NYC." Someone is typing, probably in all caps, "I can't believe Darkroom/Motor City/St. Jeromes/that crepe place on Ludlow is gone! I did something there, once! RIP NYC!"

I understand this sentiment, mostly. My capacity for nostalgia is the same as yours, which is to say it colors how I perceive every little thing. Before basic human empathy and the occasionally (very) correct online scolds kicked in, I myself felt a cold fear that B&H Dairy might disappear in last week's Second Avenue disaster and with it my favorite square footage in New York City. Even if the wanting seems trivial in the light of actual suffering, it is not unreasonable to want everything to stay right where it always was.

You know, in your hearts and heads if not your status updates, that the world erodes. Even Chinatown will someday be replaced by one enormous Thai restaurant. I will go there, and I will tell my grandchildren that I did lines of cocaine where the peanuts on their papaya salad sit. My corpulent grandchildren will listen, the fat in their ears expanding. I am old and angry and can't be expected to remember that, by this point, everybody is allergic to peanuts. Probably the only thing they won't be allergic to is cocaine. Social mores change. I hope I won't bore them.

I remember the blackout of 2003, the big fun inconvenience of the early aughts, the great liberation from having to pretend that cops and firemen were our friends, whatever name history will settle on, maybe just "Goodbye to All That Ice Cream." I was talking to a long-past friend on a landline—he'd gone from a Robitussin problem to an American military problem to a God problem so I was relieved as hell when the phone went dead and not all that nonplussed to see that the relief had spread, all those problems avoided, on a citywide scale. Good for us! I remember how all the punks and the gays at Mars Bar were feverishly working together on their rapidly dying phones to find that last working coke dealer in Manhattan and huzzah, they found him and he had bags of special blackout paste for sale and well, whatever, if you closed your nostril long enough something happened for sure, so here's to unity. I remember helping hide Dash Snow behind the bar when the cops came. And then I remember how a friend and I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge together at 3 AM, no one around, no lights but those of the theretofore estranged sky, and it was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

To live in the city is to be displaced by the city, to rage against market forces, to be sure that things were irretrievably better in the impossible-to-pin-down-to-a-specific-date "then."

Though I've spent so much time in the there that I've worked the door at Arlene's Grocery until I was fired for unfriendliness, I know that the McDonalds on Essex may be the most essential part of the Lower East Side. It's the first thing you see when you get out of the JMZ stop and you can look down on it from the blue building if you have terrible friends. It is the first and last choice you'll make before entering or leaving the LES. If you're so inclined you can read into it a link to your childhood or the rest of America, but I just like it because I prefer to start and end my nights with a "no, thanks." I don't know how sad people will be if it ever shuts down, and what will appear in its place? To ponder what could replace the McDonalds on the Lower East Side is to defy the limits of human imagination.

The "RIP NYC" crowd has been around—that's what that whole lament is about, things changing around you, the newer wave replacing the older wave, which turns out to be you. But if you've been around, surely you know there are more things to be sad about: the compromises we made to stay in the city, the people who died doing what we do, who we stayed up with for days with, whose names embarrassingly escape us right when we want to tell a good story. I'm also being willfully obtuse. I know the RIPNYCers are just basically announcing they'd rather not die. It's hard to hate them for it. Death is, after all, to be avoided. But it's also hard to not get annoyed at a nostalgia that seems one part fear-of-death displacement and two parts "death itself was cooler before all the new kids started doing it."

I've looked up Buddhism on Wikipedia, I know all compounded things are impermanent and that all emotions are pain. I also know that it's sometimes nice to have an extended discussion on how the bathrooms at Happy Endings are now used for their intended purposes and how tragic it is that you get to go on a field trip around the block in an Escalade rather than have to stand on a freezing corner on D and Second to score. We can do that, if you like. The past is a slippery fish. There will ALWAYS be a converted Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side that you can wait to get into so you can have the human equivalent of party photographers tell you that they like you. We can always recreate our 20s and we can always be the people we made fun of in our 20s. I've been both, though as years go on and my guts hurt more, I certainly lean more toward the latter. To live in the city is to be displaced by the city, to rage against market forces, to be sure that things were irretrievably better in the impossible-to-pin-down-to-a-specific-date "then."

I'm optimistic. Twenty years from now, I will still live in New York City, though I'll have a second home in Space Newark or whatever intergalactic colony is priced for the upper-middle class, and I'll visit the gleaming boutique of the Lower East Side. I hope that Ludlow will be then Carlos D Way. The scenery will still be the same I'm sure though the terrible hats on high cheekbones will now be functional to keep out the ultraviolet, and the "edginess" of the neighborhood will largely be provided by ritualistic bloodletting between tight pants wearers and the tight pants detractors. Maybe real estate agents will finally give it a name with a bit more pizzazz—"Extended White Town" or "Money Till the Water"—or maybe it will just be a strip mall in the shape of Rudolph Giuliani bullying a small black child. Frankly, being a booster, I'm excited for all these options. I'll visit. I'll buy a drink and I'll tell the shop girl/gelato-bot about my powers of precognition, about how I knew before anyone, before the industrial mishaps or terrorist plots or Mole People/Above Dwellers War, before status updates became contractual agreements with public executions in Washington Square for violators, that the city was better then, and better now, and it was exactly how I remembered, and it would always be this way.

Zachary Lipez is a writer, New York lifer, and a member of the band Publicist UK, whose debut record is due out this year on Relapse. He is on Twitter.

Last month, 15 graduates of Corinthian Colleges announced they would no longer pay their student loans. Since then, the debt strikers' ranks have grown to 100, and today they're meeting with the feds in Washington.

The students say they were persuaded to take on the loans based on promises of career placement and expected salary earnings that Corinthian, a troubled chain of for-profit career colleges, simply failed to deliver. But they're not just challenging one assortment of what they allege to be shady schools—these students are launching an attack on the institution of for-profit college education in America, and the debt that comes with it.

Debt Collective, the Occupy Wall Street offshoot that organized the strike, will present the Department of Education (DoE) with "Defense to Repayment" claims from not only the 100 or so official strikers, but also hundreds of other Corinthian students unwilling to strike who nonetheless believe that their debt is illegitimate. Debt Collective has collected these claims from Corinthian students via its Defense to Repayment App, which launched last week.

This is the first time DoE has acknowledged the Corinthian debt strike, which is pretty important since the agency is the one that decides how to treat the loans. While the former students have committed to nonpayment, they're trying to play by the DoE's rules for now, or at least get clarification on what those rules actually mean. According to the regulations that govern the federal student loan program, a loan borrower "may assert as a defense against repayment, any act or omission of the school attended by the student that would give rise to a cause of action against the school under applicable State law."

Debt Collective is asking DoE to enforce this clause by canceling all federal debt incurred by its students.

"Basically, the DoE regs say that if a school violated state laws in getting the student to take out the loan, the student can assert Defense to Repayment (DTR)," says Luke Herrine, Debt Collective's legal coordinator. "It's a way to make federal student loan law on par with private loan law—you can always assert as a defense to paying a loan that it was given to you under illegal circumstances."

While the statute exists, it's currently unknown how often the DoE has enforced it, if it has at all.

"DoE is supposed to respond to a letter from senators that would throw some light on this, and [Debt Collective] has an outstanding FOIA [Freedom of Information Act request] with DoE asking for exactly this information," Herrine says. "But nobody outside DoE knows."

