A PR girl at the London launch of Tinder (Photo by Tom Johnson)

According to a blog on Tinder's website, the transient shagging app is rolling out a new feature: verification ticks for the profile pages of "notable public figures, celebrities and athletes".

Getting verified is something that anyone who's quasi-famous can do on most social media platforms now, but it seems weird to introduce it to one that exists to help strangers find no-strings-attached sex. Surely if there's one thing that celebrities and persons of note do not need in their lives it's a hastily screen-grabbed paper trail of their intimate chat-up techniques?

Read: I Spent a Week Undercover in a Pro-Anorexia WhatsApp Group

Famous lovers have always left their own kinds of romantic paper trail. James Joyce's strange and vivid paeans to his farting missus Nora and her "rank red cunt", Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's Hollywood tearjerkers. It used to be the way that these correspondences were littered with powerful proclamations of deep feeling and longing; they were the sort of legacy you'd want to leave behind as a human being, an emotional epitaph, evidence of your sensitivity, proof of soul. What you probably wouldn't want is emoji-spattered screenshots of you saying you want to plunge your knob into someone or suffocate them with something being uploaded to Tumblr by some indiscreet conquest.

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Like sex? Like the internet? Watch our film, Digital Love Industry:

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You can see the benefits. A verification tick on Tinder is practically a license to fuck anyone you want. But if there's one thing we've learned from the last decade of lives scarred by sex tapes, fappening leaks and dodgy photoshops, it's that people online do not want to see you succeed. They want to see you with a dick in your mouth. They want to laugh, to point, to pity. Having a verified Tinder account is basically saying, "Hey, you can exploit my animalistic desire for coitus by giving the public an unfiltered view of my private encounters! I'm fair game and now this cool blue tick means there's no ambiguity as to who I am!"

If you're a star or starlet, do yourself a favour: just get with one of your many, many fans. At least that way they might love you enough not to ruin your life after you escape with a headache and heartburn.

@joe_bish

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On Wednesday morning, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's office unveiled a $17.8 million plan to keep some low-level offenders out of jail as they await trial. The money will allow 3,000 inmates to hold onto their jobs and spend time with their families rather than rot in a cell.

The supervised release program is an expansion of successful pilot programs that have been running in Queens and Manhattan since 2009 and 2013, respectively.

"There is a very real human cost to how our criminal justice system treats people while they wait for trial," Mayor de Blasio said in the statement. "Money bail is a problem because—as the system currently operates in New York—some people are being detained based on the size of their bank account, not the risk they pose."

The city is now accepting bids from non-profits that want to run the programs, and while the logistics haven't been worked just yet, the idea is to keep track of low-risk defendants via text messages or in-person meetings.

As it stands, about 45,500 people go through the NYC bail system each year, according to statistics provided by the mayor's office. As the Associated Press reported, about 10 percent of courts nationwide have a system similar to the one America's largest city is finally gearing up to implement.

The reforms come on the heels of two high-profile deaths on Rikers Island—the hellish jail complex north of Queens that houses most of the city's prisoners. Last year, a mentally ill homeless man named Jerome Murdough baked to death in his cell. He was in jail for sleeping on the roof of a Harlem housing project, and naturally, couldn't afford his $2,500 bail.

Public outcry over the broken system got even louder when the New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman told the story of Kalief Browder—the Bronx kid who was on Rikers for a whopping three years, without trial, on charges that he stole a backpack. Although Browder was eventually released, embraced by celebrities, and name-dropped by Mayor de Blasio as a symbol of everything wrong with criminal justice in the city, the story had a gut-wrenching ending: Browder ended his life early last month, at the age of 22.

Of course, there's still more work to be done to make the bail system fair. Three thousand defendants is just a small dent in 45,500. And as the AP reported, New York State law requires that judges take flight risk into account when determining whether or not to impose bail.

But even if it doesn't catch New York up with the rest of America—much less more progressive criminal justice systems around the world—the city's new bail initiative should keep more citizens safe from the notorious violence on Rikers Island.

"My Office has long supported a change to the state's antiquated law that only permits us to take an individual's risk of flight into account when setting bail," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement. "Today, I'm calling on Albany to amend that law to enable prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys to also evaluate dangerousness and risk of re-offending when making bail determinations, as is the practice in nearly every other state in this country

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The town of Catemaco in Veracruz, Mexico, is famous for its large, historic community of brujos, or witches. The area has been a hotbed of sorcery and witchcraft since pre-Hispanic times, bringing together witches who practice both white magic and black magic. In modern times, the town has attracted everyone from tourists to celebrities to high-ranking public officials hoping to get ahead with the help of a little dark magic.

For this episode of Mexicalia, VICE went down to Catemaco to watch some ritualistic chicken slaughters, summon demons, and meet with the town's most respected sorcerers firsthand.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a friend about the kind of lifestyle choices that can ruin your life. Eventually, we landed on pro-ana. "Ana" stands for the illness anorexia nervosa and "pro" connotes an obsessive and absolute devotion to it. My friend told me that wannabe anorexics look for and find each other in forums with the ultimate goal of driving each other deeper into anorexia.

It took no longer than five minutes of googling for me to find a forum full of pro-ana enthusiasts in my country of residence, Switzerland. According to the website, pro-ana is more than a lifestyle: It's a religion. There was a post with a list of commandments ("Refusing to eat and being thin are signs of true success and strength!") and another titled Ana's Letters. In these letters, "Ana" speaks to the reader as the "goddess of emaciation," explaining that stomach cramps caused by laxatives are to be celebrated as the death rattle of the hated pounds. The goddess of emaciation also warns that if you break her rules, you will be punished.

Read: I Catfished a Pedophile Who Was Posing as a Pro-Anorexia Coach

"I will force you into the bathroom, onto your knees. You will stare into the empty toilet bowl. You will stick your fingers in your throat and, not without pain, your food will come out. You need to do this over and over and over again, until you taste blood and water, and know it's all gone. When you stand up, you'll feel dizzy. Don't faint! Stand straight! You fat cow, you deserve all the pain you get," the post writes.

Not the original screenshots. All screenshots, originally written in German, have been translated into English

Both Anas and "Mias"—bulimia fanatics—are extremely organized. It only took a few minutes of browsing the forum to find three WhatsApp groups, all of which I could join after passing an entrance test: letting them know my height, my age, and my weight. I lied about my age and claimed to be 19. At 5" 3', I currently weigh 7.5 stone (105 pounds). I was admitted and given my target weight: 6.9 stone (9.6 pounds). That corresponds to a BMI [Body Mass Index] of 16.6—when I type this into Google, the search engine tells me to immediately seek medical help.

