All photos by Liam Turbett

When anti-abortion activists gathered in Glasgow for a somber commemoration last night, to mark the 48th anniversary of abortion being legalized in Britain, they probably weren't expecting to spend the night tucked away behind dozens of feminists and pro-choice campaigners. But unfortunately for those at the vigil, organized by the Catholic Church-linked Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), that's exactly what happened. This came just weeks after it was announced that control of abortion law is set to be passed to the Scottish Parliament and already, it seems, the battle lines are forming.

Although Scotland's new powers won't come until next year, rival motions on abortion have already been launched in the Scottish Parliament, with the Greens urging their fellow MSPs to commit to defending women's right to choose, while an SNP backbencher—John Mason—stuck one up recognizing "the fundamental rights of babies to be protected." Given Mason's Christian fundamentals and track record of trying to clamp down on gay rights and install creationism on the Scottish curriculum, his latest antics haven't been hugely surprising.

But Scotland's lingering religious right—who over the past two decades have seen their influence slip away when it comes to social issues—have been looking for an excuse to pick a fight over abortion and now, it appears, they finally have their chance.

Although SPUC had long planned to assemble for their Glasgow vigil last night, it took on a new significance following the devolution announcement a couple of weeks ago. The current Scottish Government has confirmed they have no plans to amend the existing legislation but nonetheless, pro-choice activists weren't taking any chances. Gathering in George Square at dusk, they were there to greet a confused audience of nuns and graying churchgoers, who at first were probably wondering why their pro-life vigil was making such a racket. But on closer inspection, the noise was coming from their foes—the vigil was effectively surrounded and hidden behind an array of pro-choice banners and hand-drawn signs, the sound of prayers and religious readings was barely audible above the chants of "my body, my choice" and "pro-life, that's a lie! You don't care if women die!"

Despite the chants about pro-lifers not caring if women die, and the tit-for-tat responses being shouted back about pro-choicers being murderers who don't care about babies, it all remained surprisingly calm. After about an hour, the 200 or so pro-lifers—who spent a lot of time clutching candles, tutting loudly, and praying intently, below a big banner of the Virgin Mary—marched off toward a nearby church. As they headed off, I was keen to find out what they made of the night's surprise counter-protest, but most were reluctant to offer anything more than platitudes about how important it is to protect life. Few seemed to have figured out a political strategy for overturning the Abortion Act either. "We'll do it through prayer," offered one older woman.

Watch: The Fake Abortion Clinics of America

"Life is so precious. Obviously the protesters are allowed to have their opinion but it saddens me to see women on it," said Grace, a young woman who had traveled from Paisley for the anti-abortion rally. "It's the creation of their body that provides life and it's sad that they can't see the worth in that."

I asked Grace how she had gotten involved with the evening's vigil. "My dad runs it," she replied.

The counter-protesters were in a buoyant mood though and felt they had sent a strong message that they won't be complacent when it comes to defending the right to choose.

"Tonight went really well. We were here to send a message that not everyone in Scotland thinks the same as those at the vigil," Emily Beever, NUS Scotland's women's officer, and one of the counter-demo organizers, told me. "It's absolutely crucial that women make their voices heard and put women's rights at the center of this debate."

That debate is now in full flow. Just yesterday, the Free Church of Scotland decided it would be clever to compare abortion with, of all things, slavery, using a newspaper column to argue that people in the future will look back on the two with a similar sense of horror. All their chat about the future seems weird though, given that what they're proposing—abolishing the Abortion Act—would drag women's rights in Scotland back at least 50 years. Others have also joined the fray, including the prominent commentator and Observer columnist Kevin McKenna. An "unequivocal" opponent of the right to choose, he's recently been fretting about "atheistic orthodoxy" and Christians being denied a voice by the "intolerant secularism" of modern Scotland.

No doubt those who share McKenna's views will see Thursday's demo on these terms—the right of Christians to hold a peaceful vigil against what they see as the "evil" of abortion being drowned out by an intolerant rabble. Their pro-choice opponents, which according to one recent poll amounts to 75 percent of the Scottish population, might respond that a more accurate definition of tolerance probably involves allowing women a say over their own bodies.

Follow Liam on Twitter.

This is a picture of a model. We don't know if she has herpes or not. Photo via Pixabay

This week the World Health Organization published figures showing that two-thirds of the world's population under 50—that's 3.7 billion people—have the herpes virus. That's most of your friends and probably you.

The most common type of herpes—and the one that two-thirds of us have—is the simple herpes virus (AKA type 1, or HSV-1). Traditionally, this is what caused cold sores. Less common is HSV-2, which traditionally caused genital herpes and is more serious. The WHO report says around 417 million people under the age of 50 have this one.

But now, most people agree the definition is arbitrary. You can get type 1 on your genitals and type 2 on your mouth (especially if you've gone down on someone with it).

"If you have oral sex with a partner when you've got a cold sore, you can give them genital herpes," says Marian Nicholson from the Herpes Virus Association advice center. "But I like to think of it like gardening. You can plant both types of virus in the same spot, but type one tends to do well in a sunny location and type two tends to do well in the shade. Make sense?"

A cold sore can be caused by either types of herpes—and you've probably got one of them. Photo Wikimedia

But if most of us have the virus that causes genital herpes, why don't we all exhibit the physical signs? According to the NHS, eight in 10 people with genital herpes don't even know they have it, as not everyone has a reaction to it.

But what is life like if you do have it and you know about it? We spoke to Shannon, 26, about living her life with genital herpes.

I picked up herpes when I was 22. I was at university doing my masters degree and I had a one-night stand with a guy in my course. We were kind of friends, but then one night we all went to the pub after a lecture and we ended up sleeping together.

The next day I had this burning sensation—I thought it was cystitis. I went to the doctor and he gave me some antibiotics. But it didn't go away. Then, a few days later, I got some blisters on my vagina, all along my lips. I totally freaked out. I thought I was having a gross reaction to the antibiotics. I went back to my GP. He took one look at me and totally panicked. He told me I had herpes and that I needed to go to the GUM clinic asap. When your doctor reacts like it's the end of the world, you think it actually is the end of the world.

The doctor at the GUM clinic was much more reassuring. They said they'd do some swabs. He explained the whole thing about there being two different types of herpes, gave me some leaflets, said, "Don't worry about this, it's really not a big deal. It's so common," and sent me on my way.

I got home and completely spun out. The only thing I knew about herpes was that it was bad. Nobody wants to have herpes, do they? I wasn't a confident person back then. I'd just gotten out of a long-term relationship, which had ended pretty badly, and this guy was the first person I'd slept with since my break-up. I was so angry. The guy I'd shagged was a lot older than me, in his 40s, and I couldn't believe he didn't know he had it. But when I saw how upset he was when I told him, I knew he had no idea. He's not an asshole. I was more pissed off at how unlucky it was. Half my friends were going out screwing around, and nothing happened to them. I was convinced I'd never be able to have normal sex again. Like I'd only be able to have sex with partners who accepted my "disease," or other people who had it too, like it was some big dark secret.

READ ON BROADLY: You Probably Have Herpes, but It's Chill

My test results came back and I found out I had type 1. Even though the difference between type 1 and 2 is now pretty much arbitrary, it did make me feel better. Type 1 is traditionally the one on your face, like cold sores. It's supposed to be less serious and the recurrences aren't as bad. Type 2 traditionally is the genital one and is seen as more serious. But it doesn't really matter, because you can get both types anywhere now.

I told a few friends and their reactions were actually quite positive, given the news. One of my best friends actually had it too and I didn't even know. Since then, two more of my friends have gotten it.

After I was first diagnosed, I developed proper health anxiety. Having herpes does things to your nervous system. At first, I'd get tingling and jabbing sensations in the back of my legs. I was paranoid about it coming back, which it did every few months in the first year or so. Generally, my recurrences are little itchy spots on my vagina, sometimes they go further back toward my ass—women especially tend to get it up there. I was too embarrassed to go to the doctor, so I bought an antiviral drug called Acyclovir from an online chemist for a while. Taking that helped and I hardly ever get outbreaks now—probably only one or two times a year.

Watch: 'Cash Slaves,' about the men who get off on giving dominatrixes huge sums of money.

When I get a recurrence, I can't have sex, because that's when I'm contagious. Loads of people don't even know they have it, though, so that's how it spreads. Either that or they just don't care about passing it on. I've been with my boyfriend for a couple of years now. He doesn't have it, but I wouldn't be surprised if I've passed it on and his body didn't react. We've been careful, but not insanely careful. You know, you're not always thinking when you first get with someone and you want to have sex all the time. I kind of see it like my period now; I get little twinges and I know it's coming. I feel run down and feverish. But, to be honest, I hardly ever think about it now.

I've found that if you tell guys like it's a really bad thing, they'll think it's a bad thing. My boyfriend's really into science, so he very quickly just got that it's actually so minor. I do think about what I'd do if I were ever single again. Would I tell a one-night stand? Probably not, actually, because I don't feel like I'm a risk. I don't want it to be something that defines me.

Names have been changed.

All photos by Grey Hutton

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Venus, the biggest erotic trade fair in the world, has been a Berlin institution for 19 years now. Besides everything else that goes on there, it is an opportunity for adult actors to do a bit of publicity. This PR work mostly consists of them standing in booths for hours on end, occasionally busting out some sort of show on one of the many stages and, of course, being unwillingly groped by sweaty fans desperate for pictures.

Maybe this rigmarole is the reason most of the women were happy to oblige when, on a recent visit to the fair, I asked them to draw their most memorable scenes. They seemed genuinely excited by the idea, making their long lines of fans wait while they put genuine effort into their illustrations. The end result is a collection of beautiful, original drawings culled straight from the memories of your favorite porn stars.

"Groupie Girl," by Pussy Kat

VICE: Is there one scene that really stands out for you?
Pussy Kat: Yeah! We were shooting in Berlin and there was this fan there, a girl. She was really cute and I asked her if she maybe wanted to partake. And she did. She was totally crazy! Like really wild. We kept shooting till four in the morning and she's on my DVD now. In the end she demanded that Leyluken cum in her face while I squirt in her mouth. So that's what we did.

Classic Berliner.
Very hospitable people!

"The Propeller," by Mia Julia

VICE: Can you break this drawing down for me?
Mia Julia: So, the scene was with Markus Waxenegger—he's a really beefy guy, and I'm so small. So he was standing there and said, "I'll take you the other way around." So, all of a sudden, I was upside down, he was holding me by my butt and I gave him a blowjob upside-down. He ate me out a little too. So, yeah, it was a bit of give and take.

It happened spontaneously?
Yeah, when I was doing video, which I don't do anymore. It was all pretty spontaneous.

"The Bathtub," by Assira

VICE: What are you up to there?
Assira: The concept of the video was that I have a really prude bitch of a roommate who always stresses me out when I bring guys home to fuck. And then I have this stud at home and we're done and he wants to go. But I know my roommate is about to come home and whenever she gets home from work she takes a bath. So we decide that I'll piss in the bathtub before she gets home. That was the story.

Wouldn't she realize?
Not necessarily, no.

You must have drank a lot of water to make it see-through.
Well, yeah.

"The Acrobat," by Angie Knoxx

VICE: What is that?
Angie Knoxx: The actor was standing behind me, and I had to have my leg up, but like backwards. And we were both looking forward... it was retarded. It was really hard.

How long did you guys maintain that position?
We didn't shoot for that long—four, five minutes. It wouldn't have held for longer. But visually, it looked really good. That was the problem.

"Piss Mishap," by Jill Diamond

VICE: What happened?
Jill Diamond: Well, the guy just couldn't control himself anymore, but nobody knew that. He had a condition and so his bladder was really weak. To cut a long story short, he started to pee in the middle of the blowjob. Luckily not in my mouth, but all over my face.

Were you mad?
No, cause he had this condition. Things happen.

Did you just continue going?
He stopped it because he was so uncomfortable. I would have continued. It's a job—you have to keep going.

"The Couch," by Sina Velvet

VICE: What's so memorable about this position?
Sina Velvet: It's hard because you have to balance. When I'm on my back—my shoulders really—and he's fucking me from above, I kind of have to catch the thrusts. It's a hot position, but it's a hard one.

Did he think it was hard, too?
His feet were a little shaky.

"The Tree," by Hümeyre Ophelia

VICE: That looks dangerous.
Hümeyre Ophelia: Yeah, it was in a tree! Totally crazy. But I'm half Turkish, half French. That's why I do these kinds of things.