Former students aren't the only ones claiming that Corinthian, once among the nation's largest for-profit college chains, made false promises. The company is currently being sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and attorneys general in California, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin for allegedly deceptive marketing and enrollment tactics that misrepresented job placement rates and school programs to both students and state regulators. After Corinthian failed to provide information concerning those accusations last year, the DoE blocked its access to federal funds, and negotiated an agreement with the chain to begin selling off its campuses nationwide. In February, the DoE brokered a deal with ECMC, a student-loan servicer with no prior experience in college administration, to take over half of Corinthian's schools. The deal also offered some students currently enrolled at the schools a complete discharge of their loans, but no such option to former students (some of whose federal debt has been purchased by this same new owner), despite the fact that their degrees are pretty much worthless as professional credentials.

Democrats in Congress, state officials, and Debt Collective have all expressed skepticism that selling Corinthian's campuses is in the best interest of students. If the DoE had just shut down Corinthian instead (as the Ontario Ministry of Education did last month with several of its subsidiary Canadian schools), they would have been responsible for forgiving $1.2 billion in Corinthian federal loans under DoE's " closed school" rule.

By selling the company's physical and debt-based assets, the DoE can continue to collect payment on Corinthian student loans. This is what annoys the Corinthian strikers the most.

"DoE has become little more than a debt collector," says striker Ann Bowers. "Not only does the law tell them to erase our debts, it's the right thing to do. If they really thought their job was protecting students, they would have done it already."

According to Hannah Appel, economic anthropologist at UCLA and one of Debt Collective's organizers, "State law which determines what is fraudulent in each state, but the ultimate arbiter for every [federal student loan] is DoE, because they're both the creditor and the regulator, which, needless to say, is a conflict of interest."

Debt Collective activists argue that bundling these claims together and delivering them in tandem with the strikers' visit to DC will put pressure on officials. Appel tells me one of the strikers filed his own claim with DoE a year ago, but they never responded.

Of course, for the strikers, the legal consequences for eventual default on student loans can be steep and severe.

"They can garnish wages, they can intercept federal tax refunds, they can offset federal benefits including Social Security, and they can also tack on substantial penalties and collection costs," says Adam Minsky, a lawyer in the Boston area who specializes in student loan law. "Of course, there are credit report consequences as well. There's also no statute of limitations for how long the federal government can pursue a delinquent borrower." Regarding defense to repayment as a legal strategy, Minsky—who's never used it—says, "It would be a tough defense, an uphill battle, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying."

Establishing defense to repayment as a way to cancel student loans delivered under bogus pretenses would be a big deal. DTR could be used against other trade schools under investigation for the same types of fraud alleged to have been committed by Corinthian, such as ITT Tech, which was also sued by CFPB last year. But when I asked Herrine whether traditional colleges and universities could be vulnerable to similar claims, he was skeptical.

"These schools might be decadent and decaying versions of their former selves, but they don't tend to violate any of the relevant laws that would trigger DTR," he says.

Even though this case might have limited applicability, Appel says the true accomplishment is in creating a "proof-of-concept" that demonstrates individuals can collectively organize around their debt and win.

"Collective financial disobedience, analogous to the labor movement, analogous to sitting down at a lunch counter where you're not allowed to sit down, is the important step here. To say, 'We refuse to go into debilitating debt for the basic things we need to survive'... Debtors need a collective seat at the table just like workers need a seat at the table; that to me is the major transition."

Corinthian spokesman Joe Hixson tells me that they were simply trying to fill a gap in the US education system left by community colleges. He adds that many students "chose Corinthian schools after finding that community colleges did not serve their needs, either because of a lack of hands-on training, waiting lists for desired programs or classes, large class sizes, or a lack of adequate support from faculty and staff." The company's responses to the lawsuits variously allege that regulators cherry-picked evidence, judged its job placement rates against arbitrary criteria, and failed to recognize that Corinthian schools produced more graduates and employed more career counselors than community college systems.

But when I ask Appel why just 100 Corinthian alumni have committed to the strike out of hundreds they say have contacted them, she's ready with an answer.

"The reason so few people have signed on as strikers is because how deeply the financial system has its claws into us—people are terrified about their credit scores; people are terrified that their wages might be garnished; people are terrified because they have no legal rights as student debtors," she says. "Out of [hundreds of] Corinthian debtors who contacted us, we [recruited] one in eight, because seven in eight people are so deeply scared of the financial consequences of the debt system and the way people's rights have been removed from them when the federal government is acting as a debt collector. When we have a frank conversation with them about what the consequences will be, even though we will provide them with legal protection and strength in numbers, they say no way. But we don't reject them; we're now inviting them to file DTR claims through Debt Collective."

So what happens if the feds don't recognize these claims?

"If DoE really did nothing... we might ultimately work with some lawyers to bring suit. But before then you can be sure more strikers would sign up, more students would apply, more legislators would speak up, and other sorts of non-legal pressure would come to bear," says Herrine. The "ball will be in DoE's court for a while until then."

Given the choice between defaulting on one's loans and filing a defense to repayment claim, the latter seems about as risky as joining a consumer class-action lawsuit after you've received a flier in the mail. But in this case, instead of getting cut a check for a few bucks, Corinthian students might get the entirety of their loan payments back.

Since they're already on the hook for paying off the loans, many of the students figure they have nothing left to lose.

Bill Kilby is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

[body_image width='1632' height='918' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='we-talked-to-the-green-party-volunteer-who-got-sacked-because-of-his-twitter-509-body-image-1427811983.jpg' id='41579']Stevie D with some guns.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Sacked: Liverpool Green Party activist Stephen Delahunty sparked a Twitter row" is such a 2015 sentence, isn't it? It comes from the Mirror's coverage of the sacking of Stephen Delahunty after he started a Twitter row. But look between the layers: It wasn't even a Twitter row he started, more of a brouhaha between a few Liverpool Labour councillors who objected to a semi-offensive image he was using as a Twitter profile picture and a Facebook photo of him holding two guns and smiling.

But that's just 2015, isn't it? We're all a few asshole-tweets-by-a-Labour-councillor away from losing our jobs. I've been trying to keep on Hilary Benn's good side for the past three years for this very reason.

[body_image width='1215' height='1719' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='we-talked-to-the-green-party-volunteer-who-got-sacked-because-of-his-twitter-509-body-image-1427812013.jpg' id='41580']Illustration by Hairy Bastard

The photo in question is the front cover of a digital magazine Stephen's involved in and depicts an 80-foot anime girl-cum-"Scouse bird" stereotype wearing a pair of startlingly white pants. Some Labour councillors in Liverpool objected to this; as the Liverpool Echo first reported, councillor Nick Small—election agent for Riverside Labour's Louise Ellman—said, "These images are offensive and anti-Liverpool."

Martin Dobson, the Green Party candidate Stephen was volunteering for, was equally as tub-thumping. "Stephen Delahunty is a volunteer who has been helping my campaign," he told the paper. "Unfortunately he allowed some offensive images from his personal account to be associated with the campaign. His comments about the images were made in a personal capacity and were not endorsed or supported by the Green Party in any way."

As a result of all this, Stephen was sacked from his role as volunteer and, following the storm, also let go from his day job. All for a cartoon picture of some pants by an artist called " Hairy Bastard." It is 2015 and this is what's up.

Anyway, we spoke to Stephen via email and asked him about the fallout from this whole weird scandal, and also why he was holding all those guns.

VICE: Alright then: what's gone on?
Stephen Delahunty: I believe I got embroiled in what's known in the industry as a "storm in a twittercup."

What was your role in the Green Party?
My role was to work with the external press coordinator on local press issues, to help organize events and help manage the candidate's website and social media presence. There was no such position when I started, and I volunteered to do it for free.

