Eerie. Photo via Flickr user Moyan Brenn

Read: I Said Yes to Everything for a Week and Ended Up in the Hospital

The Icelandic government issued a statement recently that it would aid in the crisis in Syria by taking in a meagre 50 refugees from the country. With many thinking of Iceland as a northern utopia of fjords and sheep where the soothing sounds of Sigur Rós are played non-stop and pop stars wear dead bird dresses, the offer seemed at odds with the image the world has of the progressive country with a population of less than half a million.

In response to the government's underwhelming announcement, thousands of Icelanders have joined together in offering to personally host Syrian refugees in their homes. Over 13,000 people have joined a Facebook group entitled "Syria Is Calling," popularized by a notable Icelandic author, to voice their offers and opinions regarding Syrian refugees. Though some media outlets are reporting that 10,000 Icelanders are offering to host refugees, a number have joined symbolically, and still others are there to voice dissenting opinions.

Posts have ranged from those detailing how they would help refugees—one woman offered to help with airfare of a Syrian family, child care, and home-cooked meals—to those spewing racist comments. [All sic] "Obvious you have no experience what so ever about those 'refugees'...dont come back and complain when murder and rapes goes skyhigh," one Icelander commented on a post in the group.

"It has been our goal in international politics to be of help in as many areas as possible and this is one of the areas where the need is most right now," the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, said. "I believe there is solidarity on that we should do more to respond to the problem, we just have to find out the best way to do it."

According to Statistics Iceland, over 90 percent of the population of the Nordic country is ethnically Icelandic, and another roughly three percent Polish. Just over three percent of Icelandic citizens were grouped into the "other" ethnic category in Iceland's 2014 census results.

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NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Photo via Flickr user United Steelworkers

The party that's currently leading in the polls this election announced they will increase funding for shelters so women have more options to flee from violence. The NDP made the announcement a little over a week after party leader Thomas Mulcair pulled out of a federal debate on women's issues. The debate was subsequently cancelled.

Pointing out that more than 500 women and children were turned away from shelters one night in April last year, Mulcair pledged more support for women's shelters.

"I'm committing today, that under an NDP government, we will take action to ensure that never again will a woman in need be turned away from a shelter," Mulcair said Monday.

According to StatsCan, on April 16, 2014, 338 women and 201 children who were with them were turned away. In just over half of those cases, it was because the shelter was full. StatsCan also reports that emotional and physical abuse were the most common reasons women gave for visiting the 627 women's shelters across Canada.

The NDP's plan is to inject $40 million in funding over four years into the Shelter Enhancement Program, anticipating the funding will help create or renovate 2,100 spaces and shelters, and 350 transitional housing spaces.

In the same announcement, Mulcair promised more funding for affordable housing and homelessness programs. "When a woman has to pack up and take the kids, and leave a violent situation, they need a new place they can call home," Mulcair said. "Well, we'll provide that new home."

Mulcair made the announcement in Saskatchewan, which along with Manitoba has the highest rates of reported violence against women, with rates more than double the national average, according to StatsCan.

The NDP has promised a national action plan to address the issue in coordination with women's groups and Indigenous communities, if they form government.

Though Mulcair said, "My priority is to end violence against women," and headlines about his announcement said he had unveiled a plan to do so, it was unclear what exactly the NDP plan would be to prevent the violence itself from happening.

By the NDP's own admission, gender inequality, not the capacity of shelters, is the root cause of violence against women.

Overall, men are responsible for 83 percent of the violent acts committed against women in Canada.

The most common perpetrators of violence against women are their intimate partners, and nearly 70 percent of violent incidents against women occurred in private residences—the victim or offender's home, for instance.

The homicide rate for women in Canada decreased between the mid-1970s and 2000, but in the past decade the murder rate has remained stable, while other violent crime has decreased.

In Canada, violence against women disproportionately falls on Indigenous women. Identifying as Aboriginal is a socio-demographic factor that increases risk of violence, and in 2013, Aboriginal women accounted for 16 percent of all female homicides, but represented only 4.3 percent of Canada's female population.

Both the NDP and the Liberals have promised a national inquiry into the high number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, while Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has repeatedly turned down the idea. On Monday, Mulcair reiterated that, if elected, he would order an inquiry within the first 100 days of taking office.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

Donald Trump takes a bowling ball to the stomach in 'Trumpealo.' Images via Google Play Store/Karaokulta.com.

Read: Donald Trump and the Art of Having No Shame

Mexicans have a right to be pissed off with Donald Trump. The Republican Presidential hopeful has called those crossing the border into the United States "drug dealers" and "rapists," and proposed building a huge wall along the entire border to stop Mexican immigrants from entering the country without permission.

Now Karaokulta, a Mexican video games developer, has created a way to take out your Trump-induced rage: It's released a beta version of Trumpealo, a game in which players throw shoes, bottles, and other missiles at a cartoon Trump. (Alas, it now has plenty of testers, so if you're just reading about the game now, too late.)

New high score!

In the game—a sort of one-sided Tekken but with bigger hair—players can dress Trump up in his campaign suit, a chicken outfit, or a mariachi get-up that's less Mr. President and more Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun. While he's being pelted with objects, Trump calls out phrases like "México no es nuestro amigo"—Mexico is not our friend.

Jorge Suárez, the CEO of Karaokulta, was quoted by Vanguardia as saying, "Video games are art, they are a form of interactive expression. We want to make games with different situations, and though they might be delicate, we're Mexicans. If we laugh ourselves to death, why not? This is how the idea came about. It turns out people loved it."

"Mexico is not our friend."

According to its website, Karaokulta aims to "transcend the creation of art in the form of apps and video games that the world loves." It's hard not to argue that Trumpealo—a play on the Spanish word golpear, meaning "to beat up"—transcends art, becoming something profound and beautiful for those hoping that Trump's campaign fails.

At a recent fundraiser Trump announced, "Nobody loves Hispanics like I do. I probably employ more than anybody else working for me. They rent my apartments, they give me a fortune. I love them. I love them." No matter how many he employs in his hotels, though, it looks like Mexicans don't love him back.

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Read: Kentucky Governor to County Clerk: Start Issuing Marriage Licenses or Resign

Kim Davis is a woman on a mission from God. Since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage throughout the country in June, the county clerk of Rowan, County, Kentucky, has notoriously refused to issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples, even though the elected official is required by law to do so. She claims she's doing so "under God's authority," but her crusade, which has made national headlines, may have run out of gas.

The courts have ordered Davis to give same-sex couples licenses, and on Monday the Supreme Court declined her appeal. On Tuesday, the ACLU filed two motions in court to have her held in contempt for her continued intransigence.

"Davis will be required to answer to the judge for her violation of the order and could face steep fines," said the civil-rights organization in a statement. (The ACLU isn't requesting that Davis face any time in jail.)

The contempt hearing is scheduled for Thursday; as of Tuesday morning she was still refusing to give out licenses surrounded by vocal supporters and detractors.

"It is unfortunate that we've been compelled to take further action today to ensure that the people of Rowan County can obtain the marriage licenses they're entitled to receive from their County Clerk's office," said the ACLU's legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, in a statement. "The law is clear and the courts have spoken. The duty of public officials is to enforce the law, not place themselves above it."

(You can read the motions filed against Davis here, here, and here, if you so desire.)

The entrance to the Unist'ot'en camp. Still from VICE Canada Reports: No Pipelines

Tension remains high in Northwestern BC as representatives from the Unist'ot'en clan and their legal representatives held a meeting with the RCMP regarding the fate of their settlement camp on Tuesday afternoon.

A non-violent occupation of unceded Unist'ot'en traditional territory since 2010, the camp was originally established to stand in the intended path of the Pacific Trail natural gas pipeline. It has since expanded to include structures built directly in the path of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and the TransCanada Coastal Gaslink pipeline, encompassed within a sweeping declaration that all pipelines are banned from their territories. A checkpoint ensures that no one enters or leaves the territory without their direct consent.

The meeting comes in the wake of widespread speculation regarding a potential RCMP raid on the camp.

VICE Canada Reports: No Pipelines

On Friday, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs warned of the potential of mass arrests, warning that police were gathering in nearby towns.

This statement was sparked by a face-to-face meeting between the leadership council and RCMP representatives in the boardroom of the UBCIC, Philip told VICE.

"It became very evident at that point in time that, despite our objections, despite our strong opposition to them moving in in force, it was clear that they had made decisions that they were going to execute their operational plan," said Phillip, speaking from the road on his way back from the Unist'ot'en camp on Tuesday.

That meeting was followed by an additional report, from a source Phillip considered to be reliable, that approximately 200 RCMP officers were gathering in towns close to the camp.

"There were phone calls made to the highest levels of the RCMP in Ottawa, who, under great pressure, admitted they were fully engaged," added Phillip.

