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Latin King tattoos. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

It was just after 7 AM on May 12 that Oscar Valdivia heard the sound of granite fists pounding on the front door of his two-bedroom apartment in Sunrise, Florida. Wearing only his boxer briefs, the 50-year-old Cuban-American handyman stumbled into the living room.

"Police! We have a warrant!" a man shouted as he opened the door.

"Half my nut sack is hanging out of my underwear while I've got a red dot trained on my chest," Valdivia recalls in an interview. "That's when I see a SWAT team coming up the stairs."

The cops, outfitted in green, military-style tactical uniforms, turned out to be US Marshals and deputies from the Broward County Sheriff's Office. A week earlier, an indictment in Fort Lauderdale federal court had charged Valdivia's 21-year-old son, also named Oscar, with illegally possessing a small cache of firearms.

"They told me the Feds wanted him," Valdivia Sr. recalls. "That's when I knew it was serious."

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Oscar Valdavia Jr., a.k.a. "King Oscar." Mugshots courtesy Broward County Sheriff's Office

Junior, who was home and surrendered without resistance, is among 27 alleged members of the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation corralled in the latest law enforcement offensive against the Florida chapter of the notorious Chicago-born gang.

Valdavia Jr., along with three other Kings, is only facing gun charges. But a Fort Lauderdale federal grand jury indicted another 21 "known" Kings, including 12 alleged leaders, on racketeering and conspiracy charges, accusing them of belonging to a criminal enterprise engaged in murder, robbery, kidnapping, narcotics trafficking, witness tampering, retaliation, and fraud. Two women identified as female gang members, or Queens, were also arrested on racketeering, armed robbery, and drug charges.

"They are very influential," former statewide prosecutor Anne Wedge-McMillen tells VICE. "One of the Latin Kings' legitimate goals has been the promotion of brown pride among Latino groups. A lot of members join for the purpose of having a family, support and a guiding influence. Along the way, the organization became corrupted."

Wedge-McMillen, now a private criminal defense lawyer, prosecuted the gang's top leader in Florida two years ago in a state racketeering case. "The Latin Kings are an organized crime group," she explains. "Their criminal activity is exactly what the racketeering statutes were created for."

In the last half decade, law enforcement agencies in the Sunshine State have conducted multiple sweeps against the Latin Kings, rounding up dozens of members for allegedly dishing out a menu of violent criminal offenses. By charging them with racketeering and conspiracy, authorities claim they have an easier time building solid cases that produce lengthy prison sentences. But the intense focus on the Latin Kings is only swelling the gang's numbers in Florida's prison system, while also putting some Latin Kings behind bars for crimes they had no role in.

And in at least one major racketeering case, the overzealous pursuit of Latin Kings led to charges being dismissed against two dozen ex-members due to shoddy investigative work.

Related: Watch our documentary on the subway gangs of Mexico City

Only 166 Latin Kings were registered as inmates by the Florida Department of Corrections in 1997. As of 2013, nearly 1,000 of the tens of thousands of Kings nationwide were housed in Florida correctional facilities, making it the largest prison gang in the state, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) has suggested another 900 Latin Kings in the state are outside the prison system, making it the largest gang in Florida, period.

The Latin Kings adhere to a biblical-style manifesto and identify themselves by wearing black-and-gold colors and tattooing their bodies with five- and three-point crowns, the gang's national emblems, according to the feds. State and local factions, known as "tribes," are headed by five-person committees that make important decisions, including meting out gang justice against stray members. Each state tribe has an "Inca," or a figurehead, that the local committees ultimately report to, according to Wedge-McMillen.

Local, state, and federal agencies have devoted significant resources to putting as many Latin Kings behind bars as possible. Between 2006 and 2010, the FBI, the DEA, and FDLE joined forces with nine city and county police departments to investigate 12 central Florida Latin Kings accused in a state indictment of racketeering conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, drug trafficking, and firearms violations.

The investigation eventually led to Jose "Goofy" Perez, a 39-year-old Miami Latin King who joined the gang in 1986 and rose to the Inca throne in 2008, according to Wedge-McMillen, who led the state racketeering case against him and the other Kings.

On VICE News: How Gang Policing Tactics Could Help Prevent Terror Attacks

During a 2013 trial, another high-ranking member told jurors how he held down an excommunicated Latin King while Perez burned off the crown tattoo on the victim's chest with a scalding hot pan. Perez, convicted of racketeering, conspiracy, and directing criminal gang activities, was sentenced to 20 years in state prison.

But not all Florida investigations against the Latin Kings have gone so smoothly. In 2008, Hillsborough Circuit judge Daniel Sleet threw out racketeering charges against 23 alleged members who were ensnared in a Tampa Bay Club raid two years earlier.

The judge ruled there was no evidence the defendants conspired or committed crimes together, and admonished investigators for using a confidential informant who "was left to his own devices, to scheme of ways to entrap reluctant suspects and to brazenly weave a web of deception in the face of his police handlers."

The ATF did not respond to requests for comment, and the FBI and US Attorney's Office both indicated they do not comment on open cases. But it's clear the Latin Kings remain a top law enforcement priority in Florida.

In March 2014, the Osceola County Sheriff's Office gang unit built a state racketeering case against four alleged Orlando members, including area leader Joey "King Hush" Hernandez. According to local news reports, the quartet participated in armed robberies and burglarized vacation homes in Orlando "to promote and further the interest of their gang affiliation." They were also charged with grand theft, battery, dealing in stolen property, and aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer.

Eight months later, prosecutors slapped Hernandez with additional charges of attempted murder and obstruction of justice by witness tampering, according to Osceola County court records. He allegedly ordered a failed hit against a gang-member-turned-informant hiding out in Miami.

In the most recent crackdown that ensnared Oscar Valdivia and his son, a multi-agency task force led by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) focused on disrupting Latin Kings tribes operating in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties.

The task force's breakthrough came in early January, when a confidential informant gained the trust of Christopher Isabel, the second-highest ranking Latin King in Florida, who resided in the Broward city of Plantation, according to an ATF arrest affidavit obtained by VICE. Isabel, 33, allegedly acted as a middleman, setting up four heroin deals worth $19,000 between the snitch and two Latin Kings from the Palm Beach tribe. The informant was outfitted with hidden audio and video recording devices and paid for the drugs using money provided by task force investigators, who monitored all the meetings from a close distance, the affidavit says.

Isabel eventually acquired half a kilo of heroin from the gang's Tampa distributor using $31,000 provided by the informant. Task force agents pulled Isabel over near his Plantation home and arrested him after finding the heroin in his Ford Edge on February 4.

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Christopher Isabel, a.k.a. "King Nano"

The affidavit states that Isabel, known as " King Nano," agreed to cooperate against the supplier—a 44-year-old Tampa man named Jorge Hernandez who is not a Latin King—by placing a monitored call to him. "Isabel advised Hernandez that he had the money and was on his way to Tampa," the affidavit reads. "Hernandez advised Isabel to meet him at the location where they had previously met."

Five days later, the ATF task force arrested Bobbie Tejada, a 32-year-old regional officer in the Latin King's state hierarchy from Hollywood, Florida. According to the criminal complaint, Tejada, a.k.a. "King Riko," sold an AR-15 rifle to a confidential informant on January 2, 2014.

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Bobbie Tejada, a.k.a. "King Riko"

At Tejada's May 13 arraignment, ATF task force officer John Eric Wendell testified that King Riko and another gang member plotted to rob a tow truck driver they suspected of ripping off drugs from them on June 12 of last year. They were pulled over on West Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale before they could jack the driver. Officers found two semiautomatic handguns in their car. Tejada and the other gangbanger, Andres Lugo, were arrested for possessing firearms as convicted felons and violating their probation, according to a Lauderdale Lakes Police report obtained by VICE.

The latest racketeering indictment also charged the 23 Latin Kings for crimes that are already being tried in the state criminal justice system. For instance, alleged gang members Juan Alvarez and Juan Marcos Vega are scheduled to go to trial in September in Miami-Dade County court for armed robbery. They were included in the RICO complaint for the same robbery. Sean Buendia, a.k.a. "King Chill" from Hollywood, was also included in the indictment because of pending robbery and attempted murder charges in Broward after he allegedly beat and stabbed a man who he stole 14 grams of methylone from last June, according to court records.

"Prosecution of a gang member for an individual crime is tremendously difficult," Wedge-McMillan explains. "But a racketeering indictment allows you to pull together old convictions to start establishing links with other members. It can now be used as evidence. There are usually more witnesses, which lessens the chance people will be scared to testify."

Prosecutors have not said why four alleged Latin Kings, including Valdivia Jr., are not included in the racketeering indictment. According to the indictment, he illegally possessed two .40-caliber semiautomatic pistols, two rifles, a .357 revolver, a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and 1,000 ammunition rounds between February 25 and May 8 of last year. Junior, who had a pending state felony case for marijuana possession with intent to sell, according to the Broward County Court online criminal database, also allegedly sold a handgun to a person he believed was a convicted felon.

Valdavia Sr. insists his son, identified as "King Oscar" by federal agents, was nothing more than a wannabe gangster.

"His lawyer told me they used a snitch against him," Vildavia says. "He's just stupid for hanging out with the wrong people at the wrong time."

Francisco Alvarado is a freelance investigative journalist based in south Florida. Follow him on Twitter.

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Detail from the box art of 'Deus Ex.'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Deus Ex turns 15 this year, having been released on June 26, 2000, but its vision of the future is startlingly relevant. It's a world of corporations being uncomfortably cosy with governments, of haves and have-nots, of high property prices, of constant terror threats, of police militarization, of web surveillance, of increasingly sophisticated AI, of military drones. Even some of its "that will never happen" moments have turned out to have a prescience that shits all over Nostradamus's track record.

If Deus Ex is still on your "to play" list and you don't want to know any plot twists: stop reading. This piece will throw out spoilers with the zeal of a six-year-old who, just before attending a kids' Christmas party, discovers that Santa Claus isn't real.

Set in 2052, you play as JC Denton, a nanotech-enhanced government agent in a trench coat. So far, so irrelevant. Trench coats have become the sole reserve of Matrix cosplayers and sex offenders, and we're still getting used to the idea of wearing computers on our wrists, let alone shoving them into our brains. Where the game resonates most strongly is via its most accomplished character: the setting itself.

