A few years ago, my neighbor Luke* went to a bonfire party on a mountain just outside of Beijing. Three busloads of revelers came from the capital, he said, amply provisioned with alcohol and cannabis; a few had mushrooms or acid.

But the fun didn't last. "There was a mole," he guessed. On the way back, police stopped the buses at a tollbooth. "They made all the Chinese take their bags and get off the bus. Then they went through everyone's bags, and a bunch of Chinese people got taken off and sent to jail."

The expats escaped punishment, however. "One of the police guys came on the bus to yell at us: 'When you're in China, you should obey Chinese laws!'," Luke recalled. But that was the end of it. "All the foreigners got off scot-free."

He came out luckier than the partiers at 2 Kolegas, a live music bar with a cheap-beer-and-hipsters vibe. One night last August, police suddenly sealed the exits and subjected everyone in the crowd to a surprise drug test. Australian reporter Stephen McDonell, who happened to be present, described the raid in The Drum:

With toilet doors open police watched as we gave samples one by one. Women, too, had to squat with the toilet door open. A police woman would stand in the doorway and partially block the view of those who walked about in front of the stalls.

As soon as a sample was handed over it was held up to the light. In some cases there was a reaction. From where I stood I could not see what this was but those who "failed" the test were taken outside the bar and made to sit on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs - heads down. Some had their mouths taped closed. Policemen stood over them and ordered them not to speak.

The raid on 2 Kolegas was a sobering shock to the THC-infused expat community. Would we now have to actually obey China's strict antidrug laws?

Among those caught up in the latest crackdown was Jackie Chan's son, Jaycee, who was slapped with a six-month jail sentence after getting caught with three ounces of weed. Over the past five months, authorities have arrested 133,000 suspects and seized 43.3 tons of narcotics, the official Xinhua News Service recently reported, and police have punished 606,000 suspects in total during the same period.

Coke and pills are among the local drugs of choice, but the weed scene is muted. Expats buy and sell almost exclusively among themselves; except for a few overseas Chinese men (Taiwan, Hong Kong or those born abroad) and women with foreign boyfriends, I didn't know any mainland Chinese who smoke regularly.

"The [local] stoner community here has to stay closeted," an American acquaintance told me. "It's not like [some states] in the US, where anything up to an ounce and you get, like, a $250 fine. If you have an ounce on you in China you go to a black site prison where they do crazy medical experiments to you and shit."

Still, I couldn't help being curios. Christopher Hitchens once wrote about being offered alcohol at almost every home he visited in Ayatollah-run Iran. Was there a similar underground in China? Chinese people use Facebook and watch porn in spite of nominal government bans. How many Chinese people, I wondered, have secret stashes and heat lamps?

The answer is quite a few. Behind a tight veil of secrecy, there is a small but flourishing circle of mainlanders who grow, trade, smoke, and eat weed.

I asked my closest bud-smoking buds what advice they'd give to a new arrival, and all the foreigners gave the same unanimous recommendation: "Just go to Sanlitun and talk to one of the black guys."

Sanlitun is Beijing's party district, an overpriced purgatory of fake liquor and expensive hangovers. It's the capital's yuppie center, with an Apple Store and a colossal 24-hour Starbucks. When I first arrived in Beijing two years ago, business was brisk and unmolested by the authorities. You couldn't cross Sanlitun without being asked, in the accented tones of the West African community, "Hey man, you good?"

[body_image width='1440' height='810' path='images/content-images/2015/04/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/29/' filename='i-asked-people-in-beijing-where-they-buy-weed-429-body-image-1430317971.jpg' id='51063']

Sanlitun district in Beijing. Photo via Flickr user Lux Moundi

A former colleague buys from one of the African dealers. He's an American, living in the labyrinth of alleys and corridors between the Drum Tower and a famous Tibetan temple, and agreed to be quoted on the singular condition that I call him "Richard Sledge," which is apparently a reference from Archer. I'm going to call him Dick instead.

Dick's dealer "works in an embassy, but selling is his main source of income." (Dick wouldn't tell me which embassy.) Dick thinks that at least part of the reason Africans are the most visible dealers is that with China's strict laws against drug trafficking, diplomatic missions from corrupt countries in Africa are likely among the only reliable ways to bring in commercial quantities.

African dealers, Dick explained, "won't have the best, or second-best, or even fifteenth-best stuff, but it's a start." He wasn't sanguine about the quality, though: "I'm lucky if $50 can get me two grams of halfway decent shit."

African dealers were among the first to get targeted by the new crackdowns. "My guy ran into a snag and won't be selling anytime soon," Dick told me mournfully. Multiple other sources confirmed that the market has gone underground, or at least indoors, in recent months.

The next easiest option, according to Chinese buyers, is the Uyghurs.

Lucy* is a Chinese woman I met last year at Strawberry Festival, a three-day marathon of booze and bands and drugs. She studies accounting and likes to cosplay and read Murakami. "I've only smoked weeds three times," she told me. "My boyfriend was curious, so we tried it together." Many of her friends had tried it as well. When I asked where they got it, she guessed that most students "bought it from the terrorists."

The "terrorists," in this case, are the Uyghurs—a Muslim minority that is said to have used hashish as a medicine for centuries. Her characterization is not uncommon among Han Chinese, many of whom distrust the restive minority.

Other Chinese echoed the sentiment, albeit less bluntly. At a barbecue near 2 Kolegas I met a quiet, occasional smoker who asked me to call him Wang Er.

"I worked in Shanghai for about half a year. Shanghai is not a politically strict city, so I can buy weed there. In Shanghai, lots of Xinjiang people [i.e., Uyghurs] sell marijuana."

I asked if he was worried about getting caught. "In the capital city, it's serious. Fifteen days, half a year or even longer jail time if you are caught selling drugs... But in Shanghai it's not that serious. Some Xinjiangren sell weed outside the clubs, and the police just walk by without caring."

But the Muslim weed is expensive. A joint at a Shanghai club cost Wang 100 yuan ($16) and provides only a weak, ten-minute high. Lucy paid 300 yuan for a couple of grams.

Related: Watch our documentary about how China's booming billionaire population has developed a penchant for personal bodyguards.

Mark*, on the other hand, doesn't seem like the type of guy you'd expect to do drugs. He works as the COO for a major tech firm and doesn't speak much English, but does know such essential everyday expressions as "weed," "hash," "cocaine," and "heroin."

Mark says he was 22 when he smoked his first joint, and estimates that he smokes about ten or 20 times a year. "We usually get it at clubs or concerts," he said over lunchtime beers. Most of his smoking needs are satisfied through friends."It's like you share with me when you have drugs, and I'll treat you when I have drugs, very much like treating friends to dinner. Very typical Chinese style." Mark seems to have generous friends: He said he's only had to buy for himself once, from "a black guy near Chaoyang park."

"I had several Xinjiang classmates. They just put the drugs in a cigarette box and take them on the plane. That was before the Xinjiang Chaos [of June 2009]; now they can't do that anymore."

Everyone I interviewed had one thing in common: Their interest in pot was piqued by Western cultural imports.

The last time Mark smoked was about two months ago at a company retreat outside of Beijing. "After dinner, lots of my colleagues drank lots of beer. About four o'clock we smoked pot with a colleague from America. I smoked about two cigarettes," he said. "We can smoke like that in my company."

Mark isn't the only one mixing business with pleasure. "All of my friends" smoke, said Danielle*, a mainlander I met through Luke. Most of her circle are experimental actors or musicians. "[W]e don't really talk about it but just do it," she explained over the course of several emails. "My friends, my friends of friends, there are tones of us [ sic] living under the pressure, a cop inside of our brain, but we carry on the taboo anyway."

Danielle earned a reputation for daredevilry after she turned a trendy local café into personal grow-op. The secret garden, literally beneath customers' noses, flourished for a full summer and made her a hero to her artsy friends. (She insisted that the cafe, located in Beijing's old quarter, not be named, and cafe staff emphatically declined to comment.)

Everyone I interviewed had one thing in common: Their interest in pot was piqued by Western cultural imports.

Mark became curious about pot in high school, music serving as his gateway drug: "We watched movies and documentaries about American bands and wanted to try drugs," he said. "So that makes some conservative Chinese blame American culture for teaching us bad things. " Lucy got interested after reading Jack Kerouac.

In that context, China's anti-drug policy can be seen as of a piece with the government's reluctance to open the country's intellectual and cultural doors. But it obviously hasn't turned Beijing into a drug-free zone, and the crackdown, at least as of January, was set to conclude this month, after which the city's stoners will be able to exhale a little easier.

Echo Wei contributed translations.

*Names have been changed.

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

David Simon is Baltimore's best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for the Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and, with former homicide detective Ed Burns, co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the HBO television series The Wire (2002–2008), and a member of The Marshall Project's advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday.

Bill Keller: What do people outside the city need to understand about what's going on there—the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?
David Simon: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I'm not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war—which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city—was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. It was done almost as a plan by the local government, by police commissioners and mayors, and it not only made everybody in these poor communities vulnerable to the most arbitrary behavior on the part of the police officers, it taught police officers how not to distinguish in ways that they once did.

Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It's a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, "You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long." Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war.

Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn't even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.

How does race figure into this? It's a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.
What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in Bonfire of the Vanities. When Ed and I reported The Corner, it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they're supposed to be policing, and there isn't a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable.

But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras—which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence—back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you're white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers—however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required—it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.

What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that, beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known on the street in the previous generation as 'humbles.' A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on "failure to obey," it's a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the '60s in Baltimore. It's the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way. And yet, back in the day, there was, I think, more of a code to it. If you were on a corner, you knew certain things would catch you a humble. The code was really ornate, and I'm not suggesting in any way that the code was always justifiable in any sense, but there was a code.

My own crew members [on The Wire] used to get picked up trying to come from the set at night.

In some districts, if you called a Baltimore cop a motherfucker in the 80s and even earlier, that was not generally a reason to go to jail. If the cop came up to clear your corner and you're moving off the corner, and out of the side of your mouth you call him a motherfucker, you're not necessarily going to jail if that cop knows his business and played according to code. Everyone gets called a motherfucker, that's within the realm of general complaint. But the word "asshole"—that's how ornate the code was—asshole had a personal connotation. You call a cop an asshole, you're going hard into the wagon in Baltimore. At least it used to be that way. Who knows if those gradations or nuances have survived the cumulative brutalities of the drug war. I actually don't know if anything resembling a code even exists now.

For example, you look at the people that Baltimore was beating down in that list in that story the Sun published last year about municipal payouts for police brutality, and it shows no discernable or coherent pattern. There's no code at all, it's just, what side of the bed did I get up on this morning and who looked at me first? And that is a function of people failing to learn how to police. When you are beating on 15-year-old kids and elderly retirees_and you aren't even managing to put even plausible misdemeanor charges on some arrestees, you've lost all professional ethos.

The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was [former Mayor and Maryland Governor] Martin O'Malley . He destroyed police work in some real respects. Whatever was left of it when he took over the police department, if there were two bricks together that were the suggestion of an edifice that you could have called meaningful police work, he found a way to pull them apart. Everyone thinks I've got a hard-on for Marty because we battled over The Wire, whether it was bad for the city, whether we'd be filming it in Baltimore. But it's been years, and I mean, that's over. I shook hands with him on the train last year and we buried it. And, hey, if he's the Democratic nominee, I'm going to end up voting for him. It's not personal and I admire some of his other stances on the death penalty and gay rights. But to be honest, what happened under his watch as Baltimore's mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high and with his promises of a reduced crime rate on the line, he put no faith in real policing.

Originally, early in his tenure, O'Malley brought Ed Norris in as commissioner and Ed knew his business. He'd been a criminal investigator and commander in New York and he knew police work. And so, for a time, real crime suppression and good retroactive investigation was emphasized, and for the Baltimore department, it was kind of like a fat man going on a diet. Just leave the French fries on the plate and you lose the first ten pounds. The initial crime reductions in Baltimore under O'Malley were legit and O'Malley deserved some credit.

But that wasn't enough. O'Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.

How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail—forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.

My own crew members [on The Wire] used to get picked up trying to come from the set at night. We'd wrap at like one in the morning, and we'd be in the middle of East Baltimore and they'd start to drive home, they'd get pulled over. My first assistant director—Anthony Hemingway—ended up at city jail. No charge. Driving while black, and then trying to explain that he had every right to be where he was, and he ended up on Eager Street [location of the notorious Baltimore City Detention Center]. Charges were non-existent, or were dismissed en masse. Martin O'Malley's logic was pretty basic: If we clear the streets, they'll stop shooting at each other. We'll lower the murder rate because there will be no one on the corners.

The city eventually got sued by the ACLU and had to settle, but O'Malley defends the wholesale denigration of black civil rights to this day. Never mind what it did to your jury pool: now every single person of color in Baltimore knows the police will lie—and that's your jury pool for when you really need them for when you have, say, a felony murder case. But what it taught the police department was that they could go a step beyond the manufactured probable cause, and the drug-free zones and the humbles—the targeting of suspects through less-than-constitutional procedure. Now, the mass arrests made clear, we can lock up anybody, we don't have to figure out who's committing crimes, we don't have to investigate anything, we just gather all the bodies—everybody goes to jail. And yet people were scared enough of crime in those years that O'Malley had his supporters for this policy, council members and community leaders who thought, They're all just thugs.

But they weren't. They were anybody who was slow to clear the sidewalk or who stayed seated on their front stoop for too long when an officer tried to roust them. Schoolteachers, Johns Hopkins employees, film crew people, kids, retirees, everybody went to the city jail. If you think I'm exaggerating look it up. It was an amazing performance by the city's mayor and his administration.