Fearing imminent violence, Phillip said he then "dropped everything" and immediately drove to the camp on Sunday, stopping only to buy a sleeping bag on the way.

As he traveled, wider speculation swirled that the impending raid could possibly be a test drive of new powers afforded to police by the newly enacted Bill C-51.

Though no evictions or raids have yet taken place, Phillip's comments, which also warned of potential of mass arrests, prompted the BC Civil Liberties Association to issue a strongly worded letter to the RCMP, stating that such a move would be "disastrous" and "would not respect the constitutionally-respected Title and Rights of the Unist'ot'en, as well as their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

An additional letter, signed by a number of high-profile civil liberties advocates and environmentalists titled "We Stand With the Unist'ot'en," offered further backing, much if it international, to the camp's position.

On Friday, the BC RCMP responded with a statement that the police force had no intention of taking down the camp and said their position was one which "respects the rights of individuals to peacefully protest."

"They could be standing back for a minute, and then come back again full force on Wednesday morning or something, that could happen," said Zoe Blunt, a camp supporter who has helped organize caravans of other supporters into the camp for several years.

Blunt received an email from a camp member on Tuesday which stated that legal representatives for the Unist'ot'en had secured a guarantee from the RCMP that they would not enter the camp prior to Tuesday's meeting. What happens beyond that point is dependant on what is discussed.

Both Blunt and Phillip feel that a raid, if planned, may have been stayed by the intense scrutiny and overwhelming support the camp has received in recent weeks.

A recent tour by Unist'ot'en camp spokeswoman Freda Huson and four hereditary chiefs from the area was met with standing ovations and packed crowds, said Blunt.

"This was the first time they had ever experienced anything like this, going off-reserve and speaking to a big group of people—that's always been Freda's role," said Blunt. "They were just blown away, they were feasted everywhere they went and were treated like rock stars, basically. It must have been really overwhelming."

Videos of Huson informing RCMP officers to leave the territory on July 15, in addition to more recent videos showing Chevron's failed attempts to enter Unist'ot'en territory with gifts of bottled water and tobacco, have garnered thousands of views, said Blunt. In addition, their legal defence fund has received donations from as far away as Sweden and North Carolina.

Despite support from many corners, not everyone is pleased with the situation as it unfolds.

A letter issued from four elected Wet'suwet'en chiefs issued on Monday states that they are concerned with the support from aboriginal and non-aboriginal individuals and groups such as those who have signed the "We Stand With the Unist'ot'en" letter, saying that their definition of sustainability may be different from those who live in the area.

"We have long believed it is short sighted to turn down projects such as the Coastal GasLink project before understanding the true risks and benefits; that is just an easy way to avoid dealing with complex issues," stated Wet'suwet'en First Nation Chief Karen Ogen, who was joined by Nee Tahi Buhn Chief Ray Morris, Burns Lake Band Chief Dan George and Skin Tyee Nation Chief Rene Skin in signing the statement.

The continued pressure from oil and gas companies has also not relented.

On the territory of the Gitdumden First Nation, work continues as Chevron clears a right of way for the Pacific Trail Pipeline up to two kilometres from the Unist'ot'en camp.

"We're not out here causing any trouble, we're here to see the damage that you guys are going to have to pay for when this all goes to court," said Richard Sam of the Laxilyu clan, as he hikes out to survey the damage in a video filmed on Aug. 30 and posted to YouTube.

"It's a bit pointless, right? They're not coming through with their pipeline, so any money that's spent at this point is a waste," said Sam, who was a plaintiff in a 2011 Wet'suwet'en court victory against Canfor.

On Sunday, Gitdumden chiefs sat down with Unist'ot'en clan members to discuss how they might work together to stop Chevron from clearcutting the right of way for the PTP pipeline.

As the future of the camp remains uncertain, Phillip said on his trip he did not observe any RCMP in the towns closest to the camp, and believes they may have indeed left.

"I'm grateful that cooler heads may have prevailed and they re-thought the dynamic of this. Obviously the enormous groundswell of response through social media was an indication that this would have completely spiraled out of control, and quite possibly could have triggered other actions throughout the province and right across the country," he said.

"One of the outcomes of this situation that arose is that there is an opportunity now for all the parties to understand the gravity of the situation and begin to open up a dialogue and come to some agreement."

The RCMP have not yet responded to a request for comment on this story.

The new allegations are the latest in a string of bad news for the school. Photo via The Canadian Press

In what appears to be Halifax's second mass shooting threat in the past seven months, police have arrested a suspended Dalhousie University medical student after he confessed to a psychiatrist he wanted to shoot 10 to 20 people and stab two people connected to the medical school.

According to a search warrant obtained by the Canadian Press, police alleged Stephen Gregory Tynes told a psychiatrist he wanted to stab his classmate and her mother, an associate dean at the medical school. In the warrant, police say they searched Tynes' apartment on Aug. 21 and found two rifles—a Russian SKS and a Golden Boy .22-calibre— and 1,834 rounds of ammo, The Chronicle Herald reported. They also allegedly found a firearms acquisition card and a gun club card.

The 30-year-old is charged with uttering threats. He has yet to enter a plea in the case.

None of the recent allegations against Tynes have been proven in court.

The Chronicle Herald reported the 30-year-old was previously charged with killing a cat in July 2014. He pleaded not guilty and the Crown decided not to pursue the case in court.

Police alleged he picked up a cat by its hind legs and swung it above his head and then down to the ground. The cat later died.

Last week, a Halifax court released Tynes on bail, on the condition that he live with his dad in Truro, a town outside of Halifax, and not contact any of the people he allegedly threatened. He is not allowed to be within 25 kilometres of Dalhousie.

Dalhousie ramped up security last week after the school found out about the death threats, with campus security posted at the entrances to school buildings to check IDs.

The school says it has a security plan in place after the threats came to light. Dalhousie also suspended Tynes.

This is the second time in 2015 that police have intercepted an alleged mass shooting threat in the small east coast city.

Earlier this year, two people were charged and a third person killed himself after allegations of a failed mass shooting targeting the Halifax Shopping Centre came to light.

The alleged plotters of the averted Valentine's Day shooting earlier this year are set to go to trial in November. On their Tumblrs, the alleged conspirators glorified Nazis and the 1999 Columbine shooting.

They are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and arson, possession of illegal dangerous weapons, and uttering threats using social media.

Tynes will be back in court on Sept. 15.

The new allegations come less than two weeks after a first-year Dalhousie medical student was charged with first-degree murder in relation to the death of another Dal student.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

All photos by the author

Chris Gilman made a name for himself as a Hollywood prop designer, specializing in space-related movie props and effects for films like Deep Impact, Star Trek, and Armageddon. His company, Global Effects Inc, became notorious in the industry for their unparalleled ability to manufacture hyperrealistic space suits—the kind that mirrored actual spacegear so well that it gained the attention of actual aerospace companies.

When Gilman was tapped by NASA to design a space suit for the agency, he launched Orbital Outfitters, a company for designing and manufacturing real pressure suits for orbit. Now he divides his time between making space suits for reel and reality.

At 54, Gilman seems as though he would be as comfortable in a blue-collar auto shop as he would at the heights of an ivory tower, the sort of person who could effortlessly reassemble a car engine while discoursing on the Carolingian Dynasty. I met him in the back of his workshop, where he was deeply immersed in detail work on a medieval suit of armor (another Global Effects specialty). After shaking my hand, he gestured to the gauntlet he had just been working on, relating the similarities between his precision replica and the actual armor worn by 14th century knights.

The workshop is lined with precision replicas of every space suit used by NASA since the start of the Apollo program, and littered with fragments of what seems to be the sets of every movie ever made. Gilman's office is like the literary equivalent of the chaos beyond its doors, lined with books on every conceivable topic relating to space suits, armor, and special effects, in addition to innumerable historical artifacts which he has undoubtedly used as models for his props.

"Check this out," he said, handing me something that looked like a hose. "Dave Scott's communications cable. That thing's been on the moon."

Gilman's dad owned a welding company and worked on the Apollo life support systems. As a child, Gilman spent a lot of time in his father's machine shop and learned to weld by the time he was 12. He figured he would become a machine welder too, until he watched his father's business nearly fold after the end of the Apollo program.

"I had thought that was kind of scary—working your whole life only to find out that the area you're really good at has no work because the economy changed around," Gilman recalled. "But I remembered reading in school that even in the Great Depression era people still went to the movies. I was [already] into magic and that got me really into makeup effects and stunt work."

"In the movie industry, props and costumes can be complete shit, as long as they look good on camera. I thought to myself, Fuck that! and started making my own stuff." - Chris Gilman

Gilman worked as a stuntman in Tucson, Arizona for his last year-and-a-half of high school, and, at age 19, he headed to Tinseltown to try his luck with stunt work and prop design. The industry wasn't at all what he expected.