I spoke to Sheldon Pacotti, the game's lead writer, about its increasingly uncanny predictions.

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VICE: With the recent memory of global recession and predictions that 1 percent of the world's population will own 50 percent of its wealth by 2016, it's impossible to be unaware of the growing gulf between rich and poor. But wasn't 1999/2000 a more optimistic time? The US was riding high on the dot-com bubble and video games were enjoying year on year growth. Perfect Dark came out the same year as Deus Ex and presented a future of sterility, gloss, and a ton of lens flare. In contrast, much of Deus Ex's world is slums and destitution. Why such a bleak view of things to come?
Sheldon Pacotti: Personally, I was skeptical of the dot-com boom from the beginning. When I joined the Deus Ex team I was already working on a dystopian novel, γ, which satirized the dot-com frenzy in the context of biotech and AI, circa 2037. The game's designer Warren Spector's vision of a future in which high technology empowers the elite felt to me like sober futurism compared to the dot-com delirium.

There are always those in society who fetishize dark future visions—and Deus Ex is not immune to the tendency of science fiction to exaggerate—but throughout the project Warren and Harvey Smith, its lead designer, put a premium on plausibility. The future needed to be a believable extrapolation of the present day. To this end, the team was always emailing each other recent headlines that validated the ideas going into the game.

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Since 2001, the idea of a "threat from within" is never far from the public consciousness. In the UK, for instance, increasing numbers are arrested on ambiguous "terror offense" charges, while environmental protestors working within the framework of the law find themselves on "domestic extremism" watch lists. With terrorism being one of the plot's focal points, Deus Ex feels post-9/11 despite being released in 2000. What made the team decide to make the looming threat of terrorism such a key part of 2052?
Terrorism was in the air during the 1990s, though that's easy to forget. Events like the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings, in 1995 and '93 respectively, were still fresh on people's minds, despite the booming economy and the West's presumed hegemony. In the US in particular, there was a sense of rising domestic terrorism, of a standoff between government and individualists. This feeling fed directly into the National Secessionist Forces of Deus Ex, a "threat from within" that probably felt truer in 2000 than it does today, when terrorism in the West is largely perceived as originating from outside our borders.

Related: The Toad Prophet

You once talked about us entering an age of "excess computing power." This was with regard to games, but AI is so prominent in Deus Ex's narrative that I couldn't help but mention it. The last few years have seen advances in language synthesis and decision making (IBM's Watson in cancer diagnoses), facial recognition (Facebook's DeepFace), as well as self-driving cars. When writing Deus Ex, did you foresee AI advancing this quickly?
Even as I was writing dialogue for the AI's in Deus Ex—Morpheus, Daedalus, Icarus and Helios—I was skeptical that AI would take the form of a humanoid intelligence. My feeling has been that AI would come but that it would creep into our daily lives slowly, augmenting our abilities in seemingly mundane ways while subtly robbing us of decision-making power.

This particular notion of AI has arrived more quickly than I expected. I can't count how many times I've listened to people say how "the GPS" made them take a wrong turn. We are ceding control to software, not wanting to be troubled with things like reading maps or, perhaps soon, driving. Yet these advances always seem mundane once they become part of our lives. The pace of AI innovation has surprised me, especially in the area of brain research and modeling, but even with these accelerating developments I think software will continue to fit itself to human needs.

Though AI will be running our world, especially in the area of business, its only ideologies will be macroeconomics and logistics. A truly autonomous, self-motivated electronic intelligence remains as distant today as it was in 2000, probably beyond the 2052 timeframe of Deus Ex.

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Toward the end, Denton discovers that all internet traffic is routed via a government surveillance facility. Over a decade ago, this seemed implausible. "The internet's just too vast to be monitored," I thought. Cue Snowden. Did you ever see web-monitoring facilities becoming a reality?
To me, a database providing "total awareness" of human activity seemed quite plausible, extrapolating from the web crawlers of the time, Moore's Law, and the universal hunger for information. What has surprised me is the eagerness with which Western governments have embraced such technologies to anticipate rather than just investigate wrongdoing.

I always expected that in a computer-mediated society our lives would become inherently public, but the voraciousness with which governments (surveillance), companies (targeted ads, recommendations), and all of us (social media) have vacuumed up this data has taken me completely by surprise, though in retrospect these developments sure seem obvious.

Denton has a conversation with Morpheus, one of the prototype surveillance AIs designed to monitor this sea of hijacked data. Morpheus has drawn some conclusions from its voyeurism binge, resulting in one of the game's most perceptive moments:

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"Human beings feel pleasure when they are being watched." This is truer than ever. Many of us chose to sacrifice privacy and put a version of our lives in front of an audience. Yet the theme isn't touched upon again, and social media is conspicuously absent from Deus Ex. I'm being unfair, considering that the game hails from the age of GeoCities and HamsterDance.com. However, if you were to approach Deus Ex once more, would social networks have a place in that world? If so, what would they have looked like?
If I were approaching the Deus Ex universe today—and I must admit that I have no insight into what Eidos is planning for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—would have to accept social networks as a physical fact of the world.

I think conspirators would concern themselves with personal identity and public opinion, constructing false personas and sabotaging the identities of real people. We've seen a single tweet ruin lives. In a story about truth and falsehood, the public personas of the characters would be a key battlefield.

That said, how would a game depict social media? Would some poor intern need to write mile-long Facebook feeds? I wonder if, mechanically, the impact of social media would need to come through in traditional news stories, cutscenes, murmurings of a city's inhabitants. In that sense, barring a game mechanic that allowed players to actively manipulate social media, I think social networks would simply amplify the power of media and public opinion, already a strong presence in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But I would love to see a game mechanic that allowed engagement with a social network. You could have a lot of fun with a man-in-the-middle attack on an Illuminatus's LinkedIn profile.

More on technology and science and oh-god-we're-all-going-to-die-at-the-metal-hands-of-what-we've-made at Motherboard

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In a Kotaku interview, you cited the devaluing of the human being as a theme you'd explore if you were to reimagine Deus Ex. Any other themes that you would like to get your teeth into?
Not that this theme isn't present in Deus Ex to some extent, but the dehumanization of warfare through automation is a trend I would want to explore. The calculus for using force changes dramatically when you don't have to risk your own people's lives. We're familiar with this from governmental drone strikes, but imagine what an organization willing to use suicide bombers would attempt with drone technology.

Cyberwarfare between nations—and the success of governments in suppressing aspects of the internet they don't like—is another realm of societal conflict that suddenly seems like a plausible part of the world's future. In a Deus Ex game, I would be tempted to touch on cryptography, dark nets, and the accelerating arms race between secret subcultures and the governments that would observe them. To create a truly "secret" society in the future, you'll need to be a master of cryptography and computer security.

Sheldon recently released Cell HD: Emergence on Steam, and plans to publish γ and more stories this year. See sheldonpacotti.com for more information.

Follow Liam on Twitter.

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Members of the Mines Advisory Group in the field. Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG.

The nation of Laos has been shaped by war. The country was dragged into the US-Vietnam conflict in 1953 when the Vietnamese-backed communist forces Pathet Lao began fighting for leadership, aiming to oust the Royal Lao Government. America responded by training around 30,000 Laotian tribesmen, mostly from the Hmong tribe, to go to war against the communists. As both the US and Vietnam had signed a treaty specifying Laos's neutrality, official details about America's involvement were vague, leading the press to dub the conflict the "Secret War."

What was certainly a secret at the time was what would become the most substantial bombing campaign in history. From their bases—largely in Thailand—between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos, equivalent to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. Many of these were dropped simply because no targets could be pinpointed and it wasn't safe for planes to land with their payload still in tow. With up to a third of the shells failing to detonate, over 20,000 people have been killed or injured by UXO (unexploded ordinance) in Laos since the bombing ceased.

One of the areas hit hardest by the war was Xiengkhouang Province on the rolling Central Plains. Built in the late 1970s to replace the old provincial capital, which had been bombed out of existence, I first travelled to the regional capital of Phonsavanh—literally, "Hills of Paradise"—in 2009. A concrete grid town of bullfights and cowboy hats, some of the dust-caked buildings were crumbling already.

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A bomb casing on the main road in Phonsavanh. Photo by the author

I'd travelled to UXO-littered Phonsavanh to interview Sousath Phetrasy, whose father was a high-ranking official in Pathet Lao, which eventually managed to overthrow the Royal Lao Government in 1975. With the communist victory, the last king of Laos "disappeared" into a re-education camp, never to be heard from again; a 600-year-old dynasty coming to an abrupt end. Predominantly in the royalist camp, the tribesmen who'd fought America's proxy war took to the jungles after being abandoned by their backers. Some turned to a cargo cult about a Jesus who would rise again wearing fatigues, riding a jeep, and toting a machine gun.

"My father, Soth, was the Pathet Lao's spot man, their fixer," Phetrasy explained. "He was their spokesman and later became ambassador to the Soviet Union. When the king was sent for re-education, he stayed in my father's house. They treated him like a regular civilian prisoner. He was furious."

King Savang Vatthana's death has never been reported in Laos. Rumored to be buried in an unmarked grave near the Sop Hao re-education camp, he spent his twilight years separated from his wife and children, a lonely and broken old man. Long since abandoned by the Americans, the last holdouts of the Hmong resistance finally surrendered to the Laotian authorities in the mid 2000s.

"The Hmong came out of the jungle and fainted from hunger," Phetrasy told me. "They'd been living on boiled roots for years."

Only with the Hmong's surrender did the last knockings of the Vietnam War come to an end, but the havoc wreaked by the conflict continues to cast a shadow over Laos.

A former gold smuggler and opium dealer, Phetrasy ran the Maly Guesthouse, its walls decorated with discarded munitions. His life's work, though, had been to open up Phonsavanh's mysterious Plain of Jars to tourism.

READ ON MUNCHIES: This Laos Resort Serves Rich Tourists Tiger Meat and Fresh-Killed Bear Cubs

The crater-pocked Plain of Jars takes its name from the giant sandstone vessels that have been lying there for thousands of years. Nobody knows what their original purpose was. Some archeologists argue they were tombstones or burial urns, while a local legend maintains they were cups that a race of giants drank hooch from. In his efforts to make tracts of the plain safe, Phetrasy and his family cleared 2,500 kilos of UXO by hand before assistance arrived.