There were four other girls in the group chat—all aged between 13 and 23. First off, they explained their rules to me: I was allowed a maximum of 800 calories per day. I was not allowed to eat anything after 5 PM. Every calorie had to be worked off with exercise. On Sundays, these skeletal girls send each other full body photographs and pictures of their scales. If you break the rules, you're thrown out of the group.

Watch: Dying for Treatment

Once I'd agreed to the rules, I was asked to disclose what I had already eaten that day. I was honest—a small cheese and egg roll and a plate of quinoa with vegetables. I didn't know how many calories that meant. The Anas let this one pass because I was new. The group admin sent me an audio message recommending that I download an app which counts calories meticulously. Then she proudly let us know that so far that day, she had only consumed a cappuccino. She was feeling a bit dizzy, she said.

Soon afterwards she sent another message. Apparently, she had to go to a clinic in a few weeks to be treated for depression. "Does anyone have a problem with that?" she asked. The other group members said no and sent endless crying/laughing emojis—they all have or have had depression, they said. They all seemed to be in love with their illnesses, which shocked me but at the same time made me feel bad for spying on them. They were all so excited about driving themselves into anorexia. Of course, this is part of their illness.

My second day in the group was declared "a day of fasting." When I announced a food binge, the Anas rallied round me.

A little later, the admin asked us to send pictures of ourselves. I was taken aback by the bony teenage girls I saw in the photographs, and the fragility of their minds and bodies, the latter of which they professed to loathe: "I am a fat pig. I want to just cut the fat off my body!" one of them wrote.

According to the American Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, mortality rates are 4 percent for anorexia nervosa, 3.9 percent for bulimia nervosa, and 5.2 percent for eating disorders. These pro-ana forums are extremely dangerous because they combine a desire for a perfect body with a teenager's need to belong.

I wish I could sit with each of these girls and explain to them that they're on a deadly path. But just before I'd decided to leave the group, the admin shut it down at the behest of her mom, who'd sent her to a clinic.

Follow Nadja on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

I can't speak for everyone, but each time Pride season rolls around; each time a high-profile celebrity comes out as gay, bi, or trans; and each time I read the Rainbow List or hear about the Stonewall Awards, I wonder whether we still need these affirmations and celebrations of gayness. In the halcyon era of equal marriage, is Pride still relevant? Do we really care if an entertainer, writer, or sportsperson is LGBT? And is it truly necessary to hand out accolades for someone's sexuality or gender identity?

It's obvious from the horror stories and statistics of reported homophobic violence that—though the UK is edging toward total legal parity for LGBT people—socially, we're still found wanting. Particularly with regards to the transgender community. Despite this, there are those both queer and straight who feel visibility is no longer a necessity and that it's time we moved beyond the labels entirely. People who feel that now we have marriage, the battle is essentially won. That Pride's political relevance is redundant; LGBT-specific award ceremonies are segregationist; and sexuality and gender don't matter.

In other words, people who feel that we're "post-gay."

Interested in LGBT news? Check out our LGBT section

What better place to consider this than a champagne-heavy party attended by the likes of Barbara Windsor and Duncan from Blue? Following Pride in London, Attitude magazine recently hosted its inaugural Pride Awards ceremony, and I managed to score myself a ticket.

Rather than celebrating the usual mix of out celebrities, charity CEOs, and benevolent corporations (because where would the LGBT movement be without Asda?), the "ordinary extraordinary" were honored—those making a difference to the LGBT community at a grassroots level.

Photo courtesy of the author, pictured center, with Damian Barr (left) and Matthew Breen (right).

The whole thing was a spectacularly camp rejection of the idea that we're on the verge of becoming a "post-gay" society. I mean, it was hosted by Alan Cumming. Taking place at Park Lane's Grosvenor House, the event managed to avoid descending into the insincere celebrity ego massaging and corporate back-patting session that saw the British LGBT Awards so badly derided. Rather than the usual PR nonsense, the acceptance speeches at the Attitude Pride Awards had real substance, the night a candid and genuine tribute to the deserving.

Matthew Naz Mahmood-Ogston—celebrated for setting up the Naz and Matt Foundation, which helps LGBT individuals to work through issues, particularly where religion is involved—talked openly about his partner's suicide, leaving the room half-filled with crying guests. Brighton Pride ambassador George Montague has, at 92, seen the total criminalization of homosexuality through to equal marriage and, as such, used his speech to demand the government apologize on behalf of its predecessors for making the lives of gay men hell for most of the 20th century.

Photo courtesy of Asifa Lahore, who is pictured with Duncan from Blue at the awards.

Asifa Lahore, the UK's most prominent Muslim drag queen, was also one of the night's dozen award winners. Lahore uses drag to challenge religious views of sexuality and inspire the Asian LGBT community, particularly those whose faith has caused them to suppress their identity. For her efforts she's received hate mail and death threats, but even these have failed to curb her "loud and proud" mentality. I asked her whether she thought the kind of awards we were at still have a place in the modern landscape.

"We've become quite lax at celebrating our identity," said Lahore. "I've had lots of conversations about Pride and whether it's relevant. For me, it's more relevant now than ever. As much as we've been given rights, those rights can be taken away. If we look to India and to Russia, suddenly out of nowhere they reintroduced laws that are taking the LGBT debate backward. Us being out and proud impacts the entire world, and we mustn't forget to always keep that voice alive."

VICE News: Watch our documentary 'Jamaica's Gully Queens'

Outside on the red carpet, I managed to grab a moment with Moud Goba, who arrived in the UK from Zimbabwe, a country where homosexuality is illegal and out LGBT people face institutional persecution. After successfully claiming asylum in the UK—a traumatic experience for many LGBT asylum seekers—she now works at the UK Gay and Lesbian Immigration Group, helping others to secure their refugee status. Though taken aback upon receiving her own award, saying she was happy just working in the background, Moud believes it's more important than ever to celebrate LGBT heroes.

"I definitely still think it is important to celebrate people in the community, because it's not such a long time ago that it was illegal to be gay," she told me. "Just because it's legal and there's gay marriage doesn't mean some people won't struggle. We still have homophobia, we still have religion, we still have a lot of other cultural factors for people to deal with. Although children nowadays have role models, there's no harm in having more, because there might be someone who is inspired by knowing out and proud LGBTI people."

Photo of Tom Daley by Jim Thurston. Image via.