"What I didn't know is that Hollywood is the land of bullshit. When I first got out here, I was aghast at some of the techniques they were using," he said. "In the movie industry, props and costumes can be complete shit, as long as they look good on camera and work. So I thought to myself, Fuck that! and started making my own stuff."

For more on unlikely spacesuit designers, watch our video about the Russian engineer and Brooklyn sculptor who were hired by NASA to create the next generation of space garments.

Gilman's entrepreneurialism led him to start Global Effects in 1986. By 1991, he had received a nod from the Academy for his development of the Cool Suit system, designed to keep stuntmen and actors cool while wearing bulky costumes. In a city saturated with prop designers and effect artists, Gilman found his niche making hyper-realistic space suits in the mid-90s, after noticing how poorly most movies replicated astronauts' gear.

"I wanted to do space suits because when I would see space suits in movies, they were essentially a canvas jumpsuit with some fittings on it and a fishbowl. Real suits are really complex," said Gilman.

Chris Gilman in his workshop

Gilman makes all of the suit components on site, and his ability to manufacture suits virtually indistinguishable from the real deal quickly attracted the attention of various aerospace companies. Word about the Hollywood guy who was capable of undercutting multinational aerospace companies spread quickly, until one day Gilman got an unexpected call from a professor at Berkeley, who wanted to know if Gilman would be interested in helping to design a suit for NASA.

"I thought it was a friend of mine busting my balls," Gilman told me.

It wasn't. NASA wanted a suit prototyped in two months, which even Gilman acknowledged was a "ridiculously short amount of time to do a mockup." He agreed to the challenge anyway, which was essentially to redesign the torso section of a space suit so that it would fit those with smaller bodies, such as female astronauts.

Gilman's redesign of the suit's torso evidently impressed NASA, as they later contracted him to build a real component for its Advanced Suit Lab. The component was a fully-functional helmet adapter, which has been used for testing on experimental suits.

"I seem to be qualified to make real parts for NASA, but not fake suits for Disney." - Chris Gilman

Despite the fact that Gilman was beginning to gain credibility among those actually putting people in space, it didn't count for much in Hollywood. He says he met with the producers of Mission to Mars several times, but in the end they contracted someone else for the props. Then he says he was passed over by John Favreau when it came to designing Iron Man's suit and again by Christopher Nolan for Interstellar (for which he notes that Nolan "spent all this time and energy researching space travel and black holes, but the fucking suits look like costumes").

"I found that really funny," he said. "I seem to be qualified to make real parts for NASA, but not fake suits for Disney."

NASA's amazing new space suit is built for people to walk on Mars.

Still, Gilman realized his experience and ability to produce functioning parts at Global Effects had opened another avenue for him—producing suits for the burgeoning NewSpace industry. He founded Orbital Outfitters in 2006, a company dedicated to designing full-scale vehicle mockups and functioning space suits for NewSpace companies like XCOR and SpaceX.

Orbital Outfitters sits next to Global Effects, through a small door to the rear of the facility. It's something of a cross between the orderly chaos of an architect's drawing room and the sterility of a surgeon's operating theatre: Mannequins decked out in various Orbital prototypes lean haphazardly against the wall; drawings, prototype helmets, and a device meant to test how well the joints in the suits hold up to pressure litter the tables.

Gilman gestures to one of the suits worn by the mannequins that Orbital had designed as a consultant for SpaceX. "The designer for Oblivion designed this," he told me. The suit looked far more sleek and cool than anything worn by astronauts today.

"Elon wanted something sexier and cooler," said Gilman, shrugging. Unlike with government-funded ventures like NASA, the NewSpace industry is more focused on the "sex appeal" of the suit. In its contact with Orbital Outfitters, SpaceX stipulated that the suits that were being designed for them need to look "badass," aesthetic philosophy that OO tries to apply to all its suits.

"Orbital Outfitters is Armani meets Ferrari," said Gilman. "We are fashion meets technical functioning. We look at the emotion of the thing almost before the technical side of the thing."

Read: Moon Diapers and Pee Condoms: the Evolution of Deep Space Evacuation

Part of Gilman's efforts to sell his suits to NewSpace pioneers involves persuading them that the suit is just as much a part of the launch vehicle as the rockets. Designing a launch vehicle without considering how the suit will play into it can often lead to less-than-desirable results, which can be avoided if they are designed in tandem. This was the approach taken by Orbital's latest client XCOR, who had commissioned Orbital to do cabin prototype designs for their Lynx suborbital craft side by side with the design of the suit that the astronauts will be wearing inside the cabin.

"If it weren't for the suit, you couldn't go out into space. So the saying used to be that the suit makes the man, but as far we're concerned, it's the suit that takes the man," he said. Although Orbital is a relatively new player in the NewSpace race, Gilman only sees opportunity for expansion in the future as the race continues to become increasingly lucrative for those who choose to compete. For now, things look promising: In addition to their contract with XCOR, Orbital Outfitters broke ground on a new manufacturing facility and altitude chamber in Texas last October.

While it might be a while before Gilman's suits see orbital action, if you ever want a glimpse of what the fashionable future of space will look like, you needn't go further than your local movie theater.

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

Baltimore residents protest outside City Hall after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in late April. The next day, Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby charged six cops for Gray's death. Photo via Flickr user Maryland National Guard

The United States is alone in the world in electing its prosecutors. This means every decision a prosecutor makes is a political one—doubly so when their names are in the headlines. Following the indictments of police officers in Baltimore and Cincinnati this year, there was widespread praise from activists and pundits for the prosecutors who held cops to task over the deaths of unarmed black men Freddie Gray and Samuel Dubose.

But those who saw the indictments as a step toward justice may have forgotten that fundamental tenet of American society: Everything is political. And to please both sides—the activists who seek indictments following nearly every police shooting, and agents of law enforcement who often believe they are infallible—investigations by independent prosecutors are essential when emotions are running high.

For many in Ferguson and surrounding cities in St. Louis County, prosecutor Bob McCulloch is a case in point. The son of a police officer slain by a black suspect in the line of duty, McCulloch famously removed himself from the grand jury process in the case of Michael Brown and Darren Wilson by not recommending charges to jurors and instead allowing them to weigh the evidence themselves in determining Wilson's fate.

On the night the grand jury's decision not to indict Officer Wilson was announced in November, many activists blamed McCulloch for letting the cop walk free.

University of Missouri Law Professor Ben Trachtenberg doesn't like the way McCulloch handled the case either, but for different reasons. In a recent essay for the Missouri Law Review, Trachtenberg argues that McCulloch's decision to have the grand jury determine whether to indict Wilson wasn't one made out of desire for transparency, but out of fear.

"I don't have any beef with McCulloch for not indicting Wilson," Trachtenberg tells VICE. "My problem is that he ducked behind the grand jury."

In a system where 95 percent of prosecutors are white, and some of them use legal maneuvering to keep blacks from serving on juries, elections can provide voters with great power to change elements of the criminal justice regime, according to Trachtenberg.

Sometimes, a prosecutor's constituents are clearly on the side of law enforcement. In Staten Island, despite a massive public outcry over a grand jury's decision not to indict the cop who choked Eric Garner to death, the Republican prosecutor who oversaw that deliberation whipped his Democratic opponent in a congressional election. (The House district Staten Island falls in is easily the most conservative in New York City.)

"You sent a message to President Obama, to Nancy Pelosi and, yes, even to Bill de Blasio, that their policies are wrong for our nation," Donovan told his supporters following the victory.

Elsewhere, prosecutors have chosen to take a hard line against police in controversial deaths. The most recent came in Cincinnati, where Republican Prosecutor Joe Deters oversaw a grand jury that indicted former University of Cincinnati Officer Ray Tensing in the death of Samuel Dubose. (Some legal analysts and observers have said Deters's remark about Tensing being "like a murderer" were inappropriate.) But the warm fuzzy feeling on the part of activists and those who have worked tirelessly to expose police brutality belied an uncomfortable truth: While the video of Dubose's death looks terrible, proving Tensing willfully murdered the father of 13 in a court of law is an entirely different matter.

Perhaps more famously, Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby went all-out when she indicted six police officers on charges that included "depraved-heart murder" for the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in May. The three cops from that group charged with lesser crimes may get off, depending on your reading of the Baltimore City statute that provides the rules for arresting someone armed with a switchblade knife. (The legality of Gray's arrest may hinge on the blade in question, but attorneys are a long way from discussing such minutiae in court. The future of the three others charged with more heinous crimes that led to Gray's death is far from certain.)

Larry Kobilinsky, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, says Mosby's actions represent the most glaring example of politics pervading prosecutorial discretion. Baltimore wanted an indictment, so Mosby handed one down.