OK.
I know, right? It was good, but it was hard.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

When you're in high school and college, selling weed seems like a dream job on par with race car driver or pirate. The access to drugs ups your social cache, you make your own hours, and you can get high whenever you want. I assume that pretty much everyone between the ages of 15 and 25 has dealt drugs, or seriously considered it, or at least fantasized about the ways they would avoid the cops while raking in that sweet, sweet drug cash. I would sell only to trusted classmates and refuse to talk business over phone or computer except by way of an elaborate code that might fool cops and parents. All in all, a perfect plan.

So why doesn't everyone cash in? Well, to begin with, even though the people I bought weed from as a teenager were far from cool or tough in the traditional sense, they clearly had some kind of savviness or street wisdom that I lacked. I have no idea where they were getting their drugs from, but I assume at some point dealers have to handle interactions with sketchy people who are either their suppliers or their suppliers' suppliers. Every dorky kid slinging dime bags at the Jewish Community Center is only a few degrees of separation from a dude with a gun.

Nevertheless, even in hindsight, the weed merchants of my youth appear to have gotten off scot-free. As far as I know, no one I ever bought from got arrested, or even suspended. In my mind, selling weed would have enabled me to save more money than I did through my grunt labor at Panera Bread, Firehouse Subs, Pollo Tropical, and a litany of other fast food restaurants.

But were any of those dealers I knew making any real cash? With so many weed dealers roaming America's campuses and 7-Eleven parking lots, is the market too crowded? And has the loosening of weed laws helped or hurt dealers looking to get rich? To find out, I hit up people in both the illegal and legal marijuana trades to see who—if anyone—was cashing in.

Previously: A Travel Hacker Explains How to Fly Around the World For Free

I started with a college student I'll call Darren. The Manhattan native got into selling weed two years ago when he was behind on rent. He and a friend pooled together $120 each and bought an ounce from an old high school buddy, then went to Ace Hardware, bought some baggies, and started offering delivery for orders as low as $15.

Because Darren was wiling to haul ass around NYC for the tiniest amount of money, people started hitting him up slowly but surely. The fact that he doesn't smoke made it easier to turn a profit. When he and his partner doubled their money, they went back and asked for two ounces, and managed to haggle for a discount. Two weeks later, word had spread to other dealers in the area.

"Now this is where people started figuring out who's entered the market," Darren says. "Word moves quick." Another old acquaintance sent a text offering a quarter pound of weed, and a menu of choices.

"So like I was getting shit like Blue Dream, Cookie Monster, Girl Scout Cookies, Platinum Kush, Blackberry Kush, White Nightmare," Darren says. "I was like, 'What the fuck?' And he was willing to put it on the arm, which means on credit."

The new arrangement was that Darren had two weeks to pay back the price of the quarter pound, which was easy, he tells me, since he and his friend were the only dealers selling any exotic strands in their area. About a month or two after that, another old friend texted with an offer to front an entire pound, which was about the size of a bed pillow. The friend also didn't care about when he would be paid back.

This sort of friendliness is incredible to me, but one of the big things I learned from Darren is that most of the weed world seems to operate around credit. As he explained, though, "Why would you run off with a pound that would sell for $2,000, when the potential in the long run is worth so much more?"

Watch: The Cost of Dying in Greece

The second lesson I learned was that middle-tier dealers are making a lot of their profits doing flips, or moving big amounts of weed for tiny amounts of money to other dealers below them. It seems obvious in retrospect, but they're basically selling the fact that they have a connection.

"There's a guy I sell an ounce to for $200," he tells me. "He'll literally sell the ounce to some other dude for $220, and it's an easy $20 for less than 30 minutes of his time, so he'll come back and do it again right away. Sometimes it feels like you're not even selling weed."

Darren's been dealing for three years now, and he's moving a pound or two every week and a half. The guy above him, he says, is moving anywhere from 20 to 50 pounds a week, but still doesn't consider himself a kingpin, or even big-time.

Darren has no desire to get to that level; he wants to pass his business onto someone else when he graduates from college. But if he kept with it, he might come to resemble a dude I'll call Brian, who makes big bucks running drugs as a full-time business.

Brian claims he grosses half a million a year, which comes out to about $250,000 after payroll and other expenses.

Brian's been in the weed business for about three years and has watched it become even more lucrative in that time. A pound used to cost $4,500, but now he can get one for $3,330 or $3,800. "Retail prices haven't changed at all," he says. "That means a lot of people are making good money now because wholesale has gone down so much."

On paper, Brian makes next to nothing, about $15,000 a year. He has an LLC officially set up in Delaware, where taxes are lower, and now employs an uncurious accountant and a handful of deliverymen to do the schlepping he's grown tired of doing himself.

Brian claims he grosses half a million a year this way, which comes out to about $250,000 after payroll and other expenses. Despite this, he doesn't consider himself big-time, either.

"Big-time guys are out in California and have connects to multiple farms," he insists. "They fly out here, arrange things, fly back and make sure everything is packaged correctly. They do that twice a year and make a million each time and are chilling in California the rest of the time."

Brian tells me that he knew quite a few people who had been robbed, which highlighted one of the big downsides to selling weed illegally. The thought of that looming risk, coupled with his comment about big timers having connects with Cali, though, made me wonder about the other side of the weed business—the legitimate side. Was it easier to make money selling weed the legal way?

To answer that question, I called up Anthony Franciosi, a budding entrepreneur who moved to Colorado from New Jersey when he was 18 to become a marijuana farmer. As he learned to grow, he worked as an irrigation specialist and did restaurant work in the resort town of Steamboat Springs.

He got his start hawking extra buds from his harvest to a local dispensary. "I found that when I would give it to them, it was just disappearing, and they wanted even more of it," he tells me. "If I had the foresight back then, maybe I would have put some money away and got some licenses."

Instead, he found starting a farm of his own difficult. His first opportunity came in the form of a family friend who figured Franciosi was responsible enough to entrust with a $300,000 investment. The idea was to control the product from seed to sale, eventually opening a storefront. But it soon became apparent they didn't have the funds to build that kind of operation.

"They weren't really happy with the product they were gonna be able to come out with using that kind of money," Franciosi says. "Basically that whole plan just flopped on its head."

He found a second partner from New Jersey, however, someone with a bit more capital who was willing to spend $1.5 million to build a growing facility from scratch in a rural area. It's set to open early next month, and it will employ five full-time employees as well as some auxiliary help, like trimmers. Those workers will earn around $45,000 a year, Franciosi says, which is a pretty good deal considering those jobs don't require a college degree.

Overhead is a lot more complicated for on-the-books businesses like his; Franciosi not only has to pay his employees, he has to fork over a ton in taxes, without a lot of the write-offs that many federally legal businesses enjoy. Still, he remains optimistic.

Much like the illegal weed industry, the legal one seems to run on Monopoly money.

"I feel like the margins are shrinking, and that the people who got into the industry early were able to realize huge profits," he says. "I think going forward it's still a profitable business but practices just need to get better. I want to be a boutique facility—7,000 square feet as opposed to some in the state that are 200,000 square feet." In the end, he hopes to produce 90 pounds per month in flower and have it retail for $200 an ounce in Denver and around $300 in the mountains.

Obviously, having a backer to the tune of $1.5 million helps. What I learned from talking to Franciosi is that much like the illegal weed industry, the legal one seems to run on Monopoly money. While it's called "putting it on the arm" in the former, it's called "venture capital" in the latter.

Eddie Miller is one of the guys who has a vested interest in seeing small-scale entrepreneurs like Franciosi succeed. The marketing professional, who built his first website in his parents's Long Island basement at age 16, is one of the new breed of weed enthusiasts, almost evangelical in his passion for both kinds of green. He tells me he thinks it's not a bad idea for kids to skip college and head to California or Colorado, and that he knows a guy who just invested $4.5 into the cultivation side and hopes to make it all back in the first year, and that the most profitable sector in pot is technology—which is why he's the CEO of InvestInCannabis.com, a company that aims to sell infrastructure to fast-growing weed companies.

The unbridled optimism, though, made me a little weary. If everyone followed Miller's example, wouldn't all those new businesses and all that VC cash create a marijuana bubble? And what about when a couple of companies make it huge and become the Mercedes or Starbucks of weed?

When I asked would happen to the little guys, or to people who wanted to run boutique stores, Miller replied they would simply get eaten up by something like the Apple Store of pot.

I guess that makes sense. After all, there are huge companies like Anheuser Busch InBev that swallowed up many other businesses on the way to becoming global conglomerates. Just in 2015, ABIV bought the largest independent operation in California, Heineken bought 50 percent of Lagunitas, and MillerCoors purchased most of Saint Archer Brewing. It stands to reason that the economics of the weed industry will eventually resemble those of the beer market.

In Miller's vision of the future, selling marijuana won't be any different than selling DVDs or paper. Presumably that'll be nice for him and others who have gotten in on the ground floor.

"Twenty years from now you won't go into a store and ask for a gram of Khalifa Kush Bubble Hash, you'll ask for a pack of it, or a box of it," Miller says. "Everything will have been sized accordingly. The measurements by which it's sold will have changed. As soon as there's federal legalization, the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries will all get into cannabis."

Add the two inevitabilities of legalization and consolidation together, and it seems unlikely that tomorrow's teens will even be afforded the choice of becoming either becoming sandwich artists or dime-bag-slinging outlaws. Perhaps they'll all be working at either the Starbucks of weed or actual Starbucks.

Franciosi, the grower, says that soon most of the weed on the market will be pharmaceutical grade, and that the people with 200,000 square-foot warehouses will be forced to use pesticides and other nasty chemicals to keep up. He hopes the people who want to deal with that will be motivated to buy his stuff, which he likened to small-batch whiskey. But he also thinks the black market will probably remain an option for the foreseeable future.

"The price for drug dealers is $50 a quarter, no matter what," he says. "That's kind of a joke here, though. It's like, 'Yeah, good job, you got some for $9 a gram, and this other guy paid $17,' but you compare the two, and one's some smushed-up stuff that looks like it's been in your pocket. Still, the people that I know who are local and have been here for a long time in Colorado say the store prices can't ever compete with the underground."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Blek

When a 15-year-old classmate at St. Paul prep school rejected 18-year-old Owen Labrie's initial invitation to meet up as part of a campus romantic rite of passage called the Senior Salute, he was upset. "Another dumb cunt-bucket struck from my nut sucking, suck it slut, slut fuckin bucket list," he wrote to a friend in a Facebook message in late April 2014.

Labrie was quoting a poem, "I Fuck Sluts," by the comedian Bo Burnham.

Understandably, that was not one of Labrie's go-to poems for seducing girls. The messages he actually sent the younger teen, spruced with French song lyrics and writing that sounded like he was reading a little too much Milton, eventually convinced her to meet him on the roof of a campus building, and then to the mechanical room, where he had sex with her. These messages upped the legal ante in the case against Labrie. He was convicted not only of misdemeanor statutory crimes but also a felony charge of using a computer to lure a child.

Senior Salute rendezvous—or meetings between graduating seniors and underclassmen—at St. Paul often result in hook-ups, encounters that are subsequently tallied for bragging purposes. The sexual culture at the elite school was the center of Labrie's weeks-long rape trial this summer, and his email inviting the victim to a Senior Salute and other messages would prove critical to the case against him. On Thursday, in a Concord, New Hampshire, courtroom, Judge Larry M. Smukler sentenced Labrie to a year in jail and five years probation for the misdemeanor charges and a suspended three-and-a-half-to-seven-year sentence for the felony. He is currently out on bail pending appeal.

Even though he won't serve time in state prison, because of the felony charge Labrie will have to spend the rest of his life as a registered sex offender. His case has led some to question whether teens facing misdemeanors should be punished more harshly just because they used the internet to carry out the deed.

The now-20-year-old's attorney, J.W. Carney, filed a motion arguing that the felony conviction isn't fair, and the law was written to target predator catfish or adults targeting kids in chat rooms, not teenagers. "If he merely called the 15-year-old on the telephone or spoken to her in person there would be no additional crime," Carney argued in a motion.

The Boston Herald's Peter Gelzinis wrote that Labrie was a scholar-athlete who "flushed a free ride to Harvard down the toilet while trying to make good on one last St. Paul's tradition." Jail time and sexual assault registration are too severe for Labrie, Gelzinis argued, suggesting he should do community service working with victims of sexual assault instead.

But Lyn Schollett, executive director of the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Assault, vehemently disagrees. "This law was absolutely designed for this kind of assault," she told me. "The intent of the legislature was to include all predators who use technology to lure.

"The reality is people will do things behind a screen or a keyboard that they won't do face to face," Schollett added.