Even in the UK, LGBT people need relatable role models. The younger generation especially benefits from the way publicly out figures are now "normalized" and idolized. Such "normalization" has been deemed so successful, there are those who feel the time has come to eliminate the "gay" adjective— for many, Tom Daley isn't a gay diver, he's simply a diver. But these prefixes are potent tools for eradicating stigma and raising awareness, particularly around misunderstood and underrepresented groups.

"We're everywhere, and people need to see we're everywhere," says Jonathan Blake, the night's final award winner and a member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, whose story was told in last year's movie Pride. "Not only do we need more out celebrities, what we actually need are people who are out and HIV positive. And it's beginning to happen. That's the wonderful thing about [the movie] Pride: the character Jonathan is not a victim, and that is something that really has to be celebrated."

HIV positive role models, like 20-year-old activist Luke Alexander, are crucial to eliminating the stigma and stereotypes associated with HIV. The trans community too is benefitting from high profile figures who talk publicly about their experiences, whether it's Caitlyn Jenner, the first trans woman on the front cover of Vanity Fair, or Ayla Holdom, an RAF helicopter pilot and proud ambassador of the trans community (not to mention another of the night's winners at the Attitude Awards).

Read: Paris Lees's column on VICE

"It would be lovely to live in a post label world, but it's not the world that we live in," says VICE columnist and equality activist, Paris Lees, who presented Holdom with her Attitude Pride award. "The fact is we don't have a trans newsreader, so when we do that will be a big deal. Laverne Cox being on the cover of Time magazine is the first time that a trans person's done that, so it is notable and it is important at the moment to say, 'Look, this is the amazing stuff that trans people are doing.'

"We say we don't want labels, that labels are for tins of soup, but we all have one. There's nothing wrong with taking a pragmatic approach in celebrating labels that don't get celebrated very often. To tell people who've been told that they're not valuable and to make a special case of saying that they are valuable is necessary—at least at the moment."

Barbara Windsor presents an award for Attitude. Photo by the author.

From everyone I spoke to, the consensus on labels and prefixes was that they shouldn't be reductive and that the successes of LGBT people should be as much a part of mainstream culture as queer culture. Integration works both ways. "I'm really happy for my books to be in the gay section of the book shop," says journalist and author, Damian Barr, "but I also want them to be in the memoirs section. I want there to be an LGBT section in every book shop, but I also want those writers to be integrated into the rest of the book shop." In other words, Damian doesn't want to be ghettoized.

The move away from ghettoization has helped to bolster the out and proud population in the UK. Legal protections, fewer repercussions, more role models, and shifting social attitudes have contributed to an "easier" coming-out process. Many of those who could successfully pass as straight, who may have once chosen integration, are now choosing to come out rather than assimilate. Is this a new era of resistance?

"There was one school of thought in terms of how to get your rights, which was to look and act like everybody else," says Matthew Breen, editor of Advocate magazine. "The idea that we're neighbors and family and that we could be anybody—that was very useful. But the downside of that is that not anybody looks like everybody; there's variety in any culture, any pocket of society. The part of our culture that's flamboyant and fringe—that's avant-garde and revolutionary—my hope is that that doesn't go away."

Living an openly gay lifestyle is now much easier for the "straight acting": for those who pass, or, in other words, blend in as cisgender or heterosexual. But passing is still a monumental factor for determining quality of life, especially for the trans community. Freedom of expression doesn't guarantee freedom from abuse; a significant segment of the UK's queer population can attest to this firsthand. The alleged "post-gay society," where sexuality and gender are irrelevant, is really only applicable to a privileged few.

"A lot of people think that you only come out once, but it happens daily," says Breen. "Passing is still really oppressive for people who just can't do it very well. They're the ones who get it worse than anybody else. It's buying into the idea that if you act and behave a certain way. You should be all right." That, surely, is not equality.

Related: Our documentary about gay conversion therapy in America

As well as the much-deserved wins at the Attitude Pride Awards, there have been plenty of big wins for the LGBT community this year: America and Ireland legalized same-sex marriage, and issues involving trans rights finally felt like they were entering the mainstream, after decades of trans people being sidelined from a rights movement they pioneered.

However, freedom of expression doesn't have to be a permanent fixture, and a step back is as easy as a step forward. While Pride is a big pissed-up parade in the UK and US, elsewhere it's a protest met with rubber bullets and tear gas. While we celebrate our out and our proud, elsewhere they're thrown from the roofs of buildings. And still, in both the UK and US, homophobia is rife. The fight is far from over. To those who believe there's no longer a need to honor our LGBT heroes or take pride in our identity, your beliefs are misplaced, your celebrations premature. As I left the award ceremony, it was Matthew Breen's words that resonated: "Post-gay," he said, "is bullshit."

Follow Chris Godfrey on Twitter.

Rendering of the proposed Mother Canada statue. Photo via Facebook

A Toronto businessman has proposed an idea for a ten-storey veteran memorial statue in Cape Breton, of a woman with her arms outreached for the souls that never returned home.

The problem, and reason that Tony Trigiani is getting so much opposition, is that he wants to build the D-Day memorial in a national park, which means the environment could be compromised. A group of former senior Parks Canada head members wrote a letter to the minister of the environment, opposing the statue. Also, a bunch of people think the idea is pretty lame.

What it comes down to, is that it seems many don't want a Statue of Liberty–esque figure to plop her big feet (and arse) in the middle of a protected Nova Scotian park to represent something that deserves more than this zombie-looking woman. Yet considering Canada is super obsessed with big objects in the middle of nowhere, this proposal might not be surprising to some.

We have the well-known big nickel, the big lawn chairs (in like, every province), the big lobster, and the biggest dinosaur statue in the world. But Canada has some weirder shit like the big prairie dog, a biker bear, big bee and so many more glorious and ridiculous statues that were designed, approved and built by some people who thought they were good ideas.

The plan is for the Mother Canada monument to be ready for July 1, 2017, to celebrate Canada's 150 birthday. Since it may not happen, we have proposed nine other tasteful projects for Canada's parks to help restore this nation's reputation on the world stage.

Illustrations by Adam Waito. Follow him on Tumblr

Cape Breton Highlands National Park, NS
We can retrofit Mother Canada by turning her around, her arms are outstretched towards the west, welcoming all the Maritimes' young people back from Alberta. Rita MacNeil's "Working Man" plays 24/7 at 110 decibels.

Algonqiun National Park, ON
The Group of Seven, carved Mount Rushmore–style into the rock face along Barron River Canyon in Algonquin Park. We'll need to clearcut hundreds of metres of trees, but it'll be worth it to eventually go rock jumping off of Lawren Harris' nose. (Making room for A.J. Casson's face is dependent entirely on budgets and available space.)

