Long a prominent chronicler of the black American experience in films like Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), and Get on the Bus (1996), Spike Lee has now turned his attention to a pressing social issue: gun violence. It' s a national concern—horrifying instances occur on a daily basis—but in his latest "joint," the impassioned, iridescent musical comedy Chi-Raq, Lee localizes his story in one of the nation's most affected areas: Chicago's impoverished, predominantly African-American South Side. Essentially, it's Lee on " black-on-black crime, " a hotly contested subject.

More than a few Chicagoans reacted with horror to the racy, exuberant first trailer, worried that Lee, a New Yorker (and thus an interloper) was trivializing a serious issue. In a dismaying sign of our times, writers trashed the film in hyperventilating op-eds before they, or anyone, had seen it. Lee is no stranger to this type of controversy: Back in 1989, pundits, including conservative columnist Joe Klein, erroneously fretted that his masterpiece Do the Right Thing would provoke riots among young African-American moviegoers.

In Chi-Raq's case, a plainly irritated Lee responded by cutting an unrepresentative, morose trailer prefaced by a stony-faced message in which he stressed that his film was deadly serious, and satirical. (This was a curious case of life imitating art: At the start of Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled, the main character explains the meaning of satire to the audience—did Lee figure he'd ever need to do the same?) Lee also flatly rejected requests from the likes of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to change the title, a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq coined by locals to connote the area's warzone-like volatility.

Chi-Raq also happens to be the name of the character portrayed by Nick Cannon, into whose coiled, muscular frame the tragedy, violence, and aspirations of the city are sublimated. Chi-Raq's both a talented, aspiring rapper and the leader of the purple-clad Spartans gang. Their bitter rivals, the orange-decked Trojans, are presided over by Cyclops (an eyepatch-sporting Wesley Snipes, who gives a curious performance that veers from mumbly to tittering). " Pray 4 My City," the Cannon-performed rap track that opens the film, sets a rueful, angry tone. In a possible nod to the iconic 1987 video for Prince's " Sign O the Times," its lyrics are forcefully imposed in blood-red font across a jet-black screen as they're spit out by Cannon: "Too much hate in my city / Too many heartaches in my city / But I got faith in my city."

As you may have already heard, Chi-Raq's eyebrow-raising plot is an audaciously faithful update of Aristophanes's bawdy 411 BC play Lysistrata, in which the eponymous character persuades her fellow women to withhold sex from their partners so that they will stop the Peloponnesian War. Here, the killing of a young girl by a stray bullet is the catalyst for a sex strike led by Chi-Raq's girlfriend Lysistrata, played with magnetic charisma by Dear White People's Teyonah Parris. As the strike intensifies, tempers fray, balls go blue, politicians get involved, and hijinks ensue.

In the context of Lee's career, Chi-Raq is a paradox: It's both like nothing he's done before and a comprehensive compendium of his myriad, long-standing stylistic tics and thematic obsessions. One on hand, the gulf between his grave subject matter and his unorthodox cinematic delivery has never been more profound, nor challenging. He's made one musical—campus showdown School Daze (1988)—but its gaudy exuberance was well-suited to its tale of spunky students at war and play. His diagnostic, New York–set drug drama Clockers (1995), meanwhile, was characterized by its somber visual and tonal approach, save for the occasional stylistic flourish.

In attempting to balance tragedy with fun in Chi-Raq, Lee throws a lot at the wall, hoping it'll stick. It makes for a rather odd viewing experience: One minute there's a lump in our throat as we watch a grieving mother (Jennifer Hudson) mopping up the blood of her dead child; the next we're faced with a bug-eyed strip-club proprietor (Dave Chappelle) hollering about how "these hos"—the strikers—"have literally shut down the penis power grid!" Such transitions are far from smooth, but Lee deserves credit for venturing that the rude juxtaposition of ribald comedy and deep sadness are endemic to the urban black experience.