The severity the computer charge adds to Labrie's sentencing may come as a surprise to anyone who uses social media as their primary means of communication—which is to say anyone under 40. But it's not uncommon for the state to charge teenagers with computer sex charges, even teens in statutory cases, according to veteran New Hampshire defense attorney Paul Garrity.

"The charge of the use of a computer is not a shocker," Garrity says, adding that prosecutors typically use discretion in deciding which cases the computer charge is appropriate. What's surprising, according to Garrity, is that Smukler only sentenced him to jail time and didn't put the guy in prison for the felony. "I'm guessing his age factored in a good way for him," he says.

Judge Smukler denied Labrie's motion to drop the felony charge. Meanwhile, the state released additional Facebook messages revealing his calculating strategy just ahead of the sentencing. For instance, Labrie discussed his seduction techniques with the same friend to whom he sent the Burnham poem, Malcolm Salovaara, an alum of the elite prep school who currently attends Dartmouth.

In the course of these messages, the two young men went over the textbook techniques of their peers. One strategy: "complete indifference towards anything with a vagina." Another: play the "alpha male" for which one must "just slay everyone."

Finally there was Labrie's technique of choice dubbed by Salovaara as, "THE LABREAZY SLEAZY METHOD."

Unlike the line about the "cunt-buckets," the Labreazy Sleazy method was entirely of Labrie's own creation. He broke down his strategy to Salovaara. "feign intimacy... then stab them in the back," he wrote, later exclaiming, "THROW EM IN THE DUMPSTER.

"I lie in bed with them... and pretend like i'm in love," he wrote, subsequently breaking down the Labreazy Sleazy Method into three words: "EMAIL-POEM-BONE"

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the Labreazy Sleazy Method neglects to consider consent.

Though Carney would later try to argue that since the jury found him not guilty of the forcible assault charges, the encounter between Labrie and the girl was essentially consensual, Judge Smukler set the record straight on Thursday.

"This was not consensual," he said. Not only did Labrie fail to get to know the girl and understand her responses and reactions, his age played a significant factor.

"She was in over her head," the judge said.

The victim claimed that after Labrie stripped her down to her underwear, she said "no" and then froze when he ignored her requests, scraping her insides with his finger, spitting on her vagina, and penetrating her.

Speaking to the court via a recorded video statement on Thursday, the girl said, "What he did to me made me feel like I didn't belong on this planet and I would be better off dead," she said. "In the past almost year and a half since I've been assaulted I've lead some of the scariest hardest days of my life."

The victim further claimed private investigators contacted her younger sister, that she was threatened online, and that the St. Paul hockey team stopped and pointed at her while she was walking on campus alone. She eventually had to transfer to a different school, and said she suffers from panic attacks. At times, these panic attacks led her to hurt herself, she told the court. "I thought by feeling something it would make the panic stop," she said.

Bizarrely, before the trial began, Labrie rejected a plea deal that would have kept him off the sex offender's registry. Instead, he took the stand and claimed the encounter was a mutual hookup that involving dry-humping and "divine inspiration." Said inspiration steered Labrie away from penetrating the girl, he claimed. The semen on the inside of her underwear was precum, he insisted.

The victim says a settlement wouldn't have just saved Labrie from a felony conviction and a lifetime as a pariah, it would have saved her a lot of pain, too. "It's terrible to say but I know why people don't come forward," she said, adding that she still blames herself for freezing instead of fighting her assailant. "Why didn't I kick or push or scream or do anything, why couldn't I do more?

In the year and a half since he was charged, Labrie has begun to construct a chapel by hand on his father's land in rural Vermont, according to the defense. Carney calls Labrie's conviction his "fall from grace" and his "crucible." The defense also entered multiple letters from people passionately advocating on Labrie's behalf, many of whom say they connected by Christianity. One student claimed he mentored her in poetry, and neighbors and even an ex-girlfriend's mother wrote glowing letters on his behalf. An Episcopal priest called Labrie a "spiritual pioneer."

Probably wisely, when talking to the priest, Labrie decided to recite a poem by St. John rather than Bo Burnham.

Prosecutor Catherine J. Ruffle argues that Labrie's intelligence, charisma and charm "are often the same qualities that we see in very dangerous sex offenders." Smukler took the middle road. "You are neither the angel that is portrayed by your council... or the devil that is portrayed by the state," he told Labrie.

But ultimately the judge decided Labrie wasn't trustworthy. "In some ways, you're a very good liar," Smukler told him.

He ordered Labrie to take another psychosexual test, since his first analyst was not privy to all of the details of the case. He hoped the next analyst would be able to test someone with Labrie's intelligence. "You are a very good test taker, you may be very well prepared," the judge added.

Follow Susan Zalkind on Twitter.

All photos by Jonathan Mehring

For many, Halloween in New York City is a bigger deal than Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Kwanza, Easter, Fourth of July, and their own birthdays and anniversaries combined. Drawing some two million spectators and more than 60,000 costumed weirdos, Manhattan's annual mile-long march is the world's largest Halloween parade and it is, hand's down, the greatest free Halloween experience anywhere. Although I fancy myself more of a " Christmas Guy," some of my greatest Halloween memories are tied to that parade and walking the streets of NYC while tripping out on all the amazing costume creations. Once my buddy, Chris Marshall (R.I.P.), asked me to take a photo of him pissing on the back of a guy dressed as NYPD who was, in reality, an actual police officer.

My friend and Brooklyn-based photographer Jonathan Mehring (who I recently interviewed about his new Nat Geo skate book Skate the World) lives and breathes Halloween. For the past couple years he's been spending his All Hallows Eve riding the rails around the five boroughs, documenting all the subterranean costumed happenings for an annual zine called Sub Halloween. The results are a stunning mix of festive, awkward, hilarious, and eerie. I sat Jonathan down to talk Halloween, street photography, and Rastafarian Batman.

VICE: What makes you want to spend your Halloweens in the subways of New York photographing costumed partygoers?
Jonathan Mehring: I like the subway because it takes people out of their element—it's not where you'd expect to see people in costume. People are just going from point A to point B. They're acting normal, as if they're going to work or something, but they're on a train in these great costumes. There is a surreal, bizarre, weird moment that happens once a year and I thought it would be cool to photograph.

How did this become your new Halloween tradition?
This will be the third year of shooting it, and actually the first year was kind of by accident. I only had my phone on me and I was wearing a half-assed costume and didn't feel like going to whatever my wife and I were going to so I just decided to stay in the subway the whole night and shoot on my phone. After that I knew I wanted to keep coming back every Halloween. It was so much fun. Now I don't make any plans to go to Halloween parties because I know I'm just going to stay underground all night.

Are people generally receptive to you taking their photos?
Yeah, that's one thing I like about it. It's a type of street photography, I suppose, but it's different in the sense that people are not surprised to have someone come at them with a camera on that day. There's something about street photography—whether or not it's disrespectful, it might be perceived that way by the subject and that makes me uncomfortable. On Halloween that layer is removed.

Would you consider yourself a "Halloween person"?
Yeah, you can call me a Halloween person. I get into it. The last couple years it's been less effort on the costume because ergonomically it can be a challenge with the camera. Last year I just wore my normal clothes and I put a single black dot on my forehead with a trickle of blood coming out of it. A few too many people commented on it. It drew a lot of attention to my face and was holding a camera there too.

What's the best costume you've seen so far?
Last year there was this girl who basically had a bikini made of neatly crushed down milk cartons with a Venetian mask on and a wig. She was sitting on this pile of crushed milk cartons in the train at the last stop of the L on 8 ^th Avenue. She was just sitting there in the middle of the aisle, then after a minute she stands up and you see she's sitting on this dude who was completely covered in milk cartons as well. They both slowly stood up, almost as if they were performing and then he sat back down and she sat back on top of him.

Another moment I liked from last year was this guy in a clown costume who was acting like an asshole on a train packed full of people. He had been in a fight right as I walked up to the window and people were pulling the other guy out of the train car. He leans up to the window because the dude that he was fighting was right next to me and flipped off the guy. I just liked the crazy looking clown giving the finger.

What's usually the vibe on the trains between the regular folk and those in costumes?
I guess it's 90% costumed people, but generally the people that are not in costumes are fucking over it. They're either bummed that they're surrounded by a bunch of people who are going to a party or coming from one and they're not part of it or they're just upset that the train is super crowded.

You ditched your wife the first year to go shoot by yourself, but has it become a date night for you two since then?
No. She's a photographer as well and we do shoot together from time to time, but I operate best on my own. I like these kinds of situations better solo so I can just go where the wind takes me. I feel like it's more productive that way. When you're with someone you're going to act differently and go different places because you're going to be working together, whereas when you're alone you can just be like, "Oh, there's an open door. Let me jump on this train now."

The subway is pretty sanitized these days. You see early 80s subway photos and they look so much cooler than the sterile mode of transportation we know today.
There's a Bruce Davidson book called Subway and goddamn, man, I wish it still looked like that. It had so much character. I get inspired by certain street photographers who work today and still find these moments that are worth looking at because when I think of old New York street photography it's like, man, how can you ever top that? It was grimy back then and had that gritty look that is 90 percent gone. I think it's a mistake to look for that now, though. It is what it is.

I feel like old New York street photography's purpose was to document decay, whereas now it serves to document gentrification.
Yeah, you can make an argument for that. I really like the idea of street photography, and maybe I just haven't done it enough to be comfortable with it. I still prefer settings like Halloween because it's part surrealism and part comedy in a way, with people letting go of their inhibitions.

Lastly, do you think Halloween is the best night to rob someone in New York City?
It probably happens often.

Look for Jonathan tomorrow night on the subway or order Sub Halloween II and follow him on Instagram.

Find Chris on his website and Twitter.

Illustration by Dan Evans

It is Halloween, a holiday it's getting harder to relate to. You're a millennial, probably—quick test to see if you are a millennial: Can you recount, when pressed, a top five favorite emojis list? Then yes, you are a millennial—and the good old ghost stories just don't appeal to you anymore.

If Dr. Frankenstein had a "Find Your Friends" iPhone app he wouldn't have had to chase his awful monster across the frigid Arctic tundra. The Woman in Black wouldn't have resorted to killing children in her deathly misery if she had Candy Crush Saga and Mom Facebook to keep her busy. Would Sadako have copped Yeezys, and will we ever know?

On Broadly: Why You Scare More Easily Than Your Friends

Anyway, here are some ghostly ghost stories updated to suit your short attention span:

DRACULA IS A DIFFICULT BRUNCH GUEST

And Dracula did feast upon the neck-tinted blood of a virgin, and did throw her carcass high from the castle keep, and did sleep deeply for 100 days and 100 nights, and did wake on a Sunday and was, like, totally in the mood for brunch? Like: ugh, really craving some avocado toast right now! And so Dracula did hop on the WhatsApp group with Debbie, Eddie, and his one gay friend, Carl, and did see if anyone was down for Breakfast Club, and Dracula did queue for 45 minutes outside Breakfast Club, and was baffled to find himself seated by a window.

"Excuse me?" Dracula said. "Hi? Can we—hi? I need to move." And Dracula did explain that he was sensitive to light, and so could not sit by the window because it was bright today, and the waitress had to ask sweetly if another table of four nearby would mind sitting by the window in the sunlight, and they agreed that they did not mind.

"Ughhhhh!" Dracula said. "So hungry!" And Dracula beheld the menu, and did read aloud from it, and did say that everything looked "so good." And Dracula did announce to the table that he could totally crush a fruit smoothie right now because he had had "like, the heaviest sleep," and could like really use the vitamins.

"Hi?" Dracula did say to the waitress, "Hi? Yeah, hi: Do you have any rice milk, for the smoothies? Only, I can't drink soya, and the almond alternative will aggravate my mild nut allergy, and so I cannot drink that either." And the waitress did ask him to explain how Dracula cannot drink soy milk, because everyone can drink soy milk, and he did smile tightly and say, "Soya's fine," and then did turn to the table and dramatically mouth the words: "How rude." But the table did not really understand him, and so Dracula this time said the words, very loudly indeed. "HOW," Dracula said, in that kind of loud whisper people do when they have absolutely zero tact at all, "RUDE."

When it came time to order the main, Dracula made a whole thing about GM and did say chorizo with a "th."

During the course of the 40-minute brunch, Dracula asked the waitress for: "more napkins," "a clean knife, please? I think your dishwasher needs descaling, because this is a very smudgy knife," "ketchup, for my friend," "just, like, five or six more napkins," "a little doggy bag for this croissant," "," whether the waitress could ask a mother whose baby was crying to stop her baby from crying ("Only it's very annoying," Dracula whispered), to switch tables again now the sun had gone in, "just, ten to twelve more napkins."