The 6ix, ON
The Fountain of Drake—white wine spritzer flowing down where his tears would be, into a reflection lake where Houstalantavegas hums in the background. Each penny in the fountain represents each heart Drake has healed with his voice.

Vancouver, BC
In Stanley Park, a giant alabaster joint stretching out over English Bay in honour of Marc Emery's lifelong fight for the rights of marijuana users.

Any national park, QC
An ash tray, six meters in diameter, to sit upon any oversized Adirondack chair across our nation, since we have the biggest ones in the world. For every time oversized, French Canadians want to just go for a rip and hack a dart.

James Bay, ON
A First Nations woman holding a stack of treaties in one hand, with her other hand extended toward Europe across the ocean. To remind European Canadians that if they prefer not to support the federal government's treaties with Canada's original inhabitants that they could always hop back on the leaky boats their scurvy-riddled ancestors rode in on.

The Laurentian Mountains, QC
A Habs fan triumphantly mounting a flaming overturned cop car to commemorate the one hot-button issue that reliably motivates concerned Canadians to take to the streets. Due to likely opposition in Quebec it can be moved to Vancouver with a Canucks sweater retrofit.

Dildo, NL
The inscription at the bottom of this monument reads "Neighbour, love thyself."

Hanna, AB
Same giant nickel as the one in Sudbury, but this one is in honour of hometown heroes Nickelback. (Originality is not their strong suit, y'all.)

With files from Sierra Bein, Chris Bilton, and Josh Visser.

Like this comic? Check out Tim Peacock's Tumblr and website.

Photos via Flickr user Dominick D and Sheila Sun

Watch: California's Worst Drought in 500 Years

Mustachioed actor and avocado farmer Tom Selleck has become the most recent target of "drought shaming" after court documents released yesterday revealed he has been allegedly stealing water from a fire hydrant in Thousand Oaks, California, since 2013 to service his 60-acre ranch and farm. The Calleguas Municipal Water District claims to have spent $21,685.55 on the water thievery investigation, which they are now demanding back from the Magnum P.I. star along with court and attorney fees.

The District says it saw a commercial water truck fill up using a hydrant next to a construction site in Thousand Oaks, only to covertly slink back to the Selleck property in Hidden Valley, where Selleck most likely sprayed the water in sweeping arcs across his lush avocado fields, laughing maniacally, as the rest of the state of California withered away from drought.

This hydrant siphoning reportedly happened seven times between September 20 and October 3, 2013. The District's cease-and-desist letters went unanswered, as the same white commercial water truck was seen continuing to fill up and disappear into the Selleck residence through the rest of 2013.

The lawsuit filed against the actor also includes allegations that the water truck was seen doing the exact same thing for four days straight last March. Risky move, Magnum. Looks like not even that moustache can escape the long arm of the law.

Daniel Boria's balloons. Photos courtesy Daniel Boria

A little before 8 PM on a hot July day, Daniel Boria was sitting in a lawn chair much like many other Canadians across the country. But unlike everyone else, above him hung 120 large balloons filled with helium, while thousands of feet below him sat the Calgary Stampede grounds. Boria took a breath, leaned forward, and slipped out of the light green lawn chair and began to hurtle towards earth.

All in an attempt to promote his cleaning product.

"We just wanted to be as loud as possible without having a big bloated advertising budget like the other companies that we're competing with," Boria told VICE.

Boria explained how he started the company, All Clean Natural, a year ago with $90 and a product he made himself, and has since turned it into a company with over $1 million in sales and over 20 employees. He wanted to take the company to the next level though, and to do that his company needed to become known. He needed a stunt. He needed to do something flashy.

He needed balloons.

His initial idea was just to do a typical skydive, but that quickly proved to be an issue. He couldn't find a way to reach the altitude and jump in a normal fashion.

"We called every pilot, every helicopter pilot, and every hot air balloon pilot. I even pitched it to a hot air balloon pilot meeting, but I didn't give them full details," he said. "Then the idea came up with the helium."

The idea brings about thoughts of Lawnchair Larry Walters, a truck driver who pulled a similar stunt in the early 1980s only to lose control and cause a power outage in Los Angeles. And, more recently, Adelir Antônio de Carli, a Brazilian priest, who died on a fateful flight in 2008. This type of cluster balloon stunt has been attempted multiple times throughout history (not to mention in ridiculously popular Pixar films), but fails more often than it succeeds.

Preparation of the stunt

None of this deterred Boria. He did the math and found out that each one of these balloons could hold upwards of three pounds and multiplied what he thought would work with his weight. To round out his equipment, he headed down to his local Canadian Tire and picked out a lawn chair. He and his team then tested the chair by sitting in it while it hung from a pole in their company warehouse.

But for Boria, there was a bigger problem than the logistics of balloons and lawn chairs: The man had never skydived before. (Which is something you typically need to know before hucking yourself off a Canadian Tire special into the wild blue yonder.) So, to remedy this, Boria flew himself down to Arizona and got his skydive license in two days. He then completed 30 jumps in Alberta before the stunt to prepare.

Figuring out how to get to the site also proved to be a problem. Obviously you can't steer a lawn chair that's being lifted by a bunch of balloons, so Boria had to utilize other means to get to his destination. He attached a GPS to his contraption—which obviously isn't going to do shit all when you have no control—and got ready for some diligent planning the day of the launch.

"We looked at wind directions on the last update right before launch time and we realized they were all coming from the north blowing south," said Boria. "So we decided to launch four or five kilometers north of the Stampede."

They went to a golf course north of the grounds they had scouted earlier and set up the equipment. Then, the moment of truth happened. Several of his employees let go of the balloons attached to Boria's seat and let him float off the ground and into the sky. This point was the most treacherous for Boria. He was wearing a parachute, but he would not be able to deploy it properly until he reached an appropriate altitude. So, at this point, the higher he went, the safer he was.

Boria with a sign for his company. This man really worked for his publicity.

"There were a few frightful moments," Boria said. "The first thousand feet were pretty scary, [because] we just took off and weren't exactly sure what was going to happen."

"Being in the air was incredible. I was looking up at the balloons and one would blow up and the whole chair would shake," he went on to say. "I would look down and my feet were dangling off the side. It was the same view as you would see from your window when you're in a 747, but I was looking around, and I was just on a lawn chair above the clouds."

The plan was working out until the very end. Boria was traveling south with the wind during his entire journey, but 30 seconds before he hit his jump site, an errant wind blew him slightly off course. Even with his parachute, Boria couldn't make up for this lost ground.