"There are still millions of bombs waiting," he told me. "The Americans painted them like fruit so children would pick them up. We have a song in schools now, the 'bombie song,' explaining the dangers. Because of the war, I feel such rage all the time. Sometimes I have to take my M16 into the fields and just shoot until it passes."

A few months after our conversation, the nervous and animated Phetrasy died of a heart attack.

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UXO on the outskirts of Phonsavanh. Photo by the author

Nowadays, a row of new ATMs line the main drag in Phonsavanh. Modernity is coming to the land that time forgot. In the center of town, near a restaurant called Craters, the Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and the Quality of Life Association stand alongside rival operators vying for the spoils of war tourism. In a country where an estimated 35 percent of the territory is contaminated with UXOs, in the absence of other gainful employment the debris left behind presents an opportunity of sorts.

South of Phonsavanh, Keola—a gaunt guide in faded khakis—showed me around some of the Secret War sites. The ground covered with UXO, we carefully picked our way along a winding trail scattered with mortar shells and cluster bomblets.

"When we were children, we thought the bombs were toys," he said. "We played catch with them, until one day my friend caught one and it exploded in his hands."

Stopping to survey a discarded tank, Keola laughed half-heartedly. "There used to be many tanks," he said, "but now this is the only one left in this area. I pay the villagers not to break it up for scrap."

Related: Watch our film 'The Warias,' about an Islamic school for Javanese trans people

Throughout Xiengkhouang, detritus from the Secret War has been given a new lease of life. Bomb casings have been re-imagined as cattle troughs, barbecues, and struts for stilt houses, smaller scraps of metal shaped into cutlery. In a Hmong village, the wing of a plane has been reborn as a garden fence.

I asked Eva Hegedus, MAG's Program Officer for Laos, how difficult it is to press home the dangers apparent in recycling prospectively valuable materials.

"The great majority of Laotian people are well aware of the presence of UXO and the risks posed," she told me. "Yet the high level of poverty often leaves them without a choice and forces them to use their land, even if they know or suspect it to be contaminated, or to engage in other risky activities, such as scrap metal collection."

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Kek with his son, Aloon. Photo: Sean Sutton/MAG

"I was collecting scrap metal in April 2010," 25-year-old Kek recounted through Sean Sutton, International Communications Manager at MAG. "I hit some metal in the ground when I was digging and it exploded. It was just before New Year and we really needed the money for the celebrations, as we are very poor. Next thing I remember after the explosion was waking up in hospital. I had lost both of my hands and had injuries all over me. One eye is nearly blind. I have been married since 2008 and things were good with us. But since the accident my wife has to do everything and it is very hard."

Around Phonsavanh, bomb craters with a circumference of up to a hundred meters stretch for miles, often overlapping. Each containing 540 ball bearings capable of ripping through anyone within a mile radius, cluster "bombies" still lay in wait for victims. Into this environment, non-profit groups such as MAG have brought a renewed sense of hope. Training locals in the skills necessary to clear ordinance and enable farmers to resume cultivating their land without fear, the organization currently employs 427 Laotians who otherwise might well be unemployed. Though it remains impossible to quantify exactly how much of the country is still contaminated, MAG alone has destroyed and removed over 185,000 UXO in Laos since 2004.

"I don't know what my life would be without MAG," Deputy Mine Action Team Leader Nitta Duangdal explained. "It would be very difficult. The work we do is incredibly important—we help poor people, we save lives."

Follow Stephen on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When your parent wants to find themselves, usually it means you're going on that journey, too. For me, this meant growing up in the town of Glastonbury with my new age mother—a converted hippie who shunned traditional soaps and who thought life was better led barefoot.

My mother was raised in Canada and always found herself in some sort of trouble. After dating a few musicians, dropping out of high school, and working as a roller waitress, she wanted to be somewhere new. That year, she accidentally cut her knee in a cinema aisle and used the small payout to buy a one-way ticket to England. She met my Glaswegian father at a punk poetry open mic night in south London (where else?), and soon I came into the world.

After living in London until I was three, my mum wanted to move us to the spiritual countryside that is Glastonbury. It was a town of contrasts, with a potted history of myths and religion and a small population of farmers and disgruntled town's folk. It was a magnet to spiritualists and crystal healers, a guide to those who were lost, losing it, or forgot where they put it in the 1970s. It was a place of refuge for people who didn't see the value in phone lines or heating. That sort of thing.

The day we arrived, the local newspaper headline was "Know Your Onions." The same week, the mayor's goat opened the town's first supermarket, naturally sporting a ceremonial sash. It fared better than the short-lived McDonald's, which locals burnt to the ground in 1996 out of principle. Bad burger karma aside, this was our new home, and it felt better than our cramped Brixton tower block.

My mother worked all hours to fund our new age lifestyle as a waitress, shopkeeper, child minder, and stoned cook. Sadly, the jobs didn't always cover the rent of an average bedsit. As a result, we lived nomadically in flats, squats, caravans, and in fields, unclothed, during the summer solstice. We made strange friends. They opened to us a new world of raves, protests, meditation groups, and outdoor baths. They challenged us to seek new spiritual paths of enlightenment, too, often requiring us to wear and eat hemp simultaneously.

NOISEY: What Your Favorite Music Festival Says About You

This was the early 90s, and all social gatherings in Glastonbury revolved around the town's hallucinogenic mother ship, the Assembly Rooms. Hidden in a little courtyard off the high street, this old hall hosted a sea of dream catchers, candles, twigs, and more candles. No one seemed bothered about the fire hazard. The visitors were more concerned with hallucinogenics and were themselves far more colorful than the walls of magic eye posters. There were pixies, knights of the roundtable, depressed lawyers in hiding, and the truly unidentifiable. A hobbling mass of matted hair, these people were like comedy mascots for Middle-earth.

The day we arrived, the local newspaper headline was "Know Your Onions." The same week, the mayor's goat opened the town's first supermarket, naturally sporting a ceremonial sash.

When we weren't body painting at the Assembly Rooms, we'd be up the Tor, the giant mystic hill of Somerset. Even the most spiritually skeptical cannot help but feel alive once they've reached its roofless ancient tower. Part of you is probably thinking: It's just a big hill. How can it be that good? But the Tor is an inexplicable form of hypnotic catnip to the alternative mind: It's difficult to explain the feeling you have at the top. As you soak in the horizon of endless fields, you start feeling transcendental. And before you know it, you are one of them, wearing tie-dye and sitting in a drum circle, telling everybody how you're going to buy a camper van and head to Goa just as soon as your bank aligns its chakras and extends your overdraft again.

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When summer would arrive, so too would the famous Glastonbury music festival in the nearby village of Pilton. For the average festival-goer this is a three-day affair at most, but as my mother had to work for our tickets, we arrived ten days early. We camped in the green fields reserved for long-term workers and the hippie elite. We couldn't afford a tepee, so in the first few hours we would build a warped yurt from sticks, rope, fabric, and wooden pallets. This temporary Moroccan-style cave was filled with incense and had little protection from the inevitable rain.

Two of the first things kids are usually taught are: Don't put things from the floor—namely, poo—in your mouth, and don't talk to strangers. But while my mother cooked for other hippies, I wandered the greenery wearing nothing but a small scarf and head of knotted hair and feathers I'd found on the ground. I would sit and listen to acid-trip rants around campfires, eat fresh bread baked in the back of old ambulances, and nap on old recycled parachutes with strangers. I was feral. Until the ten days soon ended and we returned to the town once more.

We might sound like what your dad calls "soap-dodgers," but our way of living—surrounded by nomadic, political people who can make incredible lentil curry—wasn't, in my experience, a bad one. The town was an enthralling and safe community, and one in which I didn't live with the same limitations as average kids. We were trusted to build structures, swim rivers, wear anything, and befriend anyone. Bedtime, bathing, and school were unstructured and largely optional. The lifestyle encouraged time with nature (clothing optional, as always), and we learned about music, art, and money. Everything was celebrated—apart from money.

Money is strange in the hippie world. Those who have it see it as an energy force. For those without, it was an "enforced system" they didn't participate in. To my mother's dismay, I saw a life beyond performing fire poi at second-rate festivals. I was commercially minded, often taking advantage of stoned locals by collecting crystal jewelry they lost during raves and selling it back to them. With my illicit earnings, I got the bus to the neighboring town of Street, just to stand around Clarks Village, a shopping outlet for discounted shoes. Capitalism beckoned me.

Related: Our documentary on a big night out at a psytrance rave

Which brings us to the question: How do you move on and function in society after growing up in such a bosom of magic? Will you ever make it past Bristol? Well, you have to camouflage to fit in. We moved out of Glastonbury when I was a teenager, and I joined a traditional secondary school. Bullied and uninspired, I walked out after a week. I later enrolled in an independent Steiner school with a more holistic approach. I made friends for life and lots of glassworks. Now I live in London and work managing art venues and teaching.

I maintain my hippie heritage as best I can. I'm a strict vegetarian (of course) and part-time Buddhist. Something I learned from my mother is that you can make any structure your home and survive any situation if you live fully in "the now." I try not to own too many things. I'm an expert recycler and can identify an array of mushrooms. A good hippie should aim to have a modest impact on the planet and not exude negativity to others or evangelize. I think I'm halfway there now, which is about all my mates can tolerate at the pub.

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Maimuna Jawo. Photo by Lou Macnamara.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"My daughter was five years old when she was cut," Maimuna Jawo tells me, calmly, over a cup of tea. She seems used to telling her harrowing story, having had to repeat it many times since she first applied for asylum in the UK in 2013. "All the girls used to scream and call their mums, because they don't give them anything that would numb the pain," she continues, quietly. "I'm the one holding my daughter and she's calling me and I cannot do nothing about it. Since then, I have said to myself, 'No: I will never do this.'"

But for Maimuna opting out has proved exceptionally difficult, and dangerous. Maimuna comes from a maternal line of "cutters," who have carried out female genital mutilation (FGM) on girls in Wellingara, her village in the Gambia, for generations. As only the woman who inherits the role can perform FGM, the village elders don't take kindly to people turning down the job. Maimuna, who was taken out of school when she was 12 and forced to help her mother cut girls, has already been punished for her aversion to the job. She tells me she used to scream along with the victims and was beaten as a consequence, to the extent that some of her teeth are still missing.

