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The VICE Guide to Right Now: California Wants Marijuana Growers to Please Stop Destroying the Environment

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Photo by Flickr user Mark

Watch: Weediquette, our video series on marijuana

California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law today a bill that will charge steep fines to marijuana growers who cause environmental damages. It's targeted at the state's increasing number of illegal pot farms, who have wreaked havoc on local wildlife and water supplies.

According to the Los Angeles Times, state agents participated in 250 raids on illegal marijuana operations in California last year, yielding over 600,000 marijuana plants and 15,000 pounds of processed marijuana. It's not just a problem because it interferes with the state's legal marijuana growing operations, but because it's causing massive environmental damages. In one case, a grow site was diverting as much as 1,400 gallons each day from a stream where endangered salmon lived.

It takes a lot of water to grow pot plants, and water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource in California. "Marijuana plants use six to eight gallons of water per plant, per day, and are a direct hazard to wildlife that eats the plants," said California Department of Fish and Wildlife's assistant chief Brian Naslund in a press release last year. Among illegal grow operations, a great deal of that water is siphoned from other sources, which has a huge impact on local environments. The LA Times reported that last year, the state "found more than 135 dams or diversions in rivers and streams that resulted in the theft of about 5 million gallons of water for marijuana grows."

Growing pot also requires flat land, which means grow operations sometimes cut down trees and destroy wildlife habitats to make room for their pot plants; it also causes water pollution to local streams, from chemical pesticides and fertilizer runoff. It's basically an environmental nightmare.

California's new law gives more power to the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and prescribes fines up to $40,000 for polluting rivers and streams and fines up to $10,000 for threatening nearby trees or wildlife.


Conjuring the Internet: Art and Contemporary Magic

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Conjuring the Internet: Art and Contemporary Magic

Why You Make Art When You're on Ambien

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Sometimes I can't sleep for an entire week. I'll feel like an alien; anything will make me cry, I'm paranoid, I hallucinate. It is insanity at its finest (and a choice torture method).

Earlier this spring, I had one of these weeks. I tried all the natural methods you can think of: yoga, meditation, Valerian root tea. On the sixth day of no sleep, when I found myself scraping for Benadryl crumbs in my purse and chugging half a hard cider in the hopes it might give me an hour of shut eye, I knew it was time to see a doctor. He prescribed me Ambien.

All Ambien art courtesy of http://tumblr.ryanhegland.com/

And it worked, if I took my prescribed 10 mg and tucked myself in bed straight away. But if I got distracted and stayed up for whatever reason, the Ambien made me energized and creative. I'd stay up writing emotional love poems. As VICE has reported, Ambien (zolpidem tartrate) is a weird drug. An extreme example of its "paradoxal reaction" is the drug's ability to wake up coma patients.

During one of my Ambien-riddled nights of Tumblr poetry, I started to search for fellow so-called "Ambien artists." I met Ryan, a 30-year-old photographer turned iPad Ambien artist from Minnesota who takes 10 mg for chronic insomnia. "If I'm working on art, normally there's a purpose to it. But when I'm on Ambien, the whole purpose is to pass time [until I fall asleep]. When I look at the art the next day, there's a lot of emotion put into it. You're seeing into that dreamlike state," says Ryan. "What you're seeing [on Ambien] and what you're going to see the next morning are two completely different things, but I think that's what makes it interesting. When I'm working on it, it's like the greatest piece of artwork!"

To learn more about the unintended creative consequences of Ambien, I spoke with addiction psychiatrist Dr. Alkesh Patel of Mountainside Treatment Center about the mechanisms responsible for my shitty love poems and how Ambien artists may have other underlying diagnoses responsible for our bad art.


WATCH: The Ambien Effect


VICE: Sometimes Ambien will make me super creative. I'll write weird poems. There are internet groups on Ambien art who report to have the same trippy, creative urges. Could you speak to the mechanisms that would cause that?
Dr. Alkesh Patel: Ambien is a sedative hypnotic, which means basically it's a sleep aid. It is very helpful in the treatment of insomnia. It's been used often times by patients because it decreases what we call "sleep latency," which means the time from when you take the pill to the time you actually fall asleep, and that's where most of the evidence is for Ambien. Ambien works really well in a lot of people, but you can have these types of adverse side effects. Everyone is different. The people who have reported [creative tendancies] or bizarre behaviors like sleep walking or bouts of increased energy are having what we call the "paradoxal reaction," when sedatives do the total opposite of what you expect them to do.

Who might experience this?
This can happen in people who have been on other sedatives and now have changed to Ambien; this can happen to people who have never been on sedatives and this is their first time on Ambien. If it does happen, the mechanism of action could be that it is activating other receptors' mechanisms in the brain. Or, just like antidepressants and other medications that calm you down and help with depression, they can actually cause manic symptoms. This happens if [the drug] works on the other receptor systems in the brain rather than the receptor system that it's supposed to work on, which is the GABA receptor system.

Just like antidepressants and other medications that calm you down and help with depression, Ambien can actually cause manic symptoms.

Yeah. It seems like if I take Ambien and just close my eyes, I fall asleep fine, but if I get sidetracked then the next thing I know I'll be plowing through chapters of my first book.
These things are not uncommon. A lot of people with amnesia will do that and [not remember it]. People sometimes remember, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that there's amnesia around it. The other explanation that may account for that is that sometimes drugs can work on other receptor mechanisms, and there may be other underlying issues going on. I have a lot of patients who have depression and part of their depression is insomnia. Or they have a different type of mood disorder that cycles a lot, like bipolar depression, and one of the symptoms is insomnia. If you give a medication that may not be specifically targeted for [other disorders], but is indicated only for sleep initiation, you may actually be shaking up the underlying issue, which could be something else. You may actually not be addressing the insomnia, which is part of the bigger disorder.

My 10 mg pills don't seem to be working as well anymore. Can you develop a tolerance to Ambien?
You do develop a tolerance to a sedative, just like you can develop a tolerance to taking benzodiazepines like Klonopin or Xanax. You have been activating those receptors for a while, and those receptors where the drug binds on the cells in the brain are kind of like, "OK, there's a lot of Ambien going on, or there's a lot of Xanax in the system, we don't need to capture everybody. We're going to go ahead and hide out inside the cell where you can't find us." We call that reuptake. There's a neurochemical change that happens when you take medications for a while; they may not feel like they're being responsive as much. And sedatives are one of those medications where you may develop a tolerance. Ideally, Ambien is usually given short-term. The clinical trials were in support of taking it maybe four to five weeks.

Follow Sophie on Twitter.

Rookie Texas Cop Fatally Shoots Unarmed Black College Football Player

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Rookie Texas Cop Fatally Shoots Unarmed Black College Football Player

Playing the Fool: My Life as a Freelance Clown

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The Craigslist post shouted, "HAVE A GREAT ATTITUDE AND LOUD PERSONALITY, LOVE KIDS?" I broke an unwritten rule about anything posted in all caps and clicked. For a post clearly about clowning, it was pretty vague about job details, though the poster did mention twice that females over 30 need not apply. I laughed, then went back to looking for work.

But the more I scrolled through Craigslist's paltry career options in Brooklyn, the more I realized clowning was the perfect part-time job: weekends only, same day cash, probably lots of free cake. I responded to the all-caps ad. One interview and two hours of balloon training later, I was on the clown schedule.

I had assumed this was a small clowning operation, because the office where I had interviewed was tiny, but there were over two dozen clowns when I arrived for my first day of work. As they waited to be dispatched, they painted each other's faces and got chastised by the boss. She yelled, "Your big asses make the moms feel uncomfortable!" When she saw me, she told me everyone else was getting ready and I shouldn't just stand there. My "lead" (basically my clown mentor), Anna, asked me if this was my first time out. I nodded and followed her to the car for my inaugural party.

We parked in Manhattan. I changed in the back as our driver, Juan, sat in the front smoking. The ruffled gaucho clown shorts were too big and I couldn't feel my arms because the costume's glittery sleeves cut off my circulation.

We entered the lobby and the bellboys escorted us to the service elevator. The common room was empty except for the mother and birthday boy, too young to be frightened or interested. A dozen toddlers, followed closely by their parents, filtered in as we set up next to a Curious George cutout. Anna told me to make balloon animals as she plugged in our pink boombox and turned on Kid Bopz Volume 23.

I knew I could make a dog. Luckily the children were all of an impressionable age and asked for more pups. When all of the children had dogs and painted faces, Anna asked the crowd if they liked magic. They looked unconvinced but sat facing us. I had no idea how she was doing the tricks, and thought that her genuinely sweet energy and untraceable foreign accent made her a pretty good clown.

I heard children scream as I entered the next party. Are you a clown? Are you my friend? Will you make me a balloon?

I relaxed until Anna told me to go change into George. Excuse me? I said. As the kids played pin the tail on the donkey, we went to the bathroom, where Anna pulled out an adult-sized, pretty professional-looking Curious George costume. After I changed, she guided my furry hand towards the children.

"We have a special guest that's traveled from a far away land to come wish a special someone happy birthday," Anna told them as I waved. I started to dance. I saw children bouncing happily and could hear adult laughter and clinking champagne glasses. I loosened my knees and remembered a video I watched about the Christmas dougie but couldn't figure out the difference between that and the regular dougie, so I just dougied. The father gave us an $80 tip, 20 bucks more than the recommended amount, and some written feedback: Great show. Especially George. Will call again!

Juan got this gig because he's the brother of a clown. He uses all the money to pay for his studies in cosmetic chemistry. Anna said she had some problems with her visa and was hesitant to take chances on a new job. She took weekday shifts, too, and saved everything. Sometimes, she said, she walks away with the same amount of cash people make in a week. She warned me that most girls don't last long.

Photos courtesy of the author

I heard children scream as I entered the next party: Are you a clown? Are you my friend? Will you make me a balloon?

A man grilling offered me some meat, but it seemed wrong to eat party food, especially with that little girl watching my every move. I made her a balloon sword, instead. Soon all the children wanted swords. I made myself a blue one and yelled "en garde" in a funny accent and started chasing the children. I am really getting the hang of this, I thought, as children hit me in the face. A kid accidentally popped my sword, and I fell to my knees yelling nooooooooo! while clenching an imaginary wound. I announced my defeat and found Anna. When she saw me coming she turned to the crowd and asked them if they liked dancing. To my surprise, the crowd grew quiet and vied for better views of the platform porch, now a stage.

Improvising a magic show is one thing but synchronized dancing? Even the children could see fear in my eyes. An electronic drumbeat pierced the silence followed by, "This is something new, the Casper Slide part two, and this time we're going to get funky..."

The mother gave us no tip. The company pays clowns on a per party basis somewhere between 20 and 40 bucks. Without the tip, the job sucks.

Anna had a plastered on smile and clapped along with the "clap, clap, clap, clap your hands" of the song. I started marching in place and focused on one point like I use to do when I got nervous during college presentations.

"To the left." My left or the crowds? "Take it back now, y'all." Back to where I started or just backwards? "One hop this time." That I can do. Right foo leezt stomb. What was that? "Let foo leez stomb?" I had no idea what the fuck it was telling me to do, though I had deduced that all of this was just a series of commands that had a few seconds between instruction and execution. "Cha Cha real smooth." I was not sure what that meant, so I dougied again. And just kept going. There were some curve balls about getting "low to the flo'" and "Charlie Brown-ing," but for the most part I mastered it by the end of the song and reveled in the crowd's applause.

It was time for my second costume: a huge, yellow beer koozie with overalls. A child yelled, "Minion!" and I felt tugs from all directions. I leaned my real head up to get a better look out of the costume head's mouth, and my nose started to itch. I rubbed my head around, trying to brush against the foam padding but it was pointless. I smiled big inside my costume head every time someone said cheese. The mother gave us a $60 tip, exactly the recommended amount.


The author, when she isn't a clown

We took a break at a strip mall. A man leaned out of his car and yelled, quit clowning around, and Anna gave him a forced ha-ha look. We lost Juan, so we waited where people enter one set of automatic sliding doors and are briefly in a consumer limbo before reaching more doors. A vending machine full of small toys ate my money, and I was feeling cheated when a young kid, probably eleven, moved me aside. "You gotta know how to work it," he said as he slipped $.50 in, maneuvered the machine, and handed me my plastic prize. "So you guys are clowns?" I confirmed his suspicion, thinking he might like to see a trick. "I don't like clowns," he said, and walked away.

