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All photos courtesy of Hostgator Dotcom

When Hostgator M. Dotcom went to the dermatologist yesterday, he had to lie to his daughter. Although she can't possibly understand what they mean, the six-year-old has come to love the porn URLs that cover her daddy's face. After all, she's never seen her father without them. But Princess could apparently intuit the excitement of the day—she knew something big was happening. "You're not going to get those tattoos removed, are you daddy?" she said as her human-billboard dad headed out the door.

"I was like, 'Oh, shoot,' because I don't wanna lie to her," Dotcom says. "I told her they're not going away, because I didn't want her to scream and stuff."

As much as Dotcom, neé Billy Gibby, loves his kids, getting the tattoos off was something he had to do. The Anchorage resident's transition into a human billboard began with an act of altruism, when he sold some skin so he could pay to donate a kidney to a Californian woman he met online. But then he fell on hard times and kept auctioning off his body, even his name, to keep his family off the streets. Eventually, his face was covered with URLs, some of them for porn companies, which made it hard for him to find traditional employment. Dotcom, who suffers from mental illness, has been trying to put his life back on track, so last month he reached out to VICE for help, and readers responded by donating more than $3,200 to his cause.

On Motherboard: This Temporary E-Tattoo Creates Power from Your Sweat

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He went for his first 45-minute removal session yesterday. Though he's fought as a boxer and obviously gone under the needle a lot, Dotcom says the session hurt more than anything he's ever experienced. "It's like way worse than getting a tattoo because you can smell your dead skin and whatnot when they burn it," he told me. "[The doctors] always told me that it kinda feel like when you're cooking and the grease splats on you, but over and over and over for the whole 45 minutes."

Watch our 'Tattoo Age' profile of famed artist Freddy Corbin:

Right now, the 34-year-old looks like he's had the shit beaten out of him. Although he looks undeniably better than when he was branded with defunct porn sites, boiling blisters and red splotches cover his mug. His daughter thinks he was punched in the face. She'll probably figure out the truth when he goes again for another session in six to eight weeks. Dotcom says the money will be enough to take care of all the ink on his face and will provide for some preliminary sessions on his neck as well.

"I'm not really used to a lot of people being that nice," he says. "Usually when I read comments on stories about me, people say things like, 'That guy's a fucking idiot,' or 'That guy's stupid,' and things like that." Although some people dropped as much as $300 for the cause, he says the comments were made him smile even more than the money.

For the better part of a decade, people have treated Dotcom like garbage. He's been denied service at restaurants and strangers assume he's some sort of criminal, even though he has no record and first became famous a decade ago for donating an organ to a relative stranger.

"It's nice when people don't think I'm gonna kill 'em," he says of his new lease on life. "I don't feel as ugly and stuff, and it helped my self-confidence a lot. When I'd look at the tattoos in the mirror I'd cry sometimes and think, 'What have I become?' It was really depressing."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Marc Pointud at the lighthouse.

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Marc Pointud is currently preparing to spend 60 days on his own, in one of the most terrifying places in France: The infamous lighthouse of Tévennec. Located on an inhospitable island, just off the Pointe du Raz in Brittany, the place has a rather dark reputation. Given that it's hard to access and people are scared shitless of the place, no one has dared to live there since 1910—the year it was automated.

Lit for the first time in 1875, the lighthouse has met 23 guards. Henri Guezennec was the first person to live there and, unsurprisingly, he was also the first to go completely mad. To this day, the legend lives on. Stories of guards losing their minds, people dying suspiciously after falling on knives, children dying and, of course, ghosts. In many ways the lighthouse isn't dissimilar to its neighbor Ar-Men—or the Hell of Hells as it's been dubbed.

Marc Pointud knows the country's lighthouses quite well. In 2002, he founded the National Society for Heritage, Lighthouses and Beacons in an attempt to preserve the country's forgotten lighthouses. In 2011, the State granted his organization permission to occupy and renovate Tévennec. The long-term goal being to eventually turn it into an artist residence.

This year, to celebrate the lighthouse's 140th anniversary and raise awareness of the historic landmark, Marc decided that he'd spend 60 days alone there. The project is called Light on Tevennec and is crowd-funded. I gave Marc a call to find out why he'd put himself through such a thing.

VICE: How are you feeling about spending two months in a lighthouse that people say is haunted?
Marc: I've been preparing myself for it for a long time now. I've sailed quite a bit but this will be my first stint in a lighthouse. I've spent some extended periods of time at sea with a crew. In a way I think that's probably harder because you not only have to take care of yourself, you need to look after a ton of other people too.

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Photo by Charles Marion. Courtesy of National Society of Heritage, Lighthouses, and Beacons.

Why would you spend 60 days alone there? Wasn't loneliness the reason the lighthouse keepers went mad in the first place?
That is exactly what this is about. Solitude is the Tévennec's keepers' tradition. Between 1874 to 1910, the lighthouse needed a new keeper every year. Nobody could last longer. But it was a different time. You weren't able to communicate with the outside world. You basically only had the birds to talk to. It'll be much easier for me, I'll be in touch with both the media and my association all the time.

Is the lighthouse equipped to have someone living in it?
Not at all. There's no furniture. It's completely abandoned. I'm going to bring a couple of bits and pieces—a bed, a chair, a table, food, and some stuff to write with. It's going to be a bit like being a prisoner, I suppose. The lighthouse is fully automated so I don't have to operate it or anything. There's no running water, no electricity, no heating. It's going to cost a fortune to refurbish that place. That's why we are crowd-funding this project.

So you're doing this to raise awareness about the abandonment of the lighthouses? Is the state involved?
Nope. There's no support from the state. Sometimes, they carry out some very basic repairs on the lights. Which is strange—these lights are used every single night but nothing is done for their upkeep.

Related: Agafia's Taiga Life

Are you afraid that you won't last 60 days?
We'll take all the necessary precautions to make sure that it all goes smoothly. That said, I could easily encounter medical or psychological problems. But if anything comes up, I just need to make a phone call and there'll be a helicopter there in 15 minutes. Folks don't die on Tévennec like they used to. I'm in good shape though, so nothing should go wrong.

Why are there so many stories about Tévennec?
Before it was a lighthouse, Tévennec was supposedly the residence of Ankou (the personification of death in Breton legends). When you sail the Raz de Sein without an engine, the current takes you directly to Tévennec. A lot of sailors have died there and that's how the rock earned its reputation. After the state built a house out there, they'd send people to live there by themselves. Which wasn't a great idea. Whenever it was stormy, waves could go all the way up above the roof—which ended with the house being completely destroyed three times in 100 years. Hopefully, things are a bit different these days.

Read: In Defense of the Isle of Wight

Hopefully. So, do you believe in ghosts?
No, I don't. But I'm respectful of people's beliefs and wouldn't rule anything out completely. But what is a ghost, even? Is it some wandering soul or is it a manifestation of loneliness? Who knows. Anyway, if I end up meeting a spirit there, I'll try to snap a picture.

Thanks.

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Screencaps via TheLipTV and ABC News

A Los Angeles judge decided to delay former hip-hop mogul Suge Knight's murder trial on Friday when celebrity lawyer Thomas Mesereau took over as his counsel. Now the court proceedings over the January 29 incident for which Knight has been charged with murder, attempted murder, and hit-and-run will resume on July 7.