The situation you described has been around for a while. Do you have a sense of why the Freddie Gray death has been such a catalyst for the response we've seen in the last 48 hours?
Because the documented litany of police violence is now out in the open. There's an actual theme here that's being made evident by the digital revolution. It used to be our word against yours. It used to be said—correctly—that the patrolman on the beat on any American police force was the last perfect tyranny. Absent a herd of reliable witnesses, there were things he could do to deny you your freedom or kick your ass that were between him, you, and the street. The smartphone with its small, digital camera, is a revolution in civil liberties.

They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies.

And if there's still some residual code, if there's still some attempt at precision in the street-level enforcement, then maybe you duck most of the outrage. Maybe you're just cutting the procedural corners with the known players on your post—assuming you actually know the corner players, that you know your business as a street cop. But at some point, when there was no code, no precision, then they didn't know. Why would they? In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren't policing their post anymore, they weren't policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren't nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There's a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods—which were indeed drug-saturated because that's the only industry left—become just hunting grounds. They weren't protecting anything. They weren't serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They're an army of occupation.

And once it's that, then everybody's the enemy. The police aren't looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There's no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops. There's no reason to solve crime. In the years they were behaving this way, locking up the entire world, the clearance rate for murder dove by 30 percent. The clearance rate for aggravated assault—every felony arrest rate—took a significant hit. Think about that. If crime is going down, and crime is going down, and if we have less murders than ever before and we have more homicide detectives assigned, and better evidentiary technologies to employ how is the clearance rate for homicide now 48 percent when it used to be 70 percent, or 75 percent?

Because the drug war made cops lazy and less competent?
How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That's what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who's going to court seven or eight days a month—and court is always overtime pay—you're going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who's burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he's made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he's going to court one day and he's out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it's time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who's doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy's only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work?

I've just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such—the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make—is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That's what the drug war built, and that's what Martin O'Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.

The second thing Marty did, in order to be governor, involves the stats themselves. In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn't enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.

What can you do? You can't artificially lower the murder rate—how do you hide the bodies when it's the state health department that controls the medical examiner's office? But the other felony categories? Robbery, aggravated assault, rape? Christ, what they did with that stuff was jaw-dropping.

So they cooked the books.
Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count. If they went to the hospital with a bullet in them, it probably had to count as an aggravated assault. But if someone just took a gun out and emptied the clip and didn't hit anything or they didn't know if you hit anything, suddenly that was a common assault or even an unfounded report. Armed robberies became larcenies if you only had a victim's description of a gun, but not a recovered weapon. And it only gets worse as some district commanders began to curry favor with the mayoral aides who were sitting on the Comstat data. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , 'I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,' and what they would do is tell him, Well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there's any paper on you. Wait, you're doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you're living with? What's your address again? You still want to report that robbery?

Two things get your ass kicked faster than anything: one is making a cop run.

They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren't a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they'd share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.

I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore's felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can't hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.

But these guys weren't satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O'Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O'Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she'll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.

So Martin O'Malley proclaims a Baltimore Miracle and moves to Annapolis. And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that's when the murder rate really dives. That's when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that's when Baltimore makes some progress.

But nothing corrects the legacy of a police department in which the entire rank-and-file has been rewarded and affirmed for collecting bodies, for ignoring probable cause, for grabbing anyone they see for whatever reason. And so, fast forward to Sandtown and the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray gives some Baltimore police the legal equivalent of looking at them a second or two too long. He runs, and so when he's caught he takes an ass-kicking and then goes into the back of a wagon without so much as a nod to the Fourth Amendment.

So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?
We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone's pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court. You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, 'Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.' No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see. But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it's draconian and it's a disaster.

When you say, end the drug war, you mean basically decriminalize or stop enforcing?
Medicalize the problem, decriminalize—I don't need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State's Attorney told all his assistant state's attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we're not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.

You didn't ask me about the rough rides, or as I used to hear in the western district, "the bounce." It used to be reserved—as I say, when there was a code to this thing, as flawed as it might have been by standards of the normative world—by standards of Baltimore, there was a code to when you gave the guy the bounce or the rough ride. And it was this: He fought the police. Two things get your ass kicked faster than anything: one is making a cop run. If he catches you, you're 18 years old, you've got fucking Nikes, he's got cop shoes, he's wearing a utility belt, if you fucking run and he catches you, you're gonna take some lumps. That's always been part of the code. Rodney King could've quoted that much of it to you.

But the other thing that gets you beat is if you fight. So the rough ride was reserved for the guys who fought the police, who basically made—in the cop parlance—assholes of themselves. And yet, you look at the sheet for poor Mr. Gray, and you look at the nature of the arrest and you look at the number of police who made the arrest, you look at the nature of what they were charging him with—if anything, because again there's a complete absence of probable cause—and you look at the fact that the guy hasn't got much propensity for serious violence according to his sheet, and you say, How did this guy get a rough ride? How did that happen? Is this really the arrest that you were supposed to make today? And then, if you were supposed to make it, was this the guy that needed an ass-kicking on the street, or beyond that, a hard ride to the lockup?

I'm talking in the vernacular of cops, not my own—but even in the vernacular of what cops secretly think is fair, this is bullshit, this is a horror show. There doesn't seem to be much code anymore—not that the code was always entirely clean or valid to anyone other than street cops, and maybe the hardcore corner players, but still it was something at least.

I mean, I know there are still a good many Baltimore cops who know their jobs and do their jobs with some real integrity and even precision. But if you look at why the city of Baltimore paid that $5.7 million for beating down people over the last few years, it's clear that there are way too many others for whom no code exists. Anyone and everyone was a potential ass-whipping—even people that were never otherwise charged with any real crimes. It's astonishing.

By the standard of that long list, Freddie Gray becomes almost plausible as a victim. He was a street guy. And before he came along, there were actual working people—citizens, taxpayers—who were indistinguishable from criminal suspects in the eyes of the police who were beating them down. Again, that's a department that has a diminished capacity to actually respond to crime or investigate crime, or to even distinguish innocence or guilt. And that comes from too many officers who came up in a culture that taught them not the hard job of policing, but simply how to roam the city, jack everyone up, and call for the wagon.

This interview was conducted by Bill Keller, editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. Keller worked for the New York Times from 1984 to 2014 as a correspondent, editor, and op-ed columnist. From July 2003 until September 2011, he was the executive editor of the Times. You can sign-up for the Marshall Project's newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

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Meghan Sage-Wolfe and Sapphire Newman-Fogel. Photo by the author

Police carding is probably the single most politically charged issue in Toronto at the moment. The practice of stopping people (usually young black or brown men) for no discernible reason, taking down their information, and saving it in a secret database for an unknown period of time has been under intense scrutiny recently, and for good reason. In a harrowing essay, journalist and VICE contributor Desmond Cole discussed the dehumanizing effect of being treated like a criminal simply for existing.

"On numerous occasions, I myself have been stopped and documented by our police," Cole wrote in a column for VICE. "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."

The practice is of import outside Canada's largest city, too. While this specific iteration of police intrusion into marginalized communities may not exist across the country, there are myriad other examples, from Saskatoon's infamous Starlight Tours to police ambushing indigenous anti-fracking protesters in New Brunswick. How we deal with this kind of institutional mistreatment of people of colour is of the utmost importance in a country that prides itself on its multicultural open-mindedness, however successful we are (or aren't) in making that a reality.

While many people find it easy to look away from injustice they don't personally experience, two teenaged girls in Toronto are doing the opposite when it comes to carding. Meghan Sage-Wolfe and Sapphire Newman-Fogel have grown up around activists and frank discussions about social injustice; Sage-Wolfe's mother is a lawyer, and Newman-Fogel's mother is a gender studies and sociology professor at York University. They also both attend an alternative, social justice-focused school. For their final project this year, they were tasked with finding a social issue and looking into it. They chose police carding.

"My mom is part of Stop Racial Profiling, that committee, so I learn about it at home all the time," said Sage-Wolfe.

The two are putting together a documentary about carding for their project, but have already begun doing other work outside the scope of their project, and have no plans to stop working on the issue when their project is done. They're working under the moniker Youth Against Carding and are hoping to engage other young people in their work. Earlier this month, they gave a deputation to the Toronto Police Service Board about carding, and they're planning on developing a "know your rights" workshop to do in schools.

"Because police didn't change the carding policy," said Newman-Fogel, "it's something we still need to keep fighting for."

"The people who usually speak out about carding," Sage-Wolfe added, "usually are white, middle-aged men. And so, you know, there needs to be—like, we are girls, and we are youth, and the youth perspective needs to be heard."

The pair are also keenly aware of where they stand in the conversation on carding: Sage-Wolfe is aboriginal, and Newman-Fogel is Jewish, but both readily admitted they have the privilege of appearing white. Because of that, they know they are far less likely to be subject to carding, and are more likely to be heard by the mostly middle-aged white men making policy decisions on the issue.

"We're both members of groups that have been persecuted before," said Newman-Fogel. "So we do know what it feels like for our families and ourselves to be part of a marginalized group, so that's part of why we're standing up for black people, but also, it's just something that we believe in really strongly. We're not trying to take away the voice of black people, that's really something we've struggled with, that we're not trying to take a voice away from them or put words in their mouth."

Sage-Wolfe added that the prospect of giving a deputation was nerve-wracking enough for them that she can't imagine what kind of experience it would be for "someone who's already scared of the police because they've been stopped, making a deputation in front of police about their feelings."

"So while we wrote down what we were going to say, we tried to sort of say, like, 'From what we've heard,' 'this is how they feel about this,' so we're not trying to.... We're not trying to take the voice away. From anyone."

It's heartening to see young people so interested in a pressing social issue, and finding ways to do something about it. But ultimately, Sage-Wolfe and Newman-Fogel themselves said, the people capable of making the large-scale changes that could end abuses of power like police carding are the same middle-aged, mostly white, mostly male groups that have refused to change time and time again. Even Toronto's new police chief, African-Canadian Mark Saunders, has yet to come out against the practice, and in fact said last night that ending carding "is not the way we are going to be able to say, 'everything is going to be better.'" Desmond Cole has written for VICE about Saunders' reputation as a "cop's cop" invested in the system of policing.

So while projects like Youth Against Carding are not going to bring an end to carding on their own, they are vitally important, because outside pressure is often the only reason people and groups in power make difficult decisions.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Last Sunday, 800 men, women, and children drowned in the Mediterranean after their boat capsized off of the Libyan coast. One week before that, on April 12, 400 people drowned in a similar disaster. The UNHCR reckons that, since the beginning of this year, 1,700 people have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

Since that fateful Sunday, the problem can no longer be ignored by the people of Europe. At an especially organized summit, EU leaders agreed upon implementing extensive measures to be able to rescue more people from danger at sea. At the same time, they discussed a number of ideas aimed at trying to discourage refugees from attempting to cross at all. Suggestions ranged from erecting giant detention camps in North African countries to military intervention in Libya.

The problem with all the aforementioned ideas is obvious: They don't tackle the fundamental problem. There are a lot of people who want to migrate to Europe and the European Union doesn't want to let them in. The motives behind their migration are varied—some are fleeing war and persecution, others poverty and lack of prospects—but the EU's answer remains unchanged: Without a visa, nobody can enter.

Yet people rarely ask why this needs to be the case. Nobody would ever think of preventing a 19-year-old from Athens from trying their luck in Stuttgart, yet we refuse others the exact same right. What would happen if we opened the borders to the European Union and simply let in anyone who wanted to enter?

Related: Escape from Greece

These kinds of political ideas seem utopian these days. We have gotten used to the notion that economically stronger countries have to defend their borders by any means necessary. Giving up this control and essentially waving through every immigrant after a background check and a medical exam—it sounds too much like the naive vision of "no borders" activism that doesn't merit serious discussion.

Because even if the moral argument for open borders is basically accepted by most, people still seem convinced that it isn't a realistic option. The prevailing opinion is that Europe would collapse under the onslaught of "third world" citizens.

Yet few people are aware that this idea is being taken very seriously by some academics—primarily economists. Michael Clemens is one of them. As a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, he's been researching migration for years and has come to some rather unexpected conclusions. These include his theory that restrictions on immigration "place one of the fattest of all wedges between humankind's current welfare and its potential welfare." His calculations indicate that the freedom to move across international borders could double the global GDP.

I asked Michael Clemens to contemplate what could happen if the EU suddenly decided to open their borders for international migration. And although this is a scenario that doesn't claim to entail absolute truth, his thoughts—to put it mildly—took me by surprise.

Michael Clemens. Image courtesy of Michael Clemens

VICE: Mr. Clemens, apart from political reasons—why do people try to migrate to wealthy countries?
Michael Clemens: People from poor countries migrate mainly to get safety for themselves and their families, and to get proper compensation for their hard work and study. Safety and opportunity depend mostly on what country you live in, and 97 percent of humanity lives in the country they were born in. For those of us born in safe, prosperous countries, such a random lottery seems quite satisfactory. Most migrants are people who have simply decided that they will not let lottery results enforced by others determine the course of their lives.

Within our own countries, we know why people leave neighborhoods that are dangerous, poor, or both. These are the same reasons that people leave countries that are dangerous, poor, or both. But there are two differences. Many people in dangerous, poor countries live with risk and destitution that even the poorest people in rich countries will never face and cannot imagine. And, of course, no one stands at the exit to poor neighborhoods, coercing people to stay inside with a gun.

So what would happen if the EU opened its borders completely? Would it be flooded by immigrants from poorer countries?
Migration flows are very hard to predict. We can see this in two episodes when the United Kingdom lifted restrictions on immigration. In 2004, the UK lifted restrictions on immigration from Poland; immigration was far more than predicted. In 2014, it lifted restrictions on immigration from Romania; immigration was far less than predicted.