When her mother died, the village elders decided it was Maimuna's turn to become the village cutter. Maimuna feared she would be attacked or even killed if she refused. In 2013, soon after she escaped to the UK, a BBC Newsnight film crew traveled back to Wellingara, where her elder sister confirmed her fears: "We have our traditions and if you don't obey that tradition, something bad will happen to you," Kombeh Jawo said. "I am telling you, anything could happen to her."

However, for Maimuna—who survived FGM herself as a child, as well as seeing her daughter cut—opposing the practice has become a moral obligation. "Nobody can stop me campaigning about FGM, because it's my life. I know what FGM is, I've been fighting since I was 12 years [old]. FGM stopped me going to school... I don't want those girls that I left behind me to be in that position," she says.

By leaving her village and the Gambia entirely, Maimuna believes she has damaged the practice by disrupting the lineage, potentially stopping the cutting of dozens of girls. "The girls will be safe," she says. "I came here to seek asylum just to save those girls that I promised that I will not cut."

Unfortunately, the British Government has other ideas. Despite having pledged to work to end FGM worldwide, officials now want to send Maimuna back to the Gambia. After making her wait a year for a decision, they have just rejected her third asylum, dismissing an array of fresh evidence.

Watch our VICE News film – 'Reversing Female Circumcision: The Cut That Heals'

Maimuna finds this difficult to understand. "They [say they are] against FGM, but still yet they want me to go back and cut those girls," she says. "[They are] even deporting mothers and their daughters to go back and perform FGM. But now they say they are against FGM? I don't think that is true... they might just be saying they are against FGM to make it look good."

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett was highly critical of the decision when she joined Maimuna on a protest outside the Home Office last month. "Behind the way she had been treated is a culture of disbelief and a really unjoined-up government," she said. "If the government is concerned about FGM, as I'm sure they would say they are, then they need to be protecting people like Maimuna."

In 2014, at London's Girl Summit, David Cameron gave an emotive speech on FGM and children, as well as early and forced marriage. He drew comparisons between girls who are cut and his own ten-year-old daughter, and said, "It is absolutely clear about what we are trying to achieve, it is such a simple but noble and good ambition, and that is to outlaw the practices of female genital mutilation (FGM) and childhood and early forced marriage, to outlaw them everywhere, for everyone within this generation."

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Maimuna Jawo with Natalie Bennett. Photo by Lou Macnamara.

But some campaigners and charity organizations that work with asylum seekers say that, in practice, the UK Government's concern about ending FGM often seems to apply only to British citizens, with an anti-immigration agenda eclipsing the desire to end FGM in many asylum cases.

Dr. Natalia Paszkiewicz works for the IARS International Institute, a charity think tank that develops social policy recommendations through a user-led methodology. The organization recruited Maimuna to participate in their Comic Relief funded Gender Sensitivity in the Asylum Process Training over a year ago.

"If we want to protect women and girls from FGM we have to protect them not just in this country and in countries abroad but also when they flee from abroad to seek protection here in the UK. Anything less smacks of hypocrisy." –Debora Singer

"I've been working in the field of refugee studies for more than ten years now," Paszkiewicz told me. "In recent years I have seen positive changes in the UK Government's approach to women's rights, so on the surface it looks like finally women's issues are taken on board, but then I realized that there is a discrepancy between how women are treated in the UK, if they are British citizens, as opposed to how women who are seeking asylum are treated."

Meanwhile, the charity Asylum Aid take on up to ten cases a year where women have been rejected for asylum initially and appeal them—usually successfully, but the cases take many months, if not years. "The cases include women at risk of FGM, women at risk of becoming cutters and men and women whose young daughters are at risk," Debora Singer, the Policy and Research Manager, told me.

"We welcome the government's initiatives to prevent FGM in both the domestic and international arena," Singer continued. "Yet women and girls fleeing FGM abroad are not necessarily granted asylum once they arrive in the UK. If we want to protect women and girls from FGM we have to protect them not just in this country and in countries abroad but also when they flee from abroad to seek protection here in the UK. Anything less smacks of hypocrisy."

In Britain the maximum sentence for carrying out FGM, or helping it to take place, is 14 years in prison. In 2014, Theresa May used the Girl Summit as an opportunity to announce plans to criminalize the practice more effectively. "We will make the law clearer on parents' liability for failing to prevent their child being subjected to FGM," she said. "We're working to improve the police response."

As well as prosecuting a doctor, recent anti-FGM measures have included targeting "high-risk" families at airports, a legal obligation for healthcare workers to report FGM cases to the police, and even the suggestion by the chief of police of mandatory medical examinations for women and girls deemed at risk.

Paszkiewicz doesn't believe this is the right way to tackle FGM. "I think the response that is very punitive and focused on criminalization is not going to work in the long term," she told me. "The focus should be very much on changing peoples attitudes and preventing FGM in the first place. Which means the communities that are affected should be supported and more should be done on a grassroots level."

The IARS International Institute see women like Maimuna as a vital part of the solution—a part the government is currently overlooking. Rather than being ignored or marginalized, the think tank want women affected by FGM to be put at the center of efforts to end the practice.

WATCH on VICE News – On the Line: Clare Ward Discusses Female Circumcision

Maimuna wants this too. "I should be the leader of those people [campaigning against FGM]," she tells me, "because I went through it, my daughter went through it, I know what FGM is, and I know the damage that FGM does."

The Gender Sensitivity in the Asylum Process Training, which Maimuna previously participated in, operated on a similar "user-led" ethos—with the aim of making asylum seeking and refugee women heard, rather than speaking on their behalf; to this end, it was designed, facilitated, and delivered to service providers with the help of women who had experienced gender-based violence firsthand and who had claimed asylum.

Since the project ended in May, The IARS International Institute have approached the European Commission to ask for funding for a new project, this time focusing exclusively on FGM. "[The new project] is very much about raising awareness and about making sure that people hear the experiences of survivors themselves" Paszkiewicz explained. "Maimuna, if we are successful, will be one of our consultant, associate partners," she added, "and we will get more women like Maimuna onboard, and we will make sure that the voices of women like Maimuna are heard."

But far from recognizing her as a part of the solution, Maimuna feels the British government has treated her like a criminal. When she first tried to claim asylum in the UK she was detained immediately in Yarl's Wood and held for five months. "It's the same as prison," she said, about the Serco-run detention center, where immigrants are held for an indefinite time period and abuse allegations have been rife. "I started thinking, to stop being a cutter is a crime in my home country, but it's not only there—it can be a crime anywhere else."

I asked the Home Office if they would explain why they had rejected Maimuna's claim, particularly when it seems so inconsistent with their stance on FGM, but they were dismissive. "We do not routinely comment on individual cases," a Home Office spokesperson told me. "All claims for asylum are carefully considered on their individual merits."

It's difficult to believe much care was taken in considering Maimuna's case, though, given the evidence and the experts who support her story.

Aware of the Home Office's skepticism toward asylum claims, Maimuna personally presented immigration minister James Brokenshire with a DVD copy of the Newsnight documentary, which shows her sister in Wellingara consolidating her story. He said he'd watch it when he got home, but she doubts he ever did.

Maimuna says that the Home Office rejected her claim on the grounds that they don't believe she is in real danger in the Gambia, at least not danger that she couldn't avoid by just going elsewhere within the country. But Maimuna points out that the absurdity of this: in a country of less than two million people—not even a quarter of the population of London—how could there really be anywhere to hide where you cannot be found?

Tony Gard, part of Movement for Justice, a campaign group supporting Maimuna, says that while she was waiting for a decision, Maimuna received a letter from Gamcotrap, the primary NGO working to end FGM in the Gambia. The charity explained that, although they have reached about a third of communities in the country, according to Gard they "had had no success at all in the area that Maimuna was living in, in her community, and they would be quite unable to defend her or to pressure the elders if she was returned."

There's little chance of protection from the state, either. "The police are nothing," Maimuna says. "Those police are the police who are not ready to marry any woman who is not cut. Those police who will take their daughters to the cutters for them to be cut. How can I go to those police and say that I am asking for protection?"

"I started thinking, to stop being a cutter is a crime in my home country, but it's not only there—it can be a crime anywhere else." –Maimuna Jawo

Paszkiewicz ventures that, rather than being considered on its merits, Maimuna's case may have been rejected in part because it was too high profile. "If her case was successful it might have quite broad implications for how women fleeing FGM are treated," she said – which is frightening if, by the same logic, the rejection of Maimuna's claim sets a precedent for rejecting other women and children fleeing FGM.

Maimuna has exhausted her right to appeal, but she is actively protesting against the Home Office decision. She says she won't stop campaigning against FGM either, whatever happens to her as a consequence.

"Sometimes I question why I left all of my children," she says, "but when I think of those girls, when I think of what happened to me, I don't want it to happen to those girls. This is the fight that I take. My campaign is not to campaign until I am granted asylum and then forget it and go. No. I'm taking it forever."

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After 30 years of dubious results and loud protests, the flagship of the supply-side drug war in North America has finally been brought to ground.

Last month, acting on the recommendations of President Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's National Council on Dangerous Drugs (CNE) voted 7-1 to indefinitely suspend the aerial fumigation of coca, the plant precursor to crystal cocaine. Colombia has been the only drug-producing country in the world where the US-backed fumigation program still operated, and the move represents the Santos administration's first concrete step toward progressive drug reform. If the New York Times editorial board can be believed, ending fumigation may even mark a bellwether shift in Latin America away from Uncle Sam's anti-narcotics hardline.

But if fumigation's suspension is going to make a real difference, it should be recognized for what it is: not just a bad idea that got worse with age, but the centerpiece of a global drug war that has persisted through the stubbornness of proponents and their blaring disregard for the consequences on people and the environment.

In other words, what the hell took so long?

Coca fumigation was implemented in Colombia in 1994, at the behest of the United States and on America's dime. To the tune of roughly $2 billion, the secretive and controversial fumigation program has seen weaponized herbicide sprayed over some 4.3 million acres of Colombian territory, including national parks, waterways, and Amazonian rainforest.

The environmental damage inherent in such a strategy is real and disconcerting. Aside from the direct loss of plant and animal life, farmers whose crops wither from fumigation are forced to push ever deeper into the jungle, slashing and burning as they go. Flying into Puerto Asis, the hub of the coca-growing Putumayo department (or state), the brownish wastelands of abandoned plots and charred clearings intended for new ones dot the Amazonian plains like acne scars.