By that point, Mesereau, who is best known for getting Michael Jackson acquitted of child molestation charges in 2005, should be ready to go.

It's been a busy week for Knight, the co-founder of Death Row Records, who refused to even show up for a separate robbery hearing Wednesday by insisting he wasn't healthy enough to make it to court. During the Friday hearing, Knight's legal team was expected to argue for a motion to dismiss the murder charges in hopes of focusing on the robbery charge, which Knight faces with co-defendant Katt Williams. (The two are accused of stealing a celebrity photographer's camera.)

Check out our documentary on some of France's toughest rappers:

The basis of Knight's motion to dismiss the murder charges is that Cle "Boan" Sloan, one of the alleged victims of the hit-and-run, gave remarks to the police that were instrumental in charging Knight, but then refused to testify, telling the court, "I will not be used to send Suge Knight to prison."

Knight's alleged history of violent witness intimidation was part of the basis for his bail initially being set at a whopping $25 million, according to The Daily Beast. (Bail was subsequently lowered to $10 million.)

Mesereau did speak in court on Knight's behalf Friday, according to the Associated Press, arguing that his new client isn't "being treated humanely" in jail.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Photo via Anheuser-Busch

The southwestern United States is in the midst of an historic storm. The widespread flooding and severe weather has resulted in at least 37 deaths across Texas, Oklahoma, and northern Mexico. With flood warnings still in effect today, the disaster could continue to leave behind damage into this weekend and beyond. To aid in the relief efforts, an Anheuser-Busch brewery in Georgia has halted its normal production to start churning out cans of emergency drinking water for the Red Cross to hand out in storm-ravaged areas.

"Oklahoma and Texas are in an unprecedented situation," Red Cross spokesman Jordan Scott told NBC News. "There are a lot of folks in need and everyone's coming forward to help out."

Anheuser-Busch—makers of Budweiser, Beck's, Stella Artois, among others—has a history of producing cans of potable drinking water for Red Cross, partnering with them a few times annually in emergency situations. They are in the process of shipping out around 2,000 cases, each with 24 water cans, to communities in the Southwest.

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Hell yeah, buddy. Photo via Flickr user SeanCallinan

Few decisions, aside from all the ones you make past the age of 25, will affect your life as much as which university you decide to attend. In addition to dictating how you'll drink until you black out, which drugs you'll discover and abuse, and the type of people who will have sex with you, which school you choose will also leave a definable imprint on your personality.

So, if you still haven't picked your school for next fall (and if you haven't picked a school for next fall by now, oh my god, you are so fucked), here's a glimpse into your debt-filled future.

Brock University
You want to obtain a university education while still being able to feel like you're never more than a hallway away from experiencing a Punta Cana hotel orgy.

Bishop's University
You are the worst thing to ever happen to Quebec, but you have probably made friends in the Hells Angels.

Concordia University
You were in student politics: you know how to stuff a ballot box.

You were not in student politics: you have a Pavlovian response to hearing about the Israel/Palestine conflict that causes you to weep uncontrollably.

Carleton University
You've spent hours at The Manx convincing yourself that "Ottawa isn't so bad!"

Queen's University
You know Homecoming is the only thing keeping you from going to Carleton.

Dalhousie University
You wanted to get out of Ontario and go somewhere your tailored sweatpants would set you apart from the crowd.

University of Guelph
Due to either your athletic regimen or your natural biology classes, you know your way around some steroids.

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OCAD, obviously. Photo via Flickr user John Vetterli

OCAD University
"You're, like, totally an artist!"

Western University
You are either actively making the world a bad place or in a constant state of existential despair. You get upset when people need you to clarify "which" London you went to school in. You are probably white. And rich.

McMaster
You could totally use your OSAP to put a down payment on a house in the Strathcona neighbourhood and make a shit-ton of money flipping the place when the rest of Toronto's artistic community gets priced out of Parkdale.

This is not a joke: this is advice.

Memorial University
You really like your high school friends.

Simon Fraser University
You're either elated or annoyed that the only thing people ever mention about your school is that it was the Delphi Museum of Colonial History on Caprica in Battlestar Galactica.

U of T
You chose U of T because you wanted an easy, non-threatening escape from your neighbouring suburban city of either Brampton, Mississauga, or Oakville, and it was either this or York. You figured you would rather live in a city, even though you visited Toronto maybe three times, and it was to go to the Exhibition Place with your older cousins. They seemed cool at the time but were encouraging you to go to York because you'd be able to commute from home, so you picked U of T out of spite.

Royal Military College of Canada
You think those pussies in Depot have it easy.

Ryerson
You read a Richard Price novel and craved an authentic, urban experience. Later, you walked past Hooker Harvey's that one time and still talk about it like it's your personal Vietnam.

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McGill University. Photo via Flickr user TMAB2003

McGill
Your parents sent you here because they heard it was called "The Harvard of the North" but knowing that won't save you from the bleak, barren landscape known as the Canadian job market, you've resigned yourself to "learning French" (aka dating a francophone) and endless games of frisbee golf. The two choices facing you now are: head back home to work a summer job at whatever company your dad runs, or stay in Montreal and get sucked into the never-neverland vortex of booze, drugs, and awesome bands that 10 years from now has you coming to in a St Henri squat afterparty next to a guy with a single dread coming out the side of his head and wondering, "Where did my life go?!"

University of King's College
You still have a copy of The Aeneid on your shelf. You have never read The Aeneid. You will never read The Aeneid.

University of Saskatchewan
You wanted the thrill of a big city without sacrificing the familiar smell of cow shit. Unless you're in a science program you have only a vague knowledge of the "Canadian Light Source," and you're sick of W. Brett Wilson being treated like the second coming of Jesus just because he's from North Battleford.

University of Regina
You wanted the familiar smell of cow shit, but without the thrill of a big city. You're probably mad that a U of S alum made this dumb joke about Regina being worse than Saskatoon, but in your heart of hearts, don't you kind of know it's true? On traveling to Ontario, you will be shocked to learn that Pil is an up-and-coming hipster beer. Pil.

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Just look at that transit mall, baby. You're really going places at UBC. Photo via Flickr user Asher Isbrucker

UBC
Like almost everyone else in Vancouver, you've perfected a blend of two formerly diametrically opposed lifestyles. You're a business hippie, and you're terrible. Nude dance recitals at Wreck Beach are a pretty sweet way to unwind after an economics exam, though.

University of Victoria
You're a real hippie. You're living the dream, out there on that island with old people and rabbits. You do you.

UPEI
You have severe anxiety about crossing bridges and Brown's Court landlords.

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That's some building. Photo via Flickr user Kurt Bauschardt

University of Alberta
You are so sick of people talking about the Butterdome. (But really, what the fuck is up with the Butterdome?)

University of Manitoba
You're either fucking sick of ag kids walking around like they own the damn place, or you're in ag, and you wish the arts students would realize whose town they're in.

University of New Brunswick
You crave Moncton's nightlife.

St. FX
You can orgasm if you stare at your X-Ring long enough (it is also the only way you achieve orgasm).

York University
That summer in Nepal really changed your perspective.

Cape Breton University
You will get out some day. You're also psyched to be included in this list.