Chi-Raq is also a Brechtian overload, forcing the viewer to recognize its artificiality (spectacularly stylized, color-coded costumes and set design) while simultaneously flashing its documentary cred. After its Cannon-rap opening, a torrent of onscreen statistics about gun violence flood the screen, followed by a stentorian voiceover about life on the streets from real-life Chicago pastor Father Michael Pfleger, a version of whom is played in the film by John Cusack. Next we're introduced to the nattily dressed Dolemedes (Samuel L. Jackson), a one-man chorus who contextualizes the narrative in gleeful monologues delivered straight into the camera. (The role recalls his turn as community focal point DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy in Do the Right Thing.) The vast majority of the film's dialogue is delivered in rhyming verse, with mixed results. For every wryly funny couplet, there's one that sounds pulled straight from the "My First Rap" songbook: "Da Greek Aristophanes penned a play satirizin' his day / And in the style of his time, ' Stophanes made dat shit rhyme!"

Although Chi-Raq's source material is centuries old, Lee (and co-writer Kevin Willmott) make a concerted effort to establish its immediacy. They freight the script with references to recent incidents of racism in action, including mentions of George Zimmerman, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and even Dylann Roof, perpetrator of the Charleston church massacre in June this year. It's admirably urgent stuff, but there's little sense of a consistent ideology underpinning Chi-Raq beyond its general despair at the existence of gun violence.

One long eulogy bellowed by Cusack' s Pfleger-proxy lays out an impressive social critique that situates gang violence and police brutality within a wider context of economic underdevelopment and structural racism. The speech is a crucial rejoinder to simplistic notions of "black-on-black crime," but the sequence feels awkwardly divorced from the wider narrative. Elsewhere, Lee appears to both decry pernicious " pull up your pants" respectability politics (in the form of a pompous black city official played by Harry Lennix) while simultaneously embracing them: Chi-Raq literally pulls up his pants at one point, and there are references in the script to a "self-inflicted genocide." The film's sexual politics are also confounding. Chi-Raq is refreshing, particularly in the context of buttoned-down Hollywood cinema, for its frank depiction of sex as a basic human need and a source of great enjoyment. But this is counterbalanced by the creeping, laugh-squelching feeling—not helped by Lee's seriously patchy record on sexual politics (see the dubious lesbian-impregnation comedy She Hate Me)—that the director genuinely sees the sex strike as a viable real-life solution. He has since said as much in a recent interview; an opinion brusquely dismantled by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a sharp article for the Atlantic; Coates compares the idea to asking women to stop wearing short skirts in order to avoid being raped. Lee has also satirized wild male sexual thirst more effectively in a single montage in his debut She's Gotta Have It (1986) than he does here, cartoonishly.

Ultimately though, for Chi-Raq's shortcomings, it's a joy to once again experience Lee, a master stylist and true artist, let loose on a subject he's passionate about, while backed with a sizable budget ($15 million by Amazon Studios, their first production). Lee's last three films—a desperately limp studio remake of Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy sandwiched between wispy, micro-budget doodles (Red Hook Summer, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus)—have conveyed a worrying sense of creative stagnation. Now Lee is unequivocally back in the spotlight, making the kind of full-blooded, confrontational, frustrating, and topical film only he can.

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Chi-Raq is now playing on theaters nationwide.

Weiland onstage at Pepsi Music Stadium with Velvet Revolver in 2007. Photo via Flickr user Ed Vill

Scott Weiland, the charismatic singer known for fronting the Stone Temple Pilots and the supergroup Velvet Revolver, was found dead Thursday evening on a tour bus in Minnesota. At the time of death, the vocalist was on the road with his band Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts.

Originally written off in the 90s for being an Eddie Vedder wannabe, Weiland and the Stone Temple Pilots managed to transcend the "fake grunge" critiques hurled at them after the release of their debut album, Core, by wholly embracing the tropes of big rock 'n' roll without any reservation.

With songs like "Big Empty," which appeared on STP's six-times platinum sophomore album Purple, Weiland channeled the unrepentant rockstar in his inner-spirit. It certainly wasn't as original as Sonic Youth or as subversive Nirvana or as emotive as Pavement, but it was big and bold and badass for anyone old enough to have seen The Crow in theaters.