"About halfway through my descent, I knew I wasn't going to make it," he said. "It was the most heartbreaking moment of my life."

So when Boria touched terra firma, it wasn't the triumphant landing among the Chuck Wagon grounds he'd anticipated. Instead, he ended up in a sleepy little suburb a kilometer away. To add injury to insult, he had also hurt his ankle in the landing. Police found Boria within minutes, and after attending to his ankle he was arrested and is facing a mischief causing danger to life charge. Police have said that his co-conspirators could also be facing charges.

The reason for the harsh charge can be tied to the fact that once Boria jumped, there still was the small issue of 120 balloons filled with helium floating through the air. The contraption finally touched down about 70 kilometers near the town of High River. Police argue that on their way down they, or the chair, could have caused serious danger to both a person and property.

When Larry Walters left the ground in 1982, it was because he always dreamed of flying and wasn't allowed into the air force due to his bad vision. Adelir Antônio de Carli floated upwards to try to raise money for a cause in which he believed. Jonathan Trappe crossed the English Channel with cluster balloons in order to prove that it could be done. Boria's stunt lacks the endearing nature that the others possess. Multiple times during our interview, Boria stopped to plug his company, and that, in a nutshell, is why he did this.

Boria is a salesman.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

If you live in Western Canada, chances are you've got wildfires on the mind.

In British Columbia, residents of Vancouver's lower mainland and Vancouver Island are cowering under apocalyptic-looking sepia skies as smoke from inland wildfires gathers in the unseasonably hot and windless region. Residents from numerous small towns in northeastern Alberta wait for possible evacuation orders with bags packed as the number of uncontrolled wildfires—often ignited by lightning—continue to grow in the 35-degree heat.

But for Megan Fink, helicopter pilot and adept iPhone photographer, wildfire is something she's always thinking about, even in the offseason.

Fink poses with her machine near Chetwynd, BC.

"You could kind of see it coming in the winter," Fink told VICE. "The winter was so dry in Alberta and BC, we didn't get the precipitation and snowfall that we usually get."

When Fink's not fighting fires in the summer, she's flying heli-skiing groups in BC's mountain ranges. Last winter, she had to fly much higher and further out than usual, as ski guides searched for skiable snowpack.

Interview with Megan Fink via DAILY VICE

In the spring, Fink usually sprays non-permanent bodies of standing water in the Edmonton area for mosquito larvae (because "Edmonton's basically built in a swamp"). Fink said that this year, her work was completed in half the time it normally takes, and with one less chopper flying, because the area was bone dry.

But then the wildfire season in Alberta started strong in early May, and Fink's been on the task flying with Alpine Helicopters ever since.

Crews deliver water to a watchtower threatened by a nearby fire in Northeastern Alberta.

As part of an Initial Attack Crew, Fink performs reconnaissance missions with a small team of experts who scope out newly-reported fires. As the team radios back critical information about fire size and fuel type, Fink surveys the nearby area for sources of water to fill her 180 gallon bucket.

Most recently, Fink found herself dropping crews at the edge of a monster fire that spanned 45,000 hectares. With a fire of that size, Fink explained, a precision battle takes place, delicately choreographed on land and in the air as crews deal with unpredictable elements.

Flying over burnt boreal forest near High Level, AB. "It's pretty vibrant when you're flying over the burn," Fink said.

Fink flies a Bell 407, a seven-seater machine that's big, but dwarfed in size by the "mediums," which carry up to 13 passengers. She explained that with a massive fire, you can have multiple helicopters sharing the same uncontrolled airspace.

"On that 45,000 hectare fire, there were five mediums bucketing and four other machines around the size I was flying," she said. "The were each flying around, one person in each machine, so there was an excessive amount of small helicopters around the big helicopters in smoke in a confined space."

Fink's machine near a heli-ski run north of Revelstoke, BC.

"You can only fly so high when it's that smoky," Fink said. "And then we have the bird dogs—small planes that drop fire retardant—come in and they lead the tanker crews on the ground.

"If you're on a really big fire with lots of machines we designate a separate air-to-air frequency so everyone will talk through that. And we set up patterns really quickly in the day so we're all on the same page," Fink said. "If anybody new comes in during the day, someone takes control of them quickly and directs them."

Fink said the aircrews usually communicate through a "fire boss" who helps coordinate with the ground crews, which also include bulldozers. "Bulldozers are actually a huge part of forest fire fighting."

"So you really need to coordinate with the guys on the ground because you don't want to dump 180 gallons of water on their heads," she said. "That wouldn't feel very nice."

"It's actually really impressive to see everybody coordinate like that. It's a necessity to pull together immediately or there'll be hell to pay."

Fink said in those moments she becomes "super dialed in" to her surroundings. "Fires are all business," she said.

Although sometimes at the end of a shift when she's flying back to camp in the light of the setting sun, Fink says the strange beauty of a wildfire hits her.

A spring mountain vista near Chetwynd, BC.

"This last tour, we were treated to some really gorgeous sunsets. The way the smoke plays with the sunshine, sometime it does really beautiful things."

Fink described flying out at dusk one evening to pick up a crew of four guys who had spent the day fighting a massive fire without backup. "It was a long day, we were all exhausted."

She said the leader of the crew asked her to "just keep flying straight for a bit."

"I thought he was directing me to drop my bucket somewhere, but he wanted to take a picture because it was a really cool hue of smoke through setting dusk sunshine."

"It was the weirdest colour. It was dreamy, dreamy in a fire," she said. "We were hot and tired but it was so pretty."

An engineer works on a helicopter near Loon River, AB.

Last of the boreal treeline. "You go further north and it becomes all tundra, no trees."

A helicopter takes off from a frozen lake near Revelstoke, BC.

11 PM at Alexander Falls on the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

Fink with a small remote radio tower pilots are often contracted to clear of snow. "We'd call this a phallic tribute."

Fink said a lot of her time is spent in camps referred to as "meat lockers." The spurs are a part of that "northern flair," as she put it.

A possibly hungover cat at a local inn. "Obviously I should have knocked."

Red tundra northwest of Yellowknife. "I wanted to have the other helicopter in the photo to show how expansive that area was."

Vibrant tundra in NWT.

A helicopter on water floats rests on a lakeshore in Northern Saskatchewan, where survey teams take sediment samples in their search for uranium.

An engineer works on a helicopter near Loon River, AB.

A helicopter on "the perch" where pilots like Fink wait for heli-skiers to complete their runs. "We sit on it because it's safe away from avalanche spots."