Université du Québec à Montréal
Okay, so everyone in the country will probably shit on you and call you "militant hippies" because you get pissed off over tuition hikes (despite paying the lowest amount in the country). And yes, your bohemian roots sometimes mean that your anti-austerity protests morph into weirdly violent, barricaded school raves that feel like a collision between The Matrix Reloaded's party scene and The Raid, but look on the bright side: with the cyclical rebirth of 90s fashion trends, your nose-ring sporting, Che Guevara-shirt and Teva-wearing, Jamiroquai-loving competitive unicycle friends will soon be the muse of fashion bloggers in Milan and London!

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This photo clearly insinuates that Drever is a heavy pot smoker and addicted to THC. The girl needs some help, she's out of control.

I ask the Zucker-God each day why Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram didn't exist back when George W. Bush was a young(ish) man. I would have loved to see cocaine-fuelled posts from Dubya himself, and I'm sure it would have screwed him out of office at some point in time—and by extension saved us from some of the shit storm in the Middle East.

Had Facebook been more prominent when Rob Ford was a young footballer, I'm sure we would have seen plenty more than the entertaining shit we witnessed during the ol' crack and booze days. Maybe Stephen Harper had a cool past, but we'll never know. (I've got to admit, he's been pretty good at hiding the fact he grew up in Toronto.)

Those lucky old bastards probably had the best time of their goddamn lives—and eating the best meals without suffering from the urge to share pictures of them.

On the other hand, are we, the selfie generation, totally fucked if we want to go into politics? While my Facebook and Twitter history might be suited to be upheld among my colleagues and friends, I'm not sure that political party officials would be as pleased with me or most of the people I know. To see that I'm attending (insert rave event here) or fucked up on (insert synthetic drug here) with my (insert degenerate adjective) friends, might not make me the most appealing character to have around. Not that I'm a bad person, but I like to have fun—and politics requires boring people.

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I think the most concerning aspects of this photo is that Drever appears to be drinking one of the shittiest beers made in North America. Also she allowed her friend to drink cider at what appears to be a party. Friends should look out for friends and she should have guided her to find a real drink.

Last week, newly elected Alberta Member of Legislative Assembly, Deborah Drever came under fire for a year-old post to her Instagram with the caption "gay boyz." The now independent MLA —she was ousted from the NDP party—posted the picture featuring her fellow politicians, former premier Jim Prentice and interim Alberta PC leader, Ric McIver, with hand-drawn speech bubbles saying "sexy mofo" from one and "Me-ow Yummy" from the other. Drever has since apologized for the picture, after she was suspended from caucus for the image.

I do agree with the backlash over the image Drever posted, it was in poor taste and inconsiderate for anyone to post smacks of juvenile homophobia, especially for someone interested in going into politics. But I'm not entirely convinced that everything Drever is being shunned for from past few years is grounds for public rage. One picture of her posing beside a shirt with a marijuana leaf is far less than scandalous—isn't Justin Trudeau trying to legalize the stuff? The image of her with an empty beer box on her head, it's silly, but not offensive. Another picture of her partying with her tongue out might not really be cause for panic.

I can't help but feel a twinge of empathy for the young politician. Because, to answer my own question, we (a generation just trying to have fun) are all fucked. If you have done anything wrong online (and I know you have) it can be dug up. Even the stuff you regret is there for others to bring up. Kind of like that shirtless video of Trudeau used in his attack ads. Also, a fucked up Rob Ford swearing in patois who, let's face it, does this shit to himself. Or even a equally shirtless, macho Vladimir Putin riding horseback in the Russian mountains. No wait, that was staged, and awesome.

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Drever seems to be attempting a "stick tongue out face" in real life. This picture is five years old, which explains the popularity of the side-bang.

On the other hand, it's possible for people like Toronto MP/former punk rocker, Andrew Cash—who presumably rocked harder than I do now, it was the 80s, after all—to make it into Parliament without dumb shit haunting him online.

My mother always told me "what goes on the internet, stays on the internet," but many of my generation have yet to heed that advice. Drever is certainly not the only young politician to post less than appropriate things online. We've driven her to remove the name of the account "Drevfever" off Instagram, which is probably a good move for her career, but a lame one for her life. Yet, It might still seem to some that the 26-year-old is actually just an average 26-year-old who can't erase her past.

Young people flock each day to the virtual world, and we've only recently started to see how it can affect the political world, too. About a third of young people feel that social media will influence their vote. More and more people have been using social media to voice their vote and opinions, too. Each party is trying to harness the power of social media for their own advantage, trying to gain support.

On top of all that, 67 percent of Millennials think that they will continue to carry on with their internet-sharing ways as they grow up, mature, and have families. Maybe we'll end up in a generation where everyone has so much dirt on each other, not a week will go by without a new political scandal involving beer pong, G-bongs, and frat party nudity.

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I'm not sure Facebook was the best place to post this, but who hasn't woken up to the news of the day and just thought "fuck you Canada."

The takeaway lesson here is that, if you have any plans of going into politics, you're going to have to be a social media celibate for the first 22 years of your life. Curb stomp that TweetDeck and kick it off a ledge. If you plan on being a little shit and also going into politics at some point, get ready to face the music.

The only people who will rise to the top will be the boring, monotone, anti-social kids who only post animé and inanimate objects as their profile pictures. I can even see that the people who buy likes could make it into the world of leading provinces and countries, at which point, I cringe.

Boring people will breed boring politicians who will create boring policies. I guess nothing will be changing anytime soon.

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

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Byrd's missing person photo

According to a statement released Friday by the Department of Justice, there is no evidence of a homicide or hate crime in the March death of a Mississippi man named Otis Byrd.

On March 20, Byrd's body was found hanging from a tree in Port Gibson, Mississippi. Byrd had gone missing more than two weeks earlier; it wasn't clear whether he had been murdered or committed suicide, but given the state's past, his death quickly became headline news across the country. An NAACP representative later told MSNBC that "based on the history in Mississippi of racial hate crimes, we are always concerned when an African American is found hung in a tree in this state."

Last month, the FBI discussed the results of Byrd's autopsy to Byrd's family, but those results were not made public. Today's statement from the Department of Justice, however, states that both "federal prosecutors and FBI agents" have determined that nothing points to a homicide, and that and that the "investigation into this incident has been closed."

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Alesha flinched as a monk uncorked a dusty bottle and lifted it to a shot glass. He poured out a 25-centiliter measure of tarry brown liquid. Sweating in the early-afternoon sun, Alesha—a detoxing heroin addict—gulped hard before swallowing the evil-looking mixture. He washed it down with warm water from a stainless steel bucket. A minute or two later, he was hunched on all fours, violently heaving the contents of his stomach into an open drain.

This harrowing ritual takes place on a daily basis at Tham Krabok, Thailand's monastic equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Located 150 kilometers north of Bangkok in the province of Saraburi, the facility has been treating addicts for over 50 years and is widely regarded as the toughest rehabilitation clinic in the world.

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There is little indulgence at the monastery. The lodgings and detoxification are free, but life there is Spartan. The daily rituals kick off with early-morning floor sweeping at 4:30 AM. Only one meal per day is served, at 7 AM each morning. Monks lead ritual chanting every evening at 6:30 PM. Everyone wears the same plain uniforms, provided by the monks, and relinquish their personal belongings for the duration of their stay. The minimum stay is seven days, but some stay for up to a month.