At my third party, I experimented with a butterfly balloon. It popped in the birthday girl's face and her eyes welled up. I informed her I was still in clown school and she giggled and gave me an understanding look.

Later in the evening, I got dressed up as Foofa from Yo Gabba Gabba. When the birthday girl saw, she swung her arms around my pink legs and told me she loved me.

The mother gave us no tip. That was when I learned about the saddest moment in a party clown's life. The company pays clowns on a per party basis somewhere between 20 and 40 bucks. An average day after travel and cleanup is around 12 hours. Without the tips, the job sucks.

READ: Clowns Are Going Extinct

We drove an hour into the Bronx for our final party. The contract said 15 to 20 kids. The gym was filled with about 100. Children clawed at my legs, begging for a balloon. A horrifying number of parents cut the line on behalf of their child. I wanted to tell them they were acting like bullies, but instead I wiped the sweat from my brow and handed them inflatable dogs. A second wave of children returned crying because they stepped on their balloon or rubbed it against sharp, pointy things that are ever so present in a Bronx community center basement. They demanded new balloons because it was not fair. I wanted to tell them life is not fair, but instead I promised them another once everyone got at least one. Unsatisfied, many returned with a parent wearing an unforgiving gaze of how I let a child down and that I better get them a new goddamn balloon that second. I knew I was not being fair, and that the most annoying kids or parents got balloons first just so I could get rid of them. I was letting the more patient ones wait, which was its own sort of a life lesson.

I looked at Anna, who motioned for me to wrap it up because I should have already been in the ninja turtle costume. I went to the bathroom to change and just as I finished zipping up the turtle body and was about to put on Raphael's head, a child came in. She took one look at me and the head in my hands and ran out like she had just walked in on her parents having sex. Our tip was 50 bucks, $10 under the recommended amount.


As we headed back to the office in Queens, a text appeared from an unknown number. It was a clown call. "Sunday, 9:00 AM, bring jeans." I am used to these types of texts from my work as an indie prop master. People write you late at night asking you to show up the next day at 7 AM, to get paid $150 for a 14-hour day. It's too much work and not enough money to live off of in New York City. That's why I turned to clowning in the first place.

I turned down the assignment, and thought I would never clown again, but soon after I found myself with thick-painted cheeks in an ill-fitting costume, once again. I clowned that whole spring, first to subsidize my time working on a play I loved, and then to pay my way on Adam Green's Aladdin, even after Adam started paying me the same rate as Macaulay Culkin.

I don't clown anymore. I don't accept that type of work. But I can still make some pretty mean balloon animals and I'm still great with other people's kids, who are always fascinated by a grownup who is willing to play a fool.

Follow Mary on Twitter.

Women Are Dropping Denim and Dresses for Sportswear

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Polyester T-shirts and spandex leggings were once inappropriate attire outside of the gym, let alone during a night out with friends. But now it's hard to spot someone on the street who doesn't look like they just came from yoga class.

Over the past few years, women's fashion has adopted such a comfortable and casual look, wearing denim can make you look overdressed. These changing attitudes towards athletic wear have made it the fastest growing segment in the fashion market. What is being called "athleisure" has helped fitness garments bring in a whooping $35.1 billion over a 12-month period ending in October 2014, and it is only expected to grow—reaching $178 billion in 2019. This means people are spending a shit ton of money to look like they just ran five miles on a treadmill.

But this newfound interest in workout wear isn't all about getting fit. Only 39 percent of the people who purchase athletic gear say they actually have the intention of hitting the gym, the look is more about functionality. Women have also been drawn to fitness clothing because it exudes the appearance of a healthy lifestyle and the spandex and lycra materials tend to be more flattering.

High-end sportswear from designers like Alexander Wang and Rick Owens have long blurred the line between gym clothing and fashion, and now it is being diluted for the masses. Brands like Nike and retailers like H&M have all amped up their active wear, specifically for women. Although both genders have taken an interest in more sporty styles, the women's market is growing the fastest and providing the most opportunities.

Since women are wearing athleisure from the office to happy hour, the offerings must be stylish enough to transition, which means more and more brands are trying to figure out how to make chic workout clothes and appeal to customers in a heavily-saturated market.

It's not necessarily that girls are really working out, but they want to look like they are. —Vanessa Chiu

One space where the growing trend is on full display is at the Axis tradeshow, where booths are filled with asymmetrical cotton tees and sheer-paneled leggings. The newly launched biannual women's lifestyle event sits in the back of its distant cousin, Capsule, a tradeshow that displays mostly high-end ready to wear by exclusive fashion labels.

Axis was launched last year by Vanessa Chiu and Reed Exhibitions and showcases the new generation of women's casual lifestyle—with a laidback vibe, a lower price point, and new brands that represent fashion, activewear, beauty, and home accessories. Before Axis, Chiu worked in marketing and sales for almost a decade, attending dozens of tradeshows a year. This experience helped her realize there needed to be a show that catered to the new way women shop and their shift towards the athleisure.

I caught up with her to chat about how women's fashion is changing and how brands are innovating with these new trends.

VICE: When did you notice that the market for women's was changing?
Vanessa Chiu: I jumped on board with Agenda about two and half years ago to develop a women's voice within the tradeshow, and that's the very point when I realized, "Oh shit, there's actually more of a need." There needs to be a whole women's movement really embracing where we shop.

Do you see more brands in the future starting to kind of accommodate to the growing active wear market?
You can. And they have to trickle it down. They're not dumbing it down, I think they're making it more accessible and more palatable. I read a report that 32 percent of denim is going into legging sales, and that was last year.

It's not necessarily that girls are really working out, but they want to look like they are. I am seeing a lot of brands offer that, even swim brands.

Since "athleisure" is growing so quickly, have you seen anyone doing cool stuff with that?
There's a brand that I love that we're working with that's really badass and it's a little bit different, called Skin Graft. They're doing what I call luxury basics.They are very known for couture leather super-crazy stuff. They're actually developing and launching with us a price-pointed active lifestyle luxury basics line to cater towards our girls so we actually can buy it and it's also wear day to night.


Fashion Week Internationale: Tel Aviv


What are some of the things you've seen brands doing to standout in the market?
What I've seen is more and more brands are embracing collaboration. Let's say it's a blogger that partners with a brand; that brand has an immediate sponsor. Or if it's an artist that they're bringing in, they're basically launching a collection and then that collection becomes a gallery show that ties into something tangible.

Why do you think they are turning to collaborations?
I feel like a lot of brands now are looking for a sense of meaning; there are collaborations based on emotional affiliation. It's always multi-functional without being cheesy. I think a lot more money, a lot more strength is being played towards creative output as well as marketing, so people want to tell why [a product was made] as opposed to what they made.

What did you have in mind when you were developing Axis?
It's not about ejecting us and pigeonholing us into this youth culture super show, it's about developing a show for the hustler girl that's multi-dimensional. We shop differently. We're not brand-loyal. We're always looking for what's new. We want to feel included, but it needs to feel exclusive at the same time. So that's how Axis was born. Our first show we had about 150 or so brands, now we have 200 at the cap for September.

How do you pick which brands to feature?
We do a shit ton of research. All of the retailers that we work with we actually have relationships with. We ask the retailer's feedback. What sells in your store? What sucks? We basically choose the brands based on what we ourselves buy because we are the authentic customers that these brands are selling to. We really target brands from around the world, like globally-relevant brands, that no one can get their hands on.

Follow Erica on Twitter.

How Hackers Could Get Out of House Arrest

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How Hackers Could Get Out of House Arrest

Surfing on Fire for Facebook Likes

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Surfing on Fire for Facebook Likes

How to Have Gay Sex Without Being Gay

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Jane Ward's new book, Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, is an investigation into "no homo" culture, which charts the many ways in which straight white men explore, explain, and excuse their sexual behavior with other men. So readily visible are the pieces of evidence she amasses, and so surprising are her conclusions, that reading Not Gay is like doing a Magic Eye puzzle for the mind: All the dots you'd never before put together suddenly snap into place, allowing you to see just how hot for other men some straight men are.

Each chapter in the book explores a different framing device that our culture uses to understand sex between straight white men: frat house or military hazing rituals, boys-will-be-boys summer camp circle jerks, or the "situational homosexuality" of sailors at sea, for instance. Women, Ward contends, are allowed (or, increasingly, expected) to be more sexually fluid and "open," while the concept of the "down low" has prompted many recent discussions on the supposed sexual fluidity (and duplicity) of men of color. But straight white men are generally held up as the paragons of our sexually normative culture, oriented in one rigid direction, unwavering and in fact disgusted by any other kind of sexuality.

In particular, Ward pays close attention to the ways in which white straight men justify their own sexual behaviors with other men. She neatly breaks down common defenses given to "explain" such actions. For example, sexual contact between men is often seen as a kind of heterosexual bonding if the participants loudly declare how disgusting the activity is (think frat boys "forced" to insert things into each others' assholes—a frequent occurrence in the pages of Not Gay). Yet she points out that many straight men openly express disgust about women's bodies, showing that disgust and desire can easily exist in the same moment.

Ward is not arguing that these men are "really" gay or bisexual (though some probably are). Instead, her point is that what makes these men "not gay" isn't their actions, nor the complicated and contradictory emotions that are involved in those actions, but rather, their commitment to straight, normative life. The very same behaviors and feelings these men exhibit might, in someone less invested in normality, have given rise to a gay, bi, or queer identity.

VICE called up Ward to discuss sexuality, normative culture, bro-jobs, elephant walks, "crossing the line," and the dozen other bizarrely named and carefully orchestrated rituals that white straight guys use to get inside each other's cargo shorts.

VICE: So, what motivated you to write a book about straight guys having gay sex?
Jane Ward: In my early 20s I was still dating men occasionally, and, as I explain in the book, one of these men started telling me about the elephant walk, which is a ritual that is notorious in the Greek system. This is basically a ritual in which men are holding the penis of the guy behind them and they have their thumb in the butt of the guy in front of them. This was a totally straight guy—I can't imagine a more hetero-masculine man—who I had known for many years, and I just thought, How were you making sense of this when you were participating in that? And so I was interested 15, 20 years ago in this question, and then I just started to see more and more evidence that straight men have intimate contact with one another's bodies and don't necessarily perceive it as sexual.

As homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. —Jane Ward

I imagine you get a lot of people saying "Oh, these men are just closeted."
Absolutely. I think because sex practices are still so closely scrutinized and morally laden, I think people—including many LGBT people—are most comfortable with sex when it adheres to clearly defined categories and when it's relatively predictable. And so I think people like to believe that there are three sexual orientations, straight, gay, and bi, and it's becoming increasingly popular to believe that we are born with those sexual orientations. Any sex practice that's more complicated than that or that can't be explained by that schema is especially threatening.

I've gotten a lot of feedback from bi-identified folks, who I think have not read the book but have read the title of the book, who feel like this is contributing to bi-erasure, but from my vantage point, bi is a distinct and significant queer identification. So I can't see why we would want to take straight-identified men who have no interest in bi-identification whatsoever and who are completely invested in hetero-normativity and who don't even understand the contact that they're having as particularly sexual, and who are framing that contact within misogyny and homophobia—why would we want to claim them as part of the queer community? It reduces bisexuality to just a technical description of sex acts. I understand bisexuality more broadly than that.

You make the point that before the rise of identity politics—before we had sexual identities that were neatly constructed into packages like gay or straight—men who thought of themselves as "sexually normal" had somewhat more freedom to engage in same-sex practices, because doing so didn't necessarily mean they were "gay" or "bi." Do you think that means that straight guys used to have more gay sex?
There's a great book written by this historian George Chauncey about precisely that. It's called Gay New York. I remember very clearly excerpts in it from an interview with a gay man who says, "It was really a bummer when the gay liberation movement started pushing people to come out because it meant that straight men were far less willing to have sex with us." All of a sudden, there are all of these identitarian consequences.

I think that we're again in a time in which all of this is shifting, because there's such a push by the mainstream movement to normalize and assimilate all of us queers, through marriage, for instance. So I think what we'll see is as homosexuality and homosexual sex become increasingly normalized, they'll stop triggering the gag reflex in your average American. There'll be more and more room for people to engage in it and to make sense of it however they want. But that doesn't mean that the binary between normal and abnormal will go away, because that's always shifting. So for instance now, I think you can be a "good gay" or you can be a "bad gay." Either you're a married gay with kids living in the suburbs, and that's good, or if you're still wearing leather and you're into kink or whatever, then that's bad. I think we're seeing the culture always adapt a little bit in ways that sometimes look like progress but half aren't.