When the bill arrived Dracula wrote and underlined the words "RUDE SKANK" on the receipt, and did not tip, and did review Breakfast Club unfavorably on Yelp before bedding down for a thousand-year slumber.

WE CANNOT GET ANY 4G AND I THINK THIS AXE MURDERER IS GOING TO KILL US

They were running through the forest, through the trees, pursued distantly and silently by the man with the axe—blood smearing their clothes and their faces, their bodies whipped by sprinting through brambles and sticks—when they came upon a cliff face.

"I thought this was the road?" she said.

"Yeah it said... the map said the road was this way."

There was a pause and their hearts throbbed like drums.

"Did—are you still using Apple Maps?"

"I am still using Apple Maps, yes."

She made a very frustrated noise.

"What's that?"

"What do you mean?"

"What was that noise?"

"It's just—and I said this to you before—Apple Maps is the worst. Remember when we were trying to find that Kasabian gig and ended up back in Bristol? I said then. I told you then. You need to download the Google Maps app."

He held his phone as far over the cliff as he could.

"I'm not getting reception," he said. "I'm just getting that 'E.' What network are you on?"

"I'm on giffgaff."

"Well can we use your phone? I'm on EE."

"I've only got, like, 8 percent battery left," she said. "I was watching all those YouTubes about how to start a fire."

"I'll turn it off and on. Sometimes that helps it find the satellites."

"Just go on Airplane Mode."

"How do I do that?"

"Just d—"

And they heard running behind them, and panting, and screaming, and their bodies were never found by the police.

Illustration by Dan Evans

YOU ARE STUCK AT A PARTY WITH A GIRL DRESSED AS A VAMPIRE WHO WANTS TO TELL YOU HOW UBER IS ACTUALLY BAD

"Uber is actually bad," says a girl dressed as a vampire at a Halloween party you are at, right as you click the Uber app and prepare to wait between 30 and 40 minutes for it to actually fucking load up. You, for the record, are dressed as a sexy cat. "Didn't you know?"

"How," you say. "How is it bad?"

"Because of... there are loads of articles," she says. "Do you like Wired on Facebook?"

You do not like Wired on Facebook.

"Well, that'll tell you. Plus, my friend got an Uber once and it took her a really weird route home."

2.8x surge fare. Give it a minute.

She is saying: "Did you not see all the black cab drivers protest in Trafalgar Square?" We respect the opinions of black cab drivers, now. The real horror is every day.

How has it gone up to 3.2x? It's 2 AM. Oh no, someone else is getting involved.

"Hey, have you ever done that thing where you check your Uber rating?" a dude dressed as Cruella de Vil is saying. "You check in settings. They email it to you. Look: I'm 4.9!" Society is a prison, and you are locked in it. You are cursed to have this conversation again and again and again until you die. You just tried to order an Uber, but the bar kept doing that thing where it bloops infinitely and doesn't order a cab even though you can see a Prius on the map two streets away. Reboot the app. Oh no, your phone is ringing—

"Yeah, hello?" an angry cabby is saying (3.5 stars). "Did you just cancel your Uber?"

"Oh, I didn't realize I ordered one. No, the app did the—"

"You just cancelled your fucking Uber. Cunt."

"Wait, where are you—"

The line goes dead. You watch a Prius turn around on the map. You get an email saying you have been charged a £5 cancellation charge. Halloween is the day the spirits cross over from the incorporeal realm and visit us on Earth—jangling their undead bones in a grotesque dance, stroking their spectral hands across our shoulders and our legs, rejoicing in graveyards, clotting together in misty fields and glens—and then they fuck right off again, back into the abyss, because anything is better than here, because being on Earth is hell.

On NOISEY: Hey Tall People – Stand At The Back So We Can See!

OH NO, A MUMMY

Oh no, a mummy. You cracked open that sealed golden room in that pyramid that one time, didn't you, and took the riches hidden deep within, and then you thought everything was alright—you traded the gold for money bought all those mansions and gear—but then, right when you thought you were safe, you get a notification:

@A_SCARY_MUMMY has followed you on Twitter!

And then, like a second later:

@ascarymummy1 is now following you on Instagram!

And then:

Anthony Scary-Mummy has sent you a Friend Request

You sense that you are being followed, but you ignore it. Until, the next day:

@A_SCARY_MUMMY has followed you on Twitter!

@ascarymummy1 is now following you on Instagram! See what they're sharing!

A. Scary-Mummy has sent you a Friend Request! Write something on their wall!

Wait, are they... are they following and unfollowing you? Your phone again: Snapchat. It's a fucking mummy wearing a hat and making a "woooOOooOOOooo" sound, big ghost emoji floating in front of their face. Tagged you in an inspirational quote on Instagram. You take a handful of diamonds and toss them furiously into your swimming pool, which is also full of diamonds. Oh, you've got an e—

A Scary Mummy would like to add you to its professional network!

This motherfucke—

@A_SCARY_MUMMY is now following you on Twitter!

AGAIN WITH THIS. For courtesy, you check their tweets—a couple of four-day-old meme retweets, a change.org petition, an @ complaint to South West Trains that starts with the word "really?," and then— oh. Oh no. You've accidentally pressed that little follow button in the bottom left-hand corner. Dude: you followed the mummy back.

The mummy slides into your DMs, like, immediately. "Haha thanks for the follow and welcome to my twitter page :+)"

And just like that you're stuck: stuck in a loose, uneasy friendship with a haunting, screaming ghoul from beyond the abyss, occasional exchange of favs, begrudgingly accepting their Facebook request, dozens of swiftly cancelled party invites every month, occasional DMs about how you should "meet up irl one time," and you're too polite to leave, locked into being at best acquaintances with a shriveled carcass wrapped in stinking bandages, dutifully answering "Maybe" to their Facebook invite to attend a nearby jumble sale next Sunday, occasionally liking their status about a new job.

Illustration by Dan Evans

A BRAVE WEREWOLF BECOMES CLICKBAIT

Oh man, her bones grew huge in her skin and thick bristles of fur pushed through her dermis and she howled in agony at the moon, and she ran and she ran all night, the taste of blood on the air, panting and slobbering, shitting in bushes, scratching, and killing, and clawing at the sky, the agony of it all, the pain. Then she woke up, human again, shivering on a park bench, then booted up her phone and checked the BuzzFeed app and got in line for a coffee at Starbucks.

Oh, shit, weird: someone must've taken a photo of her as she transformed? Kind of a weird thing to do, but whatever. No distinguishing features. Very hard to trace it back to her job at the bank. Should be fine. Should get away with it. Weird that it would be on BuzzFeed, though—

This Monstrous Wolf-Woman Just Flipped Traditional Beauty Standards On Their Head

Oh no. Oh, oh no. Her quickly sprouting armpit and torso hair has been classified as brave and inspiring, and now her body is clickbait.

This Fetid Dog Creature Is WORKING Her Body Hair

Oh no, not the Huffington Post—anything but the Huffington Po—

An Open Letter To The Hairy Wolf Woman of Hyde Park—As A Meninist, Your Body Hair Disgusts Me (But As A Feminist, I Still Would Bang)

No not... no please Upworthy:

She Looked Like A Dog Screaming So Hard It Would Die. What Happened Then Will Bring You To Tears.

No; it's only 10 AM and the think-pieces are already happening:

Body Hair? My French Husband Would Never Allow It! Why I'll NEVER Become A Slobbering Wolf Woman—And I'll Still Have Dinner on the Table At 7 PM Sharp

EXCLUSIVE! The Werewoman of Hyde Park Was Secretly A 56-Year-Old Iranian Man—And How WE'RE Paying Up To £60,000 A YEAR To Keep This Monster On The Streets

That Werewoman Isn't A Monster, The Real Monsters Work At RBS, Writes Russell Brand

Intersectionality Means Werewolves Too. Get Over It.

"All Werewolves Should Be In Jail—And I Should Be a King!"—Read Piers Morgan's Wickedly Outrageous New Column In Tomorrow's Mail on Sunday

Oh no, even deeply unpopular Comment Is Free writer Joel Golby is in on the act:

Wolves Are Shit And Werewolves Are Even Shittier

And now the counter-pieces:

Stop Deifying the Werewoman of Hyde Park: She Killed At Least Six Crows

Chris Packham Pleads: Kill This Horrid Werewolf, She Doesn't Know a Single Song By The Smiths

Lena Dunham to Write a Sitcom Based On a Werewolf Girl Who Is Very Clumsy And Has a Lot of White Friends

"Yeah, Man, I'd Fuck That Thing UP": Kid Rock Does Not Know What Werewolves Are, Is Horny

But then, like all our hopes and dreams, the clickbait cycle soon died and ebbed to nothing, and she was left alone to eat animal bones whole and bark wildly at the moon, just as unremarkable as ever.

On MUNCHIES: You Should Totally Make This Hallowe'en-appropriate Pumpkin Pizza

THIS GHOST FROM THE PAST IS THE WORST ROOMATE EVER

"Heh," a ghost from a distant past says behind you. "What is this, Narcos?" The ghost from a distant past sits on the sofa next to you. "I heard about this. Is it good?" You do not know if it is good yet. This is the first episode. "You mind if I...?" And the ghost from a distant past, slain in battle, an arrow running out of its heart, sits and watches Narcos with you. Three episodes in and you are ready for bed. "Do you mind if I...?" you say, and the ghost motions to leave. "Oh, right, sure. Do you... would it be OK if I slept on the sofa?" the ghost asks. "My soul was torn from my body and I've been shuttling around a sort of intangible cosmic realm for 400 years and now I haunt your flat, and it would be cool to sort of stretch out and get some shut-eye, you know?" It is fine. The ghost sleeps on the sofa.

When you wake up there is cereal on the floor and a dirty bowl in the sink and the cereal that you were going to eat for breakfast—Sugar Puffs—is no longer in the box—or, to be more specific, there is a half-handful of cereal in the box, enough to not say the box is empty, but certainly not enough for an actual bowl of cereal. "I hope you don't mind," the ghost from the distant past says. "I ate some cereal."

The next day you have to leave a passive-aggressive note taped above the sink reminding the ghost to do its washing up.

The day after that you come home and the ghost from a distant past has skipped three episodes ahead of you in Narcos and you accidentally see a plot-dependent shoot-out. The ghost from a distant past has used all the milk. You find an ethereal used condom in your bed. The ghost from a distant past has definitely shagged in your bed. This has to stop.

You ask the ghost from a distant past to put the recycling out and it does not put the recycling out and it is another week until the recycling lorry comes again, and so, in desperation, you pay a man from the church to spray your flat with holy water and condemn the wretched soul back to hell, and you sleep peacefully that night, quietly, and then in the morning you open the fridge, and there is a tin there—just a simple biscuit tin, with a handwritten note saying, 'Sorry I've been a bit of a nightmare to live with, mate, tough week'—and inside the tin is a lovingly baked cake, and you sit on the floor and weep. The ghost from a distant past is chained to a rock being whipped into agony in a distant hellscape, and here you are eating Victoria sponge alone. Maybe the real monster was here all along. Maybe the real monster is you.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

The author on Halloween.

As a kid, my default Halloween costume was a clown. It fit my personality—silly, eccentric—and I hated change, so I dutifully put on the clown face paint year after year. Under all that makeup, you could hardly tell if I was happy or sad, exhilarated or exhausted.

One year, after wearing the clown costume all day at school, I started to feel sick. It was Monday, October 31, 1988 and I was six years old. When I got home, I told my stepmother, Linda, who was in the midst of gathering coats and gloves, making last minute tweaks to costumes for trick-or-treating that night. Instead of dropping everything as my real mother would have, she ignored my calls for help.

In Linda's defense, there was a lot riding on that Halloween. It was her first with us, her new family. She and my dad had gotten hitched four months prior, though I'm not sure when or how they met. All I remember is that one night, a tall woman with a blond perm styled into a mullet came into my room, tucked me in with her long, Lee Presson nails, and said she was my new mommy.

When they came back from their honeymoon, I remember seeing the two of them walk through the door as Linda cooed in her dumb, slightly masculine voice, "We've got presents!" She was decked out in head-to-toe Disney, as was my father. My siblings and I had never been to Disney World; as a consolation, they brought us back Mickey ears, shirts, and toys—enough to make it clear we had missed out on an awesome trip.

"Linda and I got married," my dad explained.

"Call me mom," Linda said.