The monastery's main claim to fame, meanwhile, is its signature brown potion—the ingredients of which are an intensely guarded secret—which is fed to patients each day after lunch to induce massive "cleansing" fits of vomiting.

Overseeing the administration of the herbal emetic is Katrisha, a senior foreign nun at Tham Krabok who hails from London. A heroin addict for over 20 years, Katrisha was once a beneficiary of the brown substance herself. If the cocooning sensation of a heroin high is heaven, then her early days at the rehab in Thailand were a living hell.

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"You have to really face yourself here, there's no pussyfooting around like in the West," she said. "I had been hooked on heroin for a long time so it was never going to be an easy process. I'd never been interested in Western-style withdrawal, with methadone or other meds. I didn't want to swap one drug for another or make it easy for myself."

If she was going to quit, she said, she wanted to quit for good. "Puking my guts out every day into an open drain while withdrawing from heroin was horrible. Absolutely awful. It was real, though, so I pushed through."

Motherboard reports on virtual reality as a way to treat heroin addiction.

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Tham Krabok's unorthodox methods and spiritual atmosphere has earned it worldwide fame, in part because it seems to be effective. According to one report, which looked at the recovery rates of 65 long-term substance users who checked into the monastery, 90 percent of those who come to Tham Krabok complete the program and 60 percent remain drug-free one year later. Those are compelling statistics compared to the recovery rates in Western rehab centers, which are closer to 30 or 40 percent. The recovery rate for Alcoholics Anonymous programs, which dominate Western rehab facilities, is a mere 5 to 10 percent.

The rehabilitation program was conceived in the late 1950s during the iron-fisted rule of Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat. The dictator was a hardliner on drugs and thousands of addicts were executed under his regime. In response, monks at Tham Krabok developed the drug detoxification program and successfully lobbied for it to be introduced as a means of rehabilitating heroin and opium addicts. The monastery also treats alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction, a growing problem in Thailand due to the prevalence of yaba, a methamphetamine derivative, which translates literally as "madness drug."

Since 1959, over 100,000 addicts have passed through the gates of the monastery to detox amidst its golden stupas and collection of giant beatific Buddhas. Walking around the expansive monastery campus in the late afternoon, the tranquil surroundings belied the fearsome reputation of the facility. Stray dogs dozed lazily in the shade and red-robed monks chattered among themselves, on their way to meditation sessions. In the residential section, patients played table tennis or bashed out melodies on battered acoustic guitars. The scene was relaxed and playful—but there are no illusions about the mental fortitude required to get the best out of the Tham Krabok experience.

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"The physical detoxification is only a tiny fraction of the process here," said Mitrakhovich Evgenii, a chef from Minsk in Belarus who came to the monastery to treat his heroin addiction. "You must do the remaining work in your mind and through your actions."

While Evgenii acknowledged that the rehabilitation process is immensely difficult, "most of the monks here were former patients themselves, so there's a feeling of empathy and understanding. Nobody is treated with kid gloves. Far from it. But I think it is true that the atmosphere here instils a kind of determination that makes it possible to succeed."

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Central to the psychology is the sajja (vow), which is undertaken before treatment commences. Led by a senior monk, patients solemnly promise to forgo intoxicating substances. A sacred act that is performed—according to Buddhist belief—"in clear view of the universe," the sajja is taken extremely serious. In fact, patients are only allowed one shot at rehabilitating at Tham Krabok, with the breaking of the vow precluding a return visit.

"You have to be committed to the sajja," said Vijit Akarajitto, the monastery's deputy abbot. "You are asking the elements to believe in your vow, so it is absolutely vital that you also believe in it fully. If you have faith, the sajja can connect you to your own willpower as well as a powerful spiritual force. It can be like a lifeboat that ferries you through turbulent waters."

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Back at her home at the edge of the monastery grounds, Katrisha, the senior nun, was taking in the last rays of the sun. A resident chicken pecked around her feet as the soft strains of reggae pulsed out into the still Thai evening. It had been a long day attending to often-distressed patients, but she spoke with obvious satisfaction about what she had been able to achieve at Tham Krabok.

"I've come a long way, and I'm proud of that. I got my sense of self back here," she reflected. "There is no miracle cure. You need to really fully want to quit and be prepared to give everything to achieve that goal. If you don't, you will fail. We often see people who treat the monastery like an item on a drug rehab bucket list. They regard it as exotic to detox in Thailand. The treatment only works if the patient is serious. You can't be a tourist. You can't be a victim. You have to be a warrior."

Follow Duncan Forgan on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Look at the top of the all-formats UK game chart this week and you'll see the usual suspects: Grand Theft Auto, FIFA, Call of Duty. That reliably profitable triptych of crime, football, and war. But nestled among them, sitting inexplicably at the number two spot, is a game called Farming Simulator 15.

It's the latest in a long line of niche simulator games, but one of the first to make the transition from PC to Xbox and PlayStation. There are simulators for anything you can imagine: Garbage Truck Simulator, European Bus Simulator, London Underground Simulator. But you don't often get the chance to play them on consoles. These games are usually pretty complex, and don't map comfortably to the limited buttons of a controller, but Giants Software's Farming Simulator is pretty simple compared to the confusing multi-button nightmare of a hardcore flight simulator.

Farming Simulator 15 inserts you into the mud-caked wellies of a farmer and gives you a vast swathe of land to plough, seed, and harvest. There's no end goal or objectives to complete: you just farm. Forever. You grow crops, harvest them, sell them, and then use the money to buy more seeds and better machinery. The more money you earn, the more cool farming stuff you can do.

You spend half your time managing your farm and its finances, and the other driving tractors. This might sound like a bizarre thing to base a video game around, but not everyone wants to pretend they're rugged fantasy warriors or futuristic cyber-soldiers; some people just want to toil on an imaginary farm. I don't know who they are, but they're out there. Simulator games sell better than you might expect, especially in Germany. People love this shit.

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Go, farming via chart-track.co.uk.

I start a new game and it walks me through the basics. I learn how to operate a combine harvester, dump the wheat into a tractor-trailer, and then sell it. I learn how to plough fields and plant seeds in the freshly tilled soil. But as thrilling as that sounds, everything in Farming Simulator 15 boils down to essentially the same thing: get in a tractor and drive in straight lines, up and down a field, repeatedly. Actual farming is probably just as repetitive, though, so can I really criticize it for this? It is a simulator after all. A reflection of reality. Although real farmers can't teleport instantly between tractors at the touch of a button. I think.

The tutorials end and I'm set free to shape my own agricultural destiny. I spend what feels like an eternity harvesting a massive field of crops in a combine. It's weirdly satisfying at first, watching the wheat being sucked into my threshing maw, the chaff spewing out the back. But then, about halfway through, it dawns on me that my time on this planet is terrifyingly finite, and I'm spending it doing this.

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Alternatively, check out our documentary on eSports

I finish harvesting the field, but there are spots I've missed: infuriating little tufts of wheat poking out, taunting me. So I spend another ten minutes mopping them up. I exit the harvester and sprint around the newly flattened field in first-person, admiring my handiwork. "I did this," I think to myself. "What a fucking waste of time."