"Prosecutors want to be elected, right?" he says, noting the popularity of Mosby's push for an indictment. "I think in Baltimore, you have a real push of politics into the prosecutor's office."

Both Deters and Mosby ultimately relied on grand juries to reach true bills of indictment, recommending the cops in each case be charged. This falls in line with a high success rate of prosecutors who push jurors toward a conclusion, according to Trachtenberg. (Hence the saying a prosecutor could get a grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich.") Nearly every time a prosecutor believes someone should be indicted for a crime, a grand jury goes along. In McCulloch's case, the rule cut the opposite way: He didn't explicitly recommend that the grand jury indict Wilson, and therefore they didn't.

Deters and Mosby made decisions that not only aligned with nationwide calls for the cops responsible to be indicted, but clamoring on the part of the substantial black communities in both cities.

For all prosecutors, though, police shootings represent a no-win situation of sorts, according to Jeffrey Fagan, an expert on criminal justice at Columbia Law School.

In the case of Wilson, when a grand jury fails to indict, it is "likely to reinforce cynicism in those communities where victims of police shootings come from," Fagan says. Meanwhile, "for police, their sense of alienation from political entities that are more inclined to criticize them than praise them will also be reinforced."

In his essay, Trachtenberg makes the argument that McCulloch should have recognized the public mistrusted his ability to impartially provide evidence to the Ferguson grand jury and let another prosecutor take over. Trachtenberg notes the back and forth between McCulloch and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, who had the power to remove McCulloch from the case and appoint a special prosecutor. At one point during this public ritual of blame-shifting, McCulloch urged Nixon to "stand up, man."

But according to Trachtenberg, justice would not have been served if Wilson had been indicted. That might have bolstered the community's trust in the prosecutor, but even the rage on display in Ferguson following the grand jury announcement wasn't enough to prompt the electoral action necessary to kick McCulloch out of office. Efforts to defeat him in a November election by supporting a write-in candidate failed miserably and McCulloch, who ran unopposed, took 95 percent of the vote.

So where could an independent prosecutor come from? Kobilinsky argues that a prosecutor from a nearby county could be just as mistrusted as McCulloch himself. "Everybody knows everybody," in legal circles, as Kobilinsky puts it.

The only answer, Kobilinsky and Fagan agree, comes in one of the recently announced policy positions of the Black Lives Matter movement: independent investigations.

"Independent prosecutors may be the only workable solution," Fagan says. "Whether standing or ad hoc for each case, there has to be independence to insulate against the politics."

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In June of 1978 on a Saturday night I was playing poker with three friends. It was a typical Saturday night, and we smoked a joint, during which I drank a glass of water. Within a minute of finishing, I remember getting up from the table, going to the kitchen, getting one more glass of water at which point I turned around, lost my sense of vision and gravity and then blacked out. I learned later that I fell headfirst onto the table with all of its ashtrays and glasses. In doing so I cut a four-inch gash through the left side of my jaw. I woke up (I was told) ten minutes later, at which point I could already hear the ambulance sirens approaching the house. Oddly, I was no longer stoned. I was clear as day and totally lucid.

As fate would have it, my father was the back-up on-call doctor at the hospital that night. You can imagine. His pager called him halfway through a restaurant dinner my parents were having with friends. I can imagine how pissed he must have been to be interrupted, only to hear, Well, Dr. Coupland, it's actually your own son. You might want to stitch him up.

I wasn't a druggie kid; I wasn't a problem child. I just happened to be smoking pot at that magical moment in Canadian pot history when THC counts in BC bud went from the buzz equivalent of Nyquil to the narcotized equivalent of Oxycontin—a thousand-fold increase in potency that was never actually mentioned anywhere in the press at the time; the press instead focused almost entirely on the pathetic US government attempts to destroy the Mexican weed trade by spraying crops with a herbicide called paraquat. While nobody looked, BC dope growers were quietly hybridizing their crops for THC in the same way monks hybridized strawberries for size and juiciness, and sweet peas for their ability to prove genetic theories. THC counts exploded in the late 1970s. You heard all kinds of lies about the pot that was going around—Maui Wowie or Kona Gold or "the best Mexican" or what have you, but nobody smuggled pot into BC at that time, and that hasn't changed. Almost all bud in BC is grown in borderline industrial conditions, often overseen by gifted horticulturists.

Pot's presence in Vancouver is everywhere. It took root in the 1960s when the city became Canada's equivalent to hippie San Francisco, and from the 1970s onward, abundant cheap electrical power allowed for an indoor grow-op culture that continues to flourish to this day. The city currently has over 100 medical pot dispensaries, and when it comes to drug law enforcement, the local police and the RCMP have prioritized their focus on the tsunami of hardcore drugs arriving through the city's port. The tacit agreement in the city is no enforcement of the nation's pot laws. In 2011, four of Vancouver's former mayors endorsed a coalition calling for an end to pot-related violence in Canada. "Marijuana prohibition is—without question—a failed policy," they said. Bonus: pot is also legalized in BC's downstairs neighbours, Washington and Oregon, and our upstairs neighbour, Alaska. Extra bonus: massive amounts of weed are grown throughout the province's many secluded valleys.

Canadian Cannabis: The Cash Crop

My parents still live in the winding alpine suburban slope above Vancouver in the house I grew up in. About 15 years ago, my mother said to me, "You know, I really can't believe there's all this pot growing around here that you keep talking about." So I said, "Allow me to take you on a tour..." And so we got in my car and started driving and I said, "See over there, see all that water beading and humidity in the window? Grow-op. Over there, the unmowed lawn and huge pile of unmoved shopper papers? Grow-op." And so on; there were dozens then. After being forced to reimagine her neighbourhood, one that in the 1970s had once been the embodiment of Brady Bunch puritanism, my mother said, "Well, at least that explains why we don't get any trick-or-treaters anymore."

Back to 1978: my father came in to Lions Gate Hospital to stitch me up and I'll never forget his expression of disappointment as he stitched up my left chin like it was a cheap moccasin. I was the son who wasn't supposed to be doing this kind of shit, and yet I was. He and I have never talked about that night and probably never will. In families, every member is assigned a role, and as long as we play our role correctly, regardless of the weirdness of that role, everyone is happy. The reason we work so hard to get home for Thanksgiving and Christmas isn't so much that we know what things to discuss with each other; it's because in a properly functioning family, everybody knows exactly what not to discuss with each other. And so my father and I will never discuss that fleeting bad patch simply because I was off-script, and he was right. What was I thinking? The injury, however, largely turned me off pot, but I suppose the scar it left on my chin is also on my psyche. In 2004 I wrote a novel, jPod, in which the main character's parents have a grow op in their basement. A local indie movie I wrote (Everything's Gone Green) also featured parents growing pot. (And all of this was before the TV show Weeds, thank you.)

I was in kindergarten in 1967. I would have been five-and-a-half, and I remember it being specifically 1967 because it was Canada's centennial year and we were all handed mimeographed outlines of the country's new flag design to colour with a red crayon.

One afternoon, the school had a scared-straight-style speaker come in to talk to our class. She looked maybe 800 years old, but in reality, she was probably more like 17 and doing community service. She said hello and that she wanted to talk about her friend, Karen, and so we all leaned in. She told us of how she and Karen were the best of friends, and of what a good gal she was and then she said: "But then Karen took acid."

I know, using the word "acid" with kindergarten students? Seriously?

But what happened to Karen then? What happened then?

"Karen took the acid. And she got high. And then something happened in her brain and her body froze."

Huh?

"That's right. She was trapped inside her body. She was a prisoner. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak, she couldn't even communicate by blinking her eyes. She was completely frozen inside her body and yet the doctors absolutely confirmed she would never, ever, ever be able to communicate anything with the outside world."

Screams. Shrieks. Wailing.

I mean, what the fuck were these scared straight people thinking?

But...

...But I have to say, it really worked. We were the only kindergarten year to ever get the "Karen" lecture, but directly because of it my fellow classmates were the drug-wimpiest, most socially low-octane birth cohort to ever pass through the West Vancouver School District Number 45. We were, in the most programmatic sense of the term, scared straight. As a result I've never done coke or acid or ecstasy or MDMA or G or pretty much most recreational drugs. Thanks a lot, Karen.

To this day, if I ever encounter a social drug, all I see is poor little Karen with locked-in syndrome in some forgotten wing of a forgotten rehab ward of a forgotten institution in some part of Vancouver that nobody ever goes to and nobody ever will ...and 30 years after that scared straight lecture I wrote a novel, Girlfriend in a Coma, in which the coma patient is named Karen. I never actually made this connection until writing these words here now. The human soul is sneaky.

Sneaky human soul.

Clueless Doug.