VICE News: Why a French Town Banned Clowns for Halloween

My actual mom and dad had split up about a year before my dad married Linda. I have zero memory of my parents being happy. In fact, I only have a handful of memories of them in the same room, most of which involve yelling, fighting, and abuse.

At the time it didn't feel all that strange—my siblings and I were too young to know any different. Every dad hits their mom, right? They'd get angry and they'd fight, and that was just how it was.

The last memory I have of my mom in our childhood home, one that I would obsess over long after my mom left, is of a particular fight between my parents. They were downstairs, near the laundry room, while my little brother and I sat in the living room upstairs watching TV. I was almost five and my brother was three. We turned the volume up as loud as we could to drown out their screams, but it could never get loud enough. Then we heard a crash.

I quietly got up to investigate, slowly stepping down each step on the staircase. I don't remember my dad leaving the house, but he must have, because what I found as I reached the third to last step and peered around the corner was my mother on the ground crying. She had been pushed through the wall. The size of the hole would have been comical if my mother hadn't been jammed through it, the kind of hole left by the Roadrunner in Looney Tunes. She just sat there, sobbing. I don't remember any blood or bruises, but she must have been in pain. I don't think she saw me. Scared and uncertain, I didn't help her; instead, I went back upstairs to the TV and pretended nothing had happened.

Many months after that, my parents' divorce proceedings began. Besides the individual therapy each one of us kids received—no joke, it was called Kids in the Middle, as if our family needed more of a cliché—I remember very little about this period. We spent most of the time with my paternal grandparents, who tried to shield us from what was happening with our parents.

Then one day, my dad told my brothers and I that we were going to be living with him. Even as young as we were, it didn't make sense. He was the one I was afraid of, and where was our mother? I missed her, and wanted to be with her, but fear kept me from saying anything.

Now, nearly 30 years later, things have come into focus: After years of abuse, without a career to speak of, my mother was lost. She had to get away from my dad, she needed to rebuild her life. And with no job and little family support, how would she have been able to take care of four boys and support them while recovering from years of trauma? My dad had never hit me or my brothers, and if we didn't live with him, there was a chance we'd wind up in the foster care system that my mother had once been in. So she gave up full custody. It's the decision that I respect my mother most for.

We saw her occasionally, on weekends mostly, each visit more uncomfortable than the next. We were too angry and too young to understand. But as she rebuilt her life, we saw a side of our mother we had never seen before: happiness. And fortunately, we didn't have to wait long to find someone else to refocus our anger on.

Linda prided herself on organization, which was more for appearances than any actual satisfaction of an orderly family, and that Halloween night of 1988 she was on her game. The kids were dressed, the husband was in place, and it was just about time to start trick-or-treating.

"I don't feel well," I complained as she zipped up our coats. It was a cold Halloween that year, fall turning to winter quickly in the St. Louis suburb where we lived.

"The cold air will make you feel better," she said. It's a wonder the one kid she had from a previous marriage survived with that kind of logic. (Years later, it would become clear that her parenting skills were a bit off-kilter when she punished my little brother and I for sneaking Hostess cupcakes by locking us in the room devoted to the cat's litter boxes.)

On MUNCHIES: Will Food Allergy Hysteria Destroy Halloween?

When we were all zipped up, she went to the closet and put on her own coat, made of white and grey fur. It was one of her most prized possessions, a wedding gift from my father, and she wore it with the confidence of Cruella de Vil in her Dalmation fur. Between her mullet, the fancy fur coat, and the Freddy Kruger nails, Linda was a Halloween spectacle without even trying.

We all made our way out to the green Jeep Grand Wagoner. Linda piled my siblings into the backseat, but because I wasn't feeling well, I got to sit in the front seat, on her lap. Instead of trick-or-treating in our neighborhood, which was mostly middle-class, we were headed to a wealthier part of town, where they handed out full-size candy bars.

"Are we ready to trick-or-treat?" she asked as my father started the car.

My siblings responded, but I stayed quiet. I felt a churning in my stomach as my father put the car in reverse. I couldn't think about candy or trick-or-treating; all I could focus on was the explosion that was about to erupt from my mouth. I opened it and directed all of my vomit toward Linda's coat.

Panicking, she opened the door and leapt out as quickly as she could, while I emptied my stomach on the floor of the car. My brothers burst into laughter and a chorus of "ewww," which only made my father focus on yelling at them instead of comforting me. Linda started to cry.

"My coat!" she wailed.

Once I'd finished my act of terrorism, I looked up at my brother. He was smiling. All of my brothers were smiling. For a split second, I smiled too, because I knew we were all thinking the exact same thing: I got her, and I got her good.

I wasn't allowed to go trick-or-treating that night, even though I felt immensely better after marking Linda's coat. So instead, my dad took the others out to collect candy while Linda stayed home with me.

As we sat in the living room watching Unsolved Mysteries, I felt a sense of pride. There was no way I could get back at my dad for everything he had done to my mom, nor was there a way for me to change the circumstances of our family's reality. But on that Halloween night, I took control in the one small way that was available to me as a kid, and I showed Linda just how I felt about her.

Ever since then, I've loved Halloween.

Follow H. Alan Scott on Twitter.

Photo by Ivy Dawned via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Primary school. Am I right, guys? Those lazy, crazy days of eating Cheestrings, doodling Slipknot logos, and being horrible to everyone all the time.

Then comes secondary school and most people's first flutter with drugs. Depending on your background, your initial dance with the blurry-eyed devil will differ. It could be a bang on some of your older brother's Emphysema Haze. Or, for the popular kids, perhaps a line of cocaine gifted to you at party you're not really supposed to be at. Or, if you're moving in very dodgy circles for a 15-year-old, a quick go on some Bad Drugs.

Your average British school's attitude towards drugs will be—and, for the most part, has to be—the same as your parents': don't do them, you'll die of benefits cheating. You will be cheating the benefits system for so long that the abject distress of it all will make your once healthy, rosy skin wither away until you're reduced to just a dole form and a pen attached to its holder with a metal chain.

But adults tell children lies all the time to protect them from themselves. I was once told by someone who worked for Transport for London that a man got his coat caught in the tube doors and the tube dragged him into a wall and he died. This didn't happen, and also just couldn't have happened, for more reasons than I care to state here. But the bottom line is: Adults don't respect your intelligence, kids.

So I thought I'd do the honorable thing and debunk some of the stuff they teach you about drugs at school, while also passing on some extra tips for free. The way I see it, people do drugs and that's not going to stop, no matter how many thousands of hours of police time are spent stop and searching people. So it makes sense to provide some realistic lessons for everyone who already ignored what they were told in PSE class.

A guy doing two tabs of acid, which you shouldn't do if you're doing acid for the first time. Photo by Ben Shapiro

DOING ONE TAB OF ACID WON'T MAKE YOU PEEL YOUR OWN SKIN OFF

It may be a drug forum cliché, but don't do acid unless you're absolutely 100 percent sure you want to do it and that your brain is capable of handling it. If you're not down for it, don't do it. If you are, fine. If someone spikes your drink with it, punch them as hard as you can in the face and go and find somewhere quiet to sit with a big bottle of cold water.

Broadly speaking, one dose won't do all that much. It won't make you scalp yourself with a steak knife or hurl yourself out of a window in the belief you can fly. It will make colors more colorful and you'll laugh quite a lot. That said, always be aware and careful of dosage. If you're going to take more, wait the other one out and don't rush into taking loads in one go, because that's when you run the risk of losing yourself in the throes of the trip and try to climb into a needle collection bin because you think it's a bouncy castle.

Long-term LSD use can also lead to depression, anxiety and flashbacks, which, apparently, can last up to a year. Unless you're friends with the types who go to Burning Man and loudly make a point of not washing their hair, regular acid use is a bit of a bummer for you and everyone around you. No one wants to chill with someone who spends all day talking about expanding their consciousness.

KETAMINE IS A HUGE WASTE OF TIME

Look, I'm not about to get into any sort of drug fascism here; most have their merits, they all have their downfalls. But, objectively, ketamine is fucking stupid. Snorting a horse tranquilizer is not only incredibly bad for you—K is one of the worst club drugs in terms of harm caused to its user— but it's also popular with the sort of people who get really into electro-swing at Boomtown and spend their entire life trying to draw glitter hearts on your face and convince you to stop using any shampoo that contains chemicals (before snorting half a gram of very toxic chemicals in one massive line).

Your school will tell you that ketamine is just like all other powdered narcs: bad and for losers without salaries. But they should really go in harder on it, because it genuinely is awful. Too many people end up doing it all the time, and doing too much of it will make your bladder fail, meaning you'll have to do your A Levels with a colostomy bag leaking all over the invigilator's shoes. No A* for you, young lady!

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SOME OF THEM WILL KILL YOU, BUT MOST OF THEM WON'T IF YOU'RE NOT AN IDIOT

Most of the things you hear about drugs in school are related closely to how quickly they will bring about your untimely death. One minute you're doing a dab of MDMA to "Where Are Ü Now," the next you're on the front page of The Mirror with the words "DEAD FROM DRUGS" unceremoniously stamped beneath your most recent school photo.

You don't like the thought of your poor old mum crying as your body is incinerated in a suburban crematorium, do you? So be sensible. With club drugs—the mind-altering substances you're statistically most likely to try first, bar weed and alcohol—moderation is everything. Take ecstasy, for example: You might be sold pills containing PMA rather than MDMA. PMA has a much steeper dose response curve than MDMA, meaning it takes longer to kick in, meaning people take another before the effects come on properly, meaning they collapse when it all kicks in.

Get into meth, crack, GHB, and heroin territory, and generally you'll start to experience harms much quicker; according to Addiction blog, nine out of ten American poisonings are drug overdoses. So my best advice here is: Do not get into meth, crack, GHB, and heroin territory. Fear-mongering about drugs is counterproductive for the most part, but it's important to remember that fear exists for a reason, and if it stops you from filling your blood with a fatal dose of opiates at any point then that's undoubtedly a good thing. Use your wiles, your street smarts. Trust your gut, children!

Photo by Chris Bethell

COCAINE HABITS ARE A LOT EASIER TO DEVELOP IF YOU GET USED TO DOING IT WITH BOOZE

Unless you're a billionaire drug baron doing bumps of Charlie off a knife in your beach house on the Caymans, chances are your cocaine consumption will go hand-in-hand with your alcohol consumption. You get hammered, start to feel a bit tired and woozy, and look for a pick-me-up delivered to you by a sullen man in a flash car.

But be careful. Mixing the two creates an all new drug called cocaethylene, which, while producing a sense of euphoria, can also be quite toxic to the old ticker, according to some studies. Plus, it gets really fucking expensive: $100 and a blocked nose every time a pint turns into four is not a sustainable habit.

Also: You have to do a shitload of gear to lose your septum (multiple grams every day for months), so unless you're a banker or you have a main role in an HBO show or whatever, I wouldn't worry too much about those photos of Daniella Westbrook they put up on the OHP. You literally cannot afford to wear away your flesh with coke.

IF YOU TRY HEROIN, YOU WILL NOT INSTANTLY BECOME ADDICTED TO HEROIN

Around 23 percent of people who use heroin develop a dependency to it. Still, as I mentioned before, it's probably best to just steer clear of it altogether, unless you're really into, like, sweating profusely and selling your fingernails for dirty coins.

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ADDICTS ARE NOT INHERENTLY BAD PEOPLE

The traditional stereotype of the addict is the itching, scratching, moseying mess found urinating on a century-old grave in a gloomy churchyard. But the truth is addiction takes many shapes and forms. Piss-heads are addicts, people who smoke an ounce of weed a week are addicts. Most of your favorite musicians from both ends of the spectrum are addicts.

The point being, school will teach you to think of addiction in a derisory way, which will in turn make you treat addicts in a derisory fashion. These are some of the most vulnerable among us, so it's best not to mock them for the intense wrong turns they've made up until this point. Instead, maybe just ask them if they're alright, or something.

TALKING ABOUT DRUGS HAS NEVER BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE COOL

In school, your desire to impress is greater than it ever has been or ever will be again. You want people to know you're #thatguy, cock of the walk, that you have more Snapchat followers than the whole of Year 9 combined.

And sure, bragging that your older sibling managed to bag you a spliff is fine when you're 14, but if you carry on being #thatguy into adulthood you'll end up trying to impress people on Tinder by saying you can hoover a whole gram of showbiz in one sitting. Understandably, no one likes that guy. No one has ever sounded cool talking about how many and what drugs they do.