"Even if glyphosate were as safe as baby shampoo or spring water, aerially spraying it would still be a cruel and ineffective policy." –Adam Isacson

But the government framed its decision in terms of the impact fumigation has had on people, not wildlife. President Santos and the Colombian Ministry of Health pointed to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) finding as the rationale for their recommendation to the drugs council. Following a lengthy review of the existing literature, the WHO concluded that glyphosate, the main chemical agent used to spray coca, is "probably carcinogenic to humans."

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Coca farmers, like this man in the jungle hamlet of Alto Amarradero in Colombia's southern Putumayo department, are peasants, not the narco-mafiosos US policymakers have attempted to paint them as. All photos by Miguel Winograd

Grave health claims are nothing new in the fumigation debate, though, even if the government's preoccupation with them is. The affected communities have been denouncing fumigation's effects for as long as there's been a program. Indeed, the Ministry of Health's own misgivings date back to Colombia's disastrous, short-lived experiment spraying marijuana in the mid 1980s. Since then, independent research has linked fumigation to everything from skin disease to miscarriages.

The Colombian government recognized the legitimacy of these risks almost two years before it decided to suspend fumigation within its own territory. In 2013, Colombia reached a settlement with Ecuador to preclude a decision from the International Court of Justice. Having acknowledged the injurious effect of fumigation on its neighbor, Colombia agreed to pay a $15 million indemnization and halt all spraying within 6.2 miles of their shared border.

Nonetheless, US officials continue to dismiss health concerns. In the week leading up to last month's vote, both Kevin Whitaker, the US ambassador to Colombia, and William Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, publicly lobbied against suspending fumigation. (The US State Department and DEA declined to make officials available for interview for this article. Embassy press officers did not respond to numerous requests for comment.)

"In the history of the program, there hasn't been one single complaint of health problems in which a direct connection to the aerial spraying of glyphosate has been proved," Ambassador Whitaker wrote in El Tiempo, Colombia's largest newspaper. Brownfield, himself a former ambassador to Colombia, was no less categorical. "There isn't one single example of a person who's suffered harm from the use of glyphosate," he told Colombian media.

Glyphosate, the argument goes, is permitted for household and agricultural use in 160 countries, including the United States. If the stuff is as toxic as all the naysayers contend, why haven't there been outbreaks elsewhere?

As investigative journalist Garry Leech has reported, to eradicate the hardy coca bush, glyphosate is sprayed at five times the regular dosage and mixed with additional compounds that ensure it sticks to the leaves. Because fumigation planes are often fired upon by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, pilots fly 100 feet or more above the tops of their targets, ten times higher than the upward limit the herbicide manufacturer Monsanto's instructions warn against.

Whether it elevates the risk of, say, respiratory illness or not, the resulting particle drift is enough to dispel the fantasy of fumigation as the precise anti-narcotics tool some policymakers make it out to be.

Check out our documentary on the sewers of Bogota.

Leonaldo Obando's farm in the jungle foothills of Colombia's southern Andes is no larger than a hectare (2.47 acres). Unassuming, chest-high green coca bushes line the fields his children play in, but so, too, do yucca, plantains, corn, and other staples. Leonaldo relies on the latter to feed his family. The former provides just enough income to cover their basic needs.

According to University of the Andes economist Daniel Mejia, the average Colombian coca farmer earns $2,000 a year per hectare. Attacking the drug trade at the crop stage does not, as Whitaker suggests in his op-ed, "hit narco-mafias" so much as it punishes the rural poor for their own systemic exclusion. Racism being a pillar of that system, the hardships inflicted by fumigation fall disproportionately on Afro-Colombians like Obando, and indigenous peoples, like the nearby Kofan.

For all intents and purposes, there has been no Colombian government here, just the planes that flew overhead and poisoned the only livelihood available.

"Aerial fumigation is a cure worse than the disease, because in practice it tends to be indiscriminate, adversely affecting the already fragile food security of the inhabitants as well as destroying medicinal plants which are of deep cultural significance," Carlos Salinas, a former Amnesty International advocacy director who's worked with the Kofan peoples since 2004, told me.

From VICE News: The latest on the ongoing skirmishes between FARC and the Colombian rebels.

To Jule Anzueta, a community organizer from the Putumayo region, coca, a fast-growing, high-demand cash crop, is not a disease at all, but an imperfect cure to a chronic and far more pernicious malady. "The coca plant isn't the problem. The problem is that there are economic and social conditions that the government has never wanted to resolve," he told me.

Colombia has among the least equal distributions of land of any country in the world, both a cause and effect of its 50-year armed conflict. Poverty stands at 65 percent in the countryside—extreme poverty at 33 percent. After 30 years of officially sanctioned paramilitary terror, Colombia's internally displaced population—at roughly 6 million people—is second only to Syria's.

According to Alberto Yepes, a prominent Colombian human rights leader, it was precisely this combination of economic degradation and violence that led to the settlement of Colombia's coca frontiers.

Take Putumayo, a focal point of fumigation efforts. Putumayo's population has more than tripled since the start of Colombia's coca boom, as colonists arrived fleeing paramilitary terror, economic crisis, or both. Coca is the lifeblood of the economy, illicit and otherwise, in much of the department, where oil and other commodity booms have left little residual wealth or development.

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The Putumayo River is one of Colombia's largest and flows into the Amazon River Basin, along with any herbicides that have been sprayed in its waterways.

There are no roads to bring goods to or from Leonaldo Obando's jungle hamlet of Alto Amarradero. No school to educate his children, no medical facility to treat their illnesses, no technical training to improve his licit crop yield, no agricultural insurance to protect his losses, and no subsidies or available credit to help him compete with farmers from the United States, whose industrialized food stuffs now flood the Colombian market.

For all intents and purposes, there is no Colombian government here, just the planes that fly overhead and poison the only livelihood available. (The fumigation will reportedly be phased out by October.)

"What the government has done is stigmatize and criminalize the peasant farmer," said Anzueta, the community organizer.

In a preliminary anti-drug agreement, signed as part of ongoing peace talks with the FARC rebels, the government acknowledged that "conditions of poverty, marginalization, [and] weak institutional presence" are key factors behind Colombia's transformation into the world's largest coca producer. That distinction is one it has already ceded to Peru, which, unlike Colombia, has a strong cultural tradition of coca use. When it comes to actual policy, however, the government's stance toward coca growers has not been so nuanced.

Check out the VICE News' documentary The New King of Coke about Peru's role in global coca production.

"It's very unfortunate, because... coca growing has provided a better income for certain people, and provided better for their families, but it's still illegal," Todd Howland, the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights' representative in Colombia, told me. Coca production, he explained, has been taxed and regulated by the FARC rebel group, which holds more authority in Colombia's coca-growing regions than the government ever has. And so a peasant farmer who resorts to coca is not simply a criminal—as far as the state is concerned, "they become part of the insurgency."

Because of the way drug prohibitionism has been integrated into Colombia's decades-long anticommunist crusade, "The great peasant masses are seen as an enemy of the state, as an ally to the guerrilla," explained Yepes, the human rights leader.

The 12 US House Democrats who penned a letter supporting the suspension of aerial spraying made a related point. "Fumigation," they wrote, "often has the effect of damaging the government's credibility in area's in which it has little presence."

Some take the argument further. "There are two things you always hear," Adam Isacson, the senior Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told me. "'They spray us, because they think we're like cockroaches.' And, 'They spray us, because...they just want to displace us so they can take all we have.' Whether that's true or not, the fact that it's so widely believed is a problem for Colombia...It's sort of like counterinsurgency in reverse."

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"There's no such thing as an illegal plant," is a slogan among Colombia's southern coca farmers.

Isacson's work suggests that malicious intent explains fumigation more coherently than a genuine interest in ridding Colombia of drugs. To quote from one of his recent articles on the subject, "Even if glyphosate were as safe as baby shampoo or spring water, aerially spraying it would still be a cruel and ineffective policy."

After all, the FARC's role in the Colombian drug trade—and, by extension, the role of coca production in general—has been grossly overstated, especially when compared to that of the right-wing death squads that control cocaine processing and transnational shipment.

More importantly, as Isacson notes, there is no evidence that fumigation has done anything to reduce coca production in Colombia, much less keep cocaine off of US streets. Coca production actually rose during the height of fumigation. Recent drops, he writes, should be attributed to manual eradication, fumigation's more effective, but more dangerous, sister policy.

According to a 2013 Brookings Institute study, fumigation sprays 32 hectares of land for every hectare of coca it successfully eradicates. That's $57,150 per hectare of coca, versus the roughly $450 the leaves themselves are worth. Fumigating crops in Colombia, then, cost $240,000 for every kilogram of cocaine it prevented from reaching the United States.

Peru and Bolivia, the world's two other major coca-producing countries, discarded fumigation decades ago, for many of the very reasons Isacson and others have spent the last 15 years calling on Colombia to do the same. In 1994, the year the United States began funding coca fumigation in Colombia, the RAND Corporation conducted a study for the US Army that found domestic treatment to be 23 times more effective, per dollar spent, than a supply-side drug war abroad.

Facing hardline backlash at home and diplomatic pressure from Washington, the Colombian government has already started testing alternative herbicides to replace glyphosate, according to Colombian media reports. Should it reach a final peace agreement with the FARC rebels, the government has preemptively reserved the right to continue spraying coca.

"It's a zombie program," according to Isacson, the mindless brainchild of a senseless drug war.

So even when it's down, it's never truly dead.

Steven Cohen is a freelance journalist based out of Colombia and former editor of Colombia Reports.

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Kit Harington as Jon Snow in 'Game of Thrones.' Photo courtesy of HBO

Warning: If you aren't caught up on season five, spoilers abound.

Game of Thrones presents a classic example of a heroic fantasy that lacks just one thing: actual heroes. Sure, there are many interesting characters—some of whom we like despite ourselves—but pretty much everyone lets us down.

The Mother of Dragons, Daenerys, has spent endless episodes failing to govern Meereen either justly or effectively, getting her best warriors injured or killed, and losing control of her dragons. Season five could be retitled "Daenerys Fails at Everything She Tries." Tyrion has shown up to help, and their conversation last episode was an outstanding quiet moment. But, putting his undeniable charisma aside, let's remember that he murdered a prostitute he had forced to service him because she dared to sleep with his father. Sansa has been turned back into a victim, after a few glimmers of hope early on. Arya, my favorite Stark, just performed euthanasia on a sick child and is currently busy on her first assassination mission for the Many-Faced God. She's going to serve him... with poisoned shellfish? Not exactly the rousing sword fight to the death that we grew up with. Which leaves us with one possible hero: Jon Snow.