Follow Hugh on Twitter.

Sara Erenthal's Journey From Ultra-Orthodox Jew to Nude Model and Artist

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The Bushwick basement, filled with the chatter of young artists and performers in silver tube tops and floral skirts, fell silent as a woman with a long black braid sat down on a large chair. To signal the beginning of her performance piece, she leaned over a prayer book, and began to sway.

"I was raised to be an aideleh maideleh—a good, submissive, modest Jewish woman," said a voice in monotone, projected from a loudspeaker as the woman rocked back and forth over her book. "My name is Sara Erenthal. I am an artist."

Erenthal's performance was intensely, comprehensively personal. Her pre-recorded voice, which came through the loudspeaker in slightly accented, melodic sentences that came to sharp, uncertain ends, went on to explain how as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, she was taught that being modest was her greatest responsibility as a woman. Erenthal enumerated the strict laws of modesty that she was forced to adhere to: the covered collar bone, the stockings, the skirt six inches below the knee. Erenthal stood and touched the costume she wore, her chest rising and falling rapidly. "My hair always tied in a braid," the voice said, as Erenthal took hold of her hair. "I hated that the most."

Her face expressionless, Erenthal's voice described a childhood plagued by the prohibition against nudity—even while changing clothes—and the modest bathing suit she had to wear at camp if she wanted to go swimming, called a "swim dress."

"I didn't think it was possible to leave," she said. "They told us, if we left, we wouldn't survive."

Photo via Flickr user Disparte

Erenthal began to unbraid her hair while the voiceover described her flight from the community, her loneliness, her first time putting on pants. She began to disrobe as she described her first pair of jeans, her difficulty finding her own sense of style, the difficulty of letting skin show for the first time, or letting people touch her body.

Lifting a pair of shears, Erenthal started hacking away at the braid, and described how things got better over time. "I started feeling more comfortable in my own skin. I started feeling more confident with my body," the voiceover said, as Erenthal unbuttoned and removed her pants. "And then one day, I needed a job." Erenthal removed her top. "As an artist I needed to find a creative way to make ends meet." Removing her bra, Erenthal's voice described how she started working as a nude model in an art school. "It felt very strange to sit up there like that, exposed to a group of strangers, afraid my imperfections were being judged," she said, removing the rest of her clothing. "But I needed to do that for my wellbeing. I needed to let go of that stigma, that shame, associated with nudity. It felt pretty good," Erenthal said, now fully naked. "I felt so powerful. Yet my mind was somewhere else." She crossed her hands over her full breasts.

Removing the remnants of the wig to reveal her bleach blond hair, Erenthal stood before a mirror, and the voiceover spoke of how she now tries to see her imperfections as signs of her uniqueness. She is enjoying sex more than ever before. Still, she is haunted by her past. "There are moments when I still feel shame... It's a work in progress," Erenthal said, raising her arms in triumph, to applause.

Photo via Flickr user Disparte

Earlier in the day, I had visited Erenthal's apartment, where she was being followed around by a camera crew for a documentary about people like herself, who left the ultra-Orthodox world. Often referred to as OTDs for "Off the Derech" (Derech means path in Hebrew), these individuals face enormous challenges. The lack of secular education in ultra-Orthodox schools makes it difficult for many to find financial security, and many suffer from family shunning. The road from ultra-Orthodoxy to secular life is a hard one, fraught with elemental difficulties like finding housing, or establishing normal relations with the opposite sex. Members of this community are at higher levels of risk for suicide, too; two weeks ago, Faigy Mayer, a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur who left the Belz Hassidic community, took her own life, joining a long list of suicides from within this community.

In spite of these challenges, or perhaps because of them, these individuals have formed their own community. Some, like Shulem Deen and Leah Vincent, have written memoirs about their struggle for a self-determined life. Others, like Sara Erenthal, produce art.

Photo byCarmina Gitana

Erenthal is short, with yellow eyes and bleach-blond hair that when we met was braided close to her head—like much of her art, an appropriation of one of the worst constraints of her childhood. She was wearing a leopard print bra, visible beneath a gray tank top, and cut-offs that displayed henna tattoos of her own art on two unshaven legs. One was a drawing of a Hassidic male, the other of a young girl. Erenthal's work has a geometric quality to it, as though the reoccurring characters are all related, stuck in their abstractions.

She was raised in the Neturei Karta sect—a stream of Judaism alien even to most Jews. Ultra-Orthodox but not Hassidic, the Niturei Karta are anti-Zionists and oppose the State of Israel, so much so that their leader once joined David Duke and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a conference in Tehran about the Holocaust. The Erenthal family moved from Israel to New York, settling in Brooklyn where Erenthal went to high school.

Sitting on the stoop of her Crown Heights apartment smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, Erenthal explained how young she was when she first imagined running away. Her father was a violent man, and—not unrelatedly—Erenthal was terrified of God. "I was a pretty good kid, just to avoid getting beat by my dad," she recalled. She remembers praying hard, asking God why he gave her such a hard life. But things never seemed to improve, so she stopped praying—though she still pretended.

From very early on, the strictures of her upbringing were a poor fit for Erenthal.

"I'm born an artist," she explained. "I'm born someone who wants to have her own thing going on." She went on, "I didn't understand why we had to be so extreme," she said.


One of Erenthal's henna art pieces, via Evolving Art

Despite how much she wanted to escape, it seemed impossible. She was told frequently that if she tried to leave, she would end up dead, or a drug addict. It was only with the looming threat of an arranged marriage at 17, after the family had moved back to Israel, that Erenthal finally managed to run away from home. Distant relatives helped, and made her leave a note for her parents—"Sorry, I couldn't take it anymore, I have to go, don't worry about me, I'll be fine."

It wasn't easy. There were dark times, when Erenthal would question everything. "What is life supposed to be about?" she wondered. "Why does it have to be so hard?" Not having a family increased her sense of alienation, and she remembers crying herself to sleep on many a night. Still, rather than feeling homesick, "I was so relieved to be away from my family," Erenthal recalled. She'd wanted to run away for as long as she could remember. "I never felt loved or cared for. I had to fend for myself," she recalled.

After a few years on a Kibbutz spent shedding her religious skin, Erenthal joined the IDF before finally moving back to New York.

All along, Erenthal would draw when she needed to express strong emotions, but she's fuzzy on the details of her early work—and much of her past. She even forgot how to speak Yiddish for a time, so strong was her desire to block out her childhood. The realization that she wanted to be an artist, that she was an artist, came when she was traveling in India and had a lot of free time on her hands. "What really made it official is when a fellow backpacker asked me if he can buy one of my drawings," she recalled.

Erenthal's "My Present Encouraging My Past"

An outsider artist, Erenthal has no training, but she's been successful in the New York scene. Much of her art features the same literal sensibilities present in the performance piece in Bushwick, like the painting she hung on the wall during that piece, which features two women, both with yellow eyes, holding hands, one with long braids and one with short hair and a single earring. The piece is called "My Present Encouraging My Past." Another performance piece featured Erenthal in her black braided wig, painting with her hands dipped in black paint over a video stream of herself, naked and screaming, bound by phylacteries.

Erenthal's use of Hassidic imagery seems to be prolonging her exit while reappropriating and even creating a new symbolism through which the ultra-Orthodox community may be viewed.

There's an elemental quality to the work, as if everything extraneous has been stripped away. It's consistent with the surprising lack of affect with which Erenthal tells her story. When I asked when her anger went away, she smiled and said one word: "Art." Art operates as a kind of therapy for her. "Every time I make a piece I'm kind of letting go of something," she said.

Now Erenthal lives with three roommates in Crown Heights. While she no longer believes in God, she enjoys celebrating some Jewish holidays (the food mostly) and hosting untraditional Shabbat dinners.

"The young me would feel a lot better if I knew that everything will turn out all right," she said.


Follow Batya on Twitter.

Post Mortem: How Google Searches Influence Suicides

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Image by Flickr user Mike Licht

On March 23, Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz safely flew an empty jet from Düsseldorf, Germany, to Berlin. He then went home, where he used his iPad to search terms like "living will," "suffering," and "dying." The next day, Lubitz flew an Airbus 320 with 149 passengers into the French Alps, killing everyone on board.

This was not the first time the 27-year-old Lubitz had used the internet to look up suicide-related content. Information later gleaned by prosecutors showed that while on medical leave from the airline earlier in March, Lubitz had looked up other, more specific ways to kill himself that didn't involve flying a passenger aircraft into a mountain.

Worldwide, online content relating to suicide is not only controversial, but often banned outright. In 2013, Russia started blocking sites that provided explicitly detailed instructions for how to die, as part of a new law ostensibly aimed at protecting children. That same year, the United Kingdom required Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to ban suicide-related content as part of the country's broader "porn filter" legislation. Australia's crackdown began with the Suicide Related Material Offenses Act of 2005, which made it a criminal offense to "directly or indirectly counsel or incite committing or attempting to commit suicide" via the internet—though foreign websites are not blocked under the law. South Korea and Japan also enforce filtering by ISPs.

These laws aim to minimize suicide contagion, a documented phenomenon with very real public health consequences. But legislating the internet is tricky, and the restrictions often lead to harmless sites being blocked. In Russia, YouTube went to court to argue that a blocked video, which showed how to make a fake wound, was not what Russian lawmakers intended. In the UK, the filters have even blocked suicide prevention and other helpline websites.

On Motherboard: The Deep Web Suicide Site

Despite legislative attempts to restrict suicide-related content online, search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo don't restrict what keywords someone can enter. Indeed, they generally have functionality that gives additional keywords to help the user make their search more specific. It's not hard to see how this might become problematic if left unchecked. If enough people look up specific methods or considerations for suicide—like ways to avoid pain or detection—then the algorithm recognizes these searches as popular, and will suggest those search terms to people who are typing in more general searches. The consequence is providing ideas about suicide before the user has even clicked on the search results.

In the case of Google, there does appear to be an effort by the company to curb this effect for suicide related keywords. According to their site, the autocomplete feature (which can't be turned off) excludes a "small set of search terms" that would otherwise appear as search predictions. There is also a link to report "offensive predictions." A 2014 version of the same page explicitly mentions suicide, along with more well-known examples like pornography and hate speech. When I tried Googling common keywords relating to suicide methods, the autocomplete predictions didn't show up. But once I hit "enter" on my suicide-related search term, I found that the autocomplete predictions did appear when I left my cursor in the search bar.

Microsoft's Bing—which also powers Yahoo's search—was much less restrictive. The company lists what type of content it restricts on its search results, but its page on search suggestions (similar to Google's autocomplete) doesn't mention anything being excluded. So when I tried the same searches I had typed on Google, Bing brought up specific methods or considerations as search suggestions, indicating that no serious effort had been made to remove them. On the other hand, Yahoo's search engine seemed to exclude most additional keywords related to suicide methods on the same searches, with the exception of a few news headlines.

We devoted a week's worth of content to stories on mental health. Read the VICE Guide to Mental Health here.

What about the actual search results that users find when asking about suicide methods? As with any other keyword, these are partly determined by the search engine's algorithms for relevance as well as the user's search history (so not everyone sees identical results). Search engines don't interfere directly with what sites show up in search results for specific keywords (though they do make regular updates to their underlying algorithms, which can influence what pops up). Instead, with suicide-related terms—and others terms, like "depression help"—they prominently place a PSA in the form of a large box above the search results.

It features the phone number and website for the toll free 24-hour National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which puts people in touch with a trained counselor that can help them find crisis prevention in their area. In addition to the toll free number, the site also features an online chat option. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which runs the toll-free service, fields about 2,200 calls per day as of 2011. By comparison, approximately 3,000 suicide attempts occur daily. Lifeline claims to have conducted 16,000 life-saving rescues for veterans alone, about 20 percent of its callers.

If call volume is any indicator, the little grey box on search engines has been impactful. According to a company blog post, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline saw a 9 percent increase in calls placed after Google implemented this in April 2010. Similar helpline PSA's are now in place on local versions of Google in an additional 21 countries. The company advises partners in other countries that they should expect an increase of 10 percent when implementing this feature.

The placement of the Lifeline box could probably be expanded to include more queries—with more refined searches, neither Google nor Bing consistently show the Lifeline box. According to a company representative, who I spoke to via email, Google has an algorithm to determine the terms that bring up the Lifeline. They also work with partners on terminology such as specific techniques particular to a country or culture.