Photo by Sreebot via Wikipedia

START OFF SLOW WITH THE WEED

You don't have to dive headfirst into the world of LA imports. Don't start smashing out dabs of oil and giving yourself sleep apnea. If you want to try cannabis, again, moderation is key: Get some shit weed on the go first; a bit of stringy Thai, some of that Rasta bush weed. Crap stuff that gives you a bit of a buzz.

If you start by blazing up the sticky icky, you might find yourself powerfully stoned and unable to swallow without the aid of liquids, and then look foolish in front of your peers.

Also, while we're here, let's talk about the weed-definitely-being-a-gateway-drug thing: Of the British drug users surveyed, 93 percent have smoked the Lord's plant. But does that mean that 93 percent of drug users in the UK are also tapping their forearms impatiently, or sifting through the fibers of their carpet trying to find a crack rock? Clearly not. Weed is no more a gateway drug than alcohol or cigarettes. The company you keep is a far greater indication of whether you'll end up honking on Satan's exhaust pipe a few years down the line.

Photo by David Hudson

PILLS HAVE THE HIGHEST REWARD-TO-RISK RATIO

Ecstasy does not put holes in your brain. The majority of deaths reported as caused by ecstasy are actually caused by PMA, that slow-burning substance I mentioned earlier. On a harm scale put together by Professor David Nutt, former drugs advisor to the British government, it ranked lower than basically everything (including alcohol and nicotine) other than mushrooms and LSD.

I'm not saying take ecstasy. Taking pills is still more harmful than not taking pills, and doing so does come with its own set of dangers. But the reality is that a lot of people will try it, and will subsequently experience a euphoric, beautiful sensation unmatched by any non-chemical stimulant. It's important to be very careful when you take any drugs, to dose responsibly and make sure you don't do anything stupid, like drink too much or not enough water, or try to go swimming in all your clothes.

However, it's important to remember that certain drugs sometimes get a disproportionately bad rap from the media and the government—two institutions that don't always know what they're talking about.

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Throw that swastika in the garbage. Photo via Flickr user Denis Bocquet

I'm a pacifist. I've come to believe that the means of war, no matter how just the reasoning behind it or how noble the goals for intervention might be, are just too awful to justify any end. The evil of war, the violence it unleashes, and what that violence does to both its victims and its perpetrators is so monstrous that all people and leaders should oppose it, full-stop. There is no just war.

But there is a doubt that undermines my belief: I have never been in a real fight. The closest I came was, at 19, getting in a drunken argument with a friend that culminated in us engaging in a backyard boxing match where I learned that, no matter what is covering the fists, getting punched in the head six times really, really hurts. Other than that and witnessing a couple of particularly brutal bar fights in Sault Ste. Marie, violence has been something that I've strenuously avoided. As strongly as I believe in pacifism, I can't help but wonder if it's just a reflection of me being a tiny little coward man who doesn't know how to fight. Is my pacifism just covering up that I'm a huge wuss?

A little while ago I was walking down a side street after last call in the west end of Toronto with a Jewish friend. We were heading from one recently gentrified part of town to another, down a peaceful road littered with election signs for one or the other of Canada's progressive parties. Suddenly the calm was shattered by an honest to goodness skinhead who was literally goose-stepping up the road. He had all your skinhead characteristics: shaved head, cargo shorts, and sieg-heiling while he yelled racist shit like, "No Jews," "Get out of this country," and "Vote Harper." (You know, classic racist stuff.) Apparently subtlety is not in a drunk neo-Nazi's wheelhouse.

I was furious. Fuck this guy, this is not what this city is about, I thought. I was particularly outraged for my friend, thinking, She doesn't deserve to feel this kind of danger, not here and not in 2015. Then, showing absolutely no concern for said friend's safety, I yelled at him from across the street. I wish it had been something clever or intelligent, like, "Hey Nazi. Kristall-not this time," but instead all that emerged was a stumbling, "Hey... man, stop it. Come on now man, not cool, not cool this Nazi stuff."

That was enough. In my own drunken outrage I had forgotten that Nazis are creatures of violence who have always loved nothing more than curb-stomping the head of some uppity socialist. He crossed the street and immediately began challenging me to a fight—and not politely. This was a big, scary man. He looked like if Kevin James starred in The Believer. I was not about to fight this beast. (Though admittedly my reaction would have probably been the same even he was one of those elusive skinny hipster book-nerd neo-Nazis.) I fearfully backtracked, "Hey man, I don't actually want to fight. No trouble please."

And then the Nazi said, "You're just a little bitch," before goose-stepping off into the night.

Just a little bitch.

Admittedly, no one would advise that you should put too much stock in the opinion of a skinhead, but his statement couldn't help but echo in my head. In the immediate aftermath, I felt like I had failed some sort of societal test. I should've fought him, damnit. I mean isn't that who you're supposed to fight, a Nazi? Didn't we learn that in school? I'm sure a history teacher told me, "If you see a Nazi you should fight 'em because you never know when it's going to be that one Nazi who makes everything all crazy."

Visions of what I could've done kept playing before my eyes. I could have gotten in his face and then delivered a surprise headbutt as one of my sketchy uncles advised me one time. Or a kick in the balls, no amount of hate can protect somebody from a good nut shot. Or better yet, I should've just taken the beating. A beating received for standing up for tolerance? Once I got out of the hospital I probably would've felt great. Getting beaten up in the name of justice by a skinhead must feel like voting a million times.

The next day, I had stopped wishing for a sweet justice beatdown but was still plagued by the encounter. What could I have done to affect this man's mind, how could I have challenged his hate? I had only slightly dipped my toe into the dark, swirling, bottomless ocean that is man's capacity for violence and hate and even that made me feel out of my depth. My value of peace now seemed naive, borne out of privilege and safety. The men who commit to violence, to The Act of Killing; they aren't interested in working out a problem. This encounter left me feeling like Tommy Lee Jones at the end of No Country For Old Men.

I realize now, though, that I was making the same mistake of many as advocates for just war. Warmongers often claim that they are only being realistic, that peace is a great idea and all but that's just not how the world works. This claim of realism is often just a narrowing of events and an ignoring of the context of the situation. It's not being realistic, but simplistic. They claim to be offering sober judgement but often this involves not addressing the larger historical reasons behind a crisis and the policy alternatives that were not attempted. Furthermore, as every incursion into the Middle East has shown us, these "realists" have no fucking idea what comes after the violence. Their realism is as idealistic as pacifism; we've just been told one idea is for serious adults while the other is a neat idea for songs by hippies.

In my head, I had turned my encounter with fat Ed Norton into a battle between good and evil, one that I lost. Who was even writing those thoughts, David Frum? The context of the scenario was that, of course I shouldn't have fought this guy. He was just a drunk fool making a tremendous ass of himself at three in the morning. It's not like an awkward brawl would suddenly turn this guy into Chris Hedges. Plus, I can only hope the drunk shame you feel the morning after you goose-step in public is searing.

The West has been in permanent war for nearly 15 years now with no end in sight. The nature of this war is changing as well, becoming more reliant on drone strikes and special forces, making it harder and harder to notice and resist. This convenient warfare has become orthodoxy for even the furthest on the left all the while giving no proof that we get anything from it other than dead, innocent children, more people who hate us and more self-perpetuating war. It's time to change this. The left should advocate for total peace and foreign policies based on diplomacy, empathy and sanctuary. If this makes me a little bitch, well than all I can say is:

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Kids are people too! Photo via Flickr user Ian D. Keating

"I don't like children," I say for the umpteenth time after someone suggests I swap my black pen for a red one and take up teaching. "Well, except for my own. And those over 25."

These well-worn words roll so easily off of my tongue. I've been using them as an excuse for many years for many reasons: to avoid holding babies, to prevent people from interrogating me about whether I'm having another baby, and to get out of babysitting other people's kids. I so glibly and, I think, wittily write off an entire group of people as annoying, unintelligent, loud, and sticky.

Hating kids is easy enough. I mean, what better way to express your cool cynicism than by mocking those little people with endless streams of radioactive-looking snot running from their noses? People regularly and loudly call for kid-free flights and restaurants, and the avalanche of Mean Girls tweets when a group of children get on public transit is hilarious. But the claws and fangs really come out when some hapless politician dares offer tax breaks or any other assistance for families with children.

We've taken the 13th-century expression "children are to be seen and not heard" and updated for the 2000s. Instead we say, "Children should be carted off to the 'burbs along with their breeders and annoying Hummer-sized strollers, only to be let out when they hit 20."

But just take one of those hilarious observations and swap "children" with Black, gay, neurodivergent, or any other marginalized identity and things get a little... sticky. Maybe it's time we re-examine our hate toward children.

At the beginning of September, hordes of kids vacated the streets and public parks and began another year in state-sanctioned minimum-security kiddie prisons all over the country. We call them schools but they serve multiple purposes: socialization, brainwashing, corralling, and un-sticky-ifying. We can't, after all, have the little buggers wandering the city, clogging the malls and giggling outside after the streetlights go on.

While these small humans roll deep—they make up a third of the Canadian population—they represent a relatively powerless group. They can barely wipe their own asses and need help crossing the street, and we adults really take advantage of that. We completely disregard the unique voices, concerns, and needs of young people because, as a Facebook friend so eloquently explained it, we believe that authority resides within us for no other reason than our size and age. I get that kids don't have as much autonomy as adults but they also shouldn't be treated like they are invisible, or worse, unwanted.

And I get it. Millennials are delaying parenthood or just deciding not to have kids, but we can't let our personal decisions influence how we view, treat, and mistreat a group of marginalized people, and most kids—the ones who aren't Tavi Gevinson and Willow Smith—are indeed marginalized.

Because most youth can't vote, politicians don't bother creating policy or platforms that would benefit them (Norm Kelly doesn't count). Most kid-friendly initiatives are planned and executed without ever once consulting young people, and the unwritten norm is "talk to the parents, not the kids."

This approach to running a country has adverse effects on children.

Housing discrimination for parents of young kids is a thing, one in ten Canadian children lives in poverty, and government support of families with children could be a lot better. Recently, former mayor Rob Ford recommended cutting funding to school breakfast programs for children despite that fact that 40 percent of children in Toronto go to school hungry. When a child's stomach is eating itself and poverty is rampant they are more likely to drop out of school, join gangs, and get caught up in the criminal justice system. Available, quality child-care spaces are rare and subsidized ones are even rarer—many parents apply for spots the moment they find out they are expecting.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne isn't much more progressive than Ford. Though earlier this year she announced a modest pay raise for early childhood education workers, Wynne currently has her horns locked with Ontario teachers as she aggressively attempts to balance the provincial budget by increasing class sizes, lengthening teachers' work days, and slashing education funding.

Anti-youth sentiments in Canada are real and those sentiments translate into systemic discrimination of youth by politicians. By dismissing youth, we're closing ourselves off a valuable resource with unique perspectives.

I was walking down the street with my eight-year-old kid. We were stopped by some people doing surveys about how our neighbourhood could be improved. They humoured my kid and asked him what our neighbourhood could use more of.

"Parking spaces? Bike lanes?" they asked.

"Trees. I'd like to see more trees."

"Wow! We never thought of that," said the surveyors.

The view is a lot different, but no less valid and valuable, at ankle-biter level.

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Phillip Nolan, far right, with Herringbone. Photo courtesy The Canadian Press

A junior high teacher from Ottawa who also backed up Stephen Harper's band has pleaded guilty to molesting a teenage student 15 years ago.

Phillip Nolan, 45, pleaded guilty this week to two counts of sexual interference for molesting a 13-year-old girl in his office and during a school trip, the Ottawa Citizen reports.

Nolan taught music and computer science at Ottawa's Avalon Public School; he was suspended last year during the course of the investigation.

In addition to teaching, he was a drummer in Herringbone, a Celtic band that performed at shows across the country with the former prime minister.

At the time of his arrest, the Prime Minister's Office said it was "shocked and disturbed" to hear of the allegations against Nolan.

Speaking in court Thursday, Nolan's victim said the abuse made her feel isolated and ashamed.

"I was increasingly compelled to try to ensure that no one else would be sexually abused by Phillip Nolan," she said. "I felt guilty at not having been able to stop him sooner, and sick at the thought that he was still working with young students."

Nolan, who will be sentenced next year, apologized for his actions.

"The past two years have been a living hell for me. I want nothing more for this to be over."