Let's talk about the "Scouse Bird" image. First up: I gather that's the cover for an alternative magazine you contribute to. What's the deal with that?
It was used as the front cover illustration to represent the discussion of a loose combination of themes aimed to discuss certain aspects of Scouse identity and anime. As someone who co-founded an independent publication, we strive to bring together incompatible topics. The councillors I was debating this with could have googled the site and found all the images in their original context.

What are your thoughts regarding critics who say the image is sexist?
Sexist in relation to what? The daily tabloid press, advertising, the music industry, our political class, routes to employment in general... Sexism is alive and well—people just like to choose when it becomes an issue for them.

Plus, anyone who's read any manga will recognize the "panty shot" is a regular trope and almost always depicts strong, independent females. The woman [Janine Grifflin] who wrote the poem one of the "offensive" images accompanied finds it empowering to express her femininity, thoughts, and desires and then have them interpreted in such a way.

The gun photo has also been doing the rounds a fair bit—what's the explanation behind that one?
It was a personal photo that was taken while recently on holiday in Cambodia. It was supposed to be ironic, like the way the Labour Party still insist they're actually the party of "labor."

But isn't it a little counterintuitive to have photos of you holding guns on social media considering the Green Party's anti-gun policy?
No. MPs go on fact-finding trips all the time. If you want to learn about guns then you have to go to a country that has them.

To that end: Why were you volunteering for the Green Party in the first place?
Because they're the only party with an anti-austerity message. Plus, I personally agree with their policies on the reform of the UN, raising the minimum wage, and the need for greater localism while fostering a greater sense of international solidarity.

So if your only image of the Greens is a deluded group of sandal-wearing hippies, then I'm not your average Green. I'm a graduate that grew up in north Liverpool and lived here most of my life, that feels I shouldn't be having my freedom of speech monitored online or anywhere (real freedom of speech, that is), certainly not by members of a political party who used the affiliation to generate negative press for an opposing campaign. Do you really think they were offended? Or did they Snapchat a private message around their council group congratulating one another?

I'm laughing in the image because holding a gun is a surreal experience, and the insanity of their continued use and production—plus how easy it was to get hold of one in Cambodia—I found amusing. As do lots of other tourists that visit the same location every year.

You've sort of become a punchbag for the local Labour candidate's team after this. One person even said, "These images are offensive and anti-Liverpool." I mean, are they?
No. They're a testament to individual creativity and freedom of expression, which brought [together] the creative writing skills of a poet—a female poet, I might add—and a local artist with a penchant for horror/anime.

As someone who has worked, lived and been educated in Liverpool most of my life; who runs an independent publication in the city that creates jobs; and who is involved in the local music, arts, and events scene, the idea that I—or any of the work I do—could be considered anti-Liverpool is ridiculous.

Criticism is often associated with hatred, when the opposite is actually true.

Do you think you've been thrown under the bus a bit by Martin Dobson?
Yes. At first I thought I owed some sort of loyalty because I'd got to know him personally—and professionally I sort of got it. But he could have come out and said, "It's ridiculous to slander someone for their opinion and I'd rather talk about the real issues, such as a lack of affordable housing and the increasing inequality in the city rather than drag a volunteer into the gutter just to shame my campaign."

The problem with his response is that it only appeals to the councillors [who are] seemingly offended and to his generation. No one I know in my age group buys the Echo, and judging by the response of everyone I've spoken to since the news broke, they'd actually like to see politicians demonstrate a little bit more courage and conviction.

If the person you are trying to help get elected has no faith in you, how could I possibly vote for him and what he represents now?

The only thing I did wrong was not make clear my voluntary status at the party; the name of my actual role is irrelevant. There's a pressure, which most graduates will relate to, on leaving university to find a job ASAP in something that legitimizes their last several years of study—oh, and to start paying back their tuition fees. I'd used the voluntary role as a window to attract a paid one.

Ironically, as the news broke I was suspended from my paid job, which I've now handed in my notice for, as—in not so many words—they told me I'd keep my job as long as I didn't respond.

Is this just a local politics story that's got incredibly out of hand?
There's an arrogance that runs through Labour in the city. It's been easy to be the only alternative to the Conservatives—who face so much resentment in the city—for a number of reasons, but Hillsborough being the prime example. Their attempt to victimise me barely exposes their vulnerability.

Finally, are you OK?
Yeah—who doesn't like being unemployed for having an opinion? But for the record: I'm not sorry. That apology [released by the Green Party] was written by the "real" external press coordinator for the sake of a campaign I no longer support.

You can read Stephen's full response here.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='958' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='abortion-pill-activists-352-body-image-1427738769.jpg' id='41255']

Photo by James Keyser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.

Wherever abortion is illegal or highly restricted, women will risk mutilation, jail time, or death to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

Last year in Brazil, police discovered the charred, limbless body of Jandira dos Santos in the trunk of a car after a botched back-alley procedure, shocking the nation. A few months earlier in Ireland, a suicidal teenage rape victim went on a hunger strike after being denied a termination, repeatedly telling the hospital staff she "just wanted to die." And in January, El Salvador pardoned Carmen Guadalupe Vasquez after she served seven years in jail for miscarrying. To this day, 16 El Salvadorian women remain incarcerated for the same "crime."

Anti-abortion law's remarkable inefficacy in protecting life isn't only anecdotal. Statistics show banning abortion makes women more likely to suffer serious health consequences instead of reducing the frequency of abortions. Of the 42 million abortion procedures performed annually, Guttmatcher reports about half are done unsafely. The associated death toll is astonishing: A woman dies every eight minutes from unsafe abortion, according to the World Health Organization. For women who live in places where abortion is illegal but don't have the financial means to travel to another country, safe procedures are completely inaccessible.

"Women with money can have abortions, and women without money have babies or—and I'm not fucking kidding—they drink bleach," said Mara Clarke, the founder of the Abortion Support Network, an abortion fund that helps Irish women travel to England to safely terminate their pregnancies. "They drink floor cleaner. They take three packs of birth control pills with a bottle of gin. There was a mother of four who told us matter-of-factly, 'I'm trying to figure out how to crash my car to cause a miscarriage but not permanently injure myself or die.'"

Despite tens of thousands of women dying annually from illegal abortion— most of them from hemorrhaging, infection, or poisoning—much of the world remains vehemently opposed to loosening restrictions on the procedure. In Brazil, for example, about 80 percent of the population believes abortion should remain a crime. And so women with little hope of changing the system must risk circumventing it. A growing network of activists exists to help them, aiming to provide poor women with more options than either carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term or drinking floor cleaner.

Some of the activists who help women in this way use misoprostol. Of all the limited options available to women who want to terminate unwanted pregnancies outside of the legal system, it's by far the safest. Commonly prescribed to treat stomach ulcers, misoprostol is also used along with another drug, mifepristone, as medication abortion. When taken on its own, it's 75 to 90 percent effective at inducing a miscarriage. In several South American countries, they sell the drug over-the-counter under various generic names.

One popular brand called Cytotec rose to notoriety in Brazil in the late 1980s, after women learned of its off-label utility. By 1989, over half a million boxes of Cytotec were being sold per year in the country, an estimated 35 percent of which were used in terminating unwanted pregnancies. The growing trend stopped abruptly in July 1991 when the Brazilian government imposed harsh new restrictions on Cytotec sales. This decision had drastic effects: With Cytotec no longer readily available, abortion-related deaths tripled in Campinas alone. Now, over 20 years later, complications from unsafe abortion rank as the fourth leading cause of maternal death in Brazil, while Cytotec sales remain regulated.