I bring up the map and notice there's a town nearby, so I decide to pack the farming in for the day and go for a drive in a tractor. When I get there it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. It's eerily silent. Blank-faced pedestrians pace the street like animatronic shop mannequins. No one reacts to my presence. I try and run them over with my tractor, but I pass through them. Are they holograms? There are cars driving around, but they don't seem to be going anywhere. It's unnerving.

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Farming, eh? Such a Noisey business.

I've got a theory. I don't think this game is merely a farming simulator. I think it's actually a harrowing psychological horror, in which a farmer is being punished in the afterlife for some terrible crime. He's trapped in a nightmarish purgatory, forced to toil in the fields, endlessly, with no reward. The people in the town don't acknowledge him because he's a ghost. He never ages, the seasons never change, and the crops always need harvesting. It's like Silent Hill, but on a farm.

Or maybe it's just a bit shit, and that's why playing it feels like facing judgement. Most simulators are, after all, terrible. There are a few exceptions, like the genuinely brilliant Euro Truck Simulator 2, but they're few and far between. It's not because the developers don't try their best—it's because their niche appeal means the budget is usually low, and making a quality, polished game costs a lot of money.

Euro Truck Simulator should be, by all rights, mind-destroyingly tedious. But the weighty, responsive driving controls and polished visuals make it weirdly compelling. It is, fundamentally, a good game. In comparison, Farming Simulator 15 just feels a bit cheap, and none of the vehicles are particularly enjoyable to drive. Unless you're really into farming, it won't hold your attention for long.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/dpb3T4ORvnE' width='560' height='315']

'Farming Simulator 15' launch trailer for PlayStation platforms.

But someone will love it. That's the beauty of these incredibly specific simulator games. They aren't made for a broad audience; they're for the obsessives. That doesn't explain how Farming Simulator 15 managed to scale the heights of the UK charts, though. If The Witcher 3 hadn't just been released, it might have reached the very top.

A big part of it, I think, is the rise of YouTube. These games are routinely covered by people like PewDiePie, a YouTube personality with an astonishing 36 million subscribers. His Farming Simulator videos have millions of views, which is better marketing than anything an entire PR team could dream up. Many of those sales will be from people buying the game ironically, to snigger at it—not diehard farming enthusiasts. I don't like the game, but I'm still glad it charted. It's always good to see weird indie games sitting comfortably alongside giants like GTA and FIFA.

Follow Andy Kelly on Twitter.

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Image via Flickr user butupa.

Early last month, Daily Show heir apparent Trevor Noah got eviscerated on social media for a bunch of lame-ass jokes he'd told on Twitter between 2010 and 2014. The 140-character gags were as psychologically revealing as they were wretched, anti-Semitic and pro-domestic violence groaners that might land you a guest spot on Fox News's insipid Red Eye variety hour, and thus the usual battle lines were drawn. The iconoclastic Patton Oswalt decided to set his lofty Nerd God reputation on the line for this Jeff Dunham-caliber material, while activists and slacktivists of all stripes took to the barricades to demand redress. It was then that one of my friends, a minor figure in the outrage blogosphere, loosed the Facebook status that rocked my world: "What matters here is how Trevor Noah handles this apology."

Mea culpa, mea culpa! What mattered to this person, who is at base an extremely good person, wasn't that Trevor Noah had written some truly rotten material, but whether he would stick the landing on the apology. This is no fault of hers, since she, like most of us, is a creature of social media. Of course it's the act of public contrition that matters. Of course we trolls, who are trolling for justice for the best and noblest of all possible reasons, need to be propitiated. The story of how we have cultivated this obsession with public rituals and public performances largely unmediated by the demands of personal conscience is full of twists and turns, with social media but one of the new forms of communication that abetted its development. Even the public relations gurus of the 1920s and 1930s, who began fashioning the society of the stage-managed "public appearance," would find themselves astonished by what advances in technology have wrought.

But let's start early, like pre-Reformation Europe early. I was raised Catholic, and while the faith itself is every bit as nonsensical as any other man-made belief system, it has some interesting features, among them a mechanism for undertaking periodic examinations of conscience (i.e., the sacrament of penance and reconciliation). The usual lackluster Catholic does this every few years at Easter, but it's the point of the process that counts: Jesus urged people to consider their own thoughts, not just their actions, and to address these before addressing the failings of others. From there, flash forward to Protestantism's ascendancy—which is easy in our case, since there's never been a time, post-colonization, when it wasn't ascendant in America. The most rigorously logical Protestant theologians quickly grasped the implications of an omnipotent supreme being: If such an all-powerful creator fashioned everything from beginning to end, aren't human actions preordained and won't it be obvious that those humans who are "saved" will act like they're "saved"? Hence the emphasis on surface appearance—which has always been there anyway but perhaps was checked ever-so-slightly by the need for a periodic examination of conscience—returns with a vengeance.

This was a splendid thing for the economic development of the United States, which owes itself as much to an obsession with salesmanship as it does with any one particular technological breakthrough ("We didn't invent the German rocket plane, we just marketed the hell out of the space race!"). When you're selling, you're always on. You can't afford to slip up, to say something gauche, to break the fourth wall. America in the 20th century, noted the historian Daniel Boorstin, witnessed an efflorescence of increasingly elaborate "pseudo-events": news conferences, award ceremonies, and political addresses made use of new communication technologies and assumed the ritualistic qualities of medieval passion plays while also fetishizing the individuals involved. But this elevation of the public side of once-private, or at least partly private, people also entailed the replacement of outdated methods of localized public humiliation (e.g., the stocks and pillory of yore) with the stage-managed national apology.

And oh how the mighty apologized...while leaving an opening for the inevitable comeback, of course. "[My family] did get something after the election, a little cocker spaniel dog named Checkers," admitted Vice-Presidential candidate Richard Nixon after being accused of using campaign donations to finance personal travel and other expenses. "Indeed, I did have a relationship with [Monica] Lewinsky that was not appropriate," President Bill Clinton finally confessed to the American public after several weeks of Monicagate-related damage control. "I did a bad thing," perpetually befuddled English leading man Hugh Grant told Jay Leno after the former had been arrested for engaging in lewd conduct with a prostitute.

All three of these men came back, survived, endured—prospered, even (except for Nixon, though he did win those back-to-back presidential campaigns). But, Clinton's own remarks notwithstanding, none kept the matter "between me, the people I love most, and our God." Penance and reconciliation was fine for the cloister, but when it came to those public figures who presented their selves to us on an everyday basis, only a pound of flesh would suffice.

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Image via Flickr user That Hartford Guy.

But those contretemps occurred pre-Twitter. Social media has inflated the immediate significance of everything; yesterday's pound of flesh is today's outright flaying. As Jon Ronson noted in a penetrating examination of the deconstruction of Justine Sacco, a hapless, not-especially-public publicist who tweeted a bunch of racist comments that gave rise to an "ideological crusade against her bigotry" while also serving as "form of idle entertainment" for a bullpen of internet wits. As the scrutiny piled on, each attacker burying her deeper and deeper, her chances of a comeback were reduced to nil. She wasn't important enough for that; she was no Anthony Weiner-esque political heavyweight or even especially talented in her field. She eventually took an anonymous job in some anonymous part of the country and vanished from view. One of her primary tormentors later apologized to her, which was par for the course.