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Not the cop in this piece. Photo via Flickr user Stewart Butterfield

On Wednesday, thousands of mourners gathered to grieve Officer Randolph Holder of the New York City Police Department, who was shot to death on October 20. Holder was the fourth NYPD officer killed by gunfire in just 11 months—a huge spike compared to the typical number of cop deaths each year. The local surge in police casualties has roughly coincided with protests across the country over police killings of unarmed black men, including that of Eric Garner, who died on Staten Island last year after being choked by an NYPD officer. Cops feel like they're being targeted now, and tensions between officers and anti-brutality protesters seem to rise by the day. Police unions in New York and elsewhere went ballistic this week after filmmaker Quentin Tarantino made headlines by loudly participating in a rally in New York City where he called some of them "murderers."

Some critics have argued that Holder's alleged killer, 30-year-old Tyrone Howard, slipped through a negligent criminal justice system, a point of view even held by some of Howard's family. The father of two was released into a drug-diversion program following an arrest last year for dealing narcotics, but was suspected in previous shootings as well. Still, calls for a more stringent review of diversion candidates in the wake of Holder's death have been largely drowned out by the broader political push to reform the criminal justice system's targeting of minorities with tough sentences for nonviolent crimes.

Emotions are running high in America's law enforcement community, so I met up with an off-duty NYPD officer for a midnight drink at an Upper West Side bar to hear his take. We talked about how the shootings are changing the relationship between the NYPD and the public they're supposed to be protecting.

VICE: So tell me what's going on with these shootings.
Active-duty NYPD Officer: Things are escalating. You're seeing a change in sentiment. This country is becoming very anti-police. It's not just here, either—it's everywhere. It just seems like the good guys became the bad guys and vice versa. People are siding with the perps.

But that can't just be happening out of nowhere. Don't you think it has something to do with all the cop violence that's come to light recently?
What's going on is that people are seeing on the internet, on YouTube or whatever, the brutal side of what police work is about. That's about 5 to 10 percent of police work.

Killing people?
Shooting people. Bad guys. I don't want to shoot anyone, but sometimes you get into a situation where you have to.

Not all of those killings happened because of straightforward self-defense by cops, though, right?
Well, there are some knuckleheads who join the force because they want to be tough guys, and they sometimes act like assholes and make us all look bad. But 95 percent of our interactions end positively. Sure, people are yelling and screaming and nobody's happy if we're there. But nine times out of ten no one gets hurt and everyone walks away with a little more understanding of themselves and their situation... Like, with domestic disputes, let's say a couple is fighting and one of them calls 9-1-1. Within five minutes of walking in the door, a good cop knows 15 years' worth of their problems... Then once you've calmed that down, you go on to the next call, which could be a call for help or shots fired. You never know.

People need to get a grip and stop watching those videos over and over and over again. This is just another part of police work that no cop wants to do.

Watch our interview with journalist Chris Hedges:

This obviously doesn't pertain to cop killers, but I think some people would say they'd like to see the police force reformed.
You can reform it all you want, but it'll still be police work. You can stick a pink ribbon on it for breast cancer and make it all PR-friendly, but shooting will always come with the job. My job is to make sure the civilian population stays safe. And if there's a guy over there with a gun or a knife, I'm going to shoot.

But what if he doesn't have anything? No gun, no knife. What if he's just a kid from the projects who gets shot because a cop thinks he looks like a criminal
How often does that happen, though?

I think we've seen it happen more than once.
OK, well let's look at the total number of police interactions and measure them next to the rare instances when someone doesn't do his or her job right. Sometimes these kids play you, and you have to be a good cop and figure out what's real.

But you think the recent murders of police officers are tied into this surge of anti-cop sentiment?
Absolutely. People don't understand our world, and to a certain extent as civilians, they shouldn't have to. It's a bad, shitty world. We're the guys you call at the last minute, right before shit hits the fan. A lot of people won't ever be exposed to that. They live nice, comfortable lives. Cops see people at the worst point in their lives, and most people don't understand those circumstances. So even if you're 100 percent justified, you shoot someone and you're politically fucked.

So what's the mood at the precinct right now?
Essentially, "Don't do shit." They're saying we should just give the city what it wants. If everyone wants to go back to mayhem, that's fine. We'll just back off. I've been a plainclothes officer in multiple divisions, and you couldn't pay me enough to be one now.

"Sure, I think there are things that should be reformed. But they can't teach you how to be human at the academy. You learn that from life experience."

Has there been any top-down effort to reform the department or make it more PR-friendly?
There have been some things. Next month, we start the process of handing out cards at traffic stops. So if I stop someone, I have to give them a little card with my name, shield number, command number and personal email address through the department. So let's say I make a traffic stop; even if I don't give the guy a ticket, I've delayed him for five minutes and he's pissed off. What do you think he's going to do? He's going to email me, call the precinct and do a CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board). You're going to see a huge increase in CCRBs. There are going to be lots of cops just trying to do their jobs and having to deal with all this hassle, not to mention the paperwork and bureaucracy. So it all looks great on paper, but not so great in practice.

There's also been the push for front-cuffing, for instance, and this breast cancer awareness business. It's a great cause, don't get me wrong, but cops should not be driving around in pink fucking police cars. I guess if I were to shoot someone while wearing a pink shirt, it might look better than if I were wearing a blue one. They want everything to look nice for the cameras, and they're going to second-guess everything we do.

People are saying that the guy who shot the cop shouldn't have been out on the street because of his other crimes. What do you think?
He was a bad dude. But when someone goes to the DA's office, sometimes not everything is available to them; maybe the records are sealed for whatever reason. So they look and say, "Oh, this guy is a nonviolent offender." The DAs only see some of the perp's background. We see the whole picture—his rap sheet, arrest record, convictions.

But do you think there should be reforms instituted on cops and their policing?
Sure, I think there are things that should be reformed. But they can't teach you how to be human at the academy. You learn that from life experience. The academy is supposed to teach you how to be a cop: how to take action, when not to take action. When I came up, they partnered rookies with cops who had some life experience and knew what the fuck they were doing. But a whole generation of veteran-to-rookie wisdom and knowledge was lost with Kelly's Operation Impact, which basically kept rookies away from veteran cops and kept them doing stupid stop-and-frisks for no fucking reason. I have sergeants and lieutenants and a captain who came from Operation Impact and they're fucking useless. They're still numbers-oriented, like Kelly was. They don't know how to handle a simple job. It's like, "No, this isn't dangerous, put away your piece, that's just poor people arguing." Just because some black kids are hanging out on a corner doesn't make them perps.

Real cops can look at those kids and tell the good ones from the bad just by the way they walk and their eyes, things like that. That was lost in translation during Operation Impact, when everything became about the numbers.

Do you think the NYPD needs race-sensitivity training?
Well, let's be real. Where do the majority of our calls and complaints come from? Fifth Avenue? No. They come from the projects. It's not about race; it's about concentration of crime. There are plenty of black guys on the force, and they'll say that being an asshole is colorblind.

"No cop ever runs out there excited to shoot someone. That's the fallacy that these BLM jerkoffs really don't seem to understand. They think we're all just dying to shoot black people."

Are cops scared right now? What are you hearing?
Yes, of course they are. At the end of the day, you still have to pay a mortgage. Some of us have kids and families. They don't want to deal with the hassle and the headache and the PBA and becoming the next YouTube sensation over a shooting that will bury them for the rest of their lives. No cop ever runs out there excited to shoot someone. That's the fallacy that these BLM jerkoffs really don't seem to understand. They think we're all just dying to shoot black people.

But the question is, would any of them walk into a gunfight to help someone? Probably not. That's our job. But now some of us are just over it. They don't want to interact with the public anymore. They don't want to do car stops or even calls for help anymore. Is it worth going there and potentially dying for a public that doesn't appreciate the work they do?

I actually do less now than I did before, and I'm not the only one. Why? Because it just seems pointless. You're not going to change the system. Bad guys still get out. I've seen the process through the court system. "Oh, he's a good kid, blah blah blah," and you get a judge who's laid-back and they put him in a program or out on ROR , and then a cop gets shot, and here we are.

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Photo via Flickr user Peter Stevens

Read: Despite 100 Years of Activism, the Death Penalty Still Won't Die

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for an end to the death penalty on Thursday, laying out his case in a Senate floor speech just one day after Hillary Clinton—the party's 2016 frontrunner and Sanders' main rival for the nomination—said she was opposed to abolishing the practice.

"We are all shocked and disgusted by some of the horrific murders that we see in this country, seemingly every week," he said Thursday. "And that is precisely why we should abolish the death penalty. At a time of rampant violence and murder, the state should not be part of that process."

Sanders added that he'd rather "stand side-by-side with European democracies rather than countries like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others who maintain the death penalty."

Sanders' position may come as welcome alternative to Democratic primary voters disappointed by Clinton's more equivocal stance. At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Clinton said that she is opposed to getting rid of capital punishment, though she emphasized that the death penalty "has been too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way" in the United States.

The invective on capital punishment is the latest in a series of major policy moves for Sanders, setting up yet another contrast with the party's more moderate heir apparent. On Wednesday, he announced his support for removing marijuana from the federal government's list of outlawed drugs, saying that states should be allowed to regulate the substance as they please. He's not pushing to completely legalize weed, per se—in states where it remained illegal, federal authorities could still arrest and prosecute dealers—but those who smoked pot would no longer be subject to federal prosecution for possession.

Sanders also met with Vice President Joe Biden Thursday, cozying up to the vice president at a meeting where the two reportedly discussed campaign finance reform and college affordability.

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The cover of the greatest prime minister-related fan fiction written to date. Photo via Amazon

Read: Maybe It's Time We Re-Examine Why We Are So Shitty to Kids

Justin Trudeau has yet to officially assume the position of prime minister, and already it's clear that we are in for a second wave of Trudeaumania. Case in point, Sam Shiver's new novella, Serving the Prime Minister: A Canadian Romance.

Indeed it seems that Shiver has tapped into something Canadian literary buffs didn't know they wanted, let alone needed: Canadian political erotica.

Shiver is the author of such under-the-radar classics as Slave of the Quicksand Monster and Hypnotized by the Magician's Sex Show, but this nine-page rushed-to-e-book tale, released just days after Trudeau was elected, has the potential to be her opus.

It's already earned a rave review on Amazon, entitled "It puts the "SEX" in Sussex Drive"!

"I hope to see more erotic Prime Minister literature such as this. The sex scenes alone are enough to make me readily accept a hike in GST....," the review said.

Serving the Prime Minister: A Canadian Romance opens with our narrator Shawn—a tired yet resilient young aide for the Leaf Party—contemplating the fact that his handsome party leader will soon be the prime minister. That handsome leader is Dustin Waterhole, the kind of man who can make more than just the polls rise.

What follows is a tale of missed connections and general longing and countless references to the awesomeness of Waterhole's hair, all of which (spoiler alert) culminates in some seriously graphic sex between the soon-to-be PM and his aide.

"Seems like you're a hit with the ladies." I looked over at him - I was no judge of other dudes, but he did have a handsome face and a strong chin. I knew he worked out - there was some charity thing last year where he had taken off his shirt and it had made the front of the newspapers with his abs. "Maybe it is your hair." I winked.

He laughed, easily and naturally. "Remind me why I keep you around?" he joked. I looked over at him, his blue eyes twinkling like crystal pools. I felt some surge of emotion flutter up in my chest, something I couldn't place, amplified by the beer.

Before I could gather my thoughts, our lips were locked.

Shiver could very well be an author who truly understands the repressed passion of the people inhabiting the Great White North. Through this lens, Serving the Prime Minister holds up a mirror up to our nation's very soul, revealing our submissive relationship with our government and the inherent beauty of that arrangement.

Or maybe it's just a book about getting fucked in the ass by a hot prime minister.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Warner Brothers

It may sound strange to hear, but the director of The Exorcist, William Friedkin, never set out to make a horror movie. But when the film about a young girl's demonic possession came out in 1973 people fainted, wept, and fled the theater. Armed guards had to be posted at screenings. As Paul Mooney said after viewing the film with his friend Richard Pryor: "If you say The Exorcist didn't scare you, you're full of shit."

William Peter Blatty's novel, on which Friedkin's film was based, provoked a similar reaction when it was released in 1971. People were so unmoored by it that they banished it to linen closets, trashcans, and freezers. That Blatty's novel took its inspiration from the real-life exorcism by priests of a young boy in Maryland in 1949 speaks to Friedkin's original intention as a director. Which was to make not a horror movie, but a "realistic" "film about the mystery of faith."

Today, on Friday, October 30 at 6 PM, 42 years after The Exorcist was released, the so-called "Exorcist steps" at 36th and M Streets in Georgetown, Washington DC, down which a newly possessed Father Karras hurls himself in order to save Reagan's life at the end of the film, will be dedicated with a plaque that bears Friedkin and Blatty's names. Recently, I spoke over the phone with Friedkin about revisiting The Exorcist, 70s horror, and why the steps dedication means more than any of his Academy Awards.