Related: VICE visits Japan's Aokigahara Forest, the country's most popular site for suicides.


While more specific searches are generally used significantly less often than broader ones, the results for them are often considerably more likely to be harmful. A 2014 study by Benedikt Till for the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry examined the search results on Google and Yahoo/Bing for suicide related queries in three categories: basic, method-related, and help-related. They then tabulated protective characteristics (like providing alternatives) as well as harmful characteristics (like details of a suicide method). Overall, Till found that protective characteristics on websites outnumbered harmful characteristics by two to one.

However, this varied significantly depending on the type of search. When the search was basic, the ratio was seven to one, and for help-related searches, the ratio was as high as 20 to one (in the US versions of the search engines). But for method-related specific searches (e.g. "the best way to..."), the harmful sometimes outnumbered the protective, with one method having a protective-to-harmful ratio of one to four. Till recommends that websites with protective characteristics make a more concerted effort to show up higher for these method related searches by improving their social media presence and even purchasing ads.

The right to die: How "suicide tourism" in Switzerland doubled within four years.

Similar to before, when I entered this particular method-related query into Google, the Lifeline number popped up. But when the autocomplete options with more specificity were chosen, it didn't show up. On Bing and Yahoo, the searches yielded many more autocomplete suggestions than on Google, and the Lifeline number didn't show up at all. (I'm leaving out the specific terms here so as not to provide a "how-to" on searching suicide methods.)

Given that precise data on internet searches is a closely guarded secret, it's hard to know exactly how often a specific keyword is typed into a search engine. Google provides the relative popularity of two or more terms through its Google Trends service to the general public, but absolute figures are not included. The only publicly-available data set to provide access to raw search logs is from AOL, who decided to allow the mostly-anonymized logs of 657,000 of its users to be available for download from its site for research purposes. Paul Wai-Ching Wong's 2013 study in the Journal of Internet Medical Research examined the logs and found that "users generally accessed webpages in the search results that provided entertainment, scientific information, news, and resource information." They also found a small subset of searches related to suicide, about 1 to 2 percent of which were about specific methods of killing themselves.

Rather than censorship, Wong recommends more attention be given to the study of actual online behavior of vulnerable individuals. He cited research conducted by Lucy Biddle and published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, which interviewed 22 individuals who had previously attempted suicide between 2004 and 2009 but were no longer suicidal. Of these, five consciously used the internet for research. One person used a search engine to find the "best" method after previous failed attempts with different methods—though she ended up trying a different way than what she researched online. Others sought ways to try again using the same method they had used in the past. Suicide-specific sites were cited less frequently than general interest sites like Wikipedia or news sites.

This kind of thoughtful examination of individual users' browsing history will be essential in developing more effective harm minimization approaches, which as of right now, still have a long way to go.

If you are feeling suicidal, visit the website of the National Suicide Prevention Helpline or call toll free 1-800-273-TALK (8255) at any time. A listing of similar helplines in other countries can be found here.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Masked Gunmen Abducted and Pistol-Whipped Uber Drivers in Guadalajara

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Masked Gunmen Abducted and Pistol-Whipped Uber Drivers in Guadalajara

Finding the "Real Singapore" on Singapore's 50th National Day

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From the collection "The Land of My Heart." All photographs by John Clang.

August 9, 2015, marks the 50th year of Singaporean independence. In lieu of the celebrations taking place 10,000 miles away, VICE sat down with New York-based Singaporean photographer John Clang. Clang's collection "The Land of My Heart" is a dedication to Singapore National Day (SG50) and was recently featured in TWENTYFIFTEEN.SG, a compilation of work from Singapore's most prominent artists.

Clang's art centers on his identity as an overseas Singaporean citizen and his longing for the home he left behind. In his recent photo collection, Clang photographs ex-Singapore Airline Flight Attendants foregrounding mundane settings around Singapore. In this juxtaposition, he de-mystifies the iconic "Singapore girl" through the disruption of the Singapore Airlines global brand. His photographs capture the transitory nature of time, space, and identity that Singaporeans are facing both within and outside the nation on its 50th birthday.

While flipping through his recent photo collection, Clang and I talked about the heartland, globalization, and finding the "real Singapore" in an ever-changing nation.

VICE: Hey John, you will be here in New York on National Day, right? How do feel being so far away from home during the Nation's largest celebration?
John Clang: I'm going to watch it online. I wish I were there to be with all my family and friends—not exactly for the celebration of it, but more for the festive period.

You recently released a collection of photographs "The Land of My Heart" as a dedication to Singapore. What I found interesting about your collection was that while Singaporeans are currently chanting "Majulah Singapura" ("Onward Singapore") for today's celebration, your photographs seem to be more about looking back and celebrating the past.
When I was invited to do the series, I was thinking about doing something that is not a documentary of where we are now. Singapore is a country that is always evolving and moving forward. Presenting where we are now is not an accurate representation of what Singapore is because Singapore will be completely different in three years. I'm more interested to show what the real Singapore is. What is the image of Singapore? The image of Singapore is not the MBS [Marina Bay Sands] building, the Merlion, or the chewing gum.

I wanted to do something about time, because time is more fascinating. In this series I do talk about the past, but there are only three time zones in the world itself [that are portrayed in this collection]. There is the past—my memories, the present—the current situation where I foreground them: the places where people live in Singapore, the heartland. Then, of course, there is the everlasting logo of the Singapore girl. There are actually three time dimensions here, which exclude the future. I wouldn't say that I am [only] talking about the past, I am talking about three different things: the past, the present, and the everlasting.

"The Land of My Heart" (Dragon Playground)

You mentioned wanting to show the "real Singapore." What, to you, is the "real Singapore?"
The heartland. That's why I say "The Land of My Heart." It's basically where most Singaporeans live. Whenever I have friends come to visit Singapore, I always take them to visit the heartland—not just Orchard Road, or the central area for shopping. We are known to have a lot of malls and all the malls are basically the same. I am not particularly proud of that. What I find fascinating are the different heartlands, where people grow up, wake up, go to work, and when they come home at night. That's what's beautiful. That is the true Singapore—not where we spend our weekend or where the tourists go.

That's how I wanted to represent it, with stories that relate to me and my past. I wanted to show a young man, twenty years ago, and what he has gone through. It represents a part of the growth of Singapore as compared to what is going on now. What we are experiencing now is very different from before. I think we should have a marking in history of how Singapore grew.

Singapore is totally dating the world. We are trying to charm the world, but my thinking is that you can only charm a person so far.

50 years is a very young age for a country. You are someone who has seen Singapore grow, both as a Singaporean and now as a foreigner living abroad. What was your intent in de-mystifying the global image of Singapore?
I was born in '73, so I saw Singapore in the 70s. I have some set of knowledge of the late seventies and early eighties. My parents and grandparents were undereducated. I have seen the growth of the nation and what education can do [for its growth]. With understanding and true education, people start to have their own voice. Earlier we had a lot of guidance, guidance from the government. Now with education, everyone has [an] independent mind and wants to speak their opinion. I see a different Singapore now than before. Now you have a city with its own voice. It could mean [something] good or it could mean trouble, but [we'll] never know.

"Being Together" - Tye Family (Paris, Tanglin)

What changes stand out to you within the Singaporean society?
In the past, Singaporeans would work and hope for the best. Now, we work, and we want the best. That's the huge difference between my parents and my generation.

Singapore has fueled one of this world's greatest economic success stories by its need to be the best. Are you critical of the changes you see as a result of its success?
We used to hope for the best, and now we want the best. The question is, what is the definition of "best?" Between these two generations, the definition of "best" is different. The "best," for my parents, was material success and success for their children. They wanted a secure livelihood and a secure political situation—no crisis or war. That's what they hoped for, and they got it.

Like all humans, we have our three main courses, and the next thing we want is dessert. We are at the dessert phase. We have what our parents hoped for, [their] "best," and now we want the [new] "best." You know dessert, dessert doesn't really fill you up, it just gives you a sweetening taste. Now [Singaporeans] want to sweeten their lives, but is that a good definition of the "best?" I'm not agreeing with the current "best" we are looking for. The current "best" is just a sweet taste that will give us a sugar surge. You just get a crash after the whole thing; you just get disappointment.

I'm not concerned with the success of Singapore. As a nation you have your ups and downs, but the question is how you sustain the "up"? How do you sustain the hope? I think that's the next phase. The government has to let go of our hand and let us grow on our own and we will have to face our own failure somehow and decide where to go from there. That's the exciting part. Now we have a choice. We want the freedom and we want the power, but we are yet to know what it tastes like.

"One Minute Silence," a dedication piece for Lee Kuan Yew

Now that it's SG50, and Lee Kuan Yew has just passed, it is a critical time for the nation. Which direction do you see Singapore going in?
I like these kinds of questions. This is a very critical time. SG50 happened at a very critical time and Lee Kwan Yu's passing happens to be a very critical time, too. I just did a piece specifically for Lee Kuan Yew which is me wearing a mourning funeral suite, which is only meant for my parents when they die. In the photograph my parents and I are holding hands while I'm wearing that attire to show my utmost respect to him. What Lee Kuan Yew has done is create a very strong foundation for the company. I keep saying the word "company," it's an accidental word that I use because what I want to say is that Singapore is run like a company. It's a very well oiled machine. If you look at Singapore in the respect of a country, and compare it to Apple, you see certain similarities. The next three to four years will determine where Singapore will go, just like the next three to four years of Apple computers. If you compare Singapore to Apple, you will have a better understanding of where we are. Who is richer, Apple or Singapore?

Apple is at it's all time high now. We can ask, 'What is the future of Apple?' But who knows? They have to keep inventing and re-inventing. One thing I know for sure is that we don't want Singapore to be like Nokia. Do you know Nokia? Nokia at its highest point was pretty famous. No one wants to end up like Nokia now. That is the current state of mind of people in Singapore. We want to move onward and adapt to the countries around us.

Singaporeans are careless about the present. They think more about the past and they worry about the future. That's what Singapore is.

A lot of your work centers on your identity as an oversea Singaporean citizen, and the pain you feel being away from home. Some have been critical of the Singaporean diaspora, calling them traitors, and others have framed them as the "future Singaporeans." What is your opinion?
Why did I leave Singapore to come to New York? Twenty years ago, when I was twenty-three years old, Lee Kwan Yu said that all Singaporeans should leave Singapore, have a taste of the world, and bring the information back. When I was a kid I always wanted to cycle beyond the horizon, not knowing that there wasn't anything beyond the horizon. There will always be a horizon that you want to cross. I wanted to know what was out there and bring it back to my family and friends. Being a Singaporean doesn't mean you have to leave, but I think a lot of people who live outside Singapore have a lot to share.

"Being Together" (Family). John Clang's family portrait with his wife [Elin] in the left hand corner.

Do you find yourself in a capsule of the time when you left Singapore?
Singapore is like a Kampung. Kampung in America... I don't think you'd understand. A Kampung is like a small village. My generation grew up in Singapore when it was still a Kampung. Now the village is no longer there, but we still miss the air and the accent. That's the reason why I never changed my accent. I like it when somebody hears my voice and says "Oh! You're from Singapore."

It's a good accent.
It's great. I hold on to the idea of Singapore when I left because I know those are the fundamental roots of Singapore. The current scene, of what I see, is more decorative—it's more of a façade. It's what we need to present to the world. Honestly, it's like dating. Does your partner want to know who you really are on your first date? They want to know how to dress, what you look like and what you smell like.

So, Singapore is dating the world?
Singapore is totally dating the world. We are trying to charm the world, but my thinking is that you can only charm a person so far. At some point the world will know who you are, so you better be prepared. We're not there yet, but we will, we'll get there. It takes time, 50 years is so short.

"The Land of My Heart" (Mama Shop)

One on of your photographs in "The Land of My Heart," there is a written text saying "No, we do not go to jail for chewing gum." I found that quite amusing. Is a part of your collection's intent to counter common stereotypes about Singapore?
Yes, this was an actual statement that I made when I was young. When I first travelled to America people would ask me "Where are you from? Are you from China?" When I would say "No, I'm from Singapore" they would ask "Which part of China is that next to, Beijing or Shanghai?" Someone once asked me, "Is it near Sichuan?" For goodness sake, if you know where Sichuan is, you kind of know the world.