April 20 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Photo via Flickr user unicellular

I mentioned that in 1967 we kindergartners we had been asked to colour in the new Canadian flag. It's not an easy flag to draw; the maple leaf in the middle is more of a corporate clip-art logo than it is, say, a US star or a Japanese rising sun. Three decades later when I was on a book tour in the US and Canada and I handed out index cards and red pens to people attending the event and asked them to draw the Canadian flag. I was thinking a lot about Canadian identity then, and wanted to see how people in both Canada and the US saw it in their minds. And... basically, everyone drew a pot leaf because nobody really knew how to draw a maple leaf. The one truly good flag I got was from a guy in Chicago. I was actually kind of touched by the level of his maple leaf's draftsmanship and he said, "I didn't really do it from my head. I was sitting by the travel book shelf and copied one from a book." These days, of course, iPhones and Androids would render this drawing experience pointless.

Thinking of maple leaves and trees, the house I grew up in has a relatively unusual deep red large-leaved sugar maple in the southeast corner of the yard. For this horticultural reason, the lawn beneath it was possibly the most dense psilocybin mushrooming ground in the suburb. My parents never understood this and my mother would come to me and say, "Brian Rath is in the front yard on his knees? What is going on?" Of course, Brian was shrooming, and I'd have to go kick him off, saying, "Jesus, Brian, my mother's watching you. This looks so creepy." This same scenario happened every year and my parents never made the mushroom connection. (But he said he was doing a "science project.")

During the 2010 Winter Olympics, well-dressed Europeans were smoking huge spliffs on downtown Vancouver street corners. This was funny because while pot may be tacitly legal here, good taste suggests you ought to be slightly more discreet. But what is discretion? Who knows? Nothing makes a bottle of booze look more like a bottle of booze than a brown paper bag. And what is good taste? It's anyone's call.

April 20 is Vancouver's official 420 Day (obviously). At 4:20 in the afternoon, the city slows to a crawl while everybody downtown gets, essentially, baked. It's largely something fun, and the radio stations forecast a traffic "carmageddon," which usually adds about three minutes to the average commute.

In May of 2014 I was installing a show in the Vancouver Art Gallery and people smoking weed outside the building's air intake system turned the air in the building into a sweet syrupy goo. It felt otherworldly, like tendrils of a living organism were reaching into the building in search of humans to feast upon. It was sci-fi, like the Andromeda Strain... alien and beyond control.

In 2000 Martin Amis was touring for his autobiography, Experience. A publisher friend asked if I'd interview him and I said sure, not realizing what a huge amount of work is involved in interviewing. We were to meet at lunch in a Japanese restaurant downtown, but it was the day Vancouver introduced harsh new no-smoking bylaws and there was a baby kerfuffle finding Martin a room to smoke in where he wouldn't be written up by bylaw enforcement zealots. I walked into what appeared to be a closet with a plastic butterfly palm he looked at me and said, "You're really not going to go through with this, are you?"

With relief I said, "Thank you. No."

We then went to score some weed from a friend, Jamie, and then drove off to allow Martin to enjoy his sunny afternoon on a local beach.

Vancouver, patron city of weed. Photo via Flickr user Brian Fagan

Half a year ago I was on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver and fate put me beside someone I knew socially from home, a man famous for his sunny disposition. I'd had a terrible day and so I asked my friend, "You always seem to be in a good mood, and I'm always in a terrible mood. How do you do it? What's your secret?"

He said, "I'm always in a terrible mood, too. But what I do is this..." and he opened his jacket to reveal a collection of thin plastic tubes with spray nozzles filled with very dark brown liquid, pot syrup, basically. He took one out and spritzed the back of his throat. "My wife and I make it. Try some."

"But I haven't smoked pot in 25 years."

"It's not smoking, though, is it?"

"You have a point."

Spritz-spritz. This was over Lake Superior. The next thing I remember the cleaning staff on the ground in Vancouver were nudging me to get out of my seat so they could vacuum beneath it.

I've smoked pot maybe ten or 12 times in my life. The last time I smoked it was actually 24 years before the flight from Toronto, in the spring of 1991. I went with friends to see Reveen the Impossiblist at a local theatre. Reveen was one of those guys who calls people up on stage and hypnotizes them and makes them cluck like chickens and that kind of thing. We actually wanted to be singled out by him but he didn't choose any of us. He'd been doing this for decades and could probably tell we'd smoked up from a hundred feet away.

For the first half of the show everything was magical. He guessed the numbers people had in their heads... he... Oh my God, this is the most astonishing thing I've ever seen anybody ever do!

And then came intermission, and the pot wore off and suddenly we were sitting in a room with people who may or may not have been genuinely hypnotized and acting like chickens. Within a minute we bolted out the door. My disillusionment with magic melted into my disillusion with pot and that was that.

I don't know if people are improved through pot. I think people are helped by pot, but not necessarily improved. I just read the last sentences and they seem like the sort of statements that would rapidly be upvoted/downvoted on Reddit. Help? Improve? Palliate? Damage? Cripple? Liberate? Transform?

What drugs do to us is so broad, and here in 2015 there have never been so many mood options available to so many human beings. But then, what's a drug and what's not? We have legacy substances like pot and opiates, which our species co-evolved with, and then we have psychotropic pharmaceuticals which have exploded in the past three decades and map onto nothing that's ever existed in this universe. Think about this: there is no other place in the entire universe where molecules of, say, Effexor or Wellbutrin exist. None. Nowhere. In the entire universe. That's really insane. And cool.

Many of these new "pharmaceuticals" have turned into recreational drugs, and some recreational drugs have become medicalized. It's blurry. And then there are drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, which some people use to "super focus"... and maybe this is an instance of drugs actually improving people. I love that Bradley Cooper movie, Limitless, in which he uses all of his brain potential to the max. It's the way I felt in elementary and high school, long before the real world beat me down with a stick and I realized that intelligence is also about emotions and empathy.

In the 1990s I began noticing people in altered states of being which didn't really seem "stoned" or "high" but rather, merely medicated in some way. People were suddenly "different." Quieter. Louder. Raunchier. Boozier. More subdued. Gappier. Whatever. But they were recognizably not in moods as we once understand moods to be, and I figured it out that we really had entered the smorgasbord era of drugs, which is actually kind of interesting and not necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else, all those people who formerly would have been hidden beneath multiple blankets in dark rooms were at least out in the world experiencing life. Maybe not to the max, but with better than options that had been available historically.

I've also known a lot of suicides in my life. I'd say 20. In each instance drugs were involved as direct or indirect triggers, except for one time when it was ambiguous—Brian Rath, the high school shroomer and pothead who was so high he passed out in his van and died of carbon monoxide poisoning from the heater. He was a nice guy, but he was paranoid and didn't trust living around other people and could only live in a van by himself. I don't think it was suicide. I have no idea.

One thing I have seen many times over the years is younger guys who smoke a lot of pot and it activates (I'm guessing) a genetic predilection for paranoia which, under assault from high volumes of THC, triggers late adolescent THC-induced paranoia. For the next decade these guys (and it really does seem to be guys only) go random and make random/strange life choices and then, by 30, their brains cool down but by then they have to live with the decisions they made while being paranoid, and it's almost never easy.

Pot plants, being social. Photo via Flickr user MarihuanayMedicina

Here's a Vancouver story: In the spring of 1997, some kids in downtown Vancouver gave me three pot seeds, like Jack and the Beanstalk. I got home, planted them in little pots and watered them and they sprouted like a third grade class project on bean sprouts. A visiting friend of mine, Ian, looked at the sprouts and said, "Doug, that's not how you grow it. Pot is social, and you can't just keep it by itself. It needs to be around other plants. Pot is very social."

This was before an extended trip to England, and so I put the three sprouts, each in their own pot, down on a rock beside the creek on the bottom end of the property, surrounded by a cedar tree, sweet-scented astilbe, vine maples, moss, and a few other regional plants. Two months later I returned to Vancouver and walked in the front door to learn that Princess Diana had died in a car crash, and this sucked up all of my attention. And then around sunset I looked out over the deck and into the creek area to see that my three little sprouts had morphed into dense shaggy THC monsters. It was a real shocker. I mean, these plants were like plush mink coats of dope.

In the absence of any other plan I continued to let them grow, and by mid-September I harvested them, cutting them off at the base and hanging them upside down (thank you, internet for these directions) and then... and then I tried to find someone in my universe who'd want a huge supply of monster killer pot for free. I didn't smoke the stuff, and nobody else in my universe seemed to smoke pot. I went through my phone book and everyone declined one by one...

...just had a kid

...doing a cleanse

...too old for that shit

...more into mountain biking these days

...pot? Seriously? You?