Not that we necessarily need him. After all, plenty of shows don't have heroes. It's frequently argued that we're in the era of the anti-hero, generally charted from Tony Soprano to Walter White and Don Draper, with Frank and Claire Underwood, and perhaps Luther and Alice, as current contenders for Anti-Hero-In-Chief. The premier HBO dramas— The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, and Boardwalk Empire—all feature casts dominated by powerful, mostly white, mostly male anti-heroes. Clearly, the model sells.

And yet, Game of Thrones, as a work of heroic fantasy, belongs to a different genre than any of the other HBO dramas. When George R. R. Martin began writing A Song of Ice and Fire in the early 90s, he specifically decided to write against the grain of his own genre. Instead of a hero emerging from humble origins (perhaps with some kind of secret nobility or divine blessing), his point-of-view characters are almost all members of the Great Houses of Westeros. Though many become humbled—or dead—they start out rather mighty. It's a story of the internecine conflict among the one percent, while everybody else suffers.

Curious how knights used to fight? Check out Medieval Warfare at 'Battle of the Nations'

While Martin was writing the first book, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series came out, which focuses on the rapid ascent of a peasant to the world-shaking Dragon Reborn. Martin's focus on the elite who want to stay elite, with no mystical elevation of a peasant (or, for that matter, a hobbit) to glory and power, offers a kind of rebuke to this model.

Nonetheless, Jon Snow is the one character, featured prominently in both the books and the show, whose plot arc so far very much follows the traditions of heroic fantasy. For one thing, he's a bastard. Sure, he's the illegitimate son of Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell, and was raised with all kinds of perks compared to most people, but his relative isolation is made very clear from the beginning of the series. Caitlin Stark, Ned's wife, treats him terribly. He feels alienated from his family. He and Tyrion bond (sort of) over being different. Eventually, Jon takes himself to the Wall and joins the Night's Watch. As Ramsey Bolton of all people observed in episode seven, Jon has done very well for himself indeed, rising to great prominence as the lord commander. He was even offered Winterfell itself by Stannis. Though, Jon heroically turned it down to remain true to his vows.

In fact, much of Jon's story has followed the classic hero's quest. He leaves town and goes on a journey, first to Castle Black, and then out with the expedition into the North. There, he gets cut off from his companions and is taken prisoner, kills his superior Qhorin Halfhand (at Qhorin's command, so that Jon can infiltrate the Wildlings), confronts supernatural forces in the North, falls in love Ygritte, a beautiful Wildling spearwife, with whom he gets to have sexy times in a hot springs. Later, he betrays Ygritte in order to remain honorable, is elevated to command the defense of Castle Black against a vast force, and is even rescued by the unexpected arrival of the king. Among Game of Thrones characters, his alone is the heroic arc.

In the most recent episode, Jon Snow sailed north to Hardhome, where the bulk of the Wildlings are gathered. As the zombie hordes descend, he rallies most of the Wildlings to his plan, building the first glimmer of an alliance between peoples who have been warring for centuries. Alone of all the major characters (except maybe for Stannis and Melisandre, but let's remember that Stannis is currently considered murdering his daughter for political gain), Snow understands the existential threat that's coming and what it will take to battle it.

On Creators Project: The 'Game of Thrones' Google Map Makes Navigating Westeros a Breeze

What's more, Jon may have a secret origin story, concealed even from him, that oft-employed device in speculative fiction (think Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, another hero following the classic quest narrative). The books and show have been very coy about Snow's parentage, a move that would be pretty anticlimactic if it turned out Ned Stark—violently against his character—had a roll in the hay with some farm girl or serving wench. Fan theories abound (massive unverified spoilers at that link, be warned), and if any of them are true, it only confirms the sense that he's the one true hero of the series. His ancestry has been concealed from those around him, ready to be revealed at just the right dramatic moment.

That's if he manages to negotiate the arrival of hordes of terrified Wildlings south of the Wall, keeps his pissed-off brothers in the Night's Watch compliant, resists the machinations of Stannis and the Boltons alike, and can weather his own guilty pangs over watching Ygritte die in his arms (after she was shot in the back by Olly, the farm boy who saw his own family murdered by Wildlings). Honestly, Tyrion's decision to be drunk whenever possible or Daenerys's decision to wall herself up in a pyramid with her mercenary lover, look much more rational than Jon's attempt to save the Seven Kingdoms. Being a hero brings nothing but trouble.

Follow David on Twitter.

Tigers Jaw have been around since 2005, steering American youth away from early 00s MySpace emo and pushing them towards the righteous path of emo that germinated from hardcore and college rock in the 90s. Tigers Jaw aren't purists, though, and have always been all over the place—some songs will remind you of Cap'n Jazz, others the Microphones. Like most good emo bands (or just good bands in general), they take bits and pieces from the quality stuff that came before them and make something uniquely their own. They recently recorded an acoustic album of songs at Studio 4, and have started playing acoustic shows while touring. The album comes out June 30, but you can hear one of the songs, "Teen Rocket," exclusively on VICE.

Pre-order the album via Memory Music.

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Follow Simon Hanselmann on Twitter and look at his blog. Also buy his books from Fantagraphics and Space Face.

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When a former gold medalist and current reality show star came out as trans on Diane Sawyer, the world became a little more friendly and inclusive. After watching an E! mainstay explain complex gender issues with humility and grace, moms in Middle America empathized. Similarly, any sports dads watching were forced to reconsider tired stereotypes about masculinity and strength.

i-D: After The Tipping Point: What Do Trans People Want Next?

But now the person we were introduced to this past April has revealed her name. Today, Vanity Fair released the cover of an issue set for release on June 9. On it, Caitlyn Jenner poses for iconic photographer Annie Leibovitz as part of a shoot to accompany a profile by Buzz Bissinger—a Pulitzer winner best known for writing about football, who also happens to be bisexual and harbors an addiction to Gucci. The subject and writer combination makes a strange amount of sense, and the story is sure to be a killer.

"If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it," Jenner told Bissinger, "I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life.'"

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Trans Issues?

1. Does the US Prison System Expose Transgender Prisoners to Rape?
2. My Adventures Using Tinder as a Trans Woman
3. How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident
4. The New Gender Agenda is Here

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Alice Popkorn

When you sign up to do a Vipassana, there's a form they ask you to sign saying that you won't leave. When you arrive they ask you the same question, and then when you're unpacked and sitting in the canteen sipping herbal tea, they ask you again if you're really prepared to stay for the entirety of the course and follow each of the rules to the letter. A more sensitive soul might get the impression that they weren't really wanted at the Vipassana at all.

The rules are simple: You must meditate for up to ten hours each day. You can't talk, you can't read, you can't use your phone, you can't smoke, you can't make eye contact with other participants, you can't masturbate, and you can't leave until the morning of the 11th day. You're also not supposed to kill anyone.

Our teacher is called Davide. He looks like Buddha—round and chubby, with that perma-smile beloved of holy people and high people alike. He looks around at everyone, sizing them up, checking for doubters, the odd head shaking, a weak upper lip, and when he sees none, he smiles, asks us to hand over our phones, notebooks, and wallets (which I don't, already breaking one rule) and the Vipassana can begin.

A Vipassana is a type of silent prison that you enter of your own free will. During the time you ape the life of a monk, meaning you do no work, have no entertainment, and reduce your responsibilities to breathing, swallowing, and pissing when you need to.

The standard limit is ten days, but serious meditators do up to 90, which I can only imagine is as close to death as the still-living can ever experience. The technique was developed by Buddha himself more than 2,500 years ago, but it was lost until the 1950s. In the 70s, Vipassana centers started cropping up in California and Europe offering people the chance to change their life. John Frusciante kicked heroin after a Vipassana, for example.

About half a year ago I started taking psychedelic drugs fairly regularly. Partially because they were fun, but also because I could see how they benefited me therapeutically. When I heard that meditation could produce similar effects, I found a ten day intense silent meditation course I could join in Italy. The waiting list is a testament to their popularity: I signed up seven months ago and just got in the door. When I finally did, I activated my out of office reply, shot one final load into the covers, and boarded a plane for Tuscany and perfect silence.

You sit there with your body crumbling beneath you, waiting for the minutes to come to an end so you can stretch your legs and get a quick cup of tea.

The first day of a Vipassana is the falsest of false dawns because you're still allowed to talk and socialize. The women and men—about 80 altogether—sit down, talk, and eat soup in a big common room. Bursts of laughter ring out. A little flirting here and there as we get up for seconds. The next day a loud gong rings at 4:00 AM and we march in pitch darkness into a meditation hall, men and women are cruelly separated. The only way we know that they're is their soft footsteps crossing their side of the courtyard or the sound of a faraway lonely hairdryer in the dead of another bitterly cold Tuscan morning.

I'm put in a room with five guys in their 20s who I assume from their clothes and pudgy waists are all Italians. But I don't know for sure, because apart from their snores at night, we can't talk to each other. I also get to know them by their smells because on a Vipassana you tend to wear the same clothes every day, and sleep in those clothes because it's cold at night, and because we are told to conserve water, our daily cleaning is not much more than splashing water on our face. The smell is at times warm, at times musty, and at times like the spongy feet of a water dog after a long day nosing his way through cow manure.

In the beginning, the hardest part of the Vipassana is sitting still. They give you one cushion and a blanket and expect you to stay on that with your legs crossed, hour after hour, all day. Your back starts to hurt, your knees feel like they're on fire, and your tailbone—that bone that only seems to exist when you land on it from a height—starts to throb beneath you. After the hard posture, the second hardest part of the Vipassana is time. You sit there with your body crumbling beneath you, waiting for the minutes to come to an end so you can stretch your legs and get a quick cup of tea. I have a watch on my arm. Every time I open my eyes and look down at it, nothing has changed. I swear it's broken. I take it off, remove the battery, blow on it, rub the battery case against my arm, put it back and wait until the second hand creeps. The watch is working perfectly. It's time that's somehow broken.

That night I go to bed and sneak my phone out in the darkness. I can't get any reception. I make a promise to myself that tomorrow, instead of going to the meditation hall at 4 AM with everyone else, I'll go out of bounds, climb a hill and find cell reception.