No one knew Singapore then. Even when Singapore was known to the world, one of the first things people know is that you cannot chew chewing gum. Sometimes I would say "I'm from that country, you know, where you cannot chew gum?" and they would say, "Oh, I know that country!" but would have no idea that it's called Singapore.

Are there any last sentiments you have to share about Singapore and its 50th anniversary?
Singapore is a country where I care about its past, I look forward to its future, but I never [think of its] present. The present slips past us every minute that we are talking. If you live for the present, then there will never be a future. Singaporeans are careless about the present. They think more about the past and they worry about the future. That's what Singapore is.

VICE Exclusive Preview: Jaimie Warren at American Medium

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Jaimie Warren: Somebody to Love (part 1 of 3), 2015

Tonight at American Medium, an ambitious startup gallery in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, artist Jaimie Warren will unveil the bizarre and amazing results of her latest community art initiative. Warren has been a favorite artist of VICE since we published her first picture over a decade ago. In the past year alone, she has contributed a horrific photo essay that came with one of the most terrifying VICE magazine covers in history, a vaudeville-inspired variety show called B.A.L.F. (Buddy Alien Life Form), and participated in a forum on why art isn't funny more often. But you don't have to take it from us—the Huffington Post recently touted her as "The Photographer Who Will Save Us From Art World Snobbery", and just last week, theWall Street Journal praised the course Warren is currently teaching at MoMA as a way for local high school students to connect with others who share the creative impulse in the wake of cuts to art programs in city schools.

It's this class, called "Jaimie Warren's House of Horrors", that has lead the work she will debut tonight at American Medium. Starring some of her students as well as many friends—including MoMA's Calder Zwicky and American Medium co-owner Travis Fitzgerald—Warren's recreation of a medieval tableau depicting a gnarly amputation comes to life in a new video piece of ambitious proportions.

You'll have to go see it to believe it, but suffice it to say, the dusty religious figures in this painting are resuscitated into some of Warren's favorite celebrities, including Gucci Mane, Slash, and an all denim-clad Britney Spears and JT, circa the 2001 American Music Awards.

Jaimie Warren: "Somebody to Love"
August 9th - Sept 13th, 2015
American Medium,
424 Gates Ave.Brooklyn, NY 11216

Opening Reception: Sunday, August 9th, 6 - 10 PM
Performance at 8 PM

Read more about MoMA's "In the Making", a free educational program for city teens, here.

Why Isn’t a Revolutionary HIV Medication Getting to Sex Workers?

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This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

On a crisp day in the fall of 2013, Casper,* a slender white queer man prone to wearing a slick of plum-red lipstick, visited a free walk-in health clinic in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for a routine HIV test. Casper had moved to New York nearly two years earlier after graduating from an elite East Coast liberal arts school, and he had been doing sex work casually through Craigslist and Grindr to supplement his income ever since. He didn't feel comfortable disclosing that during a risk-assessment questionnaire at the beginning of his visit, but he had questions of his own.

In the months prior, Casper had seen posts on Facebook from some of his gay friends about a pill that, when taken every day, could protect a healthy person from contracting HIV. Like many young gay men growing up in the mid 90s, Casper had internalized a deep fear of HIV and the injunction to always practice safe sex to protect against it. A pill that could virtually eliminate the threat of infection sounded like a miracle, especially since his work put him at a higher risk of contracting the virus. (Statistics about infection rates among sex workers are hard to come by because the criminalization and stigmatization of the profession have made population-based studies in the United States nearly impossible.) Additionally, Casper's very first client in New York had offered more money to bareback, the slang term for having sex without a condom. He felt safe saying no, but the demand came up again and again. He was intrigued about a pill that could further allay his anxiety and also give him the flexibility to make more money if he needed it. Straight people bareback all the time, he thought, and he felt he had the same right with partners and clients if he chose. So after he peed in a cup and had his blood drawn, he asked the clinician what he had to do to get a prescription for the HIV prophylaxis. He didn't know what it was called. The clinician gave him a confused look and told him that no such medication existed. "There's no way that's real," she said, and urged him to just use condoms. "I didn't know enough to get them to give it to me," he said later.

But the pill was very real. It had been more than a year since the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the drug Truvada to protect individuals at a high risk of HIV infection, a regimen known as PrEP, for pre-exposure prophylaxis. Studies of men who have sex with men have shown that, when taken every day, the pill can be 99 percent effective in preventing new infections. At the time, Truvada was primarily being marketed to gay men as a means of embracing sex without fear. The initial media coverage and public health campaign, which focused on affluent gay neighborhoods like Chelsea in New York and the Castro in San Francisco, made few efforts to reach sex workers like Casper, and many of the gay men who were identified as the drug's ideal consumers treated the campaign with indifference and hostility. The belief that condoms are the only true protection against HIV remains strong in the gay community, and many resisted seeking prescriptions. The term "Truvada whore" became a popular slur for the pill's early adopters.

Eight months after Casper first asked about the drug, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, frustrated by the stubbornly high rate of new HIV cases, recommended PrEP for every American at a high risk of infection, including men who regularly have unprotected sex with men, anyone who injects drugs, and all sex workers. The next month, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a plan to end the AIDS epidemic in New York State, aiming to reduce the number of new HIV infections annually from 3,000 last year to 750 by 2020. Facilitating access to PrEP for those at high-risk was one of the pillars of the three-point plan. "I think everyone recognizes now that PrEP is one of the cornerstones if you're interested in driving down numbers," said Daniel O'Connell, who, as the director of the state's AIDS Institute, is helping to spearhead the initiative. "It offers people with a particular risk profile something other than just condoms or willpower."

The blueprint Cuomo approved indicated a shift toward getting the drug to sex workers, specifically identifying them as part of a key at-risk population that needed greater access to care, testing, and treatment. It acknowledged that one major reason it was crucial to get PrEP to sex workers was that at the time police could use the possession of condoms as evidence to justify arrests on prostitution charges. The blueprint stressed that the campaign should seek to increase cultural competency among health-care providers in order to reduce the stigma at-risk patients often encounter when seeking care. But even the CDC provides no clear guidelines for how providers should approach the topic or ask appropriate questions for people who trade sex, though they do for other at-risk groups.

More than a year after the state has announced its campaign, most anecdotal evidence suggests sex workers' access to PrEP is still woefully lacking. Due to widespread stigma and cultural incompetency within the health-care system, fueled by criminalization of sex work, and the fact that even many providers don't know what PrEP is or how to prescribe it, this potential miracle drug is not reaching the people who may need it most.

*Names of people involved in the sex trade have been changed.

It wasn't through a doctor or the state-led campaign but at an informational event in a bare, rented room in midtown Manhattan that Casper finally learned how to get on PrEP. Around eight months after his appointment at the Crown Heights clinic, he decided he wanted to learn more about earning his living fully through sex work. Some friends suggested he visit Hook Online, a sex-worker-run nonprofit that provides support to men in the sex industry, and last June Casper attended a "Steps to PrEP" talk, part of Hook's Rent U educational workshops. There were 15 other sex workers in attendence, most of whom were working at a higher level, earning about $200 an hour. Many, like Casper, had heard of the drug and were curious about a new way to protect their health. They were all interested in knowing precisely how the medicine worked, though relatively few felt ready to get a prescription.

Alex Garner, a gay Latino activist who is both HIV-positive and an advocate for PrEP, led the session. He explained that a PrEP prescription required going to the doctor every three months for an HIV test and a full blood workup. PrEP, he said, could be empowering for the sex workers, in a similar way to how the birth-control pill has worked for women. "With PrEP, you are in control of prevention," he said. There would be no more negotiating with clients to ensure sex workers were protected from HIV. Regular engagement in care, which would improve health outcomes generally, was an extra benefit.

After attending the session, Casper decided to try PrEP. I met him for pierogi in the East Village last November, the day after he finally got his prescription, through Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBT clinic in Chelsea. "It's a miracle," he said. "The vast majority of people I've talked to about this have no idea, and that's really frustrating." He was glad to have the peace of mind that he was giving himself extra protection and the possibility of having sex without a condom without endangering his health. Because he was on Medicaid, the prescription was only $3 a month. But he was nervous he would lose his health insurance if he started making too much to qualify for Medicaid, which is only available to individuals without dependents making $16,243 or less a year. If he lost his coverage, he would have to face a treatment interruption. He still felt uncomfortable seeing a doctor, and the idea of having to go back within one month for another full round of tests was daunting.


For more on Truvada, watch our documentary on the medication:


Other sex workers I spoke to expressed a similar fear about doctors that kept them from seeking the best treatment. Last year, in the aftermath of a crowded Black Lives Matter protest outside the Barclays Center, in downtown Brooklyn, I met Andy, a slim, soft-spoken Latino man. He had been involved in a focus group for Persist Health Project, a Brooklyn-based sex-worker organization, about health-care needs among people who trade sex in New York City. His testimony had been featured in the resulting report, "No Lectures or Stink-Eye."

Over continuing chants outside, he told me how he'd run away from home at 15 and began trading sex to survive. He started out sleeping with people who put a roof over his head, and then he took on clients. Eventually, he figured out how to work online—to work safer and smarter, on his own terms, and earn more money for less time. He sometimes slept in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park or on the streets, but he never went to a shelter for fear of being turned over to Child Protective Services. He avoided the doctor for the same reason, instead relying on emergency-room visits a few times when he was desperate. "I experienced it all, from feeling forced to feeling empowered," he said of selling sex.

By his late teens, Andy had moved to New York and started visiting the doctor for the first time since he was young. He never disclosed the fact he had traded sex until one day when he was in a free clinic in Chelsea to get an HIV test. This time he decided he wanted to tell the truth on the intake form that asked whether he had ever traded sex for money or drugs. It wasn't something he was ashamed of, and he wanted to see what would happen if he disclosed.

A female staff member soon called him into a back room. It wasn't made clear what her role was. "I was very upfront about my involvement in the sex trade," he said. "She began to talk about God, and asked if I knew God loved me." The provider seemed nearly in tears at the idea he had traded sex. After telling her what he needed was health care and explaining that he was uninsured, he was sent to a counselor. When he told her he didn't need or want counseling, she tried to persuade him to give it a go. He set up a date and time for a meeting just to be able to leave the room. He never went back.

Since getting health insurance through his job in social work, Andy was able to get a prescription for PrEP, which he learned about online. He wanted to protect himself in his personal life and his sex work, which he still sometimes turns to on the rare occasions that he needs the money. (Though he didn't disclose that to the doctor in his initial consultation.) "I wouldn't have gotten on PrEP," he said of his younger self. "I was too scared to come into contact with any social services, scared of being put in foster care. I don't think it would have been something I would have found accessible."

"Don't put me on a drug and make me go to the doctor every three months unless you've made my doctor a sensible fucking person who's going to treat me well"

Many of the sex workers I met through Persist echoed Andy's experience, and the organization has received a number of reports from members that doctors have tried to "rescue" them in health-care settings. Persist is concerned that a recently proposed federal law intended to help identify trafficking victims in health-care settings will push more traumatizing interventions on consensual sex workers. One woman I spoke to who'd done time in jail on prostitution charges said that before joining Persist she had never thought of disclosing to a doctor or counselor that she was involved in sex work, assuming she would be judged. "A lot of people are disgusted by you because of what you do," she said. "Their face will change." One black trans woman told me that she stopped going to the doctor for a time after one demanded to see her genitals when she came in with a scratch on her eye. While she was uninsured, she'd traded sex to buy hormones on the street.

The fact that many don't feel comfortable speaking openly with a health-care provider is a major barrier for sex workers who might benefit from PrEP. "People often expect to get some sort of rescue lecture or some sort of shaming about what they're doing if they talk about how they're doing something illegal to make money," Zil Goldstein, Persist's clinical director, told me. "People get told all sorts of things, from 'Why are you doing this? Your body is sacred' to 'Are you safe, and what can we do to get you out?' just assuming that people don't want to be working in the sex industry." Sex workers know they might face judgment if they disclose what they do for a living, but they may not get access to a PrEP prescription without explaining why they are at risk.

In June, I met Brandon Harrison, a gay black man with elegant silver piercings and a warm smile, around the corner from Callen-Lorde, where he is leading the PrEP campaign. The clinic is the largest prescriber of the drug in New York State and one of the biggest in the nation, where only around 8,000 people have started the drug regimen. In the short time he has been at Callen-Lorde, Harrison estimates that out of about 60 people prescribed PrEP as many as 15 do some work in the sex trade. "It's a significant number," he said. He is eager to set up a sex-positive awareness campaign about PrEP aimed specifically at sex workers, but right now that's just an ambition.