Basically I couldn't give away a five-grand trove of kick-ass weed. Donating it to hospices was too weird for technical reasons, and in the end I took it to my parents' house to incinerate it in the family fireplace and watched it go up the chimney. Buyers' market.

We all know what gay-dar is, but there is also something called drug-dar, and I don't have it. To this day I can walk into any social situation and have no idea of the quantity and quality of drugs everyone is taking. I just take everyone at face value, while they must look at me and say, "Doug has no drug-dar," and they move on to the next person more likely to map onto their drug wants and needs. It makes me feel foolish not to know whatever the signals and cues are.

I drink a lot. At the moment it's still charming but I'll probably have to quit someday. I like drinking because it's predictable. Regardless of the source, I know exactly how to nurse a buzz along for hours. It's wonderful. In the dozen times I smoked pot, it made me feel different every time—why would I want that? Besides, who knows how strong it's going to be, and who knows what synthetic agrotoxins are, or aren't, mixed in with it?

I smoked cigarettes from 1979 to 1988 and I loved it. I was a good smoker, but I blew out my left lung cliff jumping in Howe Sound during my senior high school year, and when I die, it'll probably be because of something to do with my lungs. They're just not the best lungs (lung-and-a-half, really), so I quit smoking on Halloween 1988, and I have several slip dreams a week. I still smoke; I just haven't had a cigarette since October 31, 1988. Dear tobacco: I miss you.

This piece isn't a gratuitous drug tell-all on my part. I'm illustrating that everybody has their own drug stories that play out across their lives. You have one, too, and it will expand as you age.

I fly a lot, and for years I'd fly over the US looking below at the roads and buildings and think... ski hill? Shopping mall? Golf course? Industrial park? And... and then... and then there were always these strange things down below that looked like electron microscope images of viruses but they were... I had no idea. Poultry farms? Amazon distribution centers? University campuses?

They were prisons.

People seem to love pot. That can't be denied, and legalized pot is obviously at the tipping point in the US and Canada, but why did it take so long? Everyone touts how much tax money can be made from regulating the stuff, and they're obviously correct. But I think a co-factor in the current pot legalization warp is that Americans are seeing that 1.5 percent of their population is currently living in a jail cell and the citizenry is understanding that this is simply nuts. Remember, Prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s wasn't so much about booze being evil; it was more of a simple solution to stopping the complex problem of domestic violence and to make life safer for women. To look at booze by itself is not the most useful way to look at Prohibition, and ditto for pot.

The sick thing about prisons is that, to a point, incarcerated people are very good for the economy: prison jobs, legal fees, construction contracts, and political pork. As a bonus, when a government has you criminalized, they then have a permanent, excellent tool for controlling you. From an evil point of view, criminalizing as many people as possible is very very good for capitalism and for those in power. Until it unravels.

In 2015 taxpayers woke up to the fact that industrial-grade incarceration is too expensive. Too many people in jail, too many people about to go into, or back into, jail... and the tax base can't support it any more. There's a finite limit to how many citizens you can incarcerate before the system falls apart—and that magic number would appear to be about 1.5 percent. Many of these incarcerated 1.5-percenters are incarcerated on pot charges. Decriminalize pot and suddenly you empty your prisons. Your tax bill is lowered, and many of your people are freed and once again their lives become useful and meaningful.

Odd that the war on drugs is ending up being cured by drugs.

There's another co-factor in the legalization of pot and this factor is called Dow. Or Cargill. Or Dupont. Or Bayer. Pot became as potent as it now is because of hybridization, but hybridization has probably reached its limits, but then what about genetically modified pot? Think about it. I'll bet you a hundred trillion dollars that at this very moment, Dow, Monsanto, Dole, Coca-Cola, BASF, Archer-Daniels Midland are throwing every spare dollar in their budget at maxing out some super new GM pot that has so much THC it drips like a chocolate fountain, but that's not necessarily why they'd be GM'ing pot. They'd be GM'ing pot so that it requires less refrigeration during shipping. Or maybe it'll be pot you can irrigate with saltwater. Or maybe it'll be pot that's resistant to Roundup and glycophosates, or pot that grows a hundred feet tall. But the moment they come up with the right combo, is the moment pot goes legal in hold-out states like Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Imagine: GM pot that can sit in freight containers for up to 180 days without refrigeration with no noticeable decomposition! GM pot is most definitely waiting in the wings to take over from GM corn.

I just googled "GMO pot" and the first hit was a blog article saying that another news article elsewhere that stated Monsanto had created GM pot was a hoax. Genuine LOL.

Cannabis Station dispensary in Denver, Colorado. Photo via Flickr user Jeffrey Beall

It also occurs to me that the days of pot being sold through medical dispensaries is soon to vanish, if not in a few years, then maybe 15 or 20. Pot will become more of a daily consumer item, and as such, it occurs to me that all of these GMO firms must right now also be lawyering up on every level and lobbying like crazy as they prepare for the inevitable. They're likely at the point of creating names and brands of pot that have yet to actually be GM'd. I'm curious to see if the names they go for are grocery-like (Ranch Dressing) or if they go scientific (Wellbutrin). This makes me think that in-house marketing teams are probably already on the case, too, identifying discrete segments within the pot user base, as well as trying to locate new ones. Old-school hippies. Moms. Emos. Country & Western listeners. Superpatriots. Jocks. Hipsters. Warfare PTSD sufferers. Telemundo viewers. Rapper wannabes. Young professionals. Jimmy Buffet fans. Deadheads—now there's a superbrand just waiting to happen. Of course, not everyone's going to want the same packaging, and remember, whoever gets market share first is probably going to be the most successful and endure the longest. Think Marlboro. It's a Klondike just waiting to start, and it's going to be brutal.

Smoking is actually a pretty clumsy THC delivery system that we use simply because we're familiar with it. Even pot brownies seem hokey in 2015. All sorts of new aesthetics and product categories are likely to emerge. I suspect the future of pot is probably in spritzed pot, like I had in the plane from Toronto to Vancouver, or in THC taste strips, like breath freshening strips. Or vaping. What will its legalized pot packaging look like? The first wave of pot products will probably resemble borderline medical products currently existing, like the tubs of creatine or protein that weightlifters buy at protein shops. The next wave will resemble packaging and labeling in the style of craft beer breweries. The third and long-term packaging may be packaging that looks like Wrigley's gum or Pepto-Bismol. Boring. Quotidian. Part of the landscape. Hi, I'll get two Gatorades, a pack of peppermint Chiclets, and a pack of Parrot Head Spritz vials.

Two years ago I was in a second-hand store in Chile and saw a really strange-looking metal vase—quite low-slung and not like something you'd put roses into. I asked what it was and was told it was a spittoon.

A spittoon.

I'd heard the word used before, but I'd never thought about it much let alone visualized what a spittoon looks like. But up into the middle of the 20th century, American men in both public and private spaces feel the need to spit, they would look at a spittoon and say, "Good. A spittoon. Now I will expel the combination of mucous and tobacco residue inside my mouth into a receptacle on the floor, and I may or may not hit the mark." And then they'd do it.

Like many things from the 20th century, spittoons seem not just barbaric but they also tax the level of credulity of what a reasonably civilized society might consider OK and not OK (apartheid, bathing suits for women, gay anything).

I think pot is at the magic spittoon moment where suddenly it's too hard and too wilfully clueless to pretend that reality isn't reality—whether it's fiscal reality or social reality. I dislike pot. It has literally left me quite scarred. It's permanently damaged people I care for.

But then so has booze. And gambling. And greed. And genetics. And cars. And psychopharmaceuticals. And gravity. And ageing. And the law.

I think people are more smart than they are stupid. If they can handle everything else, then they can probably handle pot—it's a very small leaf to throw into the salad of life. Everything will be just fine.

Douglas Coupland, one of Canada's preeminent authors and artists, has been relentlessly chronicling the future of mass culture for 25 years and has usually been right. He is currently Google's Artist in Residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.

Follow Douglas Coupland on Twitter. Lead image by Ben Ruby.

Jeff Mizanskey, a 62-year-old Missouri man who was sentenced to life in prison without parole on a marijuana-related charge, was released from prison today. He spent two decades behind bars.

Mizanskey was arrested in 1996 for conspiring to sell six pounds of marijuana. He already had two prior drug convictions—one for possession of marijuana, and another for possession and sale of marijuana—at the time of his arrest. Because Missouri had a three strikes law in place at the time, Mizanskey was labeled a "persistent drug offender" and was sentenced to life in prison with no parole.

That same year, California introduced the first medical marijuana program. Now, nearly two decades later, 23 states have medical marijuana programs in place and four states plus Washington, DC, have legalized recreational marijuana. Missouri also repealed their three strikes law in 2014, which led over 390,000 people to sign a petition lobbying for Mizanskey's release.