Despite the Brazilian government's intervention, the story of Cytotec served as a blueprint for future subversive action to many activists, showing that women are fully ready, willing, and able to take matters into their own hands when given access to misoprostol. Of the people inspired by what happened in Brazil, Dutch activist Dr. Rebecca Gomperts is easily the most notorious—not that that designation bothers her very much. For years, she's been engaging in highly visible abortion activism, most famously commandeering an abortion ship that ferries women into international waters where they can legally take the pill.

In 2004, she began instructing women on how to obtain and use misoprostol over email. "But then I learned that, for a lot of women, it was really difficult to get the misoprostol," she said in a phone interview. "They started asking whether we could provide it or help them get it." She paused. "You know, the idea is that it's a pill. You should be able to mail it."

From that deceptively simple concept, in 2006, Women on Web was formed—not wholly without controversy. Dr. Gomperts said that some of her fellow activists were originally skeptical of the idea of an abortion-pill-by-mail service. "A lot of them said, 'You can't do that,' but there were also a lot of people who were supportive," she recalled. At the time, she knew that women were using misoprostol at home safely, but she felt she had to prove that the drug wasn't dangerous in order to successfully mainstream it. One-and-a-half years after Women on Web was founded, the organization published its first paper in the British Journal of Obstetricians and Gynaecology , concluding that "women seem capable of self-administering mifepristone and misoprostol at home without a doctor physically visiting them."

In the past nine years, Women on Web has grown exponentially, evolving into a complex network of doctors, legal experts, and volunteers. Twenty volunteers field over 8,000 requests a month in nine different languages, and according to Gomperts, the organization has sent mifepristone and misoprostol to women in 130 countries. Women on Web is constantly evolving, too: This summer they plan to test out a medical abortion delivery drone, and are in the process of launching an app.

Their success has inspired other, similar groups to launch. In September 2014, several former members of Women on Web formed Women Help Women, another abortion pill service open to women in over 100 countries worldwide. "We are called Women Help Women because women's hands can help get information and products to other women," representatives from the organization said in an emailed statement. "We simply cannot rely on governments, public health systems, medical personnel, individual services, or any other group alone to fight for women's rights. We all need to act."

Women on Web and Women Help Women both use the internet to help women gain control over their own reproductive agency, but other sites purporting to offer black market abortion pills often exploit women. "Women write us saying that they tried to buy misoprostol on the black market, and they had to pay $300, and then the pills were fake," Gomperts said. "It's awful. People are so mean." On the Women on Web website, there's an exhaustive list of websites that are known to scam women—many of which directly refer to misoprostol or abortion in their name. "Beware of these sites," a disclaimer warns. "They are a fraud, could harm your health, and will not end your pregnancy."

Complications have also arisen when a woman lacked the knowledge about the drug's proper dosage and/or method of administration. "Women on Web and Women Help Women are great, but there are issues as well," said the Abortion Support Network's Mara Clarke, whose organization only assists with travel and accommodations. "We had a woman who didn't have the correct instructions, so the pills didn't work, and in the time she was waiting to find out if she was still pregnant, the cost of the abortion went up [past what she could afford]. There have been cases where a woman who's 16 weeks pregnant thinks, Oh, well, if I take two sets... And things can happen, and because they're in countries where abortion is against the law, they're afraid to go seek aftercare." She fell into a brief, reflective silence and then added, "It is great, but it also shouldn't have to exist."

Gomperts hopes to address many of these issues with a new app, Safe Abortion with Pills. Although it's not completely finished yet—Women on Web are in the process of finalizing it, and the information will update automatically—it's currently available on Google Play. Safe Abortion with Pills functions as a comprehensive DIY abortion guide: "What you can do is select a country and a language, and then you get information on the law in the country," explained Gomperts. "You get information on which brands of misoprostol you can buy, about fakes and other organizations, and there's an animation about how to do a medical abortion with misoprostol." It's currently available in 15 languages, and it will eventually be free to download in the iTunes app store as well.

"One of the most important issues is that women know how to use medical abortion effectively," said Gomperts. "This app is a way to get the information out there."

Activists have realized it's insufficient to simply make misoprostol available—to make sure women are using it safely, they need to educate them as well. As Women Help Women put it in their emailed statement: "Arming women with knowledge about the safest and most effective way to use abortion pills and opening up access to genuine quality medication is simply the fair and right thing to do. The more groups and people are involved, the more we will be able to change."

Women Help Women partners with numerous abortion support organizations, ranging in size from grassroots feminist local groups to sprawling international networks. Most of these organizations operate as traditional abortion funds, which help women pay the various and often daunting costs associated with terminating an unwanted pregnancy, or activist groups that work in various legal channels by doing advocacy and raising awareness. A few assist women in accessing and using the abortion pill. One such group is the MARIA Fund, which three activists founded in 2009 after abortion was legalized in Mexico City. In the rest of the country it remains mostly illegal, and only thirteen of the country's 31 states allow the procedure if the mother's life is at risk.

"It was in response to the social injustice the law brought to Mexican women," MARIA Fund manager Oriana Lopez Uribe said in a phone interview. "This was a way to broaden the scope of the law, to help women from other states have access to the Mexico City law."

Like Dr. Gomperts before them, the founders of the MARIA Fund quickly realized that some women cannot possibly travel in order to obtain legal abortions, even when they're given financial assistance. Some women can't afford to take time off of work; some are incapable of finding childcare; some must conceal their pregnancies from abusive partners or from their parents. In Mexico, most pharmacies still sell misoprostol over the counter, so the women of the MARIA Fund decided to put clear, detailed instructions on their website, telling women how to safely locate and use the medication. ("Pharmacists are aware that oftentimes it is used to end pregnancies. As such, they obstruct sales by demanding unnecessary prescriptions. Some women have reported that it's simple for men to buy the medication for this reason," they advise.)

"We know the abortion pill exists. Everyone knows it," Lopez Uribe said, pointing to the numerous studies showing misoprostol's efficacy and safety. "It's better to have information that helps women use it the best way, not randomly."

Pro-life organizations and politicians often point to the grisly deaths women sometimes suffer as a result of illegal abortion as proof that the procedure inherently harms people, and they tend to argue illegalization is the only way to prevent women from dying during abortions. Activists vehemently disagree, noting that women have been terminating unwanted pregnancies for millennia and the procedure is only dangerous when performed in a setting of enforced ignorance.

"Women are going to have abortions," Lopez Uribe said. "They're not asking permission from anyone. Abortion happens when it's needed."

The Women on Web website encourages women to share their abortion stories, a practice Gomperts envisions as a way of combating the oppressive stigma around their reproductive choices. The site represents the stories as a series of circles on a worldmap, larger in areas where more women have shared their own accounts. The map illuminates both the ubiquity of the procedure and the way women will circumvent restrictive laws in any way they can: Circles cover much of South America—where most countries ban the procedure—and massive circles completely engulf Ireland.

478 Brazilian women have shared their story on the site. Writing under the pseudonym Maria Clara, one woman described why she chose to abort at home using Cytotec: "I know how daunting it is, but if you're certain that you cannot have a child, it's better to resort to [abortion] than to put a child in the world who is not wanted," she wrote. "Do not let anyone decide for you—not the government ban or religious standards. You have the right to decide what is best." Another, who went by Ray, chose a photo of Rosie the Riveter to accompany her account. "Every woman has the right to an abortion, no matter what her motives are," she said about taking Cytotec at home. "Abortion, whether legal or not, happens. It is a reality, and women will continue to do it."

And as long as women continue to go to extreme measures to terminate unwanted pregnancies, activists like Dr. Gomperts will be there to help. "Whatever method we have to use to respond to this need—the need to a safe abortion, to have access to healthcare—whether it's by information or with medicine or with a ship or a drone," she said, "we'll do it."