That morning he had received a panicked call from a patient who does sex work and had been prescribed PrEP. The financial assistance program the patient was signing up for required a copy of his W-2 form and an explanation of how much money he expected to earn that year. Many who make their money by selling sex often go without health insurance or treatment requiring financial assistance because they are afraid they can't disclose income. Harrison suggested that the patient list himself as an independent contractor.

There are a number of financial assistance programs available to people who want to get on Truvada. The cost otherwise can be prohibitive. For those with insurance, the monthly copay can be as much as $100. For the uninsured, pharmacies will quote as much as $1,500 for a monthly prescription. Gilead, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Truvada, which is the only PrEP pill available right now, provides the drug for free to anyone uninsured and earning under $58,000 a year who can provide even a notarized letter giving a self-reported estimation of their annual income. The cost of multiple primary-care visits and tests are often still on the backs of patients, so the PrEP Assistance Program (PrEP-AP) was developed by the New York State Health Department's AIDS Institute to cover all medical costs related to taking the drug. But even though these programs mean most people at risk should be able to get Truvada for free, you can only receive PrEP-AP if your provider has signed up for the program.

"If my provider reacts different from how I expect them to react, not providing me with the best health care but judging the practices that I do, I think that definitely becomes a barrier, and it makes me not want to go back," Harrison said. "I think that providers definitely need some sensitivity around sex work and being sex-positive."

As for the concern among anti-PrEP crusaders that people on PrEP will stop using condoms, Harrison replied bluntly that if we continue relying on condoms HIV will continue in the community. "It's not realistic," he said. "Especially if you're worried about a cop catching you doing sex work." Last May, New York City's mayor, Bill de Blasio, reviewed the policy allowing the possession of condoms to be used as evidence in prostitution charges and came to the conclusion that it was a dangerous mistake that was inhibiting safe sex. But the policy was only changed for three minor, low-level prostitution charges, and condoms can still be used as arrest evidence for higher-level charges, including sex trafficking and "promoting prostitution," which can amount to providing a fellow sex worker accommodation or sharing resources or clients. In practice, even if not used for evidence in court, many sex workers and public defenders have said it's still common for police to confiscate condoms or use them as a threat or excuse for arrest.

"Essentially PrEP is the new gay marriage, the idea being sold to powerful, rich white gay men to make them think they're still leading the revolution."

As a demographic with diverse experiences, levels of access, and degrees of risk, sex workers have had varying reactions to how PrEP can help them. Some feel that PrEP is being forced on them by providers—another example of how doctors are often preoccupied with their sexual health at the expense of their general well-being. Some sex workers were also concerned about clients demanding condomless sex if they found out they were on PrEP. As a provider and activist for sex workers' rights, Goldstein had some concern about who was making the decision for a sex worker to go on PrEP—whether it was a person profiting off the body of someone trading sex or a sex worker who wanted protection.

Last October, Lindsay Roth, a sex-worker advocate who blogs on the website Tits and Sass, published a post bemoaning the fact that sex workers were constantly identified as a "high risk" population when it came to accessing PrEP. "What strikes fear in my little junkie-hooker heart is just how much you have to interface with healthcare professionals to get on PrEP," she wrote. "I don't think I could personally stand the potential shaming involved. Plus, lots of non-HIV specialized providers don't even know what PrEP is." She argued that if policy makers were going to make sex workers a priority as a key population, they would have to give them a seat at the table. Goldstein echoed this sentiment when I asked her how the state could improve its outreach to sex workers. "Involve more sex workers," she said.

This spring, Casper's Medicaid expired, and he didn't have the income-verification documentation necessary to renew it. For the past year, he had felt like he was on a tightrope walk with his medical insurance. While he was committed to legally reporting his income despite the fact that his work was criminalized, he faced losing access to health care if his reported income went beyond the Medicaid threshold. When his insurance ran out, he was overwhelmed by the prospect of having to somehow pay for the exhaustive routine medical visits and tests without insurance, so he stopped taking Truvada as soon as he knew he wouldn't have the copay the next month to cover it.

He now has mixed feelings about the drug he once saw as a "miracle" and an exciting new way for people engaged in sex work to protect themselves. When he was on the treatment, he described it as exhausting, with his health insurance only allowing him to pick up his prescription in one-month doses and having to have a full screen for HIV and other blood work done every three months. He could have gotten on a financial assistance program after he lost his insurance, but "they make you jump through so many hoops," he said.

In the year since Casper had started taking PrEP, he had become skeptical of the emphasis on getting people on the drug as a means of stopping new infections. Last fall, he attended a national conference on AIDS that felt like an advertising campaign for Truvada, complete with people walking around with T-shirts that said I LOVE PrEP. At a workshop he attended there, a black trans woman and community activist from the Bay Area openly criticized PrEP. While the communities she worked with needed better access to health care, housing, and employment in order to lift themselves from the conditions putting them at risk of HIV, she felt that the new push promoting PrEP was "throwing drugs at people" without addressing the social factors, economic inequality, and systemic violence that are often the real catalysts of new infections. While most of the other attendees were outraged by her critique, Casper strongly identified with the concerns. To Casper, the message from the other presenters seemed to be that now there was a pill to protect against HIV, there was no excuse for you to be infected.

"If we're talking about people who are targeted by evidence of prostitution, particularly women of color and trans women of color, they are already going to have trouble accessing the level of institutional care they need to be on PrEP," he said. "So PrEP is not a solution for the people who need it most."

"PrEP is not a solution for the people who need it most."

O'Connell, the director of New York's AIDS Institute, admitted that there was no special effort underway to reach sex workers as part of the New York State campaign. But he acknowledged that for any strategy to be successful it would have to include sensitization and training for providers to overcome the stigma felt by sex workers accessing health care. "If someone is willing to provide PrEP but people don't feel welcome when they turn up, they're not going to stay," he said.

Unless the state is making sure that doctors have a respectful approach to treating people who disclose they have engaged in sex work, Casper believes expecting sex workers to sign up for a medication that requires them to go to the doctor regularly is unfair.

"Don't put me on a drug and make me go to the doctor every three months unless you've made my doctor a sensible fucking person who's going to treat me well," he said. "That's why I feel weird about throwing PrEP at people, because taking care of themselves is submitting themselves to trauma a lot of the time."

Though he admits his own privilege in comparison with many who trade sex, he is infuriated by the "rich white gay men" he sees proudly claiming to be "Truvada whores," men who "have never done sex work, never needed to do sex work, and don't know anyone who does sex work."

For the people actually selling sex who don't have the privilege of regular health-care access, or those who are indeed HIV-positive and don't even have access to treatment, he feels that promoting PrEP as the new answer to ending HIV is a slap in the face. "It's really a thing that helps people with good health insurance and good health care," he said. "Essentially PrEP is the new gay marriage, the idea being sold to powerful, rich white gay men to make them think they're still leading the revolution."


People in Relationships Remember What It Was Like to Move in with Someone for the First Time

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Moving in with a romantic partner is one of the last rites of passage on the way to adulthood—saying "I love you" and getting idyllically drunk on a fire escape while the sun sets is cute, but sharing a bathroom and bills is real. Once you move in with someone, you're announcing to the world that you're settling down to a degree, entering a phase of life where marriage and children and growing old are all shit that could happen to you, possibly in the near future.

I've never lived with a significant other, but a few weeks ago my girlfriend and I took care of a cohabitating couple's dog, which was real enough for me, thank you very much. But the experience made me wonder: What the hell is it like to move in with someone for the first time? How do you change as a person? How do you influence the other person to change? What happens when you want to masturbate?

On Munchies: This Airport Winery Is Powered by Jet Fuel and Big Hair

I have no idea, so I reached out to a bunch of coupled people of various ages and sexual orientations and asked them to remember what it was like when they first moved in with their partners. Here are their answers, which I've kept anonymous in the name of preserving domestic harmony.

What changed when you first moved in together?

"I stay in a lot more. It's weird: When you live alone, there's nothing more pathetic than spending a Saturday night eating takeout and watching Netflix in your underwear. But when you live with your significant other, that's a very legitimate (and very enjoyable!) way to spend the weekend. It feels like you're "doing something" even when you're doing nothing, simply because there's someone else there with you. The other big change was that I became more conscious about sweeping up my hair. I shed a lot and I never noticed it until my boyfriend and I moved in together, and he'd be like, 'WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS HAIR TUMBLEWEED IN THE BATHROOM?'"

"I probably don't eat as much shit food as I used to."

"My masturbation routine was definitely affected. That was a big one, definitely a huge change. As much as I love my wife, I wanted something special that she couldn't take away from me. I wanted to have sex as much as possible, too, but I still wanted me time. I couldn't blast out in the open so I'd try to hide it by going to town while she was shitting or showering. I started putting a lock on my phone; I started using private browsing. I became a masturbation ninja."

"A peak in previously inconceivable pet peeves."

"I have absolutely forgotten how to cook for myself. My girlfriend is from Haiti and is an incredible Haitian chef. Cooking incredible and healthy meals is not just fun for her, it's also easy. So frustrating! It works out because she gets such joy from cooking. But I still need to brush up on my meal-planning skills since she's starting school this fall."

When did it feel real?

"It was very early on in the living arrangement. I got home from work one evening and my girlfriend, who was working from home at the time, greeted me a long hug: The sort of hug where neither person says anything for a minute, but the feeling is mutual. It was an otherwise unremarkable moment, just two people hugging, but at that moment it went off in my head, like, Wow, yeah, I am definitely living with this person."

"You go to bed together and wake up together and you're there when things are at their messiest and saddest."

"Definitely the first time I had to run the faucet while pooing to muffle the bathroom acoustics so he wouldn't hear me shit. Our bathroom is not that far from our bed."

"One time I left the apartment while she was watching a movie on the couch. When I got home, she had gone through my shit. If I was living alone, she wouldn't have gone through my stuff. Suddenly everything that was mine was hers—my weird baggage, my ex-girlfriend nostalgic stuff. I was like, Holy shit why would you do this? but then it was like, Right, we live together; it's our stuff, our computer."

"His mom died unexpectedly a couple months after we moved in together. I remember sitting on the floor with him after he got the call. He's a fairly big guy who usually errs on the side of stoic, but he was just kind of crumpled and crying. I'd dated other people who had big, bad losses while we were together, but you get the next-day, sanitized version when you don't live together. If we didn't live together, it would have been hard to picture him crying on the ground. That was probably the first time I realized what it is to live with someone—you go to bed together and wake up together and you're there when things are at their messiest and saddest."

Did either of you have to change to fit the other one?

"He was a marathon runner and an alcoholic, so I started to run and drink a lot more. I love cats so we adopted one. When I threatened to break up with him for being a sloppy, disgusting, drunken mess, he let me get a kitten. We stayed together another year after that. He's still an alcoholic, but no longer runs. I now run and have two cats."

"I felt like I suddenly had to be accountable of my time. I don't really care about what other people say: There's something wrong about coming home super fucked-up on drugs and alcohol while your partner isn't. It's a bad move. If we're fucked-up together it's fine, but not by myself. I stopped going out as much and partying as much, unless it was with her."

"I go to bed earlier now. I used to sleep five hours a night, starting around 2 or 3 AM, but he sleeps so much more and gets in bed around midnight. My sleeping habits were kind of stupid, anyway, so I adapted to his. Now I just wake up earlier than him, do some things on my own, and then start making noise in the apartment after a couple hours so that he'll 'wake up naturally.' He knows what I'm doing, but we pretend the noises aren't intentional."


Want to watch something about the opposite of moving in together? Watch our doc about America's lucrative divorce industry:


How has your masturbation routine and sex life changed?

"I don't think either of ours have! I rarely masturbate, and he masturbates like every morning, and neither of those things have changed as a result of living together. He just wakes up hard and then masturbates before he gets up. I'm always like, 'I don't have time for this shit,' and then I go brush my teeth or get ready. We're sometimes disgustingly comfortable around each other."

"I miss being able to be bummed out and be openly bummed out without it turning into a conversation."

"The level of sneakiness jumped tenfold for me. She knew I was beating off most of the time even though I thought I was soooo clever about it. We had more sex before we lived together... :("

"We are both on antidepressants so neither of us have super high sex drives, but he seems to be able to find time to jerk off. I rarely feel motivated to, but when I do it's usually when I'm drunk and awake and he's asleep. We still don't have sex super often, but it's easier now that we live together since we share the same bed every night."