In May, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon agreed to commute Mizanskey's sentence, which allowed Mizanskey to argue his case before a parole board. The board, agreeing that Mizanskey's sentencing had been harsh, granted him parole. He was released from prison today.

Now, Time reports that Mizanskey plans to spend his time advocating for the reform of marijuana laws. He does not plan to smoke marijuana, as doing so would go against the conditions of his parole.

Genome Soldiers from 'Metal Gear Solid'

"We're conducting exercises with a new type of experimental weapon," says DARPA chief Donald Anderson. It's the opening hours of the original Metal Gear Solid, and Snake has infiltrated the Shadow Moses compound and has just broken into Anderson's holding cell via the air ventilation system above. "A weapon that will change the world," he adds.

Minutes later, Snake checks Anderson's pulse as he lies splayed across the concrete floor. He's dead. A heart attack, seemingly.

Hours later, Snake finds Anderson's body moved to a different location, rapidly decomposed and swarming with flies. Something doesn't fit but Snake can't quite place what it is.

In hindsight, the opening hours of Metal Gear Solid are some of the best the entire series has to offer. Like many others at the time, the PlayStation essential was my first introduction to director Hideo Kojima's tactical espionage master class, and its intricate plot and multidimensional characters were like nothing I'd experienced before.

What Snake struggles to ascertain as he observes Anderson's rotting corpse is how quickly the ex-DARPA chief has begun to spoil. If he's not long dead then how is it possible for his remains be in such a state? Well, it turns out that he's actually been wasting away for days after being fatally tortured by Revolver Ocelot, and the man Snake seemingly watched snuff it by virtue of a dodgy ticker was in actual fact Decoy Octopus—FOXHOUND's master of disguise and shape-shifting.

Oh, and it wasn't a natural heart attack either, it was cardiac arrest as a result of FOXDIE, a designer virus integral to The Pentagon's biological weapons program. FOXDIE hijacks the target's white blood cells, identifies pre-programmed strands of DNA, and then produces cytokines—forcing a heart attack upon the subject.

Discovering Anderson's actual corpse is almost trivial, but this early revelation cemented Kojima's genius—a brilliance that would effortlessly shine throughout the rest of the game and the series.

Anderson, or not Anderson, speaks to Snake in Shadow Moses (screencap via YouTube)

Anderson, or rather, Octopus's mention of a "weapon that will change the world" was in reference to nuclear juggernaut Metal Gear Rex, yet FOXDIE posed an equally terrifying prospect in Kojima's fictitious/reality crossover—it very much felt like a weapon that could change the world. Furthermore, Metal Gear Solid's Genome Soldiers—a genetically altered troop whose makeup has been manipulated to pose a formidable force on the battlefield—provide a glimpse into the Brave New World, Huxley-like mind of Kojima.

Needless to say Kojima is a smart man and an excellent storyteller for the most part, but that's not to say Metal Gear Solid (and the wider series) is without plot holes. Given how much his games offer players, though, most of his discrepancies are easier overlooked. To this end, it seemed obvious Kojima would've based his game's apocryphal elements around fact, yet I was curious to find out just how realistic his lore is, some 17 years after introducing the Solid series. Since 1998, the USA has engaged in two long-standing wars, and simply googling genetic engineering produces multiple news stories. Just how far-fetched are Genome Soldiers and FOXDIE?

When I figuratively sat down with Dr Steven Block—a biological weapons expert from Stanford University—via Skype, we spoke for 70 minutes. In this time I asked just four questions, two of which were directly about FOXDIE and Genome Soldiers. I ended up with pages and pages of transcription that I've whittled down to what you can read below.

As you might imagine, it gets a bit technical from hereon in (assuming you were keeping up with the games-specific science), but nonetheless serves to highlight how prescient the first Metal Gear Solid really was on its release back in 1998.

Article continues after the video below

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VICE: FOXDIE, from the Metal Gear Solid series, is a virus that enters macrophages in the target's bloodstream, then it uses enzymes to attach to a DNA sequence that it has been "programmed" to recognize. Once the virus is attached to the DNA, the macrophage starts to produce cytokines, and ultimately causes the target to have a heart attack via programmed cell death, apoptosis. Is there any truth, in terms of what exists today, or possibility in this idea?
Dr Steven Block: Let me talk about the scientific basis for each of those pieces. Each of those pieces that you just described has a basis in fact. Is there a virus, for example, that could target white blood cells and get into them? Yes, a good example is AIDS. There are a number of leukemia viruses that, in fact, have specific receptors that are found on your white blood cells and use this as a point of entry. Is that part of it true? Yes, viruses exist that could do that.

Next question: Once the DNA or the RNA or whatever the device is using, once its genome is injected into the host's cell, can it locate a specific sequence on the surface on the DNA of that cell? The answer to that is also yes. You might've heard about this new technology called Crispr? It's not the only example, but it's the most practical as it's been brought further along in terms of technology.

It's an example of technology that was developed in evolution by bacteria and viruses to try to find specific sequences in the house. And so, Crispr can be programmed with very short segments of DNA that you provide and can be programmed to target a complementary sequence in the genome.

In other words, if I wanted to go to point A on the human genome, I can make it go to point A and—if in a different virus—I want to make it go to point B, I can make it go to point B. We know that sets of enzymes exist which once created and given the right instructions, so to speak, in the form of a short DNA molecule, can actually target a specific sequence in the genome. So, does that part of the technology exist? Absolutely, yes.

Once it's found that place, could it, for example, either active its own program to make cytokines or activate the intrinsic program in the white blood cells? (White blood cells can also make cytokines; different types of white blood cells are specialized in making different kinds of cytokines.)

The last part of the scenario that you gave is that the gene entered the white blood cells—it targeted the DNA—and there's technology for that. Boosted cytokine production—the technology exists for that, and caused lethality in the target. Is all of that possible? It's absolutely possible. But putting all of those pieces together and making them work as a practical weapon? It's a tall order.

All the little pieces need to work together like clockwork, the thing can't backfire or be self-terminating, the host can't reject it. That part is actually non-trivial. Does the technology exist for producing a genetically engineered weapon which would do all these pieces? Yes.

Has anybody done this? Absolutely not. Would it be trivial to do? It's not as easy as you think.

A bunch of dead Genome Soldiers, from 'Metal Gear Solid' (via the Metal Gear Wiki)

One of the symptoms protagonist Snake suffers from once infected with FOXDIE is accelerated aging: He becomes stiff, his hair goes gray and then white, his skin becomes wrinkled and so forth. Is there any possibility that such viruses could bring on these symptoms?
That's the most far-fetched of all the things you've mentioned up to now. There are diseases which produce Early Aging Progeria—some of those people don't live to see their teenage years, and their hair falls out or goes gray, they look aged even though they're young. We know that, at least on a mild level, that stress can cause premature aging—when people say, "It made your hair go gray," that's not totally a fable.

The fact of the matter is that being exposed to large amounts of stress can make your hair go prematurely gray for reasons we don't fully understand. Whether that's really aging or not, it's a stress response. Another response to stress is that you could have a stroke or a heart attack, but does your skin suddenly start to wrinkle, your hair suddenly go gray and fall out, develop osteoarthritis, and all of these other symptoms, that take many years to develop—can this happen over the course of a few months? I'm not aware of any examples of that.

Everything that you've mentioned so far is precedent in the literature, but this one is unprecedented to my knowledge.

New on Motherboard: The Technological Alt-History of Metal Gear Solid

In the same game, a troop of soldiers are named the Genome Soldiers and are organized to cope with terrorist incidents specifically involving weapons of mass destruction. Its members are strengthened through gene therapy, having either been injected with the "genes" of a deceased veteran leader, or otherwise having their nucleotide alignment rearranged to resemble this leader's DNA. In essence, this is obviously genetic modification but from a weapons or defense standpoint. Could genetic modification to make soldiers better at fighting, with augmented senses, reflexes, and combat skills? Could this happen in real life?
Is it possible to genetically engineer someone so that they're immune to various types of viral attack? The answer is in some cases, yes.

A virus usually tries to target something that's important, rather than something that's not important. That said, is it possible to genetically engineer people to either be immune to diseases or to have various strengths against various diseases? Again, this is one of these things that's easier to do on paper.

The fact of the matter, though, as you know, is that if gene therapy were really practical today, everyone would be doing it. It's the trillion-dollar question for the biomedical industry at the moment. For many years people have been trying to figure out how to change the genome of people on a permanent basis, which would render them unsusceptible to diseases. If we could target the genes of viruses—diabetes, ALS—and fix them, or get rid of the ones that cause bad problems, we could make everybody immune to a host of diseases that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time.