Follow Callie on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user opensource

It took Suzanne Legault, the Information Commissioner of Canada, 104 pages to say something very simple: Canadians are losing their right to access government information.

The long-delayed report, prepared by an office that is virtually bankrupt, is a jarring criticism of the Access to Information (ATI) system that is supposed to be one of the most powerful ways that Canadians can hold the government to account.

"There has been a steady erosion of access to information rights in Canada over the last 30 years," Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault said in releasing the report. "Although the act was intended to shine a light on government decisions, it has become a shield against transparency and has encouraged a culture of delay."

Legault introduced 85 recommendations to the act that would, among other things, extend the the scope of the access to information regime to ministers' offices (including that of the prime minister); create a legal obligation for bureaucrats to retain relevant information, and make it illegal to destroy it; make it harder for departments to delay requests; and to expand the commissioner's power to force departments to comply with the Act.

VICE interviewed the minister responsible for the ATI regime, Tony Clement, in December. He told us, then, that he's "quite willing to take credit" for the system.

"Canadians' right to access is healthy right now," Clement said.

VICE asked for an interview with Clement on today's report, but got a statement from his office instead—which is exactly the same statement that he read in the House of Commons when he was asked by members of the opposition about the report.

"Our Government takes Canadians' right of access to information very seriously and has taken important steps in the last few years in support of that right," the statement reads.

Clement regularly cites statistics that show that the government is releasing more documents than ever. The Commissioner's report, however, shows that refusals, redactions, and delays are bad and getting worse.

Clement's office has not commented on any of the recommendations. He would only say that: "I thank the Information Commissioner for her report and am currently reviewing her recommendations."

The fact that Legault's office could even finish the report is sort of incredible. The commissioner has been consulting and writing the report for two years, and in that time Legault's office has almost had to strip the wire out of the walls.

At the end of last fiscal year, Legault had $37,000 left in the bank. And things haven't gotten much better.

Financial statements from her office, which were also released Tuesday, reveal that the Office of the Information Commissioner has been cut so deep that there's virtually nothing left. Of their paltry $8.5 million budget, only about one percent is freed up for discretionary spending.

In other words: if the office were to be faced with any unexpected costs, they would have less than $100,000 to deal with it. Aside from that: they have no money.

"In order for the OIC to continue to operate within its appropriations, the Commissioner will need to cut into the program," the office's report reads. "This will result in longer wait times for complainants. In turn, this could lead to increased litigation related to complaint delays."

That means that it will be even more difficult to deal with the mountain of complaints levied against federal departments over delays, obfuscation, and outright refusals in releasing information under the ATI system.

One such complaint comes from VICE, over a request made to Canada's spy agency asking for financial reports on a program that has since been declared unconstitutional.

The government has not made any changes to the ATI system since they first came into power in 2006. The closest they've gotten is considering hiking the fee schedule.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Guy Miles (top left). Photo courtesy Innocence Project

In June 1998, an Orange County, California, bank was robbed. Three men made off with a little over a thousand dollars in cash.

At the time, Guy Miles, a 31-year-old black man from nearby Carson, was in violation of parole. Released from a California prison the year before—after spending two years there for stealing cars from a valet service—he was not permitted to leave the state. Miles wanted to break away from the life of gangs, crime, and prison that he had been locked into since dropping out of high school, according to his family.

So he left for Las Vegas, moved in with his new girlfriend, and kept himself afloat by shuttling between small jobs. Miles concealed his whereabouts from his parole officer by telling him he was staying with his parents in Carson, and every so often he would make a dash through the desert to show up for meetings.

In September 1998, Miles's parole officer asked him to come in for an impromptu meeting. Waiting for him at the office was a police officer with a warrant for his arrest. Two witnesses who'd been working at the Orange County bank at the time of the robbery had fingered Miles. At trial, his Vegas alibi didn't hold up against prosecutors' eyewitness testimonies and Miles and another man, Bernard Teamer, were found guilty. (Teamer had allegedly manned the getaway car.)

"During the trial, it was a farce. They were more interested in talking about gang activity than the actual crime," Miles's father, Charles, told VICE. He recalled that during the trial, the prosecutor asked Miles to show the courtroom his tattoo to indicate his affiliation with the East Coast 190 Crips.

At the outset, Patlan admitted to the investigators he would not be able to identify the stocky suspect.

With two strikes already on his record, Miles was sentenced to 75 years to life, in accordance with the state's three strikes law. He has spent the last 17 years locked up at California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo.

Criminal justice reform advocates say what happened to Miles shows what's wrong with the way eyewitness testimony is treated in America. Despite a nationwide trend toward various reforms in law enforcement, during trials a single eyewitness (who may be compromised in one way or another) can outweigh an overwhelming amount of other evidence.

"Off the bat, 35 percent of eyewitness testimonies are wrong," Rebecca Brown, director of state policy reform at the Innocence Project, told VICE.

And research shows that once you introduce a gun, a perpetrator of a different race, bad lighting, and police interference, the risk of misidentifying someone rises considerably. Last year saw a record number of exonerations, three-quarters of which centered on people who had been falsely convicted on the basis of a misidentification. Studies conducted over the last five years have shown one of every three people ID'ed as a perpetrator from a police photo lineup is an innocent "filler."

While prosecutorial misconduct, including deliberately mishandling witnesses, is present in up to 42 percent of exoneration cases, Brown believes misidentifications are a function of poor protocol.

"What we've seen is that the vast majority of mistaken identities is not the intention of police, but just them doing the normal procedures of the time," she said.

Decades of sociological and psychological research suggest the way police departments have traditionally conducted photo lineups is akin to trampling through a crime scene with muddy boots on.

"Everyone agrees that it's what happens at the front end of the criminal justice system that leads to wrongful convictions," John Furman, the director of research at the International Association of Police Chiefs (IAPC), said in an interview.

Experts and advocates recommend that police conduct double-blind sequential photo lineups in order to ensure the process is as pristine as possible. This means that instead of showing six mugshots at once ("six-packs"), a witness is shown one photo at a time, and the police officer conducting the lineup doesn't know who the suspect is. Finally, the sessions should be recorded and the witness admonished that the perpetrator may or may not be in the lineup.

"Witness identification is legally supposed to be independent, so if the detective contributes to the witnesses' decisions in some way, then it's not independent," according to Jennifer Dysart, an associate professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Dysart is one of many psychologists who believe that without blind administration, the reliability of the eyewitness process is jeopardized. She has studied the dynamic between a witness and a detective during photo lineups, and has observed that when an officer knows the identity of the suspect in the lineup, all kinds of subtle cues pass from the detective to the witness. A barely visible shift of the body. A nod of the head. A smile. Even the act of showing witnesses additional photos after they've indicated that one photo resembles the perpetrator can signal they haven't chosen "correctly."

As surely as physical evidence collected at a crime scene can be contaminated purposely or through carelessness, a witness's memory can be sullied and rendered invalid. In Miles's case, police began the process of contaminating the witnesses' already shaky memories as soon as they created the six-packs, according to advocates and experts who reviewed the case.

The two bank employees, Trina Gomez and Max Patlan, did not have a clear recollection of the two men who held them up, according to court documents. They knew that both men were black; one of the men was short and stocky and the other slender and maybe taller. The "stocky" man was said to have a shaved head, facial hair and "rolls on the back of his neck."

At the outset, Patlan admitted to the investigators he would not be able to identify the stocky suspect. The man had struck him on the face with the butt of a gun, pushed him to the ground, and shouted to him and Gomez to "do as they were told."