What we can be sure of is that many people will make loud, confident forecasts of doom. When Germany lifted restrictions on Polish immigration in 2012, German trade unions predicted that a million Poles would flood in the following year. Actual Polish immigration that year was 10 percent of that; the other 90 percent was fearful imagination. When the United States opened its borders to the poor island nation of Micronesia in 1986, many predicted that Micronesians would flood into Hawaii and California. Fourteen years later, less than 6 percent of the population of Micronesia had moved to the US.

So what would happen at a global level? We have some evidence, from the Gallup World Poll, which can only be considered suggestive. Gallup pollsters go to pretty much all countries, and in each country, they ask around 1,000 adults the same set of questions every year. One of the questions is about whether or not they would like to emigrate, and if so, where.

The bottom line is that Europe's overall population would rise by 10 percent if everyone who told Gallup they would like to move to Europe could do so. Germany's population would rise by 23 percent, because it is a particularly prosperous and desirable destination.

This is the best direct evidence we have. I say this evidence is only suggestive, because we don't know the extent to which stated desires reflect real behavior. Many people who say "yes" might be expressing an idle wish, not a genuine plan—the way you might say "yes" to a pollster who asked you if you want to start a business some day. And many people who say "no" might reconsider if they had a way to migrate without paying smugglers and risking their lives. So the real answer is that social scientists cannot be certain, but have noted a systematic tendency for interest groups to over-predict flows.

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Still from the VICE News documentary " Drowning for Freedom: Libya's Migrant Jails"

What impact would the influx of immigrants have on the European economy?
The research we have shows that immigration has had a positive effect on economic growth in Europe overall. This remains true in economists' most sophisticated forecasts for the future. Christian Lutz and Ingo Wolter forecast a positive effect of immigration on German economic growth. Katerina Lisenkova and Miguel Sanchez forecast a positive effect of immigration on UK economic growth. And so on.

I would go as far as to say that this is a consensus opinion among economists. That is saying a lot, because economists are known for putting caveats on everything. But all the serious evidence we have points to large gains in overall economic activity from reduced barriers to labor mobility. Ninety-six percent of American labor economists agree that the economic benefits of US immigration exceed the losses.

That is essentially unanimity. While a handful of economists make vague claims of economic harm from immigration, they generally have not done any peer-reviewed economic research to support that claim, and their views should be regarded as political opinions rather than reflecting economic expertise.

Of course, speed matters. There are many reasons to expect the impact of a million immigrants to depend on whether they arrive over three years or over 20 years. This is largely absent from public debate, which tends to focus instead on absolutes like "stop them all" or "let them all in immediately."

A more nuanced debate would begin from the solid consensus of serious economic research that there are large overall economic benefits, and discuss how to transition in order to capture those benefits. Economic development in poor countries is associated with more emigration—not less—for the same reasons that you're more likely to see people from an outlying neighborhood living and working in an upscale part of your town-center when that outlying neighborhood gets richer. One of the great policy challenges of the 21st century is how to build policies that translate mobility into economic benefit, rather than building naval blockades and mass-detention camps.

"Future flows of immigrants, within a large range, are likely to raise the wages and employment of typical European workers."

Would European workers experience a significant dip in wages? Is it possible for a market to integrate, say, millions of new laborers, some of who are untrained?
Future flows of immigrants, within a large range, are likely to raise the wages and employment of typical European workers.

Some of the best new evidence we have on this comes from economists Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri. No one out there has better data or more scientific methods than these researchers. They have studied the wages and employment of every individual worker in Denmark from 1991 to 2008 (yes, everyone) and tracked how they responded to a large influx of refugees from places like Somalia and Afghanistan. Those immigrants caused native unskilled wages and employment to rise.

To see why, you have to take a step back. Certainly, when there is a single job in construction or child care, a migrant filling that job means that a native does not fill it. But that is just the beginning of how a labor market works. When there are immigrants around, native workers make different choices. What Foged and Peri show is that low-skill native Danes responded to migrant inflows by specializing in occupations requiring more complex tasks and less manual labor.

People collecting the bodies of drowned migrants on a Libyan beach. Photo: imago/Xinhua

Beyond that, other research has shown that natives acquire more skill when immigration rises. And firms adjust their investments when immigrants are present, shifting away from technologies that eliminate low-skill jobs for both low-skill immigrants and low-skill natives. Most simply of all, foreign workers are not just workers, they are also consumers. Immigrants at low wages tend to consume products, like fast food and budget clothing, that are made and sold by other low-wage workers.

All of these things mean that low-skill immigrants end up both taking jobs and creating jobs. The balance, in the best research we have on Europe, has been positive even in places were politicians and activists say that it must be negative. Communicating that fact will be a permanent challenge, because the ways that immigrants fill jobs are direct and visible; the ways that they create jobs are indirect and invisible.

Would the European welfare states collapse if too many people become dependent on them? Are there ways to mitigate this?
Reasonable discussion of immigration and welfare has to start from facts. Currently, the welfare state in Europe overall depends on immigrants, not the other way around.

A comprehensive review by the independent OECD in 2013 found that the average immigrant household in Europe contributed over £2,000 [$3,000] more in taxes than it took in benefits. This means that the work of immigrants overall is subsidizing European states—helping Europeans pay for the education of their children, the care of their grandparents. The question is whether European welfare systems will collapse without immigrants.

This is also true in Germany in particular. Prof. Holger Bonin has shown that tax revenues per foreigner exceed transfer payments by about €1,400 [$1,550] per year.

So that's the current reality. Immigrants subsidize non-immigrants, in Germany and across Europe. That is unlikely to change under greater migration flows. This is because the principal reason for the OECD's finding, its analysts write, is that new migrants tend to be young, healthy people in the prime of their lives—the kind of people who are net contributors to public coffers. That pattern would change very little even if migration flows were much larger, and even if tax and spending policies did not change.

Furthermore, the welfare state can adjust to migration flows. The OECD study finds large differences across countries. The net positive fiscal effect of migrants in Norway is twice as large as it is in Denmark. The fiscal impact of immigrants is a decision that countries make. In the United Kingdom, asylum seekers are net takers of benefits because they are banned from working. That is, UK voters apparently support policies that force asylum seekers not to generate tax revenue. Then some of the same voters complain about asylum seekers because they do not generate tax revenue.

"In the United Kingdom, asylum seekers are net takers of benefits because they are banned from working. That is, UK voters apparently support policies that force asylum seekers not to generate tax revenue."

Are there cultural/societal problems that could arise from a significant number of people from less developed countries suddenly living in Europe?
Our assumptions about immigration run so deep that they are built directly into our language. It's common to say that societal problems "arise" from immigration. Think for a moment about the assumptions that are necessary for us to ask this question.

Suppose a woman is attacked by men on the street, as she walks to work. What caused the attack? It depends on your assumptions. Many people in the world do not believe that women have the unqualified right to work or to walk down any street. These people might say that the cause of the attack was that the woman's family allowed her to take a job and walk around unguarded. If you believe that women's rights to work and travel are beyond question, you might identify a different cause of the attack: The cause of the attack was that men decided to attack her.

Likewise, when activists hold rallies to unmistakably threaten immigrants with violence, many might describe this as social conflict "arising" from immigration. This view requires you to already have decided that migrants don't have the right to be there—for the same reasons that saying attacks against women arise from their presence on the sidewalk requires you to have already decided that women don't have the right to walk on the sidewalk.

This is where the reasoning becomes self-justifying. People use social conflict "arising" from immigration to justify ensuring migrants don't have the right to be in a country. But the conflict only "arises" from immigration if we start out believing that migrants don't have the right to be in that country. Arguments that justify themselves are mindsets, not arguments. Politicians might devote less energy to manufacturing fear and more energy to innovating on policy.

Alright then. But would easier emigration not hurt the development of those poorer countries that the people come from?
We are talking about immigration policy here. That is, we are not talking about whether people should or shouldn't stay in poor countries. We're talking about the extent to which rich countries should or shouldn't forcibly obstruct migration. That is what "migration policy" does. A visa doesn't oblige a person to move; a visa is a decision not to actively stop that person from moving.

So if we're talking about immigration policy, the question "Does migration substantially harm low-income countries?" is the same as the question, "Does forcibly stopping people from leaving low income countries substantially help those countries?" To put it mildly, social science has absolutely no evidence of such a effect.

Would it be different in poor countries? How about in poor areas of Africa? We do not need to wonder that either. Parts of Africa that are as prosperous as parts of Europe—Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town—have spent several generations actively blocking most black Africans from living and working there. Many people in those enclaves claimed that this was somehow beneficial to black Africans, encouraging them to "develop" their own lands. There is no evidence at all of such a positive effect.

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All in a good day's fun. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I came to the realization that my sex life is incredibly tame and, as a result, I've been trying to be proactive about mixing things up. This, coupled with my growing intrigue with BDSM and its many subsets, led me to invite a relative stranger to a hands-on workshop on using violet wands. For you vanilla bangers out there, violet wands are electrical kink toys that send small electrical impulses throughout your body.

I didn't want to go alone. I knew I had to choose a non-prude, easygoing young thrill seeker who would perhaps be keen to have the areas surrounding their erogenous zones electrocuted.

After quickly racking my brain, I found my woman—someone I'd recently spent time with at her market place epicerie. It was both her fresh produce and her cowboy boots that had attracted me to her stall. She liked that I was English and spoke French with a sexy yet infant-like accent. I must confess that I was exceptionally attracted to Roxanne.

I let her know that the workshop was $20 and told her to be there or be square and tbh, she couldn't have been more down. She was as intrigued as I was and even sent me a message on Facebook to make sure we were still going.

By chance, I saw her on the two nights prior to the Sunday workshop; at a Friday soiree and at an illegal Saturday concert. Somehow we were still hanging out by 5 AM on both nights, as the frivolities died down, and I couldn't help but realize that the initial sparks of our first encounters had seemingly disappeared.

She cut a figure of disinterest and, perplexed, I was left to trot home with my tail between my legs to smoke a lonely end of night joint.

So by Sunday afternoon, it seemed like the moment had somewhat passed. The compliments about my Englishness had dried up and I was feeling pretty self-conscious and beat down about wooing Roxanne.

She came over to my place around 2 PM and we walked downtown for our first official date, chit chatting about the coincidences of our chance meetings of the past two nights. I concluded that, "Perhaps fate is conspiring something."

I tentatively approached the building where Google Maps led me to believe the workshop was located, and Roxanne suddenly, purposefully beckoned me to follow her. It turns out she'd been here before for a flogging workshop during Montreal's fetish week.

The Montreal workshop itself, located in a room off of a corridor where a hubbub of activities were occurring, was but a mere glimpse into a series of electro-erotica fantasies.

Throughout the workshop, the expert performed almost two hours of kink-charged demonstrations over the naked posterior of the willing model (who sat with their back to us from almost start to finish).

The violet wand demands a relationship of care, as the user of the wand must listen intently to the breathing of their subject. Along with ensuring consent, testing pain tolerance and sheer enjoyment are necessary in order to generate positive experience for both giver and receiver.

The loud music drifting over from the neighbouring yoga studio synthesized with the buzzing noise emitting from the violet wand, which combined to sound like the droning falsetto of a Rihanna remix.

They stressed to us that "This isn't a shut-up-and-take-it domination; you get your high from their pleasure." The sensuality is derived from tiptoeing the thin line between enjoyment and pain, which produces a range of sensations.

The violet wand is an alternative current device that uses Tesla coil principles, which basically means the voltage is high and the current is low. The high voltage discharge of of static electricity against the skin stimulates both the skin and our neural circuit.

As an informational booklet told me, one must remember that "the violet wand can be both your friend and your enemy when badly handled. It can be a tool of relaxation, sensual, sexual or torture."

Made up of ten or so inches of gleaming black plastic, in addition to your choice of a six-inch attachment, from a Waternburg wheel to an LED light, your average violet wand cuts an imposing figure. It's essentially an oversized blunt phallic tool that has more than ample girth, strength, and length.

This thing can do some serious harm if not utilized in the right manner. Luckily we had an expert who brought their $1,100 briefcase packed with violet wand attachments to guide our practice probe.

You have to really be rather careful while waving a very large penis-shaped implement that transmits voltage around another human. Beads of sweat amassed around our instructor's face as they contorted in concentration, delicately oscillating the violet wand around the curves of the model's body.

Most of the workshop participants were keen to be electrocuted themselves. I would hazard a guess that most of us left the downtown room intrigued and more prone to electric seduction. But then again, I can only really talk for Roxanne and myself.

With the electrical currents still lingering around the fizzing hairs of our reddened skin we went to get stoned in an apartment in Montreal's Gay Village. I could not avoid how much more at ease she was with me as she lounged around while the remnants of the electrodermal current transmitted through her skin.

I didn't even play with her during the workshop, we'd each gone off and done our own thing. Maybe she dug watching me electrocute someone else and being electrocuted myself. The modern man is at ease with his sexuality to such an extent that he lets himself be electrocuted by strangers and lovers alike, I thought.

We'd already got foreplay over and done with, collectively, during the workshop. Perhaps that's why she sprawled out across my chaise lounge, inviting me to pounce.

Foreplay is no longer anything like the first base, second base malarky of yore; we electrocute, flog, and push the boundaries of our bourgeois tendencies. Kink is at the vanguard of the foreplay revolution which is increasingly encroaching it's way into popular culture.

My experiences of the day were emblematic of our generation in action. After an afternoon of sexual exploration we delved even deeper into each others' fantasies throughout the evening, as she expressed her desire for me to perform BDSM acts upon her.

The next morning she told me, "Thanks for an impressive 24 hours," before promising to wear plaid, cowboy boots and a chastity belt next time. In fact, she brought along a melange of BDSM play toys including silk bondage ties [which also double as blindfolds, reins, restraints, or aids for good old fashioned leverage], a cat o'nine tails flogger, and a horse whip.

One thing I've learned from this experience is that your date might not be impressed by a trip to a local start-up eatery or an underground club anymore. Avant-garde first dates are the future if you want to a) rapidly get to know someone and b) shock and awe. Don't get left behind at a jazz open mic or a vernissage.

While I don't think I'm going to become an electric play sensei anytime soon, the fact that I advertised myself as non-vanilla from the very outset had unquantifiable results. Although now I'm a little overwhelmed with it all.

One word of warning: apply some sunscreen if you over indulge in a volted consensual exchange.

Follow Mattha Busby on Twitter.

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Artwork by Dan Evans

Remember when you were younger and you used to say you were "depressed" all the time? Same episode of Boy Meets World as yesterday? Depressed. No fucking French fries left at lunchtime? Depressed. Lost a game of little league? Christ, will I ever catch a break?

"Depressing" was just another way of saying: "This is bullshit." Growing up, it was a nebulous term that had no real applicable meaning, one that could be used semi-sincerely and derided in the same breath. Today, many of us use it with the same flippancy. Seeing a one-legged pigeon is depressing. A stale sandwich for lunch from the bodega is roundly depressing. Even the success of your enemies can be depressing. "Fuck," you say. "Dean got that job? That's fucking depressing as fuck."

Like many things, depression can be a hard thing to "get" until you have a real sense of what it's like. It's like before you try ecstasy—you can't really "get" the level of joy and contentment and love you're going to feel. You can tritely attempt to express it with words like "loved up" and "rolling balls" but they can't convey the fizz, the glee, the closeness. Look: I'm doing a bad job of it myself.

Depression is inexplicable, too, because it's such a sharp blow to the senses. It's like nothing else you've ever felt, and it's difficult to believe when it strikes that humanity hasn't found a better way to articulate something so agonizing. You might use the word "depressed" day-to-day, but trust me, you're pretty clueless about its meaning until the gloom descends upon you.

My first dance with the black dog came at the start of summer two years ago. I'd felt a bit strange at work, had a headache. The sound of my co-workers singing along to a song on the radio was making me inordinately angry. I went to my girlfriend's house after work feeling a little woozy, and almost as soon as I walked through the door I began to cry. I had never cried like this in my life. I was beside myself. Vocally crying, yelping, my normal face replaced by a damp, red raw oval. And then I stopped crying. "What's wrong?" There was no answer. I had no idea. And then I started crying again.

The crying continued for a couple of days. When I got home, I told my parents and threw up in the garden.

A friend came over to check on me and brought a joint to help calm me down. I had a toke, and it was the worst thing I could have done. My mind began to spin. I paced the room holding my head, again, scream-crying. My friend was at a loss as to what to do. I lay on my bed, still holding my head, and shut my eyes. When I opened them, I saw the coat hook on the back of my door, and briefly entertained the thought of hanging myself from it.

How easily these kinds of thoughts creep into your conscious brain is, for me, the most terrifying aspect of depression. These days, suicide is less likely to be a spur of the moment action—in some cases, this is down to design; like the British suicide rate dropping by a third when the government changed the type of gas in everyone's ovens to one that isn't deadly. In most cases a great deal of consideration goes into suicide, but just to have the thought, just to have it in your head as something tangible that could be an option, remains the most frightening realization I have ever had in my life. Again, the flippancy of how we use these words comes to mind. "If I miss that train I'm going to fucking kill myself," you might hear today in your office. But when the notion, the sheer fucking enormity of the word "kill" enters your head, it's like nothing else on earth.

If I ever think about killing myself now, I'm aware that it's just that: a thought. One that will come, and then go. But for a few hours, two years ago, it felt so incredibly real that I began to lose a sense of who I was. Thinking something so at odds with the personality you've built up till that point shakes you like a ride on a busted waltzer.

This is where I began to disassociate.

I went to the hospital. My folks found out what I was thinking, and it upset them. This made me feel guilty. For the next few months I couldn't think properly. Everything was jumbled up. I'd cry on the phone to helplines. I'd cry alone in my room. I'd reject offers for people to come and see me. The usual depression tropes all applied, but they didn't seem like the sort of things you'd see in a webcomic when I was experiencing them. When I was in the throngs of it, it was as if nothing else existed, even perhaps myself. All there was was my brain and the dark raincloud swimming over it, shooting bolts of shitty, horrible lightning at my deflated gray matter.

It took its toll on my relationship, too, which has now, thankfully, recovered.

It's been about two years since that episode, and while I was able to tentatively shoo depression away, the prospect of it returning is a constant fear. I managed, through the help of a course of psychotherapy and the support of my friends and family, to intellectualize it; to separate myself from my thoughts. If I considered the logical foibles of it—"it" being a product of my own mind, which I control—then surely I could consciously push it out? It took time, but therapy aided in strengthening my convictions. There's something about someone with years of academic training telling you how your mind is working, scientifically, that assuages some of the more manic aspects of depression. I started to feel the positivity return. Once I was sure I could get by without the therapy, I knew I was on the right track.

Really, though, it's always there. The memories don't leave you. Depression can be likened to cancer in some ways; you can get over it, you can beat it, but there's always a chance it will come back. I'm thankful that my brush with depression was only brief—albeit severe—but others are not so lucky. Part of what made Robin Williams's recent passing so crushing for me is that, even after 50-odd years of dealing with depression and anxiety, it could still grab him. I would tell myself, when I felt really bad, that it would get better—not because I knew it would, but because it had to. You have to steady yourself under the weight of depression however you can, to accept that you're unwell but that you can cope, and not surrender to finality. Eventually it always passes.

When I emerged from the other side of this bout of depression, I'd find myself welling up at people doing things as trivial as fun runs for mental health charities. It made me want to empty my wallet. There's something incredible about helping people with injuries they don't know how to fix. There's no physical splint for a broken mind. There is, however, a great many treatments available, whether that's CBT, medication, meditation—whatever feels right for you, whatever helps you live. You will be afraid of the calm after depression has passed, and not want to trust it, because the experience is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. But if it does come back, take solace in the fact that there are other people who know what it's like. As shitty as it may be for a while, you are still here, and it will be transient.

I think about the language surrounding mental illness a lot, how "depression" was just a word to me before, like "sandals" or "matinée." Now there's a slight pang in my chest when it's mentioned, and the memories of desperate, dark sadness flicker behind my eyes when I remember that summer. Words change meaning all the time, but rarely in such personal ways.

If you are concerned about your mental health or that of someone you know, visit the Mental Health America website.

@joe_bish

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We searched to ends of Myspace's earth to find Tom. Screenshots by author.

I've still never met Tom, but he was my first friend when I moved to the internet town of MySpace in the fall of 2005. "That guy? He was the kind of guy who was friends with everybody," I picture early MySpace settlers saying of him. Thomas Anderson, or just 'Tom" as we knew him, was the co-founder of the social media site whose perpetually unchanged profile picture greeted new users and appeared throughout the site like some cult leaders statue. Praise Tom.

I joined MySpace right after high school, when my social-media brain was still pubescent by today's standards. I was too cool for chain letters, but still a sucker for posting "which character are you?" quizzes. It was an accepting new world, where all it took to make a new friend was asking. Users decked out their profile pages with music and wallpaper like it was their first apartment, and the sites "Top 8" feature kept friends sociopathically vying for the coveted positions like an ongoing platonic version of The Bachelor. It was fun; I met cool people, flirted, and developed an early, unhealthy fondness for red notification alerts. (Ooh, a birthday!)

But like most post secondary pursuits, my time on MySpace came to an inevitable close. People were disbanding the internet mecca to settle on other sites, and by the time I started backpacking around South America in 2009, it was either join Facebook or commit social suicide and remain untagged in photos. I converted, and now have daily Facebook updates about Australian politics from people I only knew for a few hours.

It's been said that MySpace returned to its roots as a music focused network once its usage began decreasing. But at that point, who was the music playing for? Was every band page just broadcasting MySpace's swan song on an eternal loop?

I thought about this recently when I was visiting my old family neighborhood. As my brain froze while comprehending yet another new frozen yogurt shop that had popped up, I began to wonder what became of my old online community: had change befallen it too? Did it still thrive or was it simply stuck in time, re-emerging only within nostalgic internet conversations about Napster?

Given that the internet is the ultimate hoarder, I had no doubt that the ruins of MySpace would be pristinely frozen in online carbonite, just waiting to be awoken. I decided to log back in, to disrupt the social media continuum and revisit myself as I debuted online eight years ago.

My first task was remembering my password. Now, this was nearly a decade of passwords ago, and for someone who clicks the "forgot password?" button as much as a new tab, I thought my journey would abruptly end here, halted by a digitally ravaged memory overloaded with disposable information (I can remember what the license plate on the cover of Tremors 2says, but not my online banking PVQs). However, when I arrived at the MySpace login page, which now resembled an aggregated, Yahoo news pop culture feed, my password inexplicably returned to me. It was as if MySpace wanted me back...

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I enter and the homepage refreshes. It was the same busy news screen that had been displayed already: Jon Stewart, something about Tech N9ne, etc. Things had indeed changed, and in a frozen yogurt kind of way. It was all the drivel of Facebook without a face behind the posts. I navigated to the bottom of the screen where the alert box had changed to a drab, totalitarian grey. There were no lovingly red notifications awaiting me. As I hovered over my inbox, reality kicked in: "You don't have any messages," it read. "You fucking loner," it implied.

Perhaps what's more surprising than my entire inbox dissipating is that I ever expected it wouldn't. I thought that, along with the Hotmail account this was connected to, my inbox would be preserved forever like a lost diary filled with painful sign offs like "awesome sauce."

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Though my inbox had vanished, perhaps deemed too subversive by the current MySpace zeitgeist, my profile remained. There it was with my original picture intact, a bold portrait of myself that was painted for the set of a high school play—postured like I was MySpace royalty. At least one thing hadn't changed, and this was still the best picture I've ever had. However, the wall itself had fallen, my Top 8 had disbanded, and my profile page was now a clunky sideways scrolling page where I was prompted to post updates, mixes, and tracks like I was enrolled in an EDM DJ college course. The old banter with friends was gone and my bio was nothing more than an image; I was a characterless social media bot, a MySpace artist without a medium. So where was everybody?

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The MySpace profile, an early form of internet birth certification. 2006 CE

It seemed I no longer had friends, just "connections." In the social sphere of the future, there are no friends, just followers and acquaintances you use to make contacts, I thought. It seemed to me that MySpace had tried to become the music industry equivalent of LinkedIn's corporate meet-and-greet, where everyone uses exclamation points with freakish enthusiasm like its Take Your Kid to Work Day. I began scrolling through my 120 connections that remained, searching for the green active pulse that signaled online life.

Some accounts had been completely nullified, with androgynous block circles remaining where smiling faces with sunglasses once stood. I assumed others had deleted theirs—protecting themselves from future employers tracing "Jesus is my homeboy" hats back to them. Then there were the ones left completely intact, pristinely preserved in the icy cell block of the web.

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I was still in Virthans top 8, but he only had 4 connections. #OddsInMyFavor

There was seemingly no law controlling what was happening here. I decided to send out a few messages to see if even from the depths of MySpace, I could still communicate with the outside Internet world. I waited for one minute (days in MySpace time) then went searching for my friend Aaron. He's the most social media savvy guy I know, and surely a notification would reach him somewhere. My green, online light blipped like a ship lost in the fog, but no responses came.

It seems that nobody had kept up with MySpace's pressure for everyone to become musicians, as not one of my connections had any mixes or songs on their page. Seemingly, things had gone dark in an attempt to compete with SoundCloud, but the artists just never returned and MySpace had despairingly tried to stitch together everything else the internet was doing in a failed last hurrah to keep it's users. Life moves pretty fast, but the Internet moves even faster. I clicked on the discover icon and the first promoted artist to appear was Enrique Iglesias. Holy shit, he's still making music? Or was this some sort of leftover MySpace White Walker? I was just happy to find some sign of life and asked the gentle Latin singer to connect. If we do rebuild MySpace society together then at least I know my Top 8 will be beautiful.

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We're now connected, and I'm told we have zero percent affinity (a barometer for how many connections you have in common). That's okay, Enrique; Rome wasn't built in a day. While I waited for Enrique to say something, anything, my inbox remained empty. My cries echoes in a dark web abyss, failing to land in any relevant inboxes since most people had all wisely switched to more comprehensive emails that were no longer connected with MySpace. I began to worry how long I'd spent in this vortex and became caught in an existential crisis of online identities: How was it affecting my other social accounts? How could I exist on MySpace and Instagram at the same time? It was time to find the only person who could help me: Tom.

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After rifling through a few tribute pages and bands that used his name as a song title, I found him far down the search line under "people." His profile picture was still unchanged; preserving his friendly and eternally welcoming "I can see your wiener" smile like it was the portrait of Dorian Gray. His bio read like an epitaph and confirmed that, like so many others, he didn't make it. "Former first friend; I'm not working for the company now ya'all :-) Just a user like everyone else. I take a lot of photos these days."

It doesn't look like Tom stuck around to see his city fall. He's into photography now, a pursuit that, like it has for the rest of us, led him to the promising shores of Instagram, where he posts scenic pictures that look like they were made specifically for desktop backgrounds. Tom's last activity on MySpace was on June 24, 2013, when he bid farewell to his children by streaming 20 songs from Tom Petty and Heartbreakers The Live Anthology album. Heartbreaking indeed.

I was beginning to feel very much alone on MySpace, which I even made light of in my first status update in years. This too yielded nothing, and despite my new connection to Enrique, I felt more disconnected than ever.

MySpace was no longer a site for sharing and discovering; it was a tomb filled with the mummified remains of people's profiles prior to the next wave of social stimulation that mercilessly continued to exist. If the internet wouldn't pull the plug, it was at least time for me to. MySpace hadn't only changed, but it had become an entirely differently entity that was severely confused about what it wanted to be. It was like watching your old used cd store get bought by HMV then go out of business. I cue up"We Used to be Friends" by the Dandy Warhols from the Veronica Mars soundtrack, dually symbolizing my current mood and questionable MySpace era taste in music, and logout.

Goodbye MySpace. Goodbye Tom. And, most importantly, goodbye Enrique. I will never forget your friendship during this time, or the that I learned you surpassed Michael Jackson for the most #1 Billboard hits while lurking your profile. Bailamos...

My profile collapses, vacuumed back into the ether of bandwidth, and I'm once again on the home page. Opening a new tab, I type "f" into my browser, and the Facebook URL automatically appears, giddily waiting for me.

I sign into a welcome back fireworks show of red notifications. There are new messages, likes, and updates to events I had never heard of. I was home. I'd returned to my flourishing network knowing how precious it was. The future of social media is always unclear, but inevitably one day the likes of FB will end, everyone's profile will be sold based on analytics and turned into weird spokespages for deodorant, and some new site will have features you didn't even know you needed, like a parent autoreply.

But that's not today; today we must enjoy our networks while they last, while your friends are all still conveniently in one place, where staying in touch takes nothing more than a click, and where hopefully, this story will get more than 10 likes. Even if Facebook is just a glorified platform of self promotion, at least it's free-willed self promotion. As for MySpace, it's still there, and even if I forget about all this in the next five minutes, the internet never will. So cheers Tom and Enrique, cheers to living forever, however odd and embarrassing that may be.

Connect with Aidan Johnston on MySpace

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Jacqueline Tuplin with her defaced poster. Photos courtesy NDP PEI

An aboriginal candidate running in the Prince Edward Island provincial election says she's "moving ahead" with her campaign after someone vandalized one of her election signs with an offensive slur.

Jacqueline Tuplin, an NDP candidate for the Island's May 4th election, discovered her sign had been vandalized yesterday. In what looks like black sharpie, someone scrawled "squaw" across Tuplin's face.

"Yesterday morning wasn't the greatest of mornings for me," she said in a Facebook video.

"I am very disappointed, to say the least, and saddened by this act of animosity directed towards me."

Tuplin is a Mi'kmaw woman, and the second aboriginal woman to run for office on PEI. Her riding includes the Lennox First Nation, of which she is a member.

She declined requests to be interviewed by VICE, saying she'd like to put the incident behind her. But in a statement, she acknowledged she's "not the first, not the last" to be subjected to misogynistic racism.

"I do hope that should the person/persons responsible for this offensive and disparaging act realize how degrading this is and never commit it again," she said.

After posting a picture of the defaced sign on Facebook and Twitter, candidates of all stripes, including the sitting premier, have reached out to Tuplin to offer support.

@TrishaBourque this is atrocious! Let's stand together against this. Stay strong Jacqueline.
— Wade MacLauchlan (@WadePEILiberal) April 29, 2015

Among those offering support is Becka Viau, a Green Party candidate who has been outspoken about obstacles facing women in PEI politics. Only 29.5 percent of candidates running in this year's election are women, and the vast majority of those women are in the third and fourth place parties. (The NDP and Green Party have elected the grand total of one person to office in their combined history.)

Viau is quick to highlight that what happened to Tuplin's signs looks like racist misogyny, an obstacle beyond the barriers most women on PEI running for office need suffer.

She's calling for an all-party response to the vandalism.

"I hope that [Tuplin's district] stands up together united and declares that their district is a safe place for indigenous women to run in politics."

The Island's NDP leader, Mike Redmond, called the incident "hateful," but said it's an isolated incident that doesn't jive with the province's self-propagating (and perhaps fictional) stereotypes.

"This incident does not reflect the values of generosity and community that Islanders are famous for," he said.

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Others aren't so sure this isn't part of a more systematic race problem on the Island

"I'd like to say, yes, it surprised me," said Don MacKenzie, executive director of the PEI Mi'kmaq Confederacy. "But I can't say I was totally surprised because there is still an undercurrent of racism there."

About 2,000 people of the province's 140,000 people identify as aboriginal. The vast majority of those people are Mi'kmaq.

MacKenzie called the vandalism "appalling" and lauds Tuplin's strategy of "taking the high road," and carrying on with her campaign.

"To the community, I would say don't be demoralized," he said.

The RCMP say they've opened an investigation into the case. Sgt. Leanne Butler says the investigation will consider whether the crime meets the criteria to be considered a hate crime.

Follow Kate McKenna on Twitter.

Today's video - Drug smugglers executed by firing squad in Indonesia, pipeline opponents go back to the land, a trans #occupotty protest in Ottawa, and what if aliens came to Earth?

Exclusive: No Pipelines, Part 3

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Screenshot

Welcome to Wednesday, when VICE brings the best of our video documentary content to your TV screens. We wait until midnight so the losers have gone to bed, and then we blast your brains with awesome. Check out this week's show, about Mexico's drug cartels branching into the oil-stealing business, tonight on City at midnight.

Tonight, VICE founder Suroosh Alvi travels to Mexico to see the effects of cartel oil theft firsthand. Mexico's notoriously violent drug cartels are diversifying. Aside from trafficking narcotics, extorting businesses, and brutally murdering their rivals, cartels are now at work exploiting their country's precious number one export: oil.

Every day as many as 10,000 barrels of crude oil are stolen from Mexico's state­-run oil company, Pemex, through precarious illegal taps, which are prone to deadly accidents. Pemex estimates that it loses $5 billion annually in stolen oil, some of which ends up being sold over the border in US gas stations. As police fight the thieves, and the cartels fight each other, the number of victims caught in the battle for the pipelines continues to climb.

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Photo via Flickr user Lindsay

Tattoos say everything you need to know about the society that births them—and America is witnessing an epidemic of bad ones. There are no numbers to back this up, probably because no one has thought to do this sort of survey, but it definitely feels like there are more terrible tattoos than ever. Everywhere you look, people are sporting clichéd branding, dumb quotes, exes' names (remember "Winona Forever"?), phrases mistranslated into foreign languages, and in one strange case, random buzzwords inked all over a guy's face.

In an effort to shed some light on why people keep getting barbed wire biceps and butterfly tramp stamps, I talked to Dr. Kirby Farrell, a University of Massachusetts professor specializing in anthropology, psychology, and history as it relates to human behavior. His latest book, Berserk Style in American Culture, discusses the vocabulary of post-trauma culture in American society.

VICE: What's your interest in bad tattoos?
Kirby Farrell: I'm interested mostly in what you'd call "the anthropology of self-esteem and identity." So I'm thinking of tattoos as a method people use to try to feel significant in the world. I do a lot of work with Ernest Becker—did you ever hear about a book he did? I think he won a Pulitzer Prize for it, called The Denial of Death.

Yes, I've heard of it.
Well, his basic argument is that we're unique among the animals because we're burdened with an awareness of the future, futility, death, and so on. We're constantly devising defenses. Culture is a defense against feeling overwhelmed or futile or doomed. Cultures are full of values and beauties that can make you feel as if your life is significant and has lasting meaning even though you know it's going to be limited. So you could say that tattoos are cultural expressions of of heroism or individuality.

So how does that translate in to an epidemic of bad tattoos?
I guess a lot of people would say they'd get a tattoo as a memorial to remember somebody or some event. For example, getting song lyrics as a tattoo. The phrases, of course, turn out to be unbelievably suffocating clichés. So they're urging you to be a strong individual by imitating all the other animals who are out there putting clichés on their skin.

So where do those two paths cross where, on one hand, people want to do something that brings out their sense of significance and self expression but end up doing the exact opposite by getting what we'd consider a "bad tattoo," or a "clichéd tattoo"?
I think the fantasy of being special and unique and important and heroic, which we've been talking about, is complicated by living in a culture that celebrates those values. We're constantly bombing other countries in order to preserve our "freedom," which presumably means individuality. But at the same time, our culture is intensely conformist. You have businesses constantly trying to imprint a brand on the public awareness. So, for example, if you're tattooing some nitwit cliché from a pop tune, like "I'll love you forever," or "Don't be an imitator" or something, in effect you're branding yourself with industrial entertainment, because rock groups, as we know, are basically money-making machines, fronted by models, funded by the entertainment industry.

So, why would people do that?
One answer is that we're incredibly social animals. You have to keep in mind that the self is not a thing. It's an event. When you're in deep sleep, the self doesn't really exist. The neurochemistry for being a self is not there. So from this point of view, we feel most real when other people are affirming us, and reassuring us, and reinforcing our identity. In all the social rituals you go through, like saying "Hi, how are you? Fine, how are you?" You don't really expect to hear any personal information. It's really just a confirmation that you both exist and acknowledge each other. So in a way, tattoos function in that sort of fashion. They bring attention to you and make you feel real, even if the attention is making you feel like a member of a huge group. A tattoo tells you that you are one of, as it were, a tribe of tattooed folks that are really beautiful and significant. You may even share symbols with somebody else! And at the same time, because of the branding phenomenon, it makes you feel like you're smarter than the next guy who doesn't know enough to buy your particular product, or your particular fashion.

"Culture is constantly tempting us with fantasies of uniqueness and heroism."

It sounds like you're saying that culture, itself, is cliché. So in trying to emulate social culture, we get these bad tattoos.
Culture is constantly tempting us with fantasies of uniqueness and heroism. You're tempted to buy something like a new BMW because it promises to makes you feel heroic on the street. You stand out from the crowd. The crowd—they're just ordinary people, they're gonna die someday and be forgotten. But everybody's looking at you, you're in the spotlight, you're the hero. And at the same time, if you adjust the perspective slightly, they're making ordinary people feel OK to be hero worshippers. You're invited to identify and admire the rich, the heroic, the prestigious, and if you admire them, it becomes "my music" or "my hairdo" or "my products." In effect, you share in the glamour with the fetishistic power of the thing you admire.

So then you're saying it's like getting tricked into a social hero worship movement.
Well, whether or not you're being "tricked" probably depends on how you feel about the validity of clichés and belonging. Like if you want to tattoo yourself with a line from your favorite song, almost certainly you're feeling a kind of emotional excitement and admiration for that song. A kind of warm, romantic ecstasy. You hear people say, "It has special meaning for me." It's a kind of emotional halo that's around this object.

Why is that feeling significant to our self identity?
I think largely people are frightened about the future and cling to some familiar ritual, some familiar tagline, some familiar cliché that you find meaningful. It's kind of like a safety blanket to give your life meaning at a period when maybe your morale is under pressure or you're really excited about something good. But the point is, in either event, the cliché doesn't seem to be a cliché. It seems to have some kind of special meaning.

Related: VICE hangs out with Scottish tattoo artist Valerie Vargas.

OK, changing the subject a little: Tattooing has been around for thousands of years, we're even finding early humans with tattoos. Do you think there is something inherent to human nature that makes us want to tattoo ourselves?
Sure. The cadaver that was found frozen and preserved in the Alps, which I think is about 5,000 years old—he's in a museum in Italy, you can drop by and say hello—the latest research shows that his body has quite a few tattoos on his skin. They tend to be abstract designs. Based on their locations, it's been hypothesized that they were there to distract from uncomfortable physical things like arthritis. Or possibly, that they have some kind of magical significance. If you think about it, from a certain point of view, as all of our behavior tends to be very magical in some ways. Imaging that there's some special power in your symbols, in your tagline, in your brand, that somehow elevates your mood, makes you feel stronger, more capable, better about yourself.

Do you think that's something inherent to humanity?
Sure. As people, we are regularly on the edge of an existential panic. Becker said that if you were to see the world realistically; just how vulnerable and totally insignificant you are, in terms of the cosmos, you'd go crazy. So you constantly need stories that build up your self esteem and make you feel significant, which is, of course, what culture provides.

And so bad tattoos are a representation of that self defense mechanism.
Yes, exactly. Its physical and artistic representations of values you can identify with. We're in this world now where there's a kind of recurring, sudden racism that we haven't really seen since the 1960s or even since the Civil War. Working conditions are extremely punishing, demanding, and depersonalizing for folks on the bottom. You don't really feel entitled to your own identity. So people feel especially pressured to try to find their own magical reinforcement for things that the culture is not really helping you much with. You see money and injury and death and guilt while people want to feel safe and feel like they're in charge of the world in terms of personal self-esteem and well being.

A lot of tattoos seem shortsighted. How do people rationalize the permanence of a tattoo in relation to their own mortality?
A lot of people, especially when they're young, imagine that they're going to be young forever. After all, if the magic that we're talking about in culture really works, then you can feel invincible and immortal, so to speak. And its kind of cliché that teenagers imagine that they're going to live forever; that's why they take crazy risks and do drugs and so on. They can't imagine that they're gonna grow up and look differently than the cultural ideal. You never have to worry about being sick or infirm or in trouble. You never have to worry about being older and having to come to terms with diminishing prospect, diminishing powers, diminishing fantasies.

Do you think that is a reaction to fear or that is an actual obliviousness because of a lack of age?
Well, wouldn't you guess it's both?

I suppose so.
That you're afraid but you don't want to admit you're afraid because it could damage your fragile morale. A damaged morale makes you less effective, less secure, less productive, etc. So you just deny that you're afraid. Probably the basic mechanism of culture is to pretend that everything is just rosy and you're not afraid.

But we are afraid.
Yeah, absolutely. You're dealing with a moment in which people seem to be so hungry for self-esteem and approval and confidence that they're willing to say and do really bizarre, or silly things, because it makes them feel different. It makes them feel unique and significant and alive.

You can find Kirby Farrell's latest book, The Psychology of Abandon: Berserk Style in American Culture, here.

Follow Jules Suzdaltzev on Twitter.

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Installation view, 'International Pop.' Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Recently, I went to check out an after-hours preview party for the International Pop exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Walker's press materials had promised a "whirlwind night" and encouraged attendees to "dress to inspire" in fashions of the pop era (skinny ties, "doe eyes," miniskirts). When my friend and I pulled up to the venerable museum we found it done up to look like a traveling carnival, awash in the neon glow of a Ferris wheel, specially installed for the occasion.

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High Striker. Photo by the author

It was a festive and appropriate setting for a preview party for a show on pop, with its focus on cultural references and the irreverent. I couldn't help but think of the wildly popular Minnesota State Fair, an homage to food on a stick that takes place in the Twin Cities every August and where, I am sure, a ton of pop (the Minnesotan term for carbonated soft drinks) is sold.

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Installation view, 'International Pop.' Photo: Gene Pittman. Courtesy the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Thoughtfully organized in dialogue with an international array of curators and scholars, International Pop chronicles the global emergence of pop from the 1950s through the early 70s with familiar categories such as "New Realism" and "Pop & Politics," but also region-specific galleries such as "Brazil: The New Consciousness" and "Japan: The Sogetsu Art Center & Tokyo Pop." (For those who are unfamiliar: The Sogetsu Art Center [SAC] in Tokyo was a major hub for avant-garde activities between 1958 and 1971, a period of concentrated energy for the experimental arts in Japan.) And it's this global aspect of the exhibit that makes it so unique. The show's focus isn't just on pop's well-documented and discussed representation in London and New York, but the worldwide phenomenon, including works by Czech artist Jiří Kolář, Italian artist Domenico "Mimmo" Rotella, and Argentine artist Marta Minujín, to name just a few.

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Often, one of the joys of opening-night museum parties is the opportunity for physical interaction with the objects on display, an act that is usually frowned upon in the traditional museum context. The Walker didn't disappoint in this regard: Our first activity for the night was to play the popular carnival game High Striker, for which we were rewarded with plastic carnival beads. Although the High Striker was only present for the preview party, future museum visitors seeking an interactive experience can still get their fix over the course of the exhibit by lounging in pop-upholstered couches in the film-screening room, or by lifting the canvas covers of Brazilian artist Antonio Manuel's Repressão outra vez—Eis o saldo (Repression Again—Here Is the Consequence , 1968), which reveal five red and black panels showing images of violent street clashes between police and students. (Even outside of the "Pop & Politics" gallery, artworks with political statements are prevalent in International Pop.)

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' La Mamouschka operada' ('Mamoushska After Surgery,' 1964) by Edgardo Giménez. Photo by Catherine

Just up the stairs from Manuel's panels, I located an intriguing suspended hybrid bird/bee sculpture titled La Mamouschka operada (Mamoushska After Surgery, 1964) by Edgardo Giménez, and a friendly gallery guard named Melissa standing beneath it. Like her colleagues, Melissa was wearing a long-sleeve black T-shirt with one question posed on the front—hers said, "Are you open to interpretation?" It sounded like an invitation to chat, and Melissa told me that each guard gets to pick her own shirt with one of several questions (my favorite: "Why do we ask questions?"). Melissa, who is a poet, answered her own shirt's question in the affirmative, asserting that "art is what you think it is," which fit the overall inclusive feeling of the preview party as a whole. Indeed, I heard artwork being interpreted all over the place. A small bronze-colored sculpture by Yayoi Kusama called Oven-Pan (1963) looked to me like a painted Pyrex dish filled with tuber-esque objects, but another partygoer said it reminded her of something she "saw in a manhole." To each her own.

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A staff member at the Walker Art Center. Photo by the author

As I scanned the galleries for the best examples of the museum's "dress to inspire" request, two attendees stood out almost immediately (disappointingly, most people didn't bother to go beyond ironing a button-down shirt). One of the standouts was Isabelle, a soft-spoken high-school student in a shiny mini dress (a regular piece of her wardrobe, not acquired especially for this event), who was simply "looking for more to do." Isabelle chose well in coming to the Walker, which also hosts regular Teen Takeover nights in the museum, where the unofficial motto is "A Safe Place for Unsafe Ideas."

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Isabelle. Photo by the author

The second winner of the evening was Japanese artist Ushio Shinohara, who won not only for his style (topped off by a mohawk he said he's sported since 1957) but also for his enthusiasm. Shinohara is one of the featured artists in International Pop, and when my companion and I approached him for a photo, he insisted on shuttling us around to each of his sculptures and paintings, where he posed with them, hamming it up with playfully aggressive faces (suited to his persona in the highly-praised 2013 documentary Cutie and the Boxer, which explores the relationship between him and his wife, artist Noriko Shinohara, who was with him at the museum and quite stylish herself). Shinohara told us that he moved to New York City 40 years ago and settled in the rapidly changing arts neighborhood of DUMBO 25 years ago, where he lives with Noriko and makes art by "just doing crazy stuff." [body_image width='1632' height='1224' path='images/content-images/2015/04/28/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/28/' filename='international-pop-party-at-the-walker-822-body-image-1430241920.jpg' id='50663']

Robert Rauschenberg 'Coca-Cola Plan' (1958) and Ushio Shinohara 'Coca-Cola Plan' (1964). Photo by the author

Shinohara's work is directly influenced by American pop, and one of his pieces, Coca-Cola Plan (1964), is displayed in the gallery side by side with the 1958 Robert Rauschenberg sculpture—also called Coca-Cola Plan—which he based his version on. The artist, who regularly read coverage of American art in the 1960s, was at the time struggling to create original Pop art of his own, and, in an inspired channeling of so many current-day fine arts MFA students, he explains his approach like so: "If you used food, that would be an Oldenburg, while human figures are taken by Segal, comics by Lichtenstein, flags by Johns, paint-pouring by Rauschenberg. There is no new style anywhere anymore. Shit! Why don't I do all of them at once then?" True to this approach, he has three works in different media in International Pop, including a painting/assemblage/sculpture called Drink More (1963), which is, in fact, owned by Jasper Johns himself.

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Ushio Shinohara with his work 'Drink More' (1963). Photo by the author

At the end of the exhibition the Walker had set up a dance floor, such as it was, replete with DJ spinning (roughly) period-appropriate tunes, a bar, and a lot of shimmying Minnesotans. Which is to say a lot of mostly white folks, mostly standing around, though everybody seemed so nice it was hard to judge their lack of moves.

As a whole, the preview party and the exhibition itself captured the exuberant spirit of pop art. The curators have done a service to museum-goers in assembling an internationally expanded view of a time period in art-making that most Americans identify disproportionately with Andy Warhol—an immensely important figure, to be sure, but definitely not the only influential player in the game, as International Pop makes clear. My only (impossible) suggestion for improvement is that Ushio Shinohararemain for the duration of the exhibition, so that all visitors can experience such a tour.

International Pop is on view at the Walker through August 29, 2015. Afterward, the exhibit will appear at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through 2016.

Follow Catherine LaSota on Twitter.

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Artwork by Nick Scott

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's when people ask why that you feel most impotent. Guilty even. Why are you depressed? What's happened to make you feel so down? As if you don't feel bad enough in the first place, now you have to rationalize, or explain away, your depression.

It's no wonder that one of the symptoms of depression is self-loathing. Of course, you're going to hate yourself when there's no bloody reason for feeling so bad. And yes, it only makes it worse when you know that there are people starving and homeless who have real cause to be miserable. You lacerate yourself for your self-indulgence.

And yet there's nothing self-indulgent about depression. It's an imbalance in the brain that makes you feel desperately bleak and/or terrified of everything around you. You don't need to have existential nausea, an intricately woven theory about the purposelessness of life. You don't need events to conspire against you. You don't need to lose your job. Though all these can help. You simply, sometimes, need the blip in the brain. And when you have the blip life loses all objectivity and stops making sense.

So, for example, you can't face getting up in the morning, and wrap yourself like a sausage roll in your duvet and lie in the dark forever. Or you do get up and find yourself weeping uncontrollably in a supermarket for no obvious reason. (I spent years weeping every time my partner and I went to Sainsbury's on Saturday morning. I don't know why—I actually quite liked the place, but eventually she decided it was easiest doing the shopping by herself.) Or you find yourself playing dare in the road, recklessly weaving in and out of cars hoping for the worst. Or you don't dare go on the tube for fear of throwing yourself under—and yes, I know the terrible impact it would have on all who witness it.

For all my adult life my ambition has been to feel something that reflects the real world; happy because something good has happened, sad because something bad.

Or you're scared of looking people in the eyes because you constantly think you're going to be exposed, even if you're not quite sure what form that exposure will take—for being thick, a smart-ass, insensitive, over-sensitive, liking someone, not liking someone, having nothing to say, you name it. Or you're so paralyzed by fear, or locked into your own world, that you stop being able to comprehend the basics—somebody might ask you the time, and you're incapable of answering because all you can hear in your head is the metronome clicking from side to side and it's suffocating all other thought.

I remember being on holiday one year in Greece with a girlfriend. It didn't help that we had no money so we spent our waking and sleeping hours on a nudist beach surrounded by narcissistic hedonists who delighted in nothing quite so much as themselves. Every day I wished it would rain. Not because we would have an excuse for leaving the beach, but because I would have reason to feel shit. "We've come all this way to enjoy the fleshy delights of Greece and now it's pissing down. Damn. Life is cruel." And for all my adult life that has been my ambition—to feel something that reflects the real world; happy because something good has happened, sad because something bad.

And it is the curse of the depressive to be denied that seemingly simple ask. Unless, in my experience, they take pills.

I resisted antidepressants as a a teenager and young man. It was probably because my doctor put me on antidepressants when I, in fact, had encephalitis—inflammation of the brain—so I never much trusted the experts' diagnosis. Pills were a sign of failure, of madness, one step away from ECT and not that far removed from the full lobotomy. Anything but pills.

So at ten years old I was sent to see a hospital psychiatrist. She asked me to talk about how I felt and then decided I had Münchausen by proxy, rather than encephalitis, and it was all my poor mother's fault. Turned out she—the psychiatrist, not my mom—was bonkers and used to run round the hospital naked regularly when the clock struck midnight.

A few years later, in the grip of genuine depression (many encephalitis survivors suffer depression for a variety of reasons – because their brain has been messed with, because they are left with disabilities or because they struggle with life afterwards), I went to another psychiatrist. How he enjoyed making me talk about what made me feel bad, how clever he seemed to think he was when he suggested my depression might have something to do with what I'd gone through. I didn't know what I was doing there, listening to a man absorb my life story and then reach a conclusion I already knew. I didn't want understanding, not even sympathy, I wanted help. Besides that, he was weird—a nice enough fella, but he was overweight, so he had his jaws clamped. That didn't do the trick. So he then had a stomach bypass operation, which eventually killed him. I had to sit in the room with the windows open because his stomach was so wrecked by the op that he trumped his way through every session I had with him.

Not long after I tried pills again. They made me catatonic. Zombie pills. Whereas before I just wanted to sleep through the days, these pills actually made me do so. Of course, you're not going to feel so bad if you're totally out of it, but it ain't much of a life. I came off the pills.

The change was astonishing—I didn't become a shiny happy person, but I did stop crying all the time.

For the next decade or so, I survived without shrinks or pills. I cried my way through life, wrapped myself up in the sausage roll duvet, and just about got through. Everything was good in life—I had my dream job at the Guardian, great partner, kids, friends—and yet I still felt like shit.

Depressives tend to be drawn to one another. You can smell them from a mile off. And that's what probably drew me to my best friend, a colleague at the paper. She was a classic depressive who didn't have anything to be miserable about. She was brilliant, lovely, loved, unique. But none of this helped her cope with life, and she killed herself.

A few months later I cracked up. I knew it was to do with my friend, and was inevitable. I took myself to the doctor and said I was suicidal, and just wanted something to make me feel better as quickly as possible. She sent me to the psychiatric hospital who didn't detain me, but put me on antidepressants. Prozac was still relatively new in the 1990s. REM wrote "Shiny Happy People" about the pills—and that was the common fear, that they were a giddy form of chemical cosh. Doctors promised me I'd feel sick for a few weeks (I did) but I should persist.

The change was astonishing. I didn't become a shiny happy person, but I did stop crying all the time. The metronome stopped clicking, I could tell people the time, and I became something approximating a functioning human being. Diane, my partner, had been against antidepressants because she had seen the effect of the earlier ones on me, but now she became insistent that I remained on them.

I read stuff about how people had become crazy and killed on Prozac, and worried. But I have never felt like killing anybody. I read that it made it more difficult to ejaculate (true, but it's good to have a challenge) and that you lose your emotions (I've still got plenty, but don't cry quite as easily as I did in Sainsbury's). I tried to come off every so often, but felt awful when I did. I questioned whether this was my depression or I had become addicted to the Prozac. Perhaps it's both. In the end, I stopped worrying.

If it's made life liveable, who cares whether I'm an addict? Eighteen years and counting with the cylindrical green and white godsends. Have I been on them too long? Probably. Am I an addict? Possibly. Will I ever successfully come off them? Probably not. Do I care? No way. Viva la Prozac. Here's to the next 18 years.

If you are concerned about the mental health of you or someone you know, visit the Canadian Mental Health Association website.

Follow Simon Hattenstone on Twitter.

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Eve as Wonder Woman. Photo by What a Big Camera

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Beyoncé has her BeyHive and Lady Gaga has her Monsters. For professional cosplayer Eve Beauregard, her "band of merry folk" is known as the Beaureguardians. She might not be a multimillion-dollar pop sensation, but with hundreds of thousands of fans across the world, Eve admits that the attention she receives can be overwhelming. But nonetheless, it's attention that's come her way from making a living doing the thing she loves the most.

Few people in the cosplay scene can consider it their profession—attending shows and conventions dressed as characters from their favorite video games (and beyond), posing for photographs with enthusiastic crowds. However, a great many supporters of costume play, coming from all walks of life, embrace it purely for fun, and it's become an integral part of encouraging and increasing diversity and inclusivity in video games. It invites male and female fans of all ages to express an interest and love for games, comics, movies, TV shows, and more, without question or exception.

For Eve, it's been an eight-year road from being an impressionable young fan to international success.

"It all started when my brothers took me to a convention," she tells me. "I wasn't super nerdy, at all, but I was into Batman and stuff. I saw these people in costume and thought it was the coolest thing, so I spent the entire next year thinking about it. I made my first costume and I was super proud of it, and it's been a downward spiral from there."

Sydney-based Eve's self-confessed decline into living and breathing everything cosplay, and being so dedicated to her craft, is directly responsible for her skyward trajectory of success. Nowadays she's one of her home country's most successful cosplay artists, and can regularly be found touring Europe, the US, and Mexico. Five or so years ago, this would never have happened—cosplay as a job just wasn't in the cards. But the attitudes of game developers and publishers have changed, for the better, with many picking up on its importance in recent years, the results of which tend to stare you right in the face at any significant expo anywhere in the world.

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Eve as Spider-Gwen. Photo by JJ Maher

"I think that the international community is leveling up and really learning how to communicate with businesses, and businesses are learning how to communicate with cosplayers," Eve says. "They're seeing the value and the worth in cosplayers. Cosplay images are some of the most viral images on the internet. An excellent cosplay photograph can go viral in, like, an hour. That's millions and millions of people seeing content from your game, and seeing that someone was passionate enough to hand-make that costume, and go out and do an epic photo shoot. It's the same when you see excellent flash art from League of Legends. It's like: 'I wanna play that game, that looks awesome!' Cosplay can do that so easily."

Eve is incredibly passionate about the industry she's so firmly embedded within. With so much responsibility and a packed schedule—this interview was originally planned for 2014, but pushed back six months due to her back-to-back touring—I'm curious to know what it's like sharing so much with so many people. Recently, sections of the cosplay community, and gaming in general, have received criticism for their depictions of women. The misguided movement known as Gamergate and all the column inches its worst machinations have manufactured has made things no easier for women like Eve—so how does someone in her position cultivate a following that they feel comfortable with?

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Eve as Harley Quinn. Photo by What a Big Camera

"In the beginning it was definitely very difficult," she says. "I had a huge influx of followers very, very quickly, and a lot of them were not looking at me as a person but as an object, or just a pretty face and a body in a costume. They behaved in such a manner. I received lots of overly sexualized comments, emails, and messages that were pornographic or just, like, massively inappropriate. People were sending me naked photos of themselves, all that kind of stuff. Even just today I had to deal with someone on Instagram who thinks that it would be really excellent and great and smart to—I don't know if I should tell you this—to have an entire account dedicated to filming himself ejaculating on pictures of famous internet personalities, uploading those videos, and tagging the personalities in them. That's the kind of stuff that I was dealing with."

This example is, of course, an infrequent extreme. Eve recognizes that and has taken a careful, delicate approach to how she interacts with her audience, as well as how she responds to people being inappropriate and disrespectful on a less-shocking scale.

Related: Check out more cosplay action in our documentary on the world of eSports.

"When I think that it could genuinely be a misunderstanding, or that they've just never been spoken to about this stuff before, then I try to talk to them about it," Eve explains. "Nine out of ten times they're actually really responsive to being spoken to like a person, rather than just being insulted.

"I think, particularly online, if someone says something out of line it's really popular and seen as fun to shut them down, and have all your friends tell you how great you are for doing so," she says. "As satisfying as that might be in the moment, and as justified as that might be in some cases, I just don't think that's the right course of action. Two wrongs don't make a right. It's cheesy, but just don't be a dick. It's still another person on the other side. If you get that chance, to talk to someone who might never have been spoken to politely or respectfully about how you should talk to women, that can impact their whole life."

It's a balanced, reserved approach, and I want to know whether Eve thinks that her mature handling of audience interaction should be reflected across all notable personalities in the online space.

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Eve as Tinkerbell. Photo by JJ Maher.

"I think that there are so many different types of cosplayers," she says, sensitive with her choice of words. "You can't possibly expect every single cosplayer that has a following to take on a responsibility as a community leader, because that's not what everyone wants. And that's fine. Within the cosplay community it becomes very apparent who the leaders are, and who's doing good things for the community—who's contributing positively—and for me that's all that matters. I want to be a positive part of the community. For other people, it's just not a priority for them; they don't really care, and that's fine. It doesn't really affect me and I don't like to blame other people for the stuff I have to deal with."

I voice my surprise that she holds no expectation for other community leaders to take responsibility for the kind of attitudes they encourage, and those they stamp out. Of course, the blame lies wholly with those who think it's acceptable to be disrespectful to people, but many will agree that with cultural influence comes a necessity to set examples, whether that be pop stars, Hollywood A-listers, or cosplayers.

"I know that there will be scumbags on the internet no matter what, and I'm always going to have to deal with people like that," she says. "I'm not comfortable placing the blame on other cosplayers, because I don't think that everyone should have to be held responsible. If you wanna be a sexy cosplayer and not care how people comment on it or perceive it, then more power to you, you go and do that. But I just won't tolerate people being overly inappropriate, disrespectful, or explicit within my space. But I don't blame other people."

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Eve as Yennefer of Vengerberg in promotional material for 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.' Photo by What a Big Camera

Developers also have a lot of responsibility when it comes to how they choose to depict people, particularly women, in their games. After consistent criticism from audiences, the press, and more, titles are slowly but surely maturing in how they decide to handle this kind of content. Eve recently partnered with CD Projekt RED, the makers of The Witcher series, to help promote their upcoming epic, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The Polish studio is renowned for dealing with very mature subjects within their games, from racism to sexism, doing so with a welcome steadiness unseen in a lot of other mainstream titles.

"I would love to see more video game characters that I relate to—whether it's with the personalities or their physique, their appearance, or the way they dress," Eve explains when I ask her what her experience working with CD Projekt RED has taught her about games. "I would like more game developers to pay more attention to reality, to real people, and to diversity. With The Witcher, you know, I think (main player character) Geralt is the most sexualized character in the game! As much as characters in The Witcher can be very sexualized, they can also be very empowered. I don't think being sexy or having sex means you're weak or powerless. In Wild Hunt there are three incredible female characters that are complex and interesting. They're women that I would look up to—and I love that about them."

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Eve as Elizabeth from 'BioShock Infinite.' Photo by What a Big Camera.

Now that Eve's time working alongside CD Projekt RED is over, with Wild Hunt just one month away from being released, she finishes by explaining what's next for her, what's next for cosplay, and how she believes the industry is continuing to improve, no matter the negative press.

"I never want to stop cosplaying, but I'm not sure if I can keep up at this pace. This part of the hobby is always something I want to hold onto in various degrees of commitment. But for me, my end goal, not just in cosplay but in the whole geeky career thing, is that I want to find a way to contribute something positive and meaningful and lasting to make positive change. I think that in the geek community as a whole, we're going through growing pains. As long as people keep pushing for positive change and for more diversity and inclusivity then it's going to go in a good direction.

"The best thing," she concludes, "is that a lot of people are."

Check out Eve Beauregard on Facebook.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

Detroit's historic Masonic Temple reeked of pot, sweat, flat soda, and Speed Stick deodorant on the night of February 21. The funk of the juggalo had choked the air of the venue that—thanks to its gold ceilings and red carpets—looked like it should have been hosting a performance of Swan Lake, instead of white rappers in clown makeup.

There's always a twisted tent revival vibe to Insane Clown Posse's shows, but Juggalo Day was another beast altogether. This year, the free annual hometown show, which is put on to collect canned goods for a collection of food banks, resembled Blade's bloodbath rave, if you exchanged the fake blood for Faygo Moon Mist. Rapturous ICP fans writhed together in their soda sacrament, yelping "whoop whoop," while Violent J, Shaggy 2 Dope, and their brood of cryptic clown dancers ran circles around the stage with the kind of swagger you can only learn in America's worst public schools.

To people outside of the culture, the scene at Juggalo Day was an embarrassment at best, and dangerous at worst. The FBI currently classifies juggalos as a national gang. And after 26 years of releasing albums and going on international tours, ICP is just as divisive today as they were when the now-defunct Blender magazine named them the worst band in history. Even though the juggalo family has never been bigger or stronger, there is little appreciation for the artistry behind their music or the supportive nature of the culture they created. And so, they soldier on, making music for their hordes of obsessed fans outside of the mainstream.

As such, the group quietly released their latest album, The Marvelous Missing Link: The Lost Version, this week. And despite it breaking the top 10 of the iTunes hip-hop albums chart, there were no reviews on Pitchfork.com or short profiles in the last pages of the New Yorker. When the band gets any press at all, it's usually terrible and diminutive. Every legitimate rap music critic I asked to talk about ICP refused to comment for this story because the band was, in one writer's words, "irrelevant." Not to mention, nearly every news outlet—including this one—has sent a reporter down to events like Juggalo Day to gawk at the freaks and depict the band and its followers as imbeciles.

However, I wasn't in the thralls of the sticky bacchanalia at Juggalo Day. I was backstage with ICP's small (by rap standards) entourage of family and friends. And from there, the scene didn't look like a bunch of rabid fans hailing dufuses who extol the pleasures of soda pop. Instead, it looked like clockwork. Roadies moved on and off the stage in synchronized fashion, covering hot lights from soda splashes and wheeling in new props and effects. Backup clowns tapped in and tapped out, like tag-team wrestlers, all based on a strict, timed script. It was like these Midwestern knuckleheads were putting on a twisted version of Miss Saigon.

"It's just all based on cues that [Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope] set," a backup clown said.

"We're performing, so they gotta know when to come out, when to leave, when to hit the floor, when to throw Faygo—all in unison," Violent J said to me. "[It's just] like the Backstreet Boys."

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For a pivotal show like Juggalo Day, ICP and their clown crew do grueling practices every day of the week before the show, on a soundstage in a warehouse located in Farmington Hills, Michigan. They rehearse costumes changes, choreograph dance moves, practice entrance cues, and work on their Faygo spraying technique. It's like a carnivalesque take on the strict, rehearsal regimen Motown artists went through in the 60s at Hitsville USA, which is only about ten minutes from where Violent J and Shaggy first formed ICP.

ICP's intense work ethic and preparation has been essential to their ascension from a second-tier Detroit rap group into the leaders of their own subculture—a feat accomplished by virtually no other group in popular American music, save for maybe the Grateful Dead.

Being a juggalo has become a way of life for tens of thousands of Americans who feel disenfranchised for one reason or another. As one dreadlocked juggalette I met at Juggalo Day named Sarah told me, ICP is for "Kids that just don't fit in at other places... It's family. It makes you feel good... You can be yourself."

The lifestyle juggalos lead isn't just about memorizing the macabre lyrics from the group's dozens of albums. It's about watching the group's feature films so many times, you know every word, and supporting all the other face-painted acts on their Psychopathic Records label, which has been estimated to pull in more than $10 million annually. It's about drinking Faygo soda until you've increased your risk for diabetes. It's about attending events like Juggalo Day and the Gathering of the Juggalos, where a reported tens of thousands of people come together every year for four days to allegedly throw poop on Tila Tequila, watch a little person give disabled veterans lap dances, and sing along to classic ICP songs like "Please Don't Hate Me (Eminem's Mom)." (Sample lyric: "Please don't hate me, but I been fucking your mom loose lately.")

The latest effort by ICP is the two-part record, The Marvelous Missing Link: The Lost Version, which revolves around faith, because according to what Violent J told me, living life without faith is like, "living with sunglasses on with a shade of depression. No matter what the weather is like, it's always gloomy and shitty."

That's a weird sentiment to come from a group known for making "inappropriate" music so offensive they were dropped from their second major record label contract in the late 90s. But then again, I've always known that there was more to ICP than what meets the eye, which is why I made my way to Detroit, the birthplace of the juggalo, to uncover how they've become one of pop culture's most reviled and successful phenomenons.

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Downtown Detroit looks like Baghdad with snow. Windowless six-story buildings litter the landscape. Local restaurants employ security guards with bulletproof vests. And police helicopters circle the city's skies like vultures, night and day, as the sound of sirens constantly ring out in the distance.

And yet, ICP are staunchly optimistic for their city. When I first met the duo at Psychopathic Records headquarters in Farmington Hills, which is 22 miles northwest of Downtown, they kept reassuring me that Motor City was on "the come up." A notion that became increasingly hard for me to understand. I found myself constantly thinking, If this is what it looks like when it's on the rise, what the hell did it look like during their childhood?

Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J, whose real names are Joseph "Joey" Utsler and Joseph Bruce , grew up together in several low-income neighborhoods outside Detroit in the 70s. This was an era of city's sharp economic decline, with rampant white flight to the suburbs and crucial institutions like Motown and manufacturing plants leaving the city for more lucrative locales. Violent crime in the inner city was also reaching an all-time high, with more than 1,000 annual homicides throughout most of the decade. This level of oppressive violence was a part of J and Shaggy's everyday life, even as kids. In his memoir, Behind the Paint, Violent J recounts seeing a naked woman "[running] out of a house with her hands tied" as he walked to school. That woman, he claims, had just been raped.

The memoir also paints the troubles Violent J was having at home. In a chapter called "Life with Satan," he describes how his stepfather, whom he refers to by the fake name "Lester the Molester," would grab his penis when he was just a young boy.

(Violent J declined a request for to comment on the topic of his childhood abuse. Psychopathic Records' publicist told us via email to, "Please refer to Violent J's autobiography Behind the Paint concerning his views on this particular topic... Many names have been changed for legal purposes, but Jumpsteady [Violent J's brother] can verify that everything described in the book is truthful.")

Violent J also remembers his stepfather's two grandsons coming over from time to time. One day, according to Violent J, one of the grandson's said, "Let's have sex," and ordered him to strip off his clothes and lay down on his stomach. At that point, Violent J didn't even know what sex was. He says he refused, left the room, and told his brother, Jumpsteady. According to the book, Jumpsteady chased the grandsons out of the house.

"Now that I'm a grown-ass, old-ass man, things are much different," Violent J writes. "If I ever run into [my stepfather]'s tired frame again, I'll kill [him]."

Later, as a teen, he says in the book, his friend walked him to the back of an abandoned house. The friend took out his cock and told Violent J to suck it. Violent J says he started crying and then saw a log. He went down, as if he was about to suck his cock, and then picked up the log, threw it at him, and ran.

"Memories like [this] can haunt you for a lifetime," he writes. "I realize that everybody out there has horrible memories of their own. I'm not alone in this. I think it's best for people to tell other ninjas about their horrible memories, because in time, that horrible memory of yours might turn into a funny story, and that makes it much easier to deal with. "

Obviously, this is a mantra that goes deep into a lot of ICP's work, considering their countless humorous songs about killing pedophiles. And although his youth featured abuse, it's clear that J holds fond memories of his childhood, especially once he became best friends with Shaggy in elementary school. Their friendship was the one constant thing they had at a time when both their families struggled to make ends meet.

They related to each other because they were so damn poor and didn't have real father figures in the home. The lack of male presence in the house especially affected Shaggy, who fell into drinking and drug use at an early age partially because there was no one around strong enough to stop him.

"Couldn't nobody take it. I was a drunk," Shaggy told Howard Stern in 2006 about how bad his drinking eventually became after ICP exploded. "I still get into fights. Only problem with [sobriety] is now I remember the fights."

As poor kids, they both only owned one shirt and two pairs of pants, which made them unpopular with classmates. Other kids clowned them constantly for being poor and treated them like "scrubs." Then, one day, they decided enough was enough. In middle school, they started to embrace the "scrub life" and made it a style choice, calling themselves "the floobs."

"We can make it cool to have nothing," Violent J decided. He and Shaggy started to flaunt. When they rode their shitty bikes down the street, they'd scream, "We're the floobs!" It was a scene probably not too dissimilar from the way I saw juggalos defiantly yell "Family!" at Juggalo Day, pronouncing their unity as proud scum bags.

Making something out of nothing would become an essential theme of ICP's music and the culture around it. Eventually, they'd go on to write songs about Payless shoes as if they were Margiela sneakers and pen love odes to overweight women like they were Rihanna. "A lot of fat chicks appreciated that," Violent J joked to me, but he sees ICP's mission as a very serious one. "There are a lot of juggalos out there who grew up by themselves in those conditions, and it was hard," he said. "It wasn't easy until they discovered [ICP]."

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Every juggalo I met at Juggalo Day echoed this statement. When they're telling their stories of first identifying as a juggalo, they sound like gay men talking about coming out of the closet. You don't become a Juggalo; you're born one. Before ICP made them aware that they were part of the juggalo family, they felt like outcasts. They were too fat, too ugly, and too poor to even hang with the punks or the comic book nerds. Juggalo culture gave them an identity, while also transforming the stigmas of their scrub-life into something to be proud of. Or, as Violent J put it, "Now everybody's a floob."

In their late teens, the floobs became an actual gang—the Inner City Posse. They "were all losers so far in our lives, and the whole gang thing kind of gave us an excuse to be losers," as Violent J put it in his memoir. Where most gangs cook crack or run prostitution rings, they just did "horrible things," like hitting hookers on the face with bricks. But the gang also acted like bloodthirsty Robin Hoods. "I hated the rich," Violent J wrote in Behind the Paint. "We'd drive around Birmingham and just beat the shit out of rich kids."

Violent J was too busy making mayhem in the streets to take rap seriously. It wasn't until he went to jail for 90 days when he was 18 for attempting to steal a car that he started really writing rhymes. When he got out, he decided to stay out of trouble and devote himself to his music. He recorded a tape called Enter the Ghetto Zone, calling himself Violent J for the first time. Shaggy loved it and started rapping with him.

The duo spent hours recording songs, handing out flyers, and begging record store owners to sell their albums. They loved the work, and Violent J hoped to become as musically accomplished as his idols like Michael Jackson and Brian Wilson, who "worked on his shit so hard he went crazy." However, this work ethic came with a price: "It meant sacrificing tons of shit that normal 19-, 20-, 21-year-old kids do like going out clubbing, hollering at chicks, and partying," Shaggy said.

The earliest incarnation of the Inner City Posse mainly rapped about goofing off. It wasn't until Violent J and Shaggy heard the Houston, Texas rap group the Geto Boys, in the late 80s, that they got interested in making music that was equally inspired by both gangster shit and horror films. By the early 90s, many Detroit rappers were penning rhymes about street life, so everybody on the scene started to develop gimmicks to make a name for themselves. Kid Rock dressed as a cowboy. Esham said he worshiped Satan. And ICP painted their faces like clowns.

Violent J claims that he got the idea to put on clown makeup from God.

"The Dark Carnival came into our life and started delivering ideas. It didn't make sense at first, but we were like let's do it—and we did it," Shaggy told me.

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Its meaning has evolved over the years, but generally speaking, the Dark Carnival is the universe in which Insane Clown Posse's mythos is based. More specifically, as Violent J told Rolling Stone, it's about "the killing of racist people and the killing of pedophiles." In that sense, it's an allegory for doling out judgement, a kind of purgatory-themed amusement park where the bourgeois and the oppressors and the predators finally get what's coming to them.

"In our music, we express a lot of anger. A lot of the anger we express is still very real. It's just easier to say it on your record and it's amplified on our records," said Violent J to me. "If we talk about killing a pedophile, that comes from somewhere. That's real anger. We wish we could kill a pedophile, so we do it on the albums."

You can see this play out in their songs, such 1997's "Piggy Pie" and 2010's "To Catch a Predator," which is a revenge fantasy about torturing and decapitating a pedophile. In the realm of the Dark Carnival, it's people like this who have to go.

"Maybe it won't look exactly like it did in my vision, but something out there is coming, and it is going to consume all those whose souls are not pure," J writes in his memoir.

Those who do the judging and killing within the Dark Carnival are a cadre of extremely violent fictional characters. They have ominous names like the Great Milenko and the Ringmaster, are depicted with sinister faces, and all possess their own unique powers. Each character is represented by their own "joker card," which serves as the cover for each character's eponymous concept album in the ICP catalog. ICP completed their first deck of joker cards in 2004. There are six cards in a deck. Now, the group is on its second deck, of which the newly released The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost/Found Era is the third installment.

"Usually, the message [of] the joker card is second to the entertainment and it's a hidden message," Violent J said to me. However, "The message [of The Marvelous Missing Link] is right in your face: Find hope."

At this point, a concept like hope being the center of an ICP album isn't too unheard of. In 2001, after leaving Island Records to release music on their own label, Psychopathic Records, they dropped The Wraith: Shangri-La, the first album of the final card of the first joker deck. The album's final track, "Thy Unveiling," shocked outsiders and even longtime fans with the final stanza of its opening verse:

"When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? Truth is we follow God, we've always been behind him. The Carnival is God and may all Juggalos find him!"

Some Juggalos felt duped: Had ICP been religious all along? Although the Guardian and other outlets have called the group Christian, ICP says this is false. They simply wanted to bring a deeper message to their music and tell the juggalos, their fellow floobs, there was hope even in the apocalypse. The shock factor also helped keep their name out there.

"We're the opposite of a band like U2 who can say 'We're gonna take a couple years and regroup guys.' We can't do that shit. We're underground," Violent J said to me. "We're constantly trying to stay relevant—constantly struggling to make noise that will cause people to look our way. It's hard when you're underground and you don't have hits on the radio and shit."

The gamble paid off. Today, Psychopathic Records is a full-blown business and ICP is a mainstay of the American cultural landscape. On the Billboard independent album charts, they have sold more number one indie albums than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the White Stripes. The band has also continued to gain new fans. At Juggalo Day, I even met second-generation juggalos who were raised by juggalo parents.

"As far as rappers, I don't think rappers even stand a chance to give their opinion on ICP because ICP is kicking all of their ass," Three 6 Mafia founder and hip-hop legend DJ Paul told me. "No rapper out, I don't give a shit who it is, could do what they did. They created the movement. [The Gathering of the Juggalos] has people sleeping in their cars or in the grass for three days straight. I can't think of another rapper who can do that. You gotta have more than some good songs and sold a [few] million records to do that. [They had a] a genius plan."

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ICP runs the Psychopathic Records operation from a two-story brick building in Farmington Hills, a suburb outside Detroit. It's their own demented take on Hittsville, USA.

Smoking an e-cig, Shaggy took me on a tour of the office with Violent J. In an office downstairs, they've pasted fan photos on the "Karma Wall."

"Every picture there's something behind it," Shaggy said. "There are pictures of some normal ass shit—people's high school photos, baby photos—but there's super entertaining things in the mix. It's not up there if it didn't mean something to somebody here."

Upstairs are offices for Psychopathic Records CEO, Bill Dail, who ICP met when they were kids, and Jumpsteady, Violent J's brother. Dail holds down the fort while the group tours and records. And Jumpsteady helps get out important messages to the juggalo family. "Jugalos love and trust the word of Jumpsteady," Violent J said.

Violent J and Shaggy have built Psychopathic to run on family values, which is incredible considering their home lives as children were so dysfunctional. They hire family members or old friends, and both rappers bring their kids and wives on tour, making pit stops at Chuck E Cheese to entertain them. Their years of raging and fucking "thousands, thousands" of women are long behind them—in fact, Shaggy's sober.

"[Being sober] doesn't make a difference in touring because we never really had the type of tours where we're balls out rock stars," Shaggy said to me. "Nowadays it's just not as appealing as it used to be. We get done with a show and we're fucking tired."

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To preserve their legacy, they've converted one conference room into a storage space containing all of their keepsakes and mementos. Silver metal shelves and clothes racks contain 25 years of ICP history: fake police outfits, zombie masks, monk robes, an ape costume—the list goes on and on. The room leads to a staircase that takes you down to a huge warehouse where they store the merch they sell online. Where most bands sell shitty shirts, ICP's merch runs the gamut from T-shirts to clothes that resemble high end streetwear. It's only a matter of time before a downtown store like V-Files appropriates their panties that say "Psycho Bitch" or the purple jumpers that say "Faygo" on the back.

The heart and soul of the building, however, has nothing to do with e-commerce or clothes—it's their recording studio, "the Lotus Pod." It's in this wood-paneled studio where they've recorded most of their masterpieces.

"[The Lotus Pod] is the mecca of Psychopathic Records," Violent J said to me.

"The ground zero of where all the magic is produced," Shaggy 2 Dope continued for him. "This is where the noise comes from—right here in this building."

On the walls I saw the result of this noise—a framed gold record of The Amazing Jeckel Brothers and platinum plaque for The Great Milenko. These accomplishments and their family fortress in Farmington are a far cry from the group's broken and battered childhood as poor misbegotten kids rummaging around the gritty streets of Motor City. The plaque represents all the tireless hard work they've channeled into their art.

"It's more like a lifestyle than a workaholic," Shaggy added. "It's kind of like work is our life."

And they want this year's next two albums, The Missing Link: Lost and The Missing Link: Found, to continue to teach the juggalo community how to hope for a better future.

And who better to spread that message than Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope? After all, before the floobs, before The Great Milenko, before the Gathering, before Faygo became white trash holy water, they were just two poor kids banding together together to overcome the perils of gang-ridden Detroit and the trauma of abuse.

"Who can knock something like [hope]? Who could diss something that provides hope for people?" Violent J asked me. "And so that's what we're talking about, man: have hope in your life."

Follow Mitchell Sunderland and Amy Lombard on Twitter.

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Photos by Amy Lombard.

Everyone knows Insane Clown Posse for their love of Faygo and the annual Gathering of the Juggalos festival, but in between performing cult classics like "Miracles," the band has built Psychopathic Records—an indie records empire that annually makes an estimated $10 million in revenue. Over the years, the label has signed several juggalo rap groups, who now all record their music at Psychopathic Records' headquarters in Farmington Hills, Michigan, a suburb outside Detroit. The two-story building serves as both the artistic and business epicenter of Psychopathic, housing the "Lotus Pod" recording studio, standard corporate offices, and a warehouse filled with Psychopathic merch.

Insane Clown Posse took us on an exclusive tour of their headquarters and photographer Amy Lombard shot the following photos.

For more juggalos, check out VICE's exclusive profile of Insane Clown Posse.