They've then tried to put in the molecules that would cause those genes to get spliced in appropriate ways. They get this to work in cell culture, sometimes in animals, but then they try it out on humans and sometimes it works, but others it doesn't—sometimes so much so that the person dies. Practical gene therapy doesn't really exist yet because none of it has actually worked. We always seem to be just around the corner from making gene therapy practical, but I should also point out that we've been just around the corner from learning how to stop cancer for the last 50 years, and yet we haven't been able to stop cancer.

Back to your Genome Soldiers – it may become possible. When and if gene therapy becomes possible, then the sky's the limit. It may become possible to produce people who are immune to a host of diseases. It may become possible to cure people of genetic diseases that they have.

Could I imagine Genome Soldiers? Yes, I think anyone who's followed the literature could probably imagine this, but I don't think we're there yet. I think this is, for the moment, a little bit of science fiction. Gene therapy is certainly going to be with us in the next 100 years, but the real question is if it's going to with us the next ten to 20 years. I wouldn't want to make a bet on it either way.

It's worth pointing out that molecular biology, like any tool, can be used for good or evil. The reason why people are investing millions of dollars in this is because the good it could do could be fabulous. Of course, once we have the tools to rid people of disease, the same tool could make people come down with disease, so it's a double-edged sword.

I wanted to point out that this is rarely brought up, because the technology for doing good things, the technology for resisting biological weapons, is being developed at the same time and is often the same technology as producing black biology or biological weapons. So what I think you can anticipate in the future is kind of a war of escalation. Sure, somebody can produce a biological weapon, but the same technology that produces that weapon might be used to fight that weapon.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is out now and is, by all accounts, pretty bloody amazing. We've some stuff up on it, which you can read here.

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British neurologist and author, Oliver Sacks pictured in London on March 10, 1983. Photo by United News/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Oliver Sacks received 10,000 letters a year from his readers. One of those letters should have been from me. Even if he wouldn't have responded to it (he only responded to children under ten, prisoners, and the elderly), I owe him a thank-you. He was a lifeline when, alone and suffering, I thought my life was over. And, it seems strange to say, I know he would have loved my headaches.

His book, Migraine, published in 1970 and updated in 1992, was the first book I ever special ordered from a bookstore. I was 15 years old and it quickly became a bible of sorts. Although written for the layperson, it's not one of his breezy, readable case histories of people with strange ailments such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Rather, it's focused on understanding the headache itself—a clinician's thorough overview of a still poorly understood neurological disease.

I didn't learn from my neurologist how to manage my fear of migraine or my impending sense of doom. I wasn't given a toolkit to understand my symptoms or side effects. Dr. Sacks gave me that.

In it, he giddily describes meeting with patients and realizing that migraines were much more than a single-type of headache. "I was at first disconcerted, but later delighted, at the complexity of the histories I received," he explains. "Here was something which could pass, in a few minutes, from the subtlest disorders of perception, speech, emotion, and thought, to every conceivable vegetative symptom. Every patient with classical migraine opened out, as it were, into an entire encyclopedia of neurology."

That's me. An entire encyclopedia of neurology. Here are some of the types and sub-types of migraine I have suffered from: classic migraines, common migraines, food and caffeine migraines, menstrual migraines, stress migraines, let-down migraines (migraines that happen after finishing a particularly stressful task—often called "weekend migraines"—mine hit after turning in homework or finishing tests). I sometimes have migraines when it is a humid day and about to rain. I have migraines when I think about migraines too much. I can unintentionally summon them. In fact, as I finished writing this I started to feel one creep into the background of my head. A shadow. And I made myself get up and work at something else to try and shake it off.

Here are some of the side effects of migraines I have experienced: sensitivity to light, sound, and smell. Sharpened taste. Dulled tasted. Severe nausea and vomiting. Weight loss. Bloating. Eye socket pain. A range of hallucinations and aura: scintillating scotomata, negative scotomata, blurred vision, phosphenes, paraesthesiae. Déjà vu. An impending sense of doom. A looming. A feeling of being followed by shadows. Post-migraine euphoria.

Migraines are difficult to define. Sacks spends most of Migraine addressing the broad range of symptoms and types. "Migraine," he says, "is traditionally described as a violent throbbing pain in one temple, and not infrequently takes this form. It is impossible, however, to specify a constant site, quality, or intensity for in the course of a specialized practice one will encounter all conceivable varieties of head-pain in the context of migraine." Migraines can be relatively straightforward headaches or they can be brutal dictators of your life. They can be muted or overload your circuitry with bizarre sensations and wreaking a havoc on your senses. The first time I encountered my migraine symptoms I thought I was dying. Sacks somehow, in Migraine, offers a sense of wonder to sufferers—as if he were the circus grandmaster directing an audience to several different special tricks our disease allows the brain to do.

Migraines are not rare—37 million Americans suffer from them. Classic migraines with aura are much less common. But despite the millions of sufferers of migraine in all forms, funding for research is limited and it remains a poorly understood, difficult to treat, and often debilitating disease. Before I had migraines, I didn't know what a migraine was. As an adult, I've known many migraineurs with a wide variety of symptoms and severities, but I've met few who had them as frequently or as young as I did.

When I graduated in 1995, it was, in some ways, remarkable. I missed 80 days of 180 days of my senior year of high school. I had a bad wisdom-teeth removal surgery that still gives me nightmares. I had an obscenely serious case of chicken pox that quarantined me for two weeks. I had a severe stomach bug and lost so much weight I hit celebrity skinny right before senior prom. But combine all these challenging illnesses together and they had nothing on what my brain was going through. Beginning around 14 or 15, I experienced three to five classic migraines a week for well over a decade.

I spent the last year of high school in a darkened bedroom with a cold compress on my head. When the headaches first started years earlier, I had been misdiagnosed. I was told I was stressed. I was told I had sinus problems. I felt dismissed. The pain was severe and unresponsive to over-the-counter pain relievers. I imagined stabbing a fork into my brain to relieve pressure. But when the auras started to accompany them, I was finally referred to a specialist.

Fractured triangles and circles across my field of vision, lines with spikes shooting out of them warping my eyesight into what appeared to me as a poorly shot horror movie. Sharp sparks of rainbow colors shooting and swirling and moving across the landscape. Called auras, the hallucinations preceded the spiky, seemingly unending sharp pain of a headache.

These auras, I eventually learned, were my warnings. Depending on their severity I would have about half an hour to find a safe space to be. I needed darkness desperately. The longer I went without it, the more pain and greater the promise of vomiting. High school was not a safe space. There were no dark rooms or quiet spaces. Light was florescent and poisonous. There were teachers and administrators who thought I was just being dramatic. Sometimes, fearing opposition, and with an aura turning school hallways into a field of shooting stars, I just walked out the door and walked home, having my mother call the school and tell them she'd picked me up. For over a decade of my life, from high school, through college, and several years after, migraines ran the show.

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At some point in tenth grade, I was finally sent to a neurologist, a man who looked uncannily like Bill Clinton and had a "Don't Panic" sign hung on the wall behind his office desk. He prescribed me Imitrex, an important migraine drug, only available in injectable form at that time. That day, I learned how to give myself shots in my arm. The needle hurt, the medication burned and often left me bruised, and the drug sent waves of nausea curling up and down through my body as if I were riding on a boat in a storm with 20-foot waves. If Imitrex had worked better for me, I would have been able to continue my day. But it knocked me down most of the time, almost as bad as the headaches themselves.

Eventually, Dr. Bill Clinton prescribed me a giant bottle of hydrocodone. The pills worked, sort of, but left me doped and prone to what are called "rebound headaches." As soon as the drug would wear off, an aura would creep back across my eyes and the process would start all over again. I learned to use the painkiller sparingly—primarily if the migraine happened at night, when I could sleep off both the pain and drug. I learned to spend days alone in the dark. And sadly, I never found a drug that truly shook off my migraine pain without its own severe side effects.

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Despite his entreaty not to panic, I didn't learn from my neurologist how to manage my fear of migraine or my impending sense of doom. I wasn't given a toolkit to understand my symptoms or side effects. Dr. Sacks gave me that. In Migraine, he quoted Montaigne, "Fear of this disease used to terrify you, when it was unknown to you." And he explained that people who read his book will not be cured, "but at least he will know what he has, and what it means, and will no longer be terrified."

Things have changed for me in some ways. I still suffer from severe chronic illness, and sadly, I still spend many days in bed. But migraines are rare for me now. I feel lucky to have under a dozen a year.

I can't say that I am a graceful sick person. I have spent so much of my life responding to illness, that I am constantly trying and usually failing to stuff bitterness and anger under my bed and out of sight. Illness and chronic pain has affected my career, my friendships, my ability to care for my family, and altered my sense of self. Reading Dr. Sacks was and will continue to be a wake-up call for me. I am alive. I am breathing. Get up. Try again. You're remarkable in your abnormality. Don't be afraid to celebrate the strangeness of it all.

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