Ronson's attempts at humanizing her aside, this Sacco wasn't exactly Nicola Sacco. No, she was just a poor, doomed soul who unwittingly dug her own grave. She didn't even stick around long enough to offer a scripted, stage-managed apology. But the bigger names do, usually in the face of intense pressure from well-orchestrated online activist communities. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham couldn't have devised a better panopticon for policing public statements on issues both great and insignificant; everyone everywhere could be watching (we both hope and fear!), and even our most thoughtless remarks never go away.

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Twitter and Facebook received a lot of praise for their role in having sprung the so-called "Arab Spring," but they've done an even better job of bringing the misanthropic ex-liberal Alec Baldwin to heel. They offered a platform for crushing Girls writer (and, full disclosure, one-time VICE editor) Lesley Arfin when she offered a riposte to The Hairpin's allegations of racism. Rashida Jones had to make nice via Twitter after accusing John Travolta of being gay. Daniel Tosh half-apologized on social media for making a rape joke about a woman in the audience at one of his stand-up shows, but that seemed to quiet his critics. Rent-a-hunks Jeremy Renner and Chris Evans cracked wise during an Avengers: Age of Ultron media event, calling Scarlet Johansson's Black Widow character a "slut" and a "whore," then immediately denounced their off-the-cuff remarks as "juvenile and offensive" and "tasteless" even if directed at a fictional character.

And on and on the list goes, with the accused generally conceding quickly—the smartest course from a PR standpoint—or responding à la Stephen Colbert, with both guns blazing, to Suey Park's allegations of racism following an ill-timed tweet (the account the tweet came from, @Colbertreport, was not affiliated with the Colbert Report, but the tweet, "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," was taken from a Colbert bit). Colbert had enough social media clout of his own to bury Park, who came to be regarded by many as a shrill spoilsport in spite of her good intentions.

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Colbert's defense of his comedy, like Patton Oswalt's equally dogged defense of Trevor Noah's futile stabs at it, is no worthier of praise than Daniel Tosh's rapid-fire semi-apology for being a jackass. Neither changes the fact that a remark cut someone to the quick or that this remark was anything but deliberate. Of course it was intentional; it was intended to be said, and it was. But Tosh and the others who have followed his example surely elected the most prudent response. They at least said the words in the way that people like my friend will demand. Never mind that these words, even if laden with well-meaning terms like "consciousness raising" and "teachable moment," may not involve even a moment's examination of conscience. One's internal thoughts are... of no consequence! What matters is for our public personalities, an almost infinitely broad category that consists of everyone from Kim Kardashian to Justine Sacco (First Amendment jurisprudence even has a term for such nobodies-turned-somebodies as her, the "limited purpose public figure"), to come forward and speak the magic words: "I was wrong. I was bad. I didn't mean to hurt anybody but I guess I did" and perhaps, if they're really feeling up to it, "my thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved," a sort of saccharine-sweet ganache to spread on top of the apology cake.

Today's requests for forgiveness are shaped by this model of the instantaneous and totalizing apology. How else can one understand Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel's apology for his alcoholism? "I owe private apologies to a lot of people that I disappointed but a very public one to the Browns organization and the fans that I let down," read his public statement on the Browns' official website. So here we have a man in the throes of a terrible disorder, a disorder that has claimed the lives of many of my family members and probably a few of yours too, and he's giving a public apology to the fans that he let down. Apologizing for suffering from alcoholism, from an American Medical Association-classified progressive disease! If only he'd added that ganache, that "my thoughts and prayers go out to all involved," it would have been perfect.

But as with every historical development, we should pause to consider the alternatives. What is the point, strictly speaking, of this ritualized public apology, now more than ever forced upon us by the panoptical surveillance of social media? The worst crimes are quite literally unforgivable. What sort of mea culpa, mea culpa from a slimebag CEO could ever make up for years of utilizing slave labor or despoiling a limited supply of natural resources to grow better and better strains of corn? What would it matter if some militia-backed strongman apologized for years of mass murder? There are various theological mechanisms for such penance—the Catholic sacrament being just one among many—but an apology offered in the world would seem to be of little consequence for those villains whose crimes warrant swift and certain justice. And for clueless boobs like Daniel Tosh and Trevor Noah, what difference does it make if they apologize for their churlish wisecracks? They made these remarks, they're now out there for all to hear or read, and it's left to them to examine their consciences and conclude where they fell short. The same goes for putatively well-meaning "allies" to various social movements who, for whatever reason, have decided to go off the rails and say something racist, sexist, transphobic, or just outright inhumane. Isn't it on them, in the final analysis, to search within for answers? And for those of us so eager to pile on, so eager to cast socially shareable stones—shouldn't we engage in a similar act of self-reflection?

In sum: I tried to vindicate my points, and those of you who made it to the bottom of the page were so very patient with me. Please accept my sincerest apologies, and know that my thoughts and prayers go out to all involved.

Follow Oliver Lee Bateman on Twitter.

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All photos by Graham Meyer

Bangkok has a wide array of spiritual services for sale. Want to pump up your rack with "natural breast enlargement" courtesy of a chest-slapping shamaness? Can do. Interested in dropping $2000 on an illegal doll that houses an aborted fetus who predicts lottery numbers? Bangkok has you covered.

In a society that loves the occult, Ace of Cups is the lone "witchcraft cafe" where you can grab a plate of fettuccine while having your fortune told.

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Ace of Cups shares a design ethos with the bookstore in The Craft. Streamers and dried herbs hang from a candelabra chandelier and the walls are dotted with astrological charts and graphs. The wifi password is "witch," and the cats lounging on the spiral staircase are called Yule and Hobgoblin. The cafe is a favorite of Thai 20-somethings, all clad in black and wearing crystals. They sit around reading tarot, throwing the I-Ching, or studying quietly.

Two chalkboard menus hang over the pastry case: One lists cakes, pastas, and sodas that correspond to your astrological sign. The other catalogs more sinister offerings, like exorcism and curse-lifting. Spells start at 350 baht (about $10).

In the loft, there are amulets, stones, and candles for sale. A fake bookshelf hides an unfinished staircase that leads to the top floor, where an altar is set up to perform spiritual cleansings and love spells.

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Intrigued by what magic might be purchased alongside a mochacchino, VICE spoke with cafe owners Wine Kongsorn and Nat Maitreemit about Wicca, exorcisms, and their unlikely business model.

VICE: Why did you decide to open a witchcraft cafe?
Wine Kongsorn: For a long time, the community of Wiccans had no place to get together in Bangkok. We needed a place to meet and perform rituals. We thought a cafe would be perfect to create community but it took us five or six years to make it happen.

How did you guys meet each other?
Kongsorn: We were in the same coven. The circle of Wiccans in Bangkok is small and we have both been interested or involved for more than ten years in the religion and witchcraft.

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How did you get into witchcraft?
In my family, we have a long tradition with Eastern witchcraft. But, for me, it was like solving a math problem. I always felt like there was something missing and I didn't have all the information. For me, witchcraft is the same as working through an equation. If you do it right, you will get the right answer. So, I started to broaden the range of witchcraft I studied. That included the Western style, which became my preferred method. My family is supportive of me and the cafe, but they're conservative.