Although Weiland enjoyed multi-platinum success with Stone Temple Pilots, the California native's career was plagued with drug and alcohol abuse. He claimed to have been to rehab 13 times between 1995 and 1997 and his status within his band was constantly in up in the air—engagements and tours were regularly postponed or outright canceled.

This fight with drugs continued into the new millennium, following him during the formation of Velvet Revolver, his supergroup with members of Guns N' Roses, which released two platinum albums and performed in arenas. He was kicked out of that band in 2008.

When he passed away, Weiland was on the road supporting his release, Blaster, with his solo band. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, his show in Minneapolis that day had been canceled due to poor ticket sales. Although his death was confirmed by his wife to the Los Angeles Times, the cause is still unknown.

Follow Wilbert on Twitter.

Image via Wikicommons

On Monday, the UK's National Crime Agency released a short cartoon to encourage casual cocaine users to think twice before doing that next bump. Over the course of two-and-a-half minutes the mini-film (released with the hashtag #everylinecounts) lays out a recipe for cocaine that includes major deforestation and dead Colombian policemen. It culminates in you, the casual consumer, passively facilitating an entire industry of exploitation.

With its emphasis on environmental and humanitarian repercussions, it's certainly a refreshing departure from the traditional "don't do drugs, you'll die" approach we've come to expect. But will it be enough to deter a nation when it comes to ordering in that next gram? We spoke to some casual users to find out.

The video released by the National Crime Agency

Tristan, 24, Guitarist

VICE: How much do you reckon you spend on coke per month?
Tristan: I would estimate I probably pretty consistently spend about £40 a month on coke, although that's only been in the last year or two.

How much do you know about where it comes from?
I don't know anything. I prefer to keep a bit of distance because, to be honest, I don't like that I do it. I don't like to do it – well, I do, obviously – but I don't really like to make it a habit. I've never met the guy I buy off, he's just a number on my phone. I feel like I should do more research, but at the same time when I smoked weed as a kid I never knew where that was coming from.

What do you know about the trade in general?
I think it's much like fruit and sugar and many of these resources. It's largely unfair trade for people who are on the fields, picking and making it. I imagine they probably don't get paid very well and it probably resembles something closer to slave labour than a Western idea of paid work.

The thing is, because I think of it as a vice, I compartmentalise it from the rest of my life. I tend to be quite a healthy and fair person day-to-day, but with things that I know are bad for me I try not to think about it because I already don't like that I do it. Same with the alcohol I drink, the porn I watch – I don't really investigate where it comes from because I know it's a bad thing already.

What do you think about the NCA video?
I think it's much less black and white than that makes out. There's no mention of the systems at play that have made the trade so dark and violent. This video is pitting the little man against the little man, when really they're both victims of the illegal underworld they created.

Sure, but regardless it is still a fact that if there wasn't a consumer at the other end there wouldn't be people dying.
That's true, but if they made alcohol illegal people would get killed for that. Does that mean it's our fault for wanting a beer? I don't think so.

Okay, you seem to have worked it through in your head. Are you going to stop?
I feel a bit more conscious of it, because regardless of whether it changes or not, the demand is still a factor. However, I'd much more readily campaign for the legalisation of it than stop altogether.

Thanks, Tristan.

Photo by Adam Swank

Tracey, 21, Student

How much do you reckon you spend on coke on average?
Tracey: If I could I'd take coke every time I go out, which is like three times a month, and spend about £20 to £50 each time, depending on how much I take. I had my first bump of coke when I was 16 or 17, but I didn't start taking it regularly or buying until I moved to London aged 19, so I'd say the regularity with which I take it now has only been in the last two years.

What do you know about where your cocaine comes from?
I've never had a friendly connection with any of my coke dealers, but I have had friends who are dealers before. It's my experience that you just take what you're given and it all falls under "miscellaneous white powder". If they rip you off, there's not much you can do about it, but you can normally tell what it's going to be like from looking at it and how much you've spent on it.