What do you miss most about living alone?

"I miss being able to be bummed out and be openly bummed out without it turning into a conversation. If I'm sad or pissed off and I'm at home, it's going to be a conversation because she'll wonder what's wrong. I have no privacy of emotions. I miss that and don't have that any more. Now it's all in my head and I have to choose if I share those feelings with other people. I think I used to spend more time at home when I was living alone. You don't need to be in your head; I could be thrashing around my room, all pissed off."

"What I miss most about living by myself after sharing a space with a partner is the level of acceptable muteness that you can indulge in after a full day of jabbering."

"There was a time when I didn't have to explain things to anyone. No one was wondering why I felt compelled to stay up until 3 AM, making something or being out late after work. There's a mental tax you pay when you live with someone who has every right to be curious about what you're up to. No single question is unreasonable, but the total volume of questions feels heavy."

"Whenever I'm home, I always feel safe, able to be my full self, and truly home. She is my home."

"The worst part—and I want to word this carefully—about moving in with your partner is that you can't undo that change to your relationship. I am very, very in love with my boyfriend and happy to be with him, and I don't expect that we'll break up—but then again, what if we did? You can't really 'turn back' after moving in with someone. I don't spend very much time thinking about my relationship future (marriage, family life, whatever) but I guess, since we live together, that's really the only direction to go in."

What's the best part about living with your partner?

"One of the best parts is that we have a queer home. It's us and two awesome queer roommates (we are the only couple). I've never been able to afford to live by myself and have struggled with terrible sublets for years. Our home feels like a refuge from all the bullshit in the world: the stares and harassment we constantly get as an interracial, butch-femme couple; misogynist and homophobic harassment we each get on our own; and the regular bullshit the comes with living in the city: delayed trains, horrible commutes, whatever. So whenever I'm home, I always feel safe, able to be my full self, and truly home. She is my home."

"The small things and the big things would be harder and worse without him."

"The real benefit of living together is metaphysical. It's about what that change does to your relationship. You become more like each others' family rather than each others' sex companion; your well-being becomes more inseparable from the other person's well-being."

"If I had to choose one thing I appreciate most, I find that when I'm living alone a lot of stuff I do at home might not have happened. It goes out into the ether or it's all in my head. My home life is now a part of the broad story of the relationship. Because of that, the things I do at home have meaning. If I want to listen to music at home, it has meaning in our relationship and both of our lives. It's like if a tree falls in the forest... kind of vibe. If I did something by myself then it might as well not have happened. Living with a partner is easily the best thing I've ever done. It has made my life better in every possible way... But I fucking hate that she never refills the ice tray. It's not that hard. Jesus."

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How Borderline Personality Disorder Put an End to My Party Days

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The author (center)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In the summer of 2010, just before I turned 19 and in my first year of university, I attempted suicide with a month's supply of my antidepressants and ended up in intensive care, breathing on a machine. By my second year, my good-time friends had had enough of me. I was no longer invited out, and became very isolated and increasingly unhappy. I got into an abusive relationship and attempted suicide another two times. I was also bulimic—vomiting everything that touched my lips.

During the first year of my undergraduate degree I reduced my calorie intake to 250 a day—about two and a half slices of bread or five medium apples—and started to go slowly insane. I drank, took drugs, and went to clubs with a religious fervor. My body started to cave in. I was starving and my hair started to fall out. My nails went blue. My skin turned to flaking scales. I once ate a burger after a night out and forced myself to run up and down the stairs until I actually passed out to "make up for it." I went to my campus GP and told him I needed help. At five and a half stone (less than 80 pounds), he said I wasn't sick enough to warrant eating disorders treatment, and borderline personality disorder (BPD) was never even mentioned.

People couldn't keep up with my impulsive behavior, the manic phases and the fits of crying. The labels of "drama queen," "attention seeker," and "total fucking mess" followed me around like a bad smell. I tried to conceal it, but being called those things hurt. I didn't know how to explain that all the stuff I was doing was an attempt to manage my out-of-control emotions, because when I'm going through a bad patch it feels like being on a sickening roller coaster—only, I can't get off.

On Motherboard: Why I Advocate for Becoming a Machine

Stephen Buckley, Head of Information at the mental health charity Mind, describes BPD as "a very broad diagnosis that can include lots of different people with very different experiences." He told me that BPD can involve experiencing a number of symptoms for extended periods of time, including "feeling worried that people might abandon you; feeling very intense emotions that are also very changeable; feeling like you don't have a strong sense of who you are; finding it hard to make and maintain relationships; acting impulsively; having suicidal thoughts or self-harming; feeling angry; feeling paranoid, having psychotic experiences; feeling numb; or feeling empty or alone a lot of the time."

To me, it was more like going from feeling suicidal and totally despairing, to reasonably positive within an hour. The intense mood swings were terrifying because they were—and still are—coupled with impulsive urges to harm myself or do things I know I'll later regret. The negative emotions I have are immobilizing. They crash over me like huge waves, knocking the wind out of me and forcing me underwater. It means living with a devious voice in my mind that whispers ugly thoughts and orders. It tells me that I'm a shitty person, don't deserve to exist, and that my life is meaningless.

The author (right)

According to the NHS, personality disorders often become apparent during a person's teenage years and are commonly associated with childhood trauma; eight out of ten people with BPD have experienced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse during childhood, or parental neglect.

I wasn't neglected by my parents. I had a very happy childhood up until I started secondary school. It was the kind of school that concerned middle-class parents tend not to send their kids to. Discipline in classrooms was practically nil and I was bullied badly, branded a "lezzer" and a "dyke," greeted with laughter whenever I entered the room, pelted with chewing gum, dismissed by boys as a "rat" and a "dog" that "no man would ever want to touch." Girls would pretend to be scared of me in the swimming pool changing rooms because I hadn't realized, at age 11, that I was meant to shave my legs.

Related: The VICE Guide to Mental Health

This continued for about two years, and by the time I was 14, I'd become completely disconnected from myself and overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness and anger. This was when my impulsive behavior kicked in, and I started self-harming, drinking, taking drugs like cocaine, mephedrone, and speed, and looking for attention from dubious men. I didn't know what borderline personality disorder was. I began limiting myself to 1,000 calories a day and visiting pro-anorexia websites. I told myself that I'd feel calmer and people would like me and the raging hurt would leave me if I just became thin enough.

It wasn't until the end of my second year of university—when I was finally accepted on to an eating disorders treatment program—that I was diagnosed with BPD. I did a course of Compassion Focused Therapy, which is designed for people with high levels of shame and self-criticism. I learned more about how to navigate my overwhelming emotions, and how to not listen to the hateful voice that pushed me to starve myself and hurt my body. The therapy was coupled with medication to help me sleep and negate some of the crushing depression that so often accompanies BPD.

Some BPD sufferers hear voices outside their heads, usually with instructions to harm themselves or others, and at the more extreme end of the spectrum, some sufferers also experience prolonged delusions or beliefs that they cannot be talked out of. Others—like Rachel Rowan Olive, a girl I talked to who also suffers from BPD—tend to disassociate or shut down when their emotions become too difficult to deal with. "BPD is hard to describe to someone who doesn't have it. I never liked the label 'borderline personality disorder.' It's the kind of term that makes people back away slowly," she says. "I used to think that a lot of the criteria for BPD didn't apply to me, but as time has gone on, I can connect things that have always been part of me to the diagnosis.

"My main problem is self-harm and that's the most outward and obvious symptom of my BPD," Rachel continues. "I experience a lot of anxiety, so I feel like if I'm going to be frightened anyway for absolutely no reason, I might as well make myself frightened of something that's real and within my control. I experience a level of emotional dysregulation, where I end up feeling really empty a lot of the time. I think a big part of it for me is finding it hard to tell the difference between my emotions and other people's. I notice it even with fiction—if I'm reading or watching TV I can end up getting panicky because it's like I'm feeling what all the different characters are feeling at once and I don't know which emotions are mine any more."

Interested in the treatment of mental health? Watch our documentary 'Institutionalized: Mental Health Behind Bars' on VICE News

Nowadays, I try to keep my environment as calm as possible, and use distracting and soothing techniques to mitigate the effects of bad episodes. Most of the time I keep my emotions under control, but there are still times when I swing between crying and not being able to get out of bed, hyper productivity and manic states where I'm tempted to be super impulsive.

I still have a hard time forming long-lasting friendships. The majority of my friends from school and university are no longer in my life. Part of BPD is forming intense relationships that don't last very long, and the illness ends up being very isolating. My emotions are so overwhelming that other people find it hard to understand why I'm laughing and bouncing around for no reason, and then suddenly in floods of tears. I don't usually tell people that I have BPD because I'm afraid they'll judge me.

Managing borderline personality disorder usually involves a combination of medication and talking therapy. There's no drug specifically licensed to treat BPD but mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotics (all of which I take) are commonly used. Rachel uses Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to manage her BPD, coupled with art therapy at a studio in Hackney. She will also plan her week out in advance to give herself a sense of structure and control.

The stigma that surrounds all mental illness is vastly unhelpful, does much to damage sufferers and can prevent them from getting help. As a "personality disorder," BPD gets more than its fair share of social stigma. People with BPD aren't cold and emotionless, as Rachel felt others perceived her to be, or attention-seeking and deserving of social isolation, as I was dubbed at university. They are merely trying to manage an illness that's every bit as real as a physical condition with the tools they have at their disposal.


WATCH: Our film about mental health treatment in the UK, 'Maisie'


It's very easy to succumb to feelings of frustration and hopelessness when you're stuck on a waiting list and it might be six months to a year before you even get an assessment appointment for any kind of therapy. Despite this, it's essential that anyone experiencing BPD-like symptoms informs their GP. No one should have to get to such a breaking point with their mental health that they try to end their life. It's five years since I was unconscious in intensive care, unable to breathe, with a nurse washing my hair because of all the sweat that had run into it. I owe it to my partner, my parents, my sister and myself not to end up back there.

Follow Harriet on Twitter.

More from VICE:

My Eating Disorder Had Nothing to Do with Barbie or the Media

Why Mental Health Disorders Emerge in Your Early Twenties

Inside the Nightmarish Body Habit Disorders That Affect 'One in 50 People'

How America's Maze of Meth Laws Hurts the Poor and Marginalized

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A meth clean-up in West Virginia. Photo by the author

Kateri Court is a bright, relatively new five-story apartment building with large, three-panel windows letting in all the sunshine that comes to Bellingham, Washington. You might mistake it for a condo development built for young professionals who have just moved to this city, which sits at the northernmost edge of Washington State.

But Kateri Court is one of 91 buildings run by Catholic Housing Services of Western Washington, whose residents tend to earn well below the area's median income, and where eight apartments are set aside for single parents participating in a program to transition out of homelessness. Constructed in 2006 with a mix of state, federal and local funds, the structure meets LEED Gold green building standards, thanks in part to a unique ventilation system that reuses exhaust to help heat the building.

Last year, one resident visited another's apartment and saw him light up a meth pipe. The visitor alerted Catholic Housing Services, which called law enforcement. The Whatcom County Health Department "became concerned that the contamination may have traveled to adjoining units," according to Steve Powers, division director for Catholic Housing Services.

First, the department demanded testing of the units above, below, and beside that of the meth smoker. Neighboring apartments had some meth residue below the level the latest science suggests is benign, which is 1.5 micrograms per square centimeter—or 1.5 μg/100 cm2—but above what was then Washington State's own standard. That meant it was time for remediation—a.k.a. a clean-up from a licensed contractor—to satisfy Washington State's safety standard.

"Then they required we test the whole building," Powers says.

In the end, seven apartments had to be vacated and remediated, and the culprit seemed to be the pride of Katori Court: the state-of-the-art, eco-friendly ventilation system. By reusing air, it was spreading a small quantity of meth particles through the building. Those seven apartments were basically remodeled. Catholic Housing Services also had to clean the ducting system for all 40 units and replace the entire ventilation system. "Unbelievably, the full cost of cleanup was about $300,000," Powers tells me.

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The damage was covered in their insurance policy, under the "vandalism" clause, and Catholic Housing Services' insurer has since reworded their policy to specifically exempt meth contamination, according to Powers. He adds that the cost to insure the charity's 22 shelters, 17 transitional housing facilities, and 52 permanent housing properties has skyrocketed. "[It] has certainly been a burden for us to absorb even if the Kateri expense was covered," Powers says.