Nevertheless, Detective Michael Montgomery, the lead investigator, presented the witnesses with a total of 48 mugshots. He told the three witnesses that the police had arrested two suspects. During the process, the witnesses picked several photos of different people, suggesting they resembled the men who robbed the bank.

After a quick meeting with the prosecutors, during which she was directed to look at Miles' mugshot again, Gomez returned to the witness stand and stated for the jury, without hesitation, that Miles was the man.

Miles's mugshot appeared in the last set. His picture shows him with close-shaven hair, a shadow of a beard, and drooping shoulders. Miles was selected by Gomez and Patlan as the "stocky" man who had waved a gun around that June night, the man Patlan had suggested he would not be able to identify.

But when Trina Gomez took the stand at the trial a few months later, she stared at Miles sitting at the table next to his lawyer and said, not in the presence of the jury, "He looks different." Pausing, and then viewing him from another angle: "I'm sure that that's him in the photo, but I'm not sure if that's him over there."

After a quick meeting with the prosecutors, during which she was directed to look at Miles's mugshot again, Gomez returned to the witness stand and stated for the jury, without hesitation, that Miles was the man.

That faulty eyewitness identifications are a prodigious source of false convictions has become an almost undisputed realm for police reform. Research recommending new methods of showing photo lineups to witnesses is as old as the 1970s, but changes didn't begin to be implemented until the 2000s.

In 2013, IAPC recommended police departments adopt the double-blind sequential photo lineup method, and last year the National Academy of Science endorsed the blind administration of witness lineups,while remaining neutral on the issue of sequential versus simultaneous photos lineups.

Jurisdictions with reformed practices report the transition was pretty simple, requiring no extra man hours or costs and just a few simple adjustments to the routine lineup.

Santa Clara County, in Northern California, switched to the double-blind sequential method in 2003. David Angel, who works in the county's Convictions Integrity Unit, told VICE that since his jurisdiction adopted new methodology for photo lineups, they have have had no known cases of a wrongful conviction due to a misidentification.

"You begin to look at witness identification as trace evidence," Angel said. "You don't want to contaminate the evidence."

"There's growing public awareness and there's also a great deal of law enforcement leadership in this area," Brown, of the Innocence Project, said. Her organization has documented a handful of states that have implemented the package of reforms.

But Southern California, including Los Angeles and Orange County—the jurisdiction that convicted Miles—remains a significant holdout.

Though IAPC has recommended departments adopt the double-blind sequential method, many resist the change. "If a department hasn't had convictions overturned, they aren't going to think they need to modify their method," Furman told me.

"We feel like it is time for a city like Los Angeles to lead in this area, and we are hopeful that through a series of conversations that they will be hopeful," Brown added.

About a quarter of the cases the Innocence Project is working on in Southern California right now involve a faulty eyewitness, and yet jurisdictions there have yet to adopt the few simple reforms that have been implemented in the northern part of state and around the country.

Asked why Orange County has not changed its photo lineup methods, Lieutenant Ken Burmood of the Orange County Sheriff's Department told VICE, "That's the way we do it, and we've done it that way for a long time."

He added, "We haven't run into any of those problems where an officer or a detective has led anyone in a different direction."

Miles might beg to differ.

After his conviction and imprisonment, Miles tried to find the real perpetrators of the crime. His parents, both ministers in Carson, helped him. They sold their house in Atlanta and invested all their money and time trying to do what they believed the police had failed to. The couple hired a private investigator and used their immediate network of neighbors and friends to try to piece together a trail to the real culprits.

In 2002, the California Innocence Project picked Miles's case out of the thousands of pleas for assistance they receive each year. By 2007, two men, Harold Bailey and Jason Steward, had been tracked down. Bailey had been one of the 48 men whose photos had been shown to the witnesses in 1997, and one of the several that Gomez said looked "familiar." Both men eventually signed confessions that included minute details of the 1997 burglary.

In 2013, in response to Miles's petition, a California Appeals Court awarded Miles an evidentiary hearing. In preparation for the hearing, the Miles family lined up their witnesses again, including the two men who had confessed. By now both were in prison for unrelated crimes. The district attorney's office fought to uphold Miles's conviction, as a matter of routine and because Trina Gomez and Max Patlan had not recanted their original testimonies.

At the evidentiary hearing, Teamer, who had originally pleaded not guilty, admitted that he had helped organize the robbery and that Miles had never been involved. Teamer testified that he hadn't told the truth at the original trial time because he was too afraid of retribution to snitch on fellow gang members.

Miles's defense team presented the confessions, Miles's alibi, and the updated scientific research on the fallibility of the photo lineup methodology the police had used to collect their testimonies.

But the assigned referee, Judge Thomas Goethals, ruled the confessions of these convicted felons "uncredible" and recommended the Appellate Court uphold Miles's conviction, even while acknowledging that he "could in fact be innocent." The fact that the eyewitnesses were sticking to their original testimonies essentially meant that Goethals could not rule that the prosecution's case had been undermined.

Miles, who completed his high school degree in prison, is now waiting for the Appeals court to make the final ruling on whether he should receive a new trial. (VICE reached out to the DA's office to ask about Guy Miles and their position on eyewitness identification reform, and they did not respond for comment.)

"We presented evidence that the system variables directly led to a misidentification, we had three people saying they committed the crime--not Guy," Alex Simpson of the California Innocence Project at the California Western School of Law told VICE. "But even in that situation, we couldn't reverse it. It shows you how powerful eyewitness testimony is."

Follow Charlotte Silver on Twitter.

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Trevor Noah. Photo from Noah's official website

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that "polyglot" South African comedian Trevor Noah would replace Jon Stewart as anchor of The Daily Show. I have polyglot friends in far-flung places and none seemed too impressed by the choice. From London: "i checked out that dude. he's not funny at all. that's not racist that's just THE TREWS." Newfoundland: "I think they should have got an American to take over the Daily Show, preferably an African-American." "I suspect he'll be a disaster," wrote a friend who consorts with an occultist. "All my Sefrican friends on FB are posting about what a comedic genius this guy is." My own Sefrican mother sent me and my dad a group text: "How cool is that!"

The great thing about a polyglot is that everyone gets to be right. Trevor Noah's standup is OK, if a little cartoonish. In one bit, he's been learning German so that he can feel closer to his father, who is Swiss. Night after night he falls asleep listening to German YouTube videos. Like putting a textbook under your pillow the night before an exam, it's amazing how well it works, it doesn't even matter which videos, the German just seeps in. Then in Cologne, he goes into a sandwich shop—in one iteration it's the American Subway chain—and orders his trimmings Heil Hitler–style. It's hard to do this sort of Godwin's Law comedy IRL, and he doesn't really pull it off.

I wager he'll pull off The Daily Show, though, because he is adorable, and warmth and charm are more important in a host than standup chops. Noah won't be writing all the jokes, but he'll deliver them well. He has the cute face of a cupid, a single dimple, and a Crest-commercial smile. His accent makes people roll over and proffer their bellies for the tickling; his jokes are more easy than cruel. He's a good mimic who can do pretty much any accent, and his American accents are accurate, excepting the Valley Girl surfer he tells he has AIDS. He's a melted pot, an everyman who dabbles in cultures, mocking each equally lightly and lovingly. Conceived illegally—his parents' relationship was a crime under Apartheid—he says he spent his childhood feeling like a bag of weed. His father couldn't hold his hand but kept an eye on him from across the street, like a "creepy pedophile." He backs up: "Not a creepy pedophile," he corrects himself—that would imply there's a special subset of classy molester, the type who says he's "just browsing."