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Conservative witches?
Yes. In Thailand, the Thai of witchcraft is acceptable, it's been around since before anyone can remember. It's like traditional medicine. They really don't understand what we do here, though.

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What is Thai witchcraft like?
Nat Maitreemit: It's based on the animist belief that everything has a spirit. It relies on the power of nature, trees, forests, plants, animals, and the dead. It's primitive. Eastern witchcraft almost always focuses on ghosts; either asking for their help or removing their resistance. There is a strong belief that ghosts play a large role in our day-to-day life and that a witch needs to figure out what spirits have come to help and which to hurt.

How do people find the cafe?
Most people find us through our Facebook group, Thailand Wicca. They join because they have an interest, or they read about it in anime... or because they saw Harry Potter. We have to kick a lot of people out of the Facebook group who think it's all Harry Potter shit. They think they'll be able to come in here and throw fire from their hands or something.

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What percentage of people come here knowing what they're looking for?
Sixty percent come in for the craft and 40 percent just open the door and want to take a look and get a cup of tea. A lot of people hear about us, come in, and want a spell, but we need to have a little discussion first. I can't perform a spell that's against my morals or ethics, like money or lottery spells. That's messing with destiny. If we were to make you super-lucky, or give you something that doesn't belong to you, the universe would take payback in some way.

I'd like to get an exorcism today. Can I do that?
Kongsorn: Are you possessed?

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I might be.
That's not a good idea. That's a bit like going to the hospital when you aren't sick and asking for an operation just to see what it's like. How about a sacred geometry spell instead? That would be good for balancing you.

You told me in a Facebook message that I could get an exorcism.
Maitreemit: You can, if you need one. All spells and all people are slightly different. We need to make a diagnosis when we meet you, to get a feel for your energy and what's gone wrong.

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What is the exorcism spell like?
It's a ritual, not a spell. We have several ways to draw an evil spirit out. We start with sound therapy like tuning forks and singing bowls and move on to using fire. Once the spirit is out, we have to do protection spells. It takes a long time and is really complicated. We don't get too many requests for the stronger spells, like curse-lifting or exorcism. It's not that they don't happen—they do! But when Thai people feel that they are haunted, they go to the temple and ask the Buddhist monks for help.

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How do you diagnose if someone is cursed or possessed?
One of the first questions we ask is: "Where have you been?" and then "Do you have any enemies?" If they really have a curse on them, we have to figure out where the curse came from and why. We can do this by intuition, sensing the spirits or asking questions. Sometimes, nature can just curse a person. But if we can figure it out, we can reverse it or cleanse them.

Kongsorn: Some people curse themselves through negative self-hypnosis. They think they are haunted or cursed, but they've just talked themselves into it, it's the opposite of an affirmation. We had a client, a girl that thought someone had cursed her and given her cancer. I gave her a spirit cleansing and reassured her in a way that a doctor couldn't. But she was actually just making herself sick with negative feelings.

RELATED: Being a Real Witch Has Never Been Much Fun

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What's your most popular spell?
Maitreemit: Divination with tarot cards. People want to know their future and what's going to happen to them. The second most popular is a love spell. People come in and they are hurting, they've been through a breakup or just don't want to be alone.

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I noticed that the prices for food and drink are almost all odd numbers. The carrot cake, for example, costs 123 baht. Does that have some supernatural significance?
No. That's just so it comes out to a round number with tax.

Visit Ace of Cups on Nak Niwat Road in the Lat Phrao section of Bangkok.

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A baggy of mephedrone, which was banned in 2010.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You know those legal highs that the British government is about to ban en masse because they kill two Brits per week? They don't kill two people per week, or anything close.

Wednesday's Queen's speech, the first airing of a fully Tory parliamentary program since 1996, included an unprecedented blanket ban on selling new psychoactive substances.

The announcement was met with various responses. Most importantly, a briefly-amusing Vine of the Queen set to an Avicii 2011 Trance Energy lightshow drop. But also warnings that the ban turns centuries of British legal tradition on its head, and plenty of Twitter users saying that the 97 deaths from legal highs in 2012 pales in comparison to the thousands of deaths linked to booze.

But for anyone with even a fleeting interest in the issue, the pertinent response should have been: Why is everyone in this story about banning legal highs talking about 97 deaths, when that figure is largely composed of drugs that were not legal at the time people died from taking them?

The dramatic "97 deaths" figure has traveled well, being quoted by the BBC, the Press Association, and the Daily Mail, among others. While yesterday was bad news for the guys selling Bob Marley weed grinders and "Adihash" T-shirts, it was very good news for a right-wing think tank founded by Iain Duncan Smith called the Center for Social Justice, or CSJ.

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So long, NOS.

The CSJ has a strong evangelical Christian bent and is extremely influential in the Tory party. They have been pushing for a blanket ban for a while, so for them yesterday's news was a major victory. The think tank's lead man on legal highs, Rupert Oldham-Reid, hailed the proposed law in an article for Conservative Home, quoting everyone's favorite figure for legal high deaths, or something close to it. "Most tragically, in the last Parliament, the number of deaths associated with 'legal highs' has gone from one per month to over two per week," he wrote. He pushed the same line on Channel 5 News. The influence of the CSJ was also seen in a BBC piece published earlier this week, which declared: "Research from the Center for Social Justice showed that there were 97 recorded deaths from legal highs in the UK in 2012."

Except there obviously weren't.

That "research" wasn't really research at all, but the very misleading use of an official figure. It stems from a landmark CSJ report in August, which noted that the government's official audit of drugs deaths, conducted by St. George's, University of London, had found 97 deaths in 2012 in the UK in which "novel psychoactive substances" (referred to as NPS) played some part.

NPS is a very wide and highly disputed category of new and resurgent substances. The important thing to know for the purpose of understanding this week's events is that many of them aren't "legal highs" at all—in fact, many of them have been banned in the UK, some for decades.

Conflating NPS with legal highs, the CSJ report conducted a back-of-the-envelope projection—based on the rise in deaths from 12 in 2009 to 97 in 2012—that should have rung major alarm bells. "Legal highs are entering the market and causing harm far quicker than our enforcement and regulation systems can adjust," it stated, "based on trend we predict they may be linked to more deaths than heroin by 2016."

Heroin is regularly implicated in more than 400 UK deaths each year. The CSJ's forecast, and its almost unbelievable conflation of the NPS category with legal highs, should have raised serious questions about its suitability to inform the debate. Instead, the "more deaths than heroin" headline was splashed over the papers and its proposal of a blanket ban is set to become UK law.

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Some Benzo Fury.

So famous has the 97 figure become that it makes sense to fully explain it. It is a tally of deaths in which a substance in the NPS group was been found in post-mortem toxicology reports by coroners in 2012. The faux-ecstasy drugs PMA or PMMA were involved in 23 of the deaths: both have been illegal since the 70s. Mephedrone—and other cathinone derivatives like 4-Mec, Flephedrone, Methylone—are linked to 37 of the deaths: they have all been banned since 2010.

Those are the big killers: all illegal in the relevant year, and therefore irrelevant to an estimation of the dangers of legal highs.