VICE: It came as no surprise to me upon rewatching The Exorcist last night how well it still stands up. Not only how scary and transgressive it is and continues to be, but also how stately and deliberately paced it is. It achieves this wonderful combination between mounting dread and absolute restraint.
William Friedkin: Which is why I'm stunned when it appears at the top of virtually all horror-film polls. Because we didn't conceive of it as a horror film.

I felt that the story was great—I mean, really confounding, because it was so real. It introduces the supernatural as a part of real life. And so I wanted to respect that. Today, I will admit that it's a horror film. [Back then] I knew it would be disturbing to people, though I had no idea how disturbing. People were freaked out—for years!—and to some extent, still are. I appeared last night at a screening at the Soho House here in Los Angeles. Full-house audience. Mostly young people in their 20s and 30s. And they were as struck by it as when it had first come out. I don't think that the film has dated because of the way it was cast, paced, and presented.

The pacing is deliberate, and I wanted it to happen slowly because the story, as it affected the real people who inspired it, took place in just that way. I felt we had to go through all of that. You had to see the symptoms. You had to see the treatment that was given out by internal medicine and by psychiatry, and to see that it all had been tried and failed.

"There are only three reasons people go to the movies: to laugh, to cry, or to be scared."

Well, one of the reasons I think it's so effective as a horror film is the pathos you feel for the characters. I think that mainly comes across in the performances. And this time around, I was really struck by the performance of Jason Miller (Father Karras). How did you coax such an elemental and intense performance out of him?
I didn't have him in mind at all. He wasn't really making a living as an actor; he was a milkman in Flushing, New York. But he had written this play called The Championship Season, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a terrific play, and I saw it when I was in New York casting the little girl, and it seemed to reek of lapsed Catholicism. And it turned out that he had studied for the priesthood at Catholic University in Washington for three years, then had a crisis of faith and dropped out—very much like the character, Father Karras.

So it wasn't an instance of my having to hammer this into him. He understood it, he got it. He had lived it.

There were big stars that wanted to play that part. Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman. Many others. And I had an instinct to not hire a star. I did not want to put someone like that in a priest collar.

On VICE: Watch Teenage Exorcists:

It's interesting—you're watching the movie, and the acting is great, and the direction is great, but if you were to take away the good actors, by virtue of the direction alone, it would still be a scary film. I noticed that a large part of the film's beauty and its grotesquerie derives from this sort of piecemeal imagery that we get...
You're talking about the subliminal cuts [of the demon Pazuzu's face]. They're not in the script, they're not in the novel, but I've always believed that while are in a conversation with someone, or having a meal, or watching a movie, or even driving—images pop quickly into our mind's eye like fireworks. Almost like a waking dream. I became very interested in the idea of subliminal perception.

The first scene when you see Linda being examined in the doctor's office there's this two-three frame cut of the demon, and that's the initial makeup test, which I rejected. It wasn't organic, it was just horror makeup. , there's the scene where she cuts herself with the crucifix in the vagina. It occurred to me that she probably did that to her face, too. And so Dick Smith, the makeup artist, and I decided to have the makeup grow out of self-inflicted wounds to the face that become gangrenous so that there was an organic reason for the change in her facial features, which might certainly be demonic possession, or self-immolation.

I love that that was in the DNA of the film, right down to the makeup design. The other thing I was wondering about, though, were some more extended shots toward the beginning—like the ironsmith with the blighted eye in Iraq, the ghostly nun, the homeless man on the subway. I was looking at how those shots were working with sound effects and sound-editing in the film. I think that's where the fear comes in, for me. It's that accord between very, very economical visual imagery and sound-editing that really does it.
I treated the soundtrack completely separately. I created sound environments with my collaborators. What I had in mind, of course, was to recreate dramatic radio, which I loved as a kid. All these wonderful suspense radio programs. Inner Sanctum, Suspense, Orson Welles's Mercury Theater. But I always tried to work with soundtracks in just that way—where the soundtrack has its own life and its own importance.

Was "Tubular Bells" originally composed for the film?
I had commissioned Lalo Schifrin to write a score, and I didn't like the score. I felt the need for something that was akin to Brahams's "Lullaby"—a kind of childhood feel. I went to see the head of Warner at the time, and he didn't know what the hell I was talking about, but he said go into that room over there, the music library. There were a couple tables stacked with demos. I went through that stack until I came to this thing called "Tubular Bells" by a guy named Mike Oldfield. And had no interest in it—was not going to release it. It's a narration record. Because right after I play "Tubular Bells," Mike Oldfield starts narrating and talking about tubular bells, what they are, and how they sound. But I listened to that refrain, and it hooked me, and we won the rights to it. I think it sold 10 or 20 million records. And it was an accident.

" really changed the horror film—his novel, our movie. It was not a serial killer, a robot, a monster, a vampire, a zombie—it was something completely different, set in a realist world."

You know, it strikes me that many of the great horrors films of the 70s or early 80s have some kind of iconic classical score. Like, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Sentinel, Carrie, Halloween, Suspiria, Jaws, and at the end of course you have Alien and The Shining. Why do you think the 70s was such a golden age for that kind of film being made?
There was a lot more freedom of the screen then. It was not formulaic. In those days, the studios were open. You could make a film like The Exorcist and get away with it. But the form of course was inspired and influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley. Those were the people who invented horror films, because the first really significant horror films were things like Dracula, Frankenstein, and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

You know, the guy's name who should be up there with those three is William Peter Blatty, for The Exorcist . He really changed the horror film—his novel, our movie. It was not a serial killer, a robot, a monster, a vampire, a zombie—it was something completely different, set in a realist world. Of course, everything I've mentioned to you—the gothic horror stories that are the origin of all this—they're set in a totally fictional world. Nobody is pretending that Dracula or Frankenstein's monster are real.

Right, they take place in these kind of hyper-realities. There's something entirely otherworldly about them.
They're great! And they still hold up. But Blatty changed horror films.

"I'm not a fan of The Shining at all. That's kind of masturbatory stuff, I felt."

You've dabbled in many different genres over the years, most notably crime, yet every decade or so you seem to return to horror, or at least films with a strong macabre sensibility. Cruising, Jade, Rampage, Bug. What keeps you coming back to horror and the macabre?
I don't consciously return to any genre. I'm certainly drawn more to drama than to comedy. And I think there are only three reasons people go to the movies: to laugh, to cry, or to be scared. I think I come back to not horror films so much as high-intensity films about characters that have their backs against a wall and no place to go.

But you know, the horror film genre is a small brotherhood of real classics. The Shining—I'm not a fan of The Shining at all. That's kind of masturbatory stuff, I felt. I don't find it scary, and I also found it—a bit obscure. I don't know what the fuck it was about!

The films that have terrified me are Alien, Psycho, a Japanese film called Onibaba (1964)—one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen. And I loved this recent film The Babadook. It took me by surprise, and I believed it. I mean, it was largely about the difficulty of being a single mother with a troubled child. In other words, a realistic situation, with real characters, that I found to be profoundly moving.

On the Creators Project: Virtual Reality Horror Film 'Catatonic' Comes to Your Smartphone

With The Exorcist, as you say, you set out to make a high-intensity film, though not necessarily one of such majestically disturbing proportions. So what do you think was lost in translation there between you and the audience?
Nothing. People interpreted the film as they chose. Most people think of it as a horror film, so I've long since accepted that it must be. And I've learned over the years that the most terrifying scene is the arteriogram.

Yes! I absolutely agree with you. That is the most terrifying scene.
Medical science impinging upon the innocence of this little girl. Which is more disturbing than the demon.

My last question has to do with the dedication of the steps. How do you feel about it?
Let me tell you exactly how I feel about it. I have an Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director [ The French Connection ], and a number of nominations. There are probably hundreds of people who have won an Academy Award, but I don't think there are any who have a dedication like that on one of their locations. They're calling those steps now—in a historic district—in a historic city—the Exorcist Steps. My name is on the plaque. As is Blatty's. To me that's an absolutely great honor because the Academy may come and go. Its importance has been diminished over the years anyway. But that plaque on those steps is going to be there for a very long time.

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Photo courtesy of Indecline

On a stretch of the Mexico/US border in Tijuana, not far from the airport, there is an enormous mural of Donald Trump, a red ball gag stuffed in his mouth, his signature combover perfectly styled, with the words "¡Rape Trump!" Nevermind that the Spanish word for rape is actually violar—the point is completely clear.

The mural, which was created by an art collective called Indecline, was spray painted there about a week ago and also features instructions on how to get to Trump Tower from Tijuana. The group's creative director (who asked not to be named) told me the art was in direct response to Trump calling Mexicans "rapists" during his presidential announcement in June, and again in a clarification of that speech, where he said, "What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc."

"Do I feel bad about saying he should get raped? No. Not at all," the creative director told me. "He's a pretty horrible person. This was a tongue-in-cheek response to the quote—just kind of throwing it back on him."

"We don't honestly expect anyone to crawl over the border and follow the instructions and find Trump and rape him," said the Creative Director, "but we want to raise awareness horrible shit he said. Controversy works better than something subtle."

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It's the week of Halloween, and maybe you don't know this, but if you suddenly wanted to adopt a black cat, you would probably have a hard time. That's because thanks to their association with witchcraft, accepted wisdom holds that Halloween is a time when people ritualistically mutilate black cats.

To test if this really was still accepted wisdom, I contacted some animal shelters near to our Los Angeles office, and they all told me they wouldn't let me adopt a black cat. One, The Lange Foundation—the type of animal rescue that takes in cats from city shelters before they can be euthanized—was willing to talk to me on the phone and explain: If someone were to call and ask specifically for a black cat, that would trigger the policy. "I would say 'not today!'" said one of the foundation's board members, Diana Nelson.

The policy is somewhat casual in its execution, however. Nelson gave the proviso that the Lange Foundation would be perfectly willing to let someone adopt one "if it's someone we know." In fact she told me black cat adoption had "never become an issue."

When asked I Nelson why, the policy became a little less clear. "We're afraid they're going to harm them," she said, "because apparently there are bad people."

We reached out to The Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) to find out if they had official policies on the matter, but they did not return requests for comment.

In the late 1980s, animal shelters started to set aside black cats around Halloween in order to prevent people from adopting them. According to an Associated Press report from 1987, a woman went into a Chicago animal shelter that year and asked for a black cat as some kind of accessory for her Halloween costume. Weirdly, according to the story, the shelter let her adopt one on that premise, and a few days later law enforcement reported a dead cat.

The idea seemed to catch on. Throughout the 1990s, it was common knowledge that you couldn't adopt a black cat around Halloween.

Why? For the same reason kids couldn't listen to Marilyn Manson in the 1990s: Satan.

"It goes back to satanic rituals and the strange kinds of things that happen at this time of year," Jeanne Stoffel, executive director of the Ozaukee, Wisconsin Humane Society told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 1996.

It's hard, however, to find a definitive example of a cat-sacrificing ceremony on Halloween. A rash of grisly cat mutilations in California in 1999 appears to have occurred in the summer when there was a full moon. A series of incidents in Utah that were reported around Halloween of 2002, actually began in the spring, and also involved dogs. That story cited, seemingly as common sense, the idea that Halloween is the time of year when animal mutilations become more common.

That sort of thing doesn't seem all that likely in the modern Satanist Church, which shares more DNA with new age self-help philosophy than the P.A.G.A.N.s from the 1987 movie Dragnet. Religious animal sacrifice seems a little more plausible as a reason for black cats to disappear in areas like South Florida, where people practice Santeria. According to Santeria's official website, ritualistic animal slaughter is necessary if you want the spirits known as Orishas to show up to your party.

In 1993, the Supreme Court said animal sacrifices like those in Santeria were constitutionally protected. Still, despite animal rights groups occasionally targeting Santeria practitioners for reportedly killing dogs, sacrificing cats at Halloween seems to be an ugly rumor, according to activist groups like Canada's Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.

The policy against letting people adopt black cats on Halloween does appear to be relaxing. In the early 2000s, some shelters started dropping the policy. The rationale seems to be that adopting a cat from a shelter is relatively difficult anyway, and you can find a stray cat pretty much anywhere.

Paul Miller, director of the Washington County, Maryland, Humane Society told a reporter for Capital News Service in 2003, "Cats are readily available, free on the street," adding, "Those are the ones I'm concerned about."

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