South Africans love Noah because he makes us feel better about our terrible history. "I grew up in a country that wasn't normal," he told the Times, a nice bit of understatement. He likens the clicks in Xhosa, his mother's tongue, to Chinese New Year in your mouth. They're happy sounds, he says, whether or not the speaker is happy. As a little boy he enjoyed it when his mother shouted at him for drawing on the walls, until she gave him a smack and he realized the language was "not as advertised." Noah is Madam and he is Eve. Like Pieter-Dirk Uys, an older South African stand-up artist, he is a deft impersonator of politicians. Uys is Afrikaans and looks it, whether or not he's in drag. Noah's skin is a color you might have "raced together" with a Starbucks barista, were that still on the menu, and in race-hysterical South Africa, his mixedness is a source of loneliness as well as power. Like President Obama, he self-identifies as black; it is his nuance within that identity that gives his comedy intelligence and dimension.

In 2012, Noah went on The Tonight Show and made Jay Leno laugh about Americans' terrible credit scores. "Come back and see us again, man," said the host, and the Times of South Africa called Noah's mother to find out how proud she was of her witty kid. " Ufun' ukuthetha ngezinto zasecawini? [Do you want to talk church matters?]" she asked, possibly rhetorically. "Unless you want to talk about izinto zasecawini, I know nothing... I have not even watched one movie or show, and I know nothing about his life. I'm strictly into God's things—not interested in Trevor's things." Eish!

Now everyone's interested in Trevor's things, which has led to the discovery of some rather sloppy tweets about Israelis, "fat chicks," and how Jewish girls don't go down. Those years-old quips have ignited a controversy that's an echo to another recent online dustup centered on a Lena Dunham New Yorker piece entitled "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz." David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, defended Dunham's piece by issuing a statement that read, "The Jewish-comic tradition is rich with the mockery of, and playing with, stereotypes... Lena Dunham, who is Jewish and hugely talented, is a comic voice working in that vein. Richard Pryor and Chris Rock do the same about black stereotypes; Amy Schumer does it with women and gender." (Dunham, as her surname suggests, is half-Jewish, the half that lets you say you're all in and the hall pass you need if you want to claim you're self-skewering—a stale line of reasoning that in Dunham's case is a reach.) Comedy Central has likewise stood by Noah, saying, "To judge him or his comedy based on a handful of jokes is unfair." It's safe to say that Noah has learned what Dunham knows, which is that everyone is watching now.

No one is watching more proudly than his fellow South Africans. My mother rang me to go over a list of his achievements, as though he were a schoolmate of mine (we're the same age), technically impossible because, Apartheid. "I'm still amazed that he was offered the job. I think it's a fluke. What's his name, the guy who's leaving?" My mother has lived in the US for 30 years and forgets this type of stuff on purpose. "I think Jon whoever-he-is just fell in love with Trevor, and that's what made it happen." Her favorite Noah bits include the cashier in Checkers ("they look at you like your dad invented the barcode"), his drunk Nelson Mandela, and his depiction of white versus black South African girls in the shower. "The white girls are like, 'Oh, the water is so lovely, la-la-la.' The black girls are washing their bodies and getting on with life."

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Image courtesy of Mikey Mike

Recently, a set of fliers began to appear in Los Angeles. "New to LA," the copy read. "Lonely as fuck. Wanna be friendz? Interests: Women, Narcotics, Pizza." The fliers featured a crappy picture of a dude that was clearly a DMV photo, and an email address. As many compellingly weird things do, the fliers found their way to Reddit, where the poster was compared unfavorably to Charles Manson and Barty Crouch from Harry Potter, and got summarily written off a viral marketing stunt for the Fox sitcom Weird Loners, despite other posters claiming that they had seen the man on the fliers shirtlessly posting them himself.

Hoax or not, there's something strangely touching about such a desperate and public plea for companionship. Meeting new people as an adult is inherently weird, and it gets even weirder as you get older, your tastes change, and you may find yourself grown apart from your old buddies.

I know a little bit about this sort of loneliness: In the past six months I relocated to from New York to Los Angeles and then quit drinking. I was left in a strange new place where my two closest companions were my girlfriend and my dog. I love both of them, but it's very easy to feel disconnected in a new city, even when you're with a partner. So I emailed the address on the flyer, hoping against hope my message would reach a real, if sorta-creepy-looking, guy trying to find some people to eat pizza with.

I got a response almost immediately. As it turns out, the fliers are not viral marketing for a TV show, but they are a work of viral marketing (sort of). They come from a guy named Mikey Mike (legal name: Mike Williams), a Los Angeles–based musician who initially put the posters up to help drum up publicity for his upcoming music video for a song titled "Cut My Hair."

"I knew [the posters] would start this spiral of shit," Mikey Mike told me over the phone, "because you can't miss it. Even if you just see the picture, you think either I'm a murderer on the loose, or I'm missing." Mikey told me he made the fliers as weird as humanly possible, to inspire the reaction of, "What the hell is that?" among those who saw it. He claims he was inspired to make the posters by Dan Perino, a New York man who put up similar fliers in an attempt to find a girlfriend. As for the "Interests: Women, Narcotics, Pizza" thing, Mikey said, "That's actually my interests so that was a given."

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Photo courtesy of Mikey Mike

Whatever his reasons for posting the flyers, he's now finding out that there are a lot of lonely people in Los Angeles. He's started meeting them, too—last night he emailed me a picture of him and a new friend who called himself Simba, and joked, "One down, a couple hundred to go." The most interesting thing Mikey has discovered from this, he told me, is "how many people in such a giant city feel lonely and the lengths they are willing to go to meet other people and shit."

VICE: So talk about some of the responses you've gotten.
Mikey Mike: It runs the whole fucking gamut. There have been a lot of genuine people who are just like, "Hey, I'm new here too. I'm also lonely. Let's smoke a blunt," or, "Hey, I'm into narcotics." None of them are normal because there's not really a normal way to be like, "Let's be friends and we're strangers." The end idea was to email everyone who did it back and tell them, "Friday night meet me at..." We had a spot rented out but it fell through so we're trying to find another one. We're trying to start this grassroots shit where people can come if they're new to the city or even if they're not new there are so many people here who, even if they've got a lot of friends, they want to meet new people.

It really speaks to the idea that LA can be a very lonely place. And it can be hard to make platonic friends.
You make friends and then people get so involved in what they're doing they disappear. I've been here two years and sometimes I'm still fucking lonely. I'm kind of just rolling around trying to figure it all out. I know when I first moved here, it was weird because I didn't know anybody except people in music from the other side of the country. So I would go to bars and I met all my friends through getting trashed, smoking cigarettes on the patio, like going to a bar, bumming cigarettes, and talking to people. That was kind of the only way I knew how.

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Mikey Mike eating pizza with Simba, a man he met through his fliers.

A lot of people, especially college students, make friends like that. But it's hard for an actual connection to be forged over getting fucked up.
I think that reflects the times. Everybody's so wrapped up in their shit, wrapped up in their fucking Instagram page, how many likes they're getting. It's like everything, especially in this city, it's just kind of set up where people are just like in their own fucking world. Even when you hang with people, sometimes you can't really get to know them. I've had a lot of times where I thought I had really gotten to know somebody here and some shit happened and I was like, "Holy fuck I didn't know that person at all." And I considered that person a friend. It's part of being in this city I guess.