But the next morning, I'm in too much of a daze to scheme an exit. The gong rings and before I know it, I'm sitting cross-legged on my cushion, surrounded by all the other meditators, listening to the instructions about following your breath, and another day of torture awaits me.

Related: VICE host Hamilton Morris investigates what happens to the mind, body, and spirit while inside a sensory deprivation tank.

There's an older man who's been assigned the space beside me. He's wearing a bright red hoodie with an inscription along the arm: Surf, Life, Love. Est. 1987.

To pass the time, I turn it into a code, where each letter represents its numerical position in the alphabet, plus one. So Surf would be 19, 21, 18, 6. And 1987 is A, I, H, G. I do this all day, and although it doesn't make time pass any quicker, I convert all the numbers and letters I see. By the time night comes around, I'm more convinced than ever that I'm going to leave. Tomorrow morning, I plan to take my phone to the top of the hill, contact friends, leave, drink wine, eat mozzarella, talk, jerk off, and have an adventure in Italy.

When I wake up the next morning, I'm in battle mode. I put on my coat and while the rest of the dreary meditators file off into the hall, I slip off the path, hop the fence that we promised to never cross and run through the long wet grass towards the hill. The first thing I notice is how useless my pins have become after two days sat cross-legged. My knees make a noise like old door handles. My thighs start aching after just a few steps. And then when I finally get to the top of the hill, the reception is so patchy that the only thing working for me is Whatsapp. I send a message to my friend Andrea:

I'm leaving tomorrow. Can I stay with you?

Once I've sent the message, I feel relieved. I come back down the hillside and go back to bed. When breakfast comes along, I drink the instant coffee and eat the cold porridge with the swagger of a man who knows tomorrow there'll be nothing but cappuccino and croissants in my future. And when the gong rings a little later that day, I walk towards the meditation hall, climb the 49 steps (I'd counted them too) and take my place beside the older man in the red hoodie with calmness and serenity. The instructions begin: Concentrate on your breath. Only this time, because I decide there's no point in resisting something I'm about to abandon anyway, I follow them. I close my eyes and concentrate on my breathing. I concentrate so hard that I feel my head dropping.

Only it's not my actual head that's dropped, it's something inside it. And then the next thing I know, the room has become impossibly quiet. I say impossibly because at every session so far there's been at least two coughers and some sneezers, a whole load of shufflers and half a dozen throat-clearers. But now the room's quiet as the grave. My head drops a little deeper and then all these lights inside my skull turn on. I see shapes, like mandalas, and then shooting rockets and a big blast of lightning that's so bright, I have to open my eyes again and I lose balance, slip off my cushions and fall on top of the guy in the red hoodie next to me.

"Sorry," I say reflexively, and he looks back at me with gentle eyes and puts one finger to his lips.

It's just like coming up on ecstasy, only there's no music, no dancing, and I'm doing nothing more than closing my eyes and concentrating.

On a Vipassana, in case of emergency, you're allowed to go talk to Davide, the teacher running the course. Afterwards I go to him in his little room. He sits on a tall, white, cushioned throne. You sit in front of him on the ground and instantly feel like a small child approaching Santa Claus in a shopping mall after standing in line with a weak bladder for 40 minutes.

"Davide," I say, "I've just tripped balls. "

"Ma che?" says Davide.

"I hallucinated. In the meditation hall. It was so strong I fell off my cushion. What does that mean?"

"It means it's starting to work," Davide says, and sends me on my way.

We break for lunch. Lunch is always very simple at the Vipassana: It's vegan with very little flavor but, eating is the only time of the day when you actually have something to do so the excitement you feel when those times are approaching is huge. The menu is more or less the same every day: rice, veggies, broth, and some green leaves, followed by fruit. We eat in silence. Across from me is a guy in a poncho eating a banana with a knife and fork. Three seats along from him someone is holding a lettuce leaf up to the light and licking it. My mouth is full of cold lentils. I close my eyes and the mandala shapes reappear, diving, floating into the corner of my vision like feathers from a burst pillow. Whatever I've done, I've managed to access a section of my brain which neurosurgeons may or may not call "free drugs."

I go back into the meditation hall and start following my breathing again. This time I start feeling electricity running through my arms. And then my belly starts rumbling and a great ball of air starts traveling from my gut up towards my neck and out of the top of my head like some huge earth-shattering drill. It's just like coming up on ecstasy, only there's no music, no dancing, no manic consumption of cigarettes, and I'm doing nothing more than closing my eyes and concentrating.

I decide to stay. This is too good to miss out on. That night as we're walking back to our dorms, I slip out of the line, go scale the little hill and send another message.

Abort rescue plan. Tutto bene.

In bed, I close my eyes and I trip and I trip and I trip till morning.

But the next day is a sad one. The old man wearing the red hoodie has left. He's not in the meditation hall beside me. In his place is just a cushion and the gentle smell from where his ass had pressed against it for the last three days. I close my eyes, concentrate on my breathing and wait for the beautiful hallucinations and the dancefloor rushes to creep up my spine. Except they don't. I can't even concentrate. For some reason all I can do is think about sex. I'm sitting there in the silent meditation hall going back through every women I've slept with since I can remember and imagining that sex again in real time. I have to pull a blanket over my erection. After the break, it continues. Nothing I can do can do to remove the vivid recreations of all the sex scenes I've had in my life. It's not very attractive and most of it is drunk in rooms with grubby mattresses where the posters are stuck to the wallpaper with thumb tacks.

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An illustration from the author's notebook.

A friend of mine who's done Vipassanas before told me to watch out for this. In fact it's the main reason they separate the sexes. The devil makes work for idle hands I guess, especially hands that can't get you off for ten days.

After the break, I go back in to the hall again. This time I'm determined to not think about sex; I want to hallucinate again. That determination changes something, just not how I wanted it to change. Now I'm thinking about having sex with men. Hairy fellows with big beards and thick tangled chests. And then the hairy chests turn into dog hair and then I can see a dog, my neighbors' dog—Rascal is his name, a rutty yellow thing—and Rascal's climbing over my chest and before I know it, Rascal has got his long tongue out and I have an erection and I stand up, drop my blanket on the ground and stumble out of the hall and into the daylight.

It's a beautiful late spring day in Tuscany. In the valley below there are farmers pushing tractors through fresh muck and old ladies picking mint from the sides of the stream and up above their heads on the hillside, I'm realizing that four days of intense meditation have either revealed to me that I'm a sex fiend or turned me into one.

I go speak to Davide.

"Yes?" he says.

"Davide," I say, "something's gone wrong. Yesterday I had nothing but euphoria and today I'm trapped in a world of grim sexual deprivation."

"Deprivazione?" he says.

"Si," I say. "It's horrible."

"The law of impermanence," Davide says, "nothing lasts forever. That's the lesson of Vipassana."

"So tomorrow won't be like this?"

"Nothing lasts forever," Davide says and he smiles again.

"Thanks," I say to him, and then to myself I say 20, 8, 1, 14, 11, 19 and wonder if Davide's right and will I ever return to a time of not converting letters to numbers or fantasizing about fucking all things with holes. For dinner they makes us penne pasta. Hundreds of tiny oily holes staring up at me. I eat them with a hard on, of course.

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An illustration from the author's notebook.

On the fifth day, someone else leaves. One of the chubby Italians from my room. I come back in from a morning of meditation and see his bed made and his belongings gone. His snoring was like a small two stroke engine on a hill. His smell was old rubber and talc. God only knows what his name was. I'll miss him all the same.

Crossing my legs in the meditation hall feels about as comfortable as removing splinters, and the worrying sexual fantasies continue, although I am relieved that they no longer include family pets or hairy men. The hallucinations won't come back either. I feel like I'm right back at the start again. That day, after lunch I make a break for the hill. I send another message:

Leaving. This time for real. See you soon. Un bacio.

I come down the hill and go to talk to Davide. We're on first name terms at this stage. I go into his small room and sit cross-legged in front of him but before I can even begin to speak, he points at my leg.

"Look," he says.

I pull up my trouser leg and I see a small tick burrowing through my skin. Our hill is in deer territory. There are warning signs, which I've long since converted into code, to not walk in the long grass. Davide reaches over and with remarkable skill, clamps the tick between his fingernails and pulls the tick free. He holds it in the palm of his hand and shows it to me. The tick must have a hole, I remark to myself, but I feel no sexual desire towards it. In one move Davide has saved me from Lyme Disease and cured my rampantly escalating sexual deprivation.

"What was your question?" Davide says.

I say nothing.

After all that, I know I need to stay. For the sixth and seventh days, I go to every single meditation session—even the optional ones. I meditate during free time and I even meditate before going to bed. I treat it like a sport, competitive meditation—the first to transform into a flaming ball of light wins.

My legs feel like chalk. My ass feels like someone's kicked me really, really hard. My back spasms in pain.

It rains during those two days and maybe it's the weather or the fact that the lower halves of our bodies are rotting away in slow torment, but people start to act weird. An Italian boy in my room starts talking to objects. At night he arrives at his bed and says "ciao letto" and in the morning when he puts on his shoes, he encourages them along with "andiamo." Another guy comes to the meditation hall with his tracksuit pants on backwards and the top of his butt cheeks on show. The drawstrings hang out over his ass like a two-tailed cat. And then later that day a woman on the other side of the hall starts snoring. A teacher wakes her up, but she keeps on falling asleep. Nothing will keep her awake anymore, not even the pain in her legs, the hunger, or the exhaustion that comes from having nothing to do.

That night we leave the meditation hall and mill around outside on the hill waiting to file back to our dorm rooms. It's a starry night. They're as bright as they get. One shoots across the sky leaving a long trail behind it. It's the brightest shooting star I've ever seen. No one says "wow."

On the eighth day, I get up before the gong rings and go to the empty meditation hall and start meditating. My legs feel like chalk. My ass feels like someone's kicked me really, really hard. My back spasms in pain. I follow my breath. I follow my breath. I look out for the tiny sensations that run through my body. I examine them like a surgeon, as the instructions tell you to and then something really wonderful and unexpected happens. Tiny waves that move like long silk scarves start traveling through my sore limbs. My body feels incredibly light. I can't feel my ass anymore. Maybe it's dissolved into the flat cushion beneath me. My shoulders drop away and a great energy shoots up through my stomach, into my skull and then falls back down on top of me like buckets and buckets of warm, velvety water. I feel like I'm levitating that I've moved beyond my own bones and flesh. This goes on for the next hour and when the gong rings for lunch, I don't get up, I don't stretch out my legs, I just sit there and cry.