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When she stepped off the boat on the shores of the Colorado River, Nicoll Hernandez-Polanco thought she'd found safety. A transgender Guatemalan woman, Hernandez-Polanco had suffered years of abuse in her home country, and had taken buses, trains, and finally a packed dinghy to get to this dry bit of desert in southeastern Arizona.

Intending to seek asylum, she went straight to US Customs and Border Protection agents to announce her presence. But though Hernandez-Polonco had identified as a female since childhood, the government sent her to an all-male detention center, where guards gave her boxers and a standard-issue blue uniform, and tossed her into a facility with hundreds of men.

"The guards made me take off all my clothes, my bra and my underwear. They just laughed, and touched my breasts and my butt," Hernandez-Polanco said in an interview, describing her first moments in Arizona's Florence Service Processing Detention Center last October. "I had to shower with the other inmates and they touched me and made me have sexual relations with them," she said. "I felt horrible because I didn't want to do it but the inmates warned they would punish me if I didn't."

Hernandez-Polanco—who has taken hormones, used makeup, and gone by a female name (instead of her birth name Atmer) since adolescence—spent six months in the detention center, before being granted political asylum for persecution based on her gender identity. Hernandez-Polanco had faced sexual abuse and assault for years while living in Guatemala and Mexico. But while she came to the United States seeking refuge, in those initial months in detention she only encountered more abuse, including being patted down six to eight times a day by guards, who groped her and referred to her with slurs; in December, she filed a complaint after being sexually assaulted by another inmate.

"I feel battered. I live with this wound, it weighs on me because the memories just keep coming back," she told me in Spanish. "I came to America because I understood there were rights for transgender women, but they treated me like a man."

In an email to VICE last week, Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe, a spokesperson for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that the agency had investigated Hernandez-Polanco's sexual abuse complaint, but had found no proof of her claims.

"ICE takes any allegations of abuse and mistreatment very seriously. All formal complaints are thoroughly investigated," Pitts O'Keefe wrote. "Our investigators were unable to corroborate or establish the veracity of the allegations, in other words, her allegations were unsubstantiated."

Hernandez-Polonco's story is strikingly typical for transgender individuals who seek asylum in the US. According to a 2013 report by the Government Accountability Office, one in five confirmed sexual assault cases that occur in ICE detention centers involve transgender victims, despite the fact that trans individuals make up just 0.2 percent of the detainee population. The report documented graphic instances of staff targeting trans detainees, including an incident in which a guard made a transgender detainee show her breasts while he touched himself, and in which a guard assaulted a transgender detainee who had been placed in protective custody.

Another 2013 investigation, by the Center for American Progress, found that LGBT detainees were 15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their non-LGBT counterparts , and detailed a "systemic nature of abuse against LGBT detainees," in immigrant detention including sexual assault, withholding of medical treatment, solitary confinement, inappropriate use of restraints, and verbal and physical abuse by guards.

That report found that between 2008 and 2013, at least 200 LGBT detainees made formal complaints to ICE about such abuses. According to a recent investigation by Fusion, at least one transgender woman actually died in ICE custody in 2007 after guards chained her to her bed and denied her access to HIV medication.

Related: Does the US Prison System Expose Transgender Inmates to Rape?

In an effort to curb this rampant abuse, the Department of Homeland Security announced last week that it was implementing new guidelines for the treatment of transgender detainees. According to the new Transgender Care Memorandum,the agency will create a special team of medical and psychological experts that will determine where each transgender detainee should be placed; while some detainees may still be placed according to their biological sex, others may be housed according to their gender.

"The Transgender Care Memorandum reaffirms ICE's commitment to provide a safe, secure and respectful environment for all those in our custody, including those individuals who identify as transgender," Thomas Honan, executive assistant director for ICE's Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, said in a press statement. "We want to make sure our employees have the tools and resources available to learn more about how to interact with transgender individuals and ensure effective standards exist to care for them throughout the custody cycle."

The guidelines also create a few units in larger detention facilities that will specifically care for transgender individuals, with medical and psychological specialists on site. And all ICE staff will receive training on how to tend to transgender individuals in custody, according to another agency spokesperson.

"This specifically allows for placement based on gender identity which is a new step for the agency. ICE has historically not placed transgender women with females," the ICE spokesperson told VICE in a phone interview. "Transgender individuals' input will be considered heavily in their placements as well. We're not going to dictate where any individual should be housed."

The new policy follows a surge of activism highlighting the problems transgender immigrants face in US detention centers. Last month, Jennicet Gutierrez, an undocumented transgender activist, made headlines when she heckled President Obama at a White House LGBT Pride event, and was escorted out by security.

"This is no pride in how LGBT immigrants are treated in this country," Gutierrez said in a statement after the incident. "If the president wants to celebrate with us, he should release the LGBTQ immigrants locked up in detention centers immediately."

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also been asked to take a stand on the issue. Responding to a question from an activist at a May campaign event in Las Vegas, the Democratic presidential candidate said that the US needs to "do more to provide safe environments for vulnerable populations," including the LGBT community.

"I don't think we should, you know, put children and vulnerable populations into large detention facilities because I think they're at risk," Clinton added. "These issues can only be resolved once and for all if we have changes in law."

Want more? Watch VICE's documentary on gay conversion therapy

But while ICE's new policy is a step forward, advocates for transgender immigrants said the new measures fall short of actually guaranteeing protection for detainees. "What's fundamentally groundbreaking is ICE is declaring in a formal manner that trans individuals have special vulnerabilities in detention," said Aaron Morris, legal director for Immigration Equality.

"We encourage and welcome any new attempts to make it safer and this is certainly an attempt to do so," Morris added. "But we get frustrated with all of these hoops they set up in an attempt to skirt around most logical solution, that you can't house these people safely."

In particular, activists noted that the guidelines still allow transgender women to be housed in male detention centers. But some argue that the only safe option for trans immigrants is not to detain them at all. "These facilities are absolutely dangerous for transgender folks particularly women in male detention centers," said Raffi Freedman-Gurspann, a policy advisor for the National Center for Transgender Equality. "ICE has the discretion of whether they want to be holding these people are not. They need to be looking at alternatives to detention."

Olga Tomchin, an attorney and former fellow with the Transgender Law Center who has defended dozens of transgender detainees, said that "nothing is really that different" with the new policy. She noted that ICE has allowed transgender detainees to be housed according to their gender since 2011, when the agency implemented its Performance-Based National Detention Standards. Like the 2011 standards, Tomchin said, the current memorandum merely suggests what ICE staff should do.