The Ketamine-like mexxy (linked to six deaths) was banned from March 2012. The tranquilizer phenazepam, used medicinally abroad and linked to 14 of the deaths, was banned in mid-2012.

As far as I can see, the only actual legal highs on the list linked to more than a handful of deaths are the Benzofurans (known as "Benzo Fury"), like APB and 6-APBl, which were collectively linked to nine deaths and have since been banned.

So the figure pushed right to the center of the national conversation by the CSJ think tank—the one used to show that legal highs are a major new killer and require a blanket ban—is, in fact, largely based on deaths linked to highs that weren't legal at all.

Of those 97 deaths in 2012, the number judged by coroners to be definitively and directly caused by NPS was 68—a figure which, for the same reasons, has little to do with legal highs, as a letter in the Lancet last year pointed out. This letter was co-authored by the government's former chief drug advisor Professor David Nutt. Since his sacking in 2009, Nutt has become a vocal critic of non-evidence-based drugs policy. When I called him last night to ask him what he made of the re-emergence of the 97 deaths figure, and the sweeping new ban, he said it represented an insult to science.

"It is outrageous that they continue to ignore the data," he said. "To base policy on second-hand reporting of flawed data is very worrying." He confirmed that he has pointed out to the CSJ that it is grossly misleading to quote MPS figures when talking about the dangers of legal highs. "They know exactly this. We should expose them as not telling the truth."

How many deaths does he think actually resulted from taking legal highs in 2012? "Less than ten. Maybe none."

Like learning about drugs? You might like this film about Sisa: the Cocaine for the Poor

When I contacted the CSJ to get their take, Oldham-Reid sent me a link to 2013 figures from Scotland, which again mainly relate to drugs that were already banned. After that message, and just like the last time I asked the CSJ questions about their research, the emails abruptly stopped.

Instead of answering my questions about the CSJ's use of the 97 deaths figure, Oldham-Reid had instructed me to ask the people who compiled it. So I did. A spokesman for St George's confirmed that the figure Oldham-Reid and the CSJ have repeatedly used as a legal highs deaths figure is no such thing: "the much quoted figure involved not only psychoactive substances that were legal at the time of publication, but also those that were already controlled."

Once more, as drug reform takes place all over the world, Britain's drug policy is still being dictated by right-wing scaremongers armed with disinformation, bad science, and shonky statistics.

Follow Joshi on Twitter.

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Leopoldine Huyghues Despointes. Photos courtesy of Ethan James Green

At 24, Leopoldine Huyghues Despointes has already achieved what many people hope to accomplish in lifetime: a Best Actress award for her first film, and a Sundance debut for her second. The actress, writer, and producer was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bones), but rather than disabling her, the disease has served as a catalyst and inspiration for her promising career.

Despointes produced and starred in her first film, Atlantic Avenue (2013). She played a troubled teenager who finds love with an antisocial male prostitute (Brady Corbet). In her next project, Despointes acted as an associate producer for 2014's Rabbit, which premiered at Sundance this year. She's also worked on projects like the feature film Yosemite, which was directed by Gabrielle Demeestere and stars James Franco. This year, she's gone on to star in Jean Emmanuel Godart's Big House opposite Gérard Depardieu.

Despointes is also making waves outside of films as an activist. Her latest effort, [dis]ABLED Inside Out, is a collaboration with French photographer JR that aims to create a large public art project to help normalize disability. The project, inspired by JR's large-format street "pastings," gives every participant the opportunity to have their portrait and tell their story. These images will be used to create a larger whole when they are printed and pasted onto the streets of New York. Despointes and JR hope to gather over 3,000 portraits, and the official installations will start in October, Disability Awareness Month, with exact locations currently under wraps. VICE spoke with Despointes about her early success, her advocacy, and her life as a young disabled woman and activist in New York City.

VICE: You've accomplished some incredible things for someone so young—what drives you?
Despointes: I want to awaken minds and engender a positive change in the social representation of people with disabilities. I'm very fortunate. I grew up surrounded by an amazing multi-cultural family who raised me as a normal child, not telling me that I was disabled or that I couldn't do something because of my condition. I would go scuba diving, horse back riding... As a result, I'm ambitious and always want to do more, learn more, and grow, both personally and professionally. But I'm aware that not everyone has had the same chance.

Today, people with disabilities represent one in five people in the world. I felt the need to take action and help change the portrayal of this undervalued and underrepresented community, myself being an actress on wheels! I want to create a movement that empowers disabled individuals—within themselves, as well as within their communities.

There's an energy in New York, a vibrant undercurrent that you just don't get anywhere else. I fit in well in New York, as it never stops.

For [dis]ABLED Inside Out you've collaborated with the photographer JR. What drew you to his photography?
I have always been inspired by his work. His images are incredibly arresting, and he has an extraordinary ability to tell stories, especially those that often go untold. I watched his TED talk in 2011 and was taken by his call to action. The idea of a global participatory art project as a means to change the world really spoke to me. I realized that we had a few friends in common, so I approached him last December in New York. That was the start of [dis]ABLED InsideOut.

Who or what inspires you?
Not to sound cheesy, but my mother is my greatest inspiration. Both my sister and I have the same condition, Osteogenesis Imperfecta. My mother fought for us to be treated like everyone else and to have the same opportunities. The reason I am where I am today is testament to her strength, courage, and resilience in the face of adversity. Thank you, Maman.

You're French, but you live in New York. Has the city has influenced the way you approach work and art?
Absolutely. There's an energy in New York, a vibrant undercurrent that you just don't get anywhere else. I fit in well in New York, as it never stops. I'm surrounded by creative entrepreneurs and we all fuel each other's interests. It's an inspiring environment.

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Which other artists do you admire or would you like to collaborate with?
Filmmaking is my biggest passion, so I hope to produce and act in more films. I would love to work with directors such as Jacques Audiard, Xavier Dolan, and Olivier Assayas.

What would you say to anyone who was contemplating coming out to have their portrait taken?
Be seen, be heard, be counted. Only through the power of collective action will we be able to engender change. We are trying to create a movement, so whether you have a disability, support someone who does, or simply believe that everyone deserves the same opportunities, come to Brookfield Place in New York on Saturday on May 30 and get your portrait taken. Together through art and unity, we can change the world.

What's the best advice you've been given?
My step dad always says: Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. I try my best to keep that in mind!

What do you want people to take away from the project?
I want everyone to remember the movement we are creating, and what it feels like to be part of something bigger than you. Most importantly, I want people to come away understanding that just because someone may look different, we are all the same, and that people with disabilities deserve to be valued and treated with the same respect you would anyone else.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?
Atlantic Avenue, my first film. I knew nothing about filmmaking and had only acted on stage before that. We went to the Tribeca Film Festival and other film festivals around the world. It was really well received and earned me a Best Actress Award at the Milwaukee Film Festival. I will always love that project, as it brought me to filmmaking. Playing opposite Gerard Depardieu in my first feature film, Big House, is also a highlight. [The film is currently in post-production.]

What are your hopes for the future?
I hope that I will be able to continue working on influential art projects and powerful films, whether as an actress or producer. As I gain experiences, I hope that my ability to tell stories through art will grow.

New Yorkers can head to Brookfield Park this Saturday, May 30, to have their portraits taken as part of [dis]ABLED InsideOut.