Bhanga Nana is the term Vipassana teachers use to describe the dissolution of the body. It's an extremely powerful experience where you move beyond all body pain. And that's pretty much how the ninth and tenth days play out: with me in a type of suspended state of hyper-sensation and lots and lots of tears.

When Davide finally gives us the all clear to talk again we walk out onto the hillside and look at each other like we've just come out of comas until someone finally gets up enough nerve to say "buon giorno," and then because you have as much chance of keeping Italians quiet as you do keeping beach sand out of shoes, the hill erupts in chatter.

Some people felt very little it turns out. The guy who was talking to objects, Raphael, tells me that he had no visions, no silky sensations—just a broken ass for ten days straight.

"Why didn't you leave then?" I ask him.

"The food," he said, "and another train ticket would be too much money."

About two hours before we leave, the men and women are allowed to see each other again. Two hours was just enough. Everyone is so horny, any longer and our quiet little monastery setting in Tuscany might have turned into the Folsom Street Fair.

Tuscany is beautiful. Maybe one of the most beautiful places in Europe. On the train ride to the airport it feels like I'm passing through the Garden of Eden, although the only Garden of Eden I know is a florist on a roundabout near Dublin where they sell plastic roses.

When shit happens in life, you're reminded of the pain you felt during the Vipassana and you know that you have the choice to either stress about it or let it slide.

In the airport I watch a big screen showing images of the Nepal earthquake and can't stop myself from crying. A woman comes over and asks me if I'm OK. "Did you miss your flight or something?" she asks. I look up at her and she's got buck teeth. They fall over her lip like a pair of floor boards. I can't help but think how hard it must have been for her growing up and that makes me cry even more. Somewhere in the distance I hear a father giving out to his daughter. And just like the waterworks continue. It's as if the constant stream of unrequited erections have manifested themselves into some form of optical ejaculation. Or what those in Vipassana would call more correctly, a reawakening of compassion.

Sitting silent for ten days and learning to meditate were, as it turned out after all the resistance, the close call with Lyme disease, and the pain my hips, knees, and ass experienced, a beautiful experience. Back in the real world, it helps you to put things in perspective. Pain is only temporary, pleasure is only temporary and you only bring yourself misery if you go chasing after either is the basic deal. And while those things sound simple as a rule of thumb, that doesn't make them easy to follow. Being confined and restricted for all that time and concentrating on this wisdom has the effect of transforming it into your own. It becomes yours, just like your accent or your walk or that woman's buck teeth. So when shit happens in life, you're reminded of the pain you felt in your legs during the Vipassana and you know that you have the choice to either stress about it or let it slide.

In the short term, I think doing something like this has the effect of slowing down time. Possibly because in the immediate days after a Vipassana you're not stressing over things you don't need to, and that frees up a whole world of extra hours. Also, decision making becomes way easier. As dumb as this sounds, your body actually tells you what to do because you've managed to connect with it on this very deep level.

As for all those sexual deviations, all I can say is the the first beardy gay man I saw did nothing for me, nor did the second. The same went for Rascal. I gave him a kiss on the head and basta.

Follow Conor Creighton on Twitter.

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Screen shot via YouTube.

The "tampon tax" issue has been unavoidable recently in Australia. It's in our newsfeeds, in the papers, in front of Treasurer Joe Hockey's face on live TV, and Thursday morning, on the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra where giant tampons danced to Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood."

The period talk has been flowing for the past week, after an online petition to abolish the 10 percent GST (goods and services tax) on sanitary products (tampons, pads, liners, and menstrual cups) spread across social media.

The petition was started by University of Sydney student Subeta Vimalarajah, and has so far gathered close to 100,000 signatures. It also landed Subeta on Q&A, where Joe Hockey awkwardly admitted that the GST "probably should" be removed from sanitary products. Further, he promised to take the matter up with the State Treasurers to review in July.

Currently, sanitary products are classed as "luxury items," and not "health items," which are exempt from GST. This reasoning is based on the shaky logic that sanitary products do not prevent illness, unlike condoms, lube, and nicotine patches.

Tampon taxes are an issue in the UK too.

This is not the first time Australian women have lobbied for the tax on sanitary products to be scrapped. Since the introduction of the GST in 2000, the issue has flared on and off. So what is it about the current social and political climate that has pushed Subeta's campaign further than those in the past?

"All the past campaigns helped elevate mine and helped build momentum," Subeta told VICE. "But Australia has changed in the last ten years. We're more aware about these kinds of issues, about fairness and equity and it just means people have taken to the cause."

While one politician's promise doesn't assure the change to GST legislation will be made, it's the closest indication of a government shift on the issue Australia has had. And despite Prime Minister Tony Abbott distancing himself from Joe Hockey's promise, five Australian states have since given a positive indication that they'd back the scrapping of GST on sanitary products.

Debate over #tampontax spills out onto lawns of Parliament House http://t.co/r93QJN3AYS (pic v. @DavidSharaz) #auspol pic.twitter.com/saSs7NHSmt
— Stephanie Anderson (@stephanieando) May 28, 2015

The tax has never been popular in the community. Former Prime Minister John Howard (whose government introduced the GST in 2000) was literally pelted with tampons by a group called the "Menstrual Avengers." In 2007, writer Clem Bastow started an online petition asking for the tax to be abolished.

Watch: Why is the British government taxing tampons?

Clem says her petition gathered a decent amount of support, with "thousands of signatories" before the hosting site went down. "At the time, we petitioned the health minister and treasurer with no luck," she says. "I received a generic response quite literally years later."

In 2013, Sophie Liley, a student at the University of Western Australia started her pun-laden online petition called "Axe the Tampon Tax," targeted at the then "I will not be lectured on sexism and misogyny" Prime Minister Julia Gillard. It gathered 45,000 signatures, but even the #bloodoutrage hashtag didn't move the government.

Certainly in the present online landscape where there is a greater awareness of feminism and women's issues, it's prime time for a petition on the tax to gather steam. The tampon tax is one of the clearest and plainest examples of sexism to digest. It doesn't take much explaining, and it affects a large swath of the population.

Tampon Tax protest pic.twitter.com/sBNis9VyAM
— ellinghausen (@ellinghausen) May 27, 2015

The success of Subeta's campaign so far is also testament to her strategy. She timed her petition to coincide with the government's Better Tax review, allowing signees to make direct submissions to the government review—the aim being to "flood the tax review with thousands of submissions."

But internet petitions alone, despite large numbers of signees, don't always go further than Facebook newsfeeds. Their success is anchored by the media. Subeta's gimmicks—a giant tampon at the centerpiece of every campaign photo, the planned billboard of Tony Abbott behind a tampon driving around Canberra—were perfect media bait. "I was fairly lucky," Subeta says. "When the petition started, I had quite a bit of media attention and signatures came in really quickly."

But it was cornering the treasurer on live TV that took it to another level. By some stroke of luck, Joe Hockey fumbled on Q&A, and instead of deflecting the question or shutting them down completely, made a live-on-air commitment to discuss the tax with the states and territories. It's not an easy commitment to make—the government makes $25 million from taxing sanitary products each year. And while the Federal Government could actually amend the GST law without state agreement, Hockey's words were a start.

Having received a positive response from Joe Hockey, Subeta is now aiming the giant tampon at Tony Abbott, who stated that amending the GST was not something his government was planning on doing. Maybe another live on air cornering is due.

Follow Emma on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user uncle_shoggoth.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If there's one person I can't imagine advertising the digital stick of non-committal that is the e-cigarette, it's Vinnie Jones. But then again, what do I know? I'm no Don Draper, no Peggy Olson. An e-cig ad campaign by yours truly would probably just consist of a guy taking a bang on one and going, "Yeah, alright, I s'pose. Bit like a fag, but not. A bit different. Don't have to light it, plus it might help you look vaguely interesting to one of the eight people in Britain who haven't already asked to have a go on one in a nightclub smoking area."

As it turns out, Jones—who used to smoke but gave up—is going to be the first celebrity to front a televised e-cig campaign in the UK. More specifically, the adverts for Kik e-cigs, which are set to air between primetime ITV shows like Emmerdale and Corrie and that.

RELATED: Hanging Out with Metalhead Vape Enthusiasts at the UK's First Vaping Expo

While Vinnie won't actually be smoking a computer in the ad, he will be on hand to tell you about the 80 different flavors Kik has to offer, with chief executive of the company Sandy Chadha stating that: "Vinnie Jones was a natural choice for us to sign up. He is a Hollywood A-lister and well known among our target audience."

That target audience is where it gets interesting. What might this human look like? A dedicated vaper, no doubt—presumably someone who owns at least three vape-specific slogan T-shirts ("About to Go Vape-Shit," "Bro, Do You Even Vape?" "Keep Calm and Carry On Vaping")—clicking download on a torrent of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, because vapers don't buy DVDs. It's 2015, mate: Their movies are in file form, their smoke is produced with the help of electricity and their food is blended into mush in a NutriBullet.

Next question: Is Mr. Jones really the right person to promote something that's supposed to be the healthier option? More often than not, the characters he plays are there specifically to harm people's health, by shooting them in the stomach, or setting fire to them, or crushing their heads in car doors. The man is anti-health. He's the kind of person who, if he saw you vaping in a pub, would come over, put his hands flat on the table, get in your face and shout, "Don't you know there's a smoking ban, you cunt? You want this place to lose it's license, do ya? Get outside and smoke a Silk Cut Purple like a real man."

Perhaps I'm wrong, though. Perhaps what Kik are really doing is appealing to the hardman demographic, trying to shake the image of vapers being exclusively pick-up artists or metalhead Warcraft fans who are too racist to go to a shisha bar. Perhaps they're trying to convert that other breed of racist: the hooligan.

Related: Watch our documentary on how to sell drugs

Picture it: an army of bald blokes strutting through a tunnel on their way to a stadium. Bricks and bottles in hand, the flashing blue lights of 100 e-cigs creating a terrifying firefly effect in the murky underpass. And, in that moment, Kik get what they've always wanted: Vaping is finally cool.

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