"ICE and DHS have on paper very progressive policies for how trans people are supposed to be treated," Tomchin, who now works as a deportation defense coordinator with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. "But all these rules are literally never followed."

Closed off from the outside world, many transgender immigrants don't know where to turn when they suffer abuses in detention. Lisa Barrios, a transgender Honduran woman who was detained at an ICE facility in September 2013, was bewildered and terrified as she struggled to navigate the system. Barrios, who began transitioning at age 8, told me that soon after she was apprehended in Texas, a Border Patrol agent gave her a speech on "acting as male as possible,"before sending her to an all-male detention center.

"I've always tried to act like a man but it hasn't worked," Barrios, who is now 32, told me in Spanish. "I just didn't talk to anyone there. I was terrified."

Barrios was later moved to the South Texas Detention Facility, where she said other inmates tried to have sex with her. She was relocated again, to another Texas facility, but she said that the problems only got worse. "It was very discriminatory," she told me. "Guards put me in a separate room with one other trans woman and didn't let us leave to go to the recreational area or to the library. They let other inmates work but wouldn't let us work."

Barrios also told me guards refused to give her hormones, although the agency's policy is to continue providing them to detainees. "I felt horrible. It was an ugly experience, we lived with discrimination almost every day," Barrios said. "We transgender women are women—even though we don't have the organs, we're women."

ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice confirmed that Barrios had been transferred to several different facilities in Texas, but said that she had never filed a complaint while in the agency's custody .

"After receiving your inquiry we researched our records and determined that this former detainee never lodged any formal complaints about her treatment while in the agency's custody," Kice said in an email. "ICE is working hard to ensure that we provide appropriate care and protections for those in our facilities and have made progress on our standards to that end."

Meanwhile, as Hernandez-Polanco settles into her new life in Arizona, she has become a vocal activist for transgender immigrants' rights. In May, she traveled to Los Angeles for a protest against trans detention, and she told me that on her birthday last month, she went to church and prayed for strength to keep demonstrating.

"I want to help the rest of people like me because I want to make sure they don't suffer like I have," she told me. "I had to stop studying when I was 9 years old...now I want to study law and to learn to read. I want to help my community and I know I'm going to achieve it."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

'Your Sinclair' rarely shied away from spreading a little crimson on its cover

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Nostalgia's not what it used to be. In the cold light of 2015, the humble Sinclair ZX Spectrum is tech trash by any logical analysis: games would take several minutes to load from cassette, assuming they worked at all; the standard 48K or 128K memory limited their scope; and the octo-colored palette meant that games tended to look at best atmospherically minimalist or at worst as garish as having Enter the Void injected directly into your retinas.

But if the Spectrum represented your thrillingly flawed introduction to gaming, you'll remember the positives: programmers who could triumph over its inherent shortcomings; the diverse range of gaming styles; and, above all, how often a simple idea could prove to be surprisingly addictive.

By the mid-1980s, the Spectrum was booming. Computing magazines at the time were often very serious—buying guides, tech advice, programming. Your Sinclair, however, was different. It was a bright and brash explosion of anarchic humor and surrealism that naturally appealed to many a game-playing teenager. It was a golden age for the industry, in which game companies and magazines alike were experimenting with commercializing from their independent roots.

"Games at that point weren't mainstream, although we could tell they were going to be," explains Teresa "T'zer" Maughan, who edited Your Sinclair at its peak, between 1987 and 1989. "The big magazines at the time were Smash Hits and Just Seventeen. They were very upbeat and they were quite cult-y, so we started looking at those for inspiration. Humor was quite important, and as our target audience was primarily teenage boys, we also became quite juvenile."

The magazine's anarchic vernacular—think "fnar," "hatstand," "yibble," and "skillo"—seemed to infiltrate every paragraph. With the help of Maughan's editorial sidekicks Marcus Berkmann and Phil South (most of these phrases were sourced from South's family, a self-confessed "long line of word munglers"), plus an army of freelancers, the magazine's writing oozed personality which set it apart from competitors such as Crash (Berkmann: "It was sort of alright, but written by people who couldn't really write") and Sinclair User (Maughan: "It was a bit boring").

In a review of movie tie-in A View to a Kill, Berkmann wrote: "Now everyone thinks that every Bond game is going to be a pile of jobbies, so it doesn't matter how brillsville it turns out to be—no one's going to want to know."

"I wouldn't write anything like that now," he protests. "I wouldn't have written anything like that since I left the magazine. The weird thing was that you could write complete drivel like that, and it was fine: no one took out the jokes." It was that balance of blunt honesty and precise comic flair that made YS such an engaging read.

"We wanted it to have Viz-style swearing, but we were constrained by the fact that parents bought it for their children," South recalls. "We had to be more arch about it, so there was a lot of veiled profanity."

He continues: "You can't underestimate the contributions of the art people, not only to the look and feel of the magazine but also to the ambience of the office. They were all very skilled artists who labored for weeks on end to craft something that looked thrown together."

Vital to such ambience was booze. Unsurprisingly, if you put a bunch of young people together in a profession in which a drinking culture is entirely accepted, they'll take advantage. "It was unbelievably boozy," emphasises Berkmann. "We drank at lunch and we drank after work and we drank Lucozade in the morning to ward off our hangovers."

The magazine's growing profile was helped greatly by giving away the unreleased Batty game as a free cover tape, while its repositioning was assisted by including a watered-down mini-edition of Viz ("Bundling a free sampler of the lewd adult comic was, from a kid's point of view, the best thing ever in the history of ever," says tribute site YSRNRY) and upping the ante with its covers. Your Sinclair had sought to link youth culture and gaming before by splashing the likes of the cast of The Young Ones and Max Headroom on its frontage, but the summer of 1988 presented a boundaries-pushing double-bill of sex and violence.

Vixen came first, with the YS cover featuring Page 3 girl Corrine Russell clad in a leopard-print bikini. Such was the furore that Felix Dennis, founder of the magazine's parent company Dennis Publishing, was quizzed about it on national television.

"My view at the time was that it was going to be a big game, that was the marketing material that they were using and we were aiming at teenage and upwards boys," states Maughan. "She was wearing a bikini and that was what the game's content was about, and we were in the business of selling magazines that would appeal."

The magazine soon achieved monthly sales in excess of 80,000, which ratifies Maughan's logic. The following month's cover illustration was of a blood-splattered oinker chainsawing an off-page foe to death in the name of promoting Psycho Pigs UXB.