What about the implications of the cocaine trade more broadly?
I don't really know much about the cocaine trade apart from the occasional gangster movie or book or public figure exposing all in some undoubtedly glamourised version of the south American cocaine trade. Sometimes a dealer will text me saying he's got the "banging Peruvian", so maybe it's from Peru?

Okay great, now watch this video from the NCA. What do you reckon?
God, that was a bit peak – I feel like I'm going to look like a wanker now. It definitely raised a few things I hadn't thought of before, like the thing about the environment. It's hard, though, because all consumerist things seem to have bad environmental consequences.

Do you think you'll think twice about ordering another gram now?
Realistically, I know I won't stop taking it just because I know these things a bit better now. I knew about the violence before, but I guess I just feel like I'm such a small chain in the link. I'm a self-interested individual like everyone else, but I also think the impact of a few consumers stopping is a drop in the ocean compared to global and national drug reform and a more morally-sound farming procedure.

That said, the message of the video is definitely a lot stronger than the traditional "don't do drugs, you'll get addicted and die" message. That just really annoys me because it's so unrealistic and it undermines the governmental and moral systems that enforce it, which distances the consumer even further from these networks. It's like, "I took it, I didn't die, clearly everything you say can't be correct then." It really pisses me off.

Thanks, Tracy.

Photo by Georgina Lawson from This Is What One of Colombia's DIY Cocaine Making Classes Is Actually Like

Charlie, 25, Barista

How much do you estimate you spend on cocaine?
Charlie: Probably between £150 to £200 a year, but that's spread over periods of high density and then gaps of little use.

How much do you know about where it comes from?
My dealer changes fairly regularly, probably about every six months to a year, and I've never known them very closely. Generally when I pick up I get it through several chains of different people, usually someone I know who knows someone who would then go and pick it up. In terms of where they get it from, I'd have no idea, really. I'd always just assumed it was all from the South America-type region...

How aware of the repercussions of the cocaine trade are you?
Most of what I know I probably got from pure fiction – TV shows, things like that. There's that Johnny Depp film, Blow, and that TV show Narcos on Netflix.

Okay, so you're aware of the political context?
I'm not sure I've got to that bit yet – I'm only on episode two.

From what you know about the trade, is it something that gets to you much?
No, I definitely compartmentalise it. I feel like we're bombarded so much these days with terrible things going on around the world that lead to all sorts of pain and misery that, in a way, you sort of become desensitised to it.

Did the NCA video make you re-think your cocaine use?
I was sort of vaguely aware of the kind of widespread criminal networks that exist to transport and facilitate it, but the environmental effects never really occurred to me. This might sound kind of bad, but it's something that makes me think a lot more and speaks to me a lot more because it's kind of larger than just our species.

Does it make you want to stop?
Probably not, but it might make me think a bit more next time.

As in have a moment of guilt before you indulge?
Yeah, more like that. Unfortunately I don't think a short video will have enough impact to make me stop, but it might make me more aware at points. Maybe lots of similar things like that, over a long period of time, might make me think about changing. But for now I don't know.

Thanks, Charlie.

(Photo by Chris Bethell)

Jonny, 30, Designer

How often do you do coke?
Jonny: Back when I did it regularly, it was probably a line or two a week if I was offered it, and then maybe buy a gram every three or four weeks on top of that. I tried it for the first time when I was 17 so have been doing it for 13 years, give or take, although I stopped taking all drugs two months ago.

How much do you know about where it comes from?
I've got lots of dealers, all who I know either personally or who I have a long-standing relationship with. I have a last minute guy who does good stuff, I have a specialist guy who does all different varieties of high quality stuff and who I would go to if I knew I was getting it in advance. Then I have the guy who I go to if I'm going to festivals; he sells pure, uncut pellets, the ones smugglers have to shit out. I only really call him for Glastonbury and then split one with a friend.

What do you know about the global repercussions of the trade?
I'm sadly very aware of the repercussions of the trade and the sort of effect it has had on farmers in places like Peru. It's a dark trade. Most of the information I've picked up from articles and TV programmes and it's something I do try and keep in mind, but it's like anything else you are desensitised to: I don't think about the slaughterhouse as I