And most of it might have been unnecessary.

To be sure, meth—an amateur chemist's drug made from materials purchasable at Walmart in bathtubs, closets, basements and makeshift labs across the country—leaves behind a residue that can be harmful. A 2009 study found that headaches, nausea, vomiting, respiratory and eye irritation show up in a small percentage of people exposed to a former meth site, and every so often a horror story of a family falling ill after buying a "meth house" from an unscrupulous realtor makes it into a local paper. However, 14 states and countless local jurisdictions are holding onto an antiquated standard for how much meth residue is harmful, and treats places that were just downwind of meth usage—like the apartments in Kateri Court—as if they were full-blown meth labs. The resulting fees and facility shutdowns tend to impact some of America's most vulnerable citizens.

The first wave of laws regulating third-hand meth exposure—or contact with meth particles left in the environment—passed in the early 2000s. They almost universally used the standard of 0.1 μg/100 cm2, or the the smallest amount that could be detected.

"That standard comes from a time when we had very little knowledge of meth, when we just assumed if there was any, we had to get rid of it." says Greg McKnight, the former clandestine drug lab manager for the Washington State Department of Health. "It has no scientific basis."

In 2009, the state of California finalized its finding that third-hand exposure to be meth becomes dangerous when it reaches 1.5 μg/100 cm2, a metric that has been tacitly endorsed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but so far, only a handful of states have incorporated that rule into law.

All of these measurements are microscopic—less than the size of a fraction of a grain of salt on an area the size of a CD case—but for homeowners, landlords, housing agencies, mortgage-holding banks left with a meth-effected property, it pays to be in a 1.5 μg/100 cm2 area.

Since the Kateri Court disaster, Washington State has upped its threshold for meth contamination. Had the state done that a year earlier, it would have shaved $200,000 off the price of remediating the building, according to Power, "and based on the reasoning employed by the [state] health department, no one's health would have been placed at risk by performing a more modest and reasonable cleanup."

A few ounces of crank in a sock drawer can require a visit from a crew in hazmat suits.


If you were the proud owner of one of the thousands of meth sites busted last year, some combination of police, firefighters, and public health officials probably removed anything immediately explosive or flammable from your property. A local or state health department then likely demanded you shutter the place until you had fulfilled whatever cleanup requirements pertain to your area, and then handed you a list of licensed testing and remediation contractors.

Typically, testing is required if the authorities find meth or evidence of its use. A few ounces of crank in a sock drawer can require a visit from a crew in hazmat suits who will wipe every surface for samples to test.

Jennifer McQuerrey Rhyne, owner of Affordable Clean Up LLC, which remediates meth sites across West Virginia , says the cleaning an average home costs about ten grand. This is in addition to replacing all of the miscellaneous items in rooms dubbed "contaminated" by West Virginia's standard—the archaic 0.1 μg/100 cm2. In one case of low-level contamination, she cleaned the house of a woman whose adult grandson smokes meth in the basement. "She lost everything, all the belongings she acquired throughout her life," Rhyne tells me.

Kent A. Berg, president of Decontamination Professionals International, a South Carolina–based cleanup and cleanup contractor training company, says costs vary. "It depends on the level of contamination and the contents of the house."Some materials, like wood and carpeting, are more absorbent. Berg gives a range of $2 to $8 per square foot.

Most companies that clean meth properties also test them for contamination levels. Though states license these contractors, mostly to ensure they're trained to deal with hazardous waste, there is little oversight of them once they are in the field. Some health departments, like the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, do occasional random checks, testing meth properties and comparing their results with that of the contractor assigned to it, but that's not a universal practice.

Because of this, Berg recommends bringing in one company to do the testing and another to do the cleaning, "so there's no impropriety." But he adds that most people left with a meth property use the same contractor for both. "Most companies out there are aboveboard," Berg says. "But [the process] does leave the question: Was the testing done in a way that was self-serving?"

While the costs to clean individual homes are high, the price to remediate public housing and the community spaces—places built to serve the same downtrodden populations who happen to be meth's target demographic—can be astronomical.


Watch: Thailand's Meth Epidemic and Vomit Rehab


For over six months now, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have struggling to contain meth cleanup costs on the Flathead Indian Reservation, a span of land that stretches five counties and is home to 28,000 people in Western Montana. Last February, a custodian found a meth pipe in a washing machine in the basement of the Arlee Head Start Center, a pre-K program with an enrollment of 38 kids, according to tribal spokesman Robert McDonald. The tribes shut down the center. (The program itself continued at a nearby church during the two months the building was off-limits.) The Tribal Council then ordered meth residue tests on all public buildings. The immersion school, community center, and health clinic all came up clean, but residue was found in the senior center, a nonresidential building that hosts programs and weekly meals for the elderly. "Definitely from smoking," according to the center's director, Willie Stevens. "No one here has been making." The senior center, too, was deemed off-limits.

Last year, the Salish & Kootenai Housing Authority started a policy of testing each of its public housing units upon a renter vacating. So far, 36—half of those tested—have come up positive for meth, increasing the waiting list for housing.

According to the US Justice Department, Native Americans have the highest meth usage rates of any ethnic group. "It'd be hard to find an Indian community that hasn't been impacted by drugs," says tribal spokesperson McDonald. "Recently, we've seen a lot of meth and prescription drugs. ... Where there is pain, there is addiction. There is something called historical trauma."

Technically, the tribes' meth cleanup is entirely voluntarily. Jurisdiction can be complicated in Indian country, but Montana environmental laws do not pertain to reservations. Still, on matters of ecology, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes try to utilize state laws in order to be good neighbors according to McDonald. Because Montana adheres to the old 0.1 μg/100 cm2 standard, that courtesy hasn't been cheap.

The tribes spent $50,000 remediating and reopening the Head Start Center. (That cost does not include replacing all of the items that were thrown out.) The Tribal Council is still creating a plan to remediate the senior center and the rental units. McDonald says each cleanup will cost $50,000 to $80,000, coming from the tribes' budget.

"If we were out in California, we'd be paying half of what we are paying," he says.


Fourteen states hold onto the standard of 0.1 μg of meth residue per 100 cm2: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia. (Arkansas' threshold is actually 0.05 μg/100 cm2, though 0.1. μg/100 cm2 is the lowest level detectable, so that's the limit by default.) Indiana, Michigan and Oregon go by 0.5 μg/100 cm2. Utah's standard is 1.0 μg/100 cm2. Seven states have moved the needle to 1.5 μg/100 cm2: California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming.

If you don't see your state, you don't get off scot free; it might have a different way of measuring meth toxicity. Also, your city or county probably has protocols and standards, especially if you live out in meth country.

Of the places that have the more 1.5 μg/100 cm2 standard, most loosened their regulations in response to what, in public health and remediation circles, has come to be known as "the California Study." (Its actual name: "Assessment of Children's Exposure to Surface Methamphetamine Residues in Former Clandestine Methamphetamine Labs, and Identification of a Risk-Based Cleanup Standard for Surface Methamphetamine Contamination.")

In 2005, as the state was dealing with about 100 meth busts a year, the California legislature ordered the premier scientific study on the toxicity threshold of third-hand meth exposure, i.e., how much residue in your house would make you sick. The job fell to two state agencies: the Department of Toxic Substances Control and the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The study was authored by Dr. Charles B. Salocks, a toxicologist who had been working in various state environmental agencies since 1989.

Coming up with the measurement "was a two-part process," Salocks tells VICE. "One was to characterize the toxicity of meth at low levels." The second was "estimation of the exposure that a small child living in a former clandestine lab would receive."

As for figuring out the toxicity of meth, there was actually a few filing cabinets worth of studies dating back a century for Salocks to consult. Before it was a sludge that hillbillies used to get high, before it was a West Coast club drug that paired well with gay sex, before it provided a revenue stream and means to ride all night to Hell's Angels, methamphetamine was used as a stimulant for Allied and Axis powers in World War II. Before that, meth's parent drug, amphetamine, was manufactured and sold as a decongestant and stimulate. This left 125 controlled experimental studies, in several languages and from military and big pharma scientists, for Salocks to consult.

"We looked at studies from the Germans in the 1930s when they were trying to improve the performance of soldiers," he says. "We reviewed the human studies [in which] women gained weight during pregnancy when they were taking methamphetamine." If it was a reliable scientific study on humans absorbing meth, Salocks incorporated it.

To unlock the second half of the equation—determining how much residue meth would make it into the system of a small child—Salocks relied on previous scientific models, such as the EPA's Stochastic Human Exposureand Dose Simulation Model, used in previous studies of chemical exposure. "Basically, we were trying to figure out how much someone who's always touching things, who might be on the floor, with sticks his fingers in his mouth would be exposed to a toxin in the environment."

The conclusion: 1.5 μg/100 cm2 or less of meth residue is harmless.

This does not mean there are no precautions to be taken before moving into a "meth house." "Other contaminants may be present," according to Sallocks. "Cleanup specialists generally don't test for those chemicals and don't have cleanup numbers for them." If you experience the headaches, nausea, and sleep disturbances that have been observed in these places and your methamphetamine residues are less than 1.5 μg/100 cm2, it's likely something else leftover from the meth operation.

Adopted as a legal standard, 1.5 μg/100 cm2 will save anyone from moving into an untreated meth lab, according to Salocks—except in cases of lithium/anhydrous ammonia synthesis, which does not generate fumes, and "in cases where the 'cook' was extremely careful about venting fumes to the outdoors." It just might not prevent you from moving into a place where someone burned some meth every now and then or a place like the apartments in Kateri Court, where someone a few units over was doing crank. The 1.5 μg/100 cm2 standard "would be hard to achieve if you were simply smoking meth," says Salocks. "It's not like smoking a cigarette. You put a glass pipe up to your mouth and take it right into your lungs. It's a pretty efficient process."

The standard is of course not beyond challenge. A new study could settle on a different number. But many professionals specializing in meth consider it preferable to the old one, which is based on no science. The same year the California study was first released, the federal Methamphetamine Remediation Research Act required the EPA to come up with its own voluntary guidelines for meth cleanup. With 35 public health officials specializing in meth, from agencies across the country, signing on, it adopted the 1.5 μg/100 cm2 standard.

But so far only a handful of states and other jurisdiction have made it law, leaving property owners and housing agencies coughing up cash to meet the stricter standards.


As Catholic Housing Services was tearing apart Kateri Court's ventilation system, public housing agencies in Washington State were also getting clobbered by meth costs.

The Peninsula Housing Authority, responsible for the public housing in the two counties across the Puget Sound from Seattle, had three 1940s-era duplexes it couldn't fill until it paid for a $200,000 cleanup, according to Executive Director Kay Kassinger. In each case, a resident smoked meth in one unit of the duplex and particles seeped into the other half. "The remediation company told us we'd have to tear them all apart, down to the studs," says Kissinger.

The Tacoma Housing Authority has it even worse. It tests every unit upon vacancy would up with about 140 "hot" apartments within three years, according to Executive Director Michael Mirra. The cost to clean them all was about $4 million.

There had never been a bust for meth manufacturing in either's jurisdiction, the two agencies claim.

"It was not affordable and not justifiable because it was not a health-based criteria," according to Mirra. So, the two housing authorities and the Association of Washington Housing Authorities made a formal petition for a rules change to the Department of Health.

Under Washington State law, the standard of meth remediation was entirely left to the Department of Health. Still, the state legislature held a hearing on it. The change seemed like a no-brainer to state Rep. Steve Tharinger.

"We looked at the study from California. The housing authorities wanted a change," Tharinger told VICE. "Public health officials said [the stringent standard] wasn't needed, and it wasn't meth labs. It was just renters or occupants smoking."

A few remediation contractors raised a small fuss. According to the minutes of the hearing, some submitted written comments stating "[a} belief that the primary study considered in establishing the new standard is flawed; and without a strict standard to determine a property has been used as a lab, many homes in need of remediation will not be detected."

"But of course they didn't have much credibility," according to Rep. Tharinger.

In January, Secretary of Health Dr. John Wiesman signed off on the change, establishing Washington State's threshold for meth remediation in 1.5 μg/100 cm2 standard. Meanwhile, counties have chosen to keep the old one. But contractors working for the Peninsula Housing Authority were able to meet the new threshold by simply washing down the surface areas of three units.

The change could have helped the administrators of Kateri Court, but Steve Powers, division director, takes one consolation from the experience.

"It's the cleanest building in Whatcom County, if not the state, as far as I'm concerned."

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