"I don't think you'd get away with some of that stuff now," Maughan says. "I think things are a bit more PC. We had stickers saying things like, 'The mag that put your brain in the blender,' because at the time there were all those jokes about putting a frog in a blender—'what's green and goes red at the push of a button?' If you're going to push boundaries, you will offend people."

It was around this time that Duncan MacDonald joined the YS ranks. MacDonald's input was to heighten the magazine's surreal excesses: his comic strips possessed the black humor of a PG version of Cyanide and Happiness, and his reviews would feature non sequiturs like "Crikey, I wouldn't send you out to buy a pound of sausages." He reviewed Skate Crazy from the perspective of a monkey named Pippo, and introduced a preview of Human Killing Machine with "I've always been nervous of sewing machines."

"He was a world class loonbag," chuckles South. "He was a genius, but like many a genius he was overwhelmed by his ideas."

Watch VICE Meets Norwegian Novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard:

MacDonald's finest moment was one of the strangest incidents in mainstream publishing. He created a game called Advanced Lawnmower Simulator—a sort of spiritual prankish precursor to Goat Simulator—that he then hyperbolically reviewed. Writers and readers alike continued this April Fools' joke for months on end, until the game itself was given away as a cover-mount cassette 18 months later. South still plays it to this day: "It's a work of minimalist genius."

Throughout such hijinks, however, lurked the awareness that the Spectrum had a limited shelf life. "We thought if we could write for the magazine for two or three years, we could then go off and become serious writers like we once said we wanted to be," laughs South. Even as early as September 1987, Berkmann's comparison of the Spectrum +3 with the Sega and Nintendo consoles of the time noted, "Both machines boast graphics and speed that, at their best, make the poor old Speccy look like a pocket calculator."

By the summer of 1989, Your Sinclair's golden era concluded when Maughan moved upstairs to become associate publisher, by which point South and Berkmann had both flown the nest to become freelancers. And yet, under new editor Matt Bielby, the magazine continued to remain credible as its frenetic writing and daft antics (including trying to make a pop star of writer David "Whistling Rick" Wilson) continued unabated.

The Spectrum was wheezing its final breaths come 1993, and Your Sinclair had inevitably become a shadow of its former self, hindered by a dwindling supply of games to cover. It's last hurrah came in September '93 with a sentimental celebration of its past—albeit one undermined by numerous Amiga ads and a classifieds page that was full of Spec-chums optimistically trying to offload their machines.

On Motherboard: Apogee's Forgotten Retro Game Classics

Your Sinclair writers often branched out into other publications and platforms over the years, and Maughan's publishing career maintained some of the mag's spirit with the likes of Zero, Game Zone, Nintendo Zone, and PC Zone. She's since had strangers trace her through Facebook to pay compliments, and Berkmann has met people who were inspired to go into gaming journalism because of their love of the mag. "People thought, 'These guys are writing fun stuff, maybe I could write fun stuff, too,'" says South. "That legacy is immeasurable."

It would return, briefly, as a one-off tribute supplement in November 2004's Retro Gamer, whose then-editor Martyn Carroll concluded: "Of all the early computer magazines, Your Sinclair is perhaps the best remembered and best loved."

But it was the final words of Your Sinclair itself that summed up its weirdly wonderful run: "Remember folks! Be crap to each other! In a funky skillo sort of way."

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Graphics via Daily VICE.

The pothead vote is real, and it's spectacular, according to an exclusive poll provided to VICE News.

Forum Research contacted Canadians across the country to ask if they would be more like to cast a ballot for a pro-legalization candidate. For more than half of Canadians polled, the answer is: yes.

The results are surprising not because Canadians are pro-legalization—previous opinion surveys have pegged support for legalizing or decriminalizing at roughly two-thirds—but the poll shows that people actually see it as an election issue.

And it may be the thing to lead young voters to the poll when this election comes around.

In the 2011 election, it was estimated that just four in ten under 35-year-olds went to the polls to cast a ballot. That's probably unsurprising, given the election was mostly fought about purchasing F-35s, infrastructure spending, tax cuts for families, and pension plans.

This time around, bong-hitting youngsters may yet amble to their local school gymnasium and cast a ballot, and probably not one for Stephen Harper.

With 56 percent of those asked saying they're more likely to vote for a pro-pot leader, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair must be popping champagne (or perhaps lighting a doobie). Both leaders are advocates of tearing down the prohibitions for possessing and selling marijuana.

Trudeau came out forcefully in favour of outright legalization, making him the first leader to do so.

"We want to keep it out of the hands of kids while respecting the rights of adults to make choices," the Liberal leader told VICE News in a sit-down interview earlier this year.

He said he'd like to emulate Colorado's system, where a 28-percent tax rate brought in $53 million in revenue for the state government. He also said he wouldn't jack taxes on the pot too high, lest the underground economy undercut the legal prices.

The NDP leader was a little less categorical in his position.

"There's something that we can do overnight in Canada, which is to decriminalize," Mulcair told VICE in March. When pushed, however, he wouldn't commit to legalizing the sale of weed, except to say that he'd work with the provinces on a solution.

"We'd have to look at different models," he said.

Elizabeth May is, obviously, pro-legalization.

Between the three federal opposition parties, their supporters say their anti-prohibition stance positively affects their vote.

The Conservatives are the odd ones out on this. Longstanding arch-enemies of the marijuana, the party has run an aggressive attack ad campaign to make Trudeau look like a reefer-mad college student.

Those haven't worked to any measurable degree, likely because only a fraction of Canadians appear to agree with the idea that marijuana is at all dangerous.

But Harper's rhetoric on marijuana isn't just political. His government has fought tooth-and-nail against the notion that they should make marijuana available for those living with cancer and glaucoma, and they've ratcheted up arrests and prosecutions for simple possession.

Possession charges for cannabis have grown by a staggering 40 percent since Harper took office. Each year, roughly one in every 600 Canadians will be charged with marijuana possession.

While there is a dearth of statistics about the makeup of provincial prisons, which house most convicted of drug crimes, currently four percent of federal inmates—meaning they're serving a sentence of two years or longer—are serving time for drug possession.

The animosity towards potheads is evident in the Conservative voting base. Just a third of Conservative voters say they want a pro-legalization leader.

Forum's data shows that when leaders talk about marijuana, it has the power to affect the outcome of the election.

"While not the most compelling issue we track, marijuana legalization has the power to move votes, and it is instructive to see that's the case among even one fifth of Conservative voters, whose party does not support it," said Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff.

The poll questioned 1,281 Canadians from June 15 to 16 and is considered accurate +/- 3%, 19 times out of 20.

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