What do you think defines friendship? Specifically friendship in Los Angeles?
I think friendship in general is like, for me, if I'm drunk at a bar and I get in a fight with somebody, even if I'm fucking in the wrong, you got my back. That's what it means to be a friend. Even if I know maybe they offended somebody and it's on them, I'm still gonna have their back. And here that's a rare thing to find. Everybody's so caught up in their own shit, it's like, "What can you do for me? What can I do for you?" And a lot of friendships are based on that. Even if you dance around that shit, like a lot of times I feel like that's the case.

Has there been anyone who's emailed you that you've been genuinely interested in hanging out with?
There were a few people that you could tell by the way they worded their responses that they were really clever and smart, and I immediately knew they were on to something. And whatever it was, they were cool people and they were with it. It's funny because a lot of people have said similar things: "I don't have a lot of friends, let's hang out."

Below is selection of responses from Mikey's new friends:

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Drew Millard is on Twitter.

For months now, signs around Amsterdam have been warning passersby to "ignore street dealers." Apparently, someone has been selling white heroin as cocaine, so far causing three British tourists to die from overdoses, so I guess they are necessary.

A while back, a man I'll call Dennis tried to sell me "coca, coca" about two feet away from one of those signs. We got talking about the current drug market and his personal life, which has been something of a roller coaster. Dennis has spent more time in jail than I've spent riding the tram, and has seen the drug business change drastically in the past 40 years.

VICE: How do you feel about the fact that one of your colleagues is selling heroin as cocaine?
Dealer Dennis: I think it's inhumane to pull a dirty trick like that. That stuff will kill you. I don't understand why he's doing it. But it's not really hurting my business or anything. Tourists mostly ignore the signs, so it doesn't really affect me. Some dealers are selling test kits with their cocaine now, but I don't.

How did you end up becoming a coke dealer?
When I was 17, I was really good at football. I was doing really well, until I got a girl pregnant. After that, it all went downhill fast. I couldn't handle the responsibility and didn't want to accept that I had a kid. Meanwhile, I was using more and more and had started selling on the streets.

How did the selling work?
I knew people that had kilos of the stuff lying around for a good price. I'd sell it on the Zeedijk, in the heart of Chinatown near the red light district. I was making lots of money – a gram of coke went for about 300 gilders [$170] then. It was easy money; there were people coming and going all day and night. Amsterdam was really a drug city in the late 1980s.

Isn't it still?
Not as much as it was back then. It's terrible out on the streets now. People are selling all kinds of shit. Like lidocaine, for example. If you put that on your gums, it will numb them a bit, just like with cocaine. Those drunk English tourists always pretend to feel something, but it doesn't really do much.

"A lot of tourists only come here to do drugs—not to see how beautiful the Netherlands are, or to have a nice bit of cheese. I stop them from only using drugs on their holiday by selling them fake shit."

What was it like when you were arrested for the first time?
The more you sell and the more profit you turn, the more you feel like you're invincible. Until an undercover cop tapped me on the shoulder one day and I had to go to jail. It wasn't half as bad as I thought it would be, though. I was like, "Oh, is that it? That prison was like a hotel!" And there were so many drugs inside, even more than on the outside. Anyway, once I got out, I started thinking about ways to make sure I wouldn't get arrested again.

So you changed your tactics?
At first, I'd just have all my drugs on me and sell them myself. Afterwards, I had people working for me: One had the drugs on him, another would go looking for customers, and I'd collect the money. If they nabbed me, they couldn't really touch me, because I didn't have anything on me.

But I took good care of my customers. Not like those guys that use their users, you know. I'd sometimes pay for a hotel room if they didn't have a place to go, or give them some food if they were going through a rough time. I was also pretty easy about lending money.

Was business good then?
On good days, I was making 1,500 to 2,000 gilders [$840–$1,200] a day. But I did indulge a little at times. And I would get arrested every now and then, but I never spent more than two, maybe four, months in prison. At a certain point, the Netherlands was suddenly overflowing with cocaine, which really drove the price down. Suddenly coke was only going for 25 gilders [$14] a gram. Everything was still going relatively well though—until the euro was introduced.

The euro?
Yes! No one had any cash anymore after we got the euro. The police also got a lot stricter all of a sudden, and they installed cameras everywhere. Before you knew it, you'd be locked up again. I was doing a lot more time. The euro really killed the business.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='an-interview-with-an-amsterdam-coke-dealer-876-body-image-1427804593.jpg' id='41516']A pair of tourists being charming in Amsterdam. Photo by Jitske Nap

Were you still using at the time?
I'd been with a girl that I'd met on the streets for about nine years. I'd told her: "Listen, I'm going to take care of you, but I just got out of prison and I'm a user. So please, I really don't want any kids." One day I came home, and she told me she was pregnant. I freaked out. I told her I didn't want to have a kid, and she left me.

Do you feel guilty about that?
Absolutely. I felt embarrassed about my drug use. I didn't want my kids to grow up with an addict for a father. When she left me, I just fell apart. I was smoking coke every day. I'd wake up and just smoke and smoke. I didn't want to see anyone, stopped paying my bills, built up mountains of debt. I'm still struggling with that now.

Are you still using as much?
No, I quit about two years ago. My mother became ill and needed help. Half of her body is paralyzed, and she can't sit down or stand up on her own or go to the bathroom. I made myself useful by taking care of her. I take care of her every day now; sometimes I cook her a nice Surinam dish, she likes that a lot more than the traditional Dutch stuff. Before she got sick, we went to Surinam together and I didn't use for a week, even though there's plenty of drugs there. Someone in the hotel where we were staying asked if I wanted to bring some drugs back to the Netherlands. I said: "I'm here with my mum, man. Come on."

What are the biggest changes you've seen in the drug business?
People are cutting their stuff more and more. The quality has just gone downhill. Before, Surinam dealers used to have the best coke, but those days are over. The Moroccans have taken over the trade now—that's where I get my stuff too. And sometimes I sell flour or baking powder.

"It's terrible out on the streets now – people will sell all kinds of shit. Like lidocaine."

Flour? You offered me "coca, coca." Would you have sold me the fake stuff?
No, no. I only sell that to drunk Brits. I might run into you again. You seem like a nice guy, but you never know who's carrying a knife or a gun. I usually have both coke and flour on me, and decide on the spot which one you'll be getting.

I think of it as drug prevention. A lot of tourists only come here to do drugs—not to see how beautiful the Netherlands are, or to have a nice bit of cheese. I stop them from only using drugs on their holiday by selling them fake shit. And you can't die from snorting a bit of flour, so I think it's a good solution.

Why don't you just get a job?
I'd like to, but social services thinks that I committed benefit fraud because I was selling fake dope while I was on benefits. So I have to pay back about 40,000 euro [$43,000]. And I still have to pay off water bills, medical insurance, and rent money from the time when I was still an addict. So I'm a bit short on cash. I'm on welfare, and have about 60 euro [$65] a week to spend on food or something like a pair of shoes. I stopped using two years ago, but those debts don't just go away.

How are your kids doing?
Very well. I have four, with three different women. My youngest daughter had her birthday this week, which was nice. Only my eldest son knows about my past. He's doing very well with his degree and stuff. I feel bad that I wasn't there for him in the past, but I'm very proud of him now.

Have you every thought about starting a delivery service instead of selling on the street?
I'm afraid that I'll start using again if I have the stuff on me for too long, so I don't want to do anything big anymore. This is all very small-scale. I sell a gram or two in the weekend, just to have an extra tenner to spend during the week.

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Here's the latest look into the world of Walter Pearce, the coolest 21-year-old photographer we know. Walter is a model and casting director in addition to being an artist, and these are some of the beautiful people he hangs out with.

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Walter Pearce is an NYC-based photographer. Follow him on Instagram for more dry moments from exciting places and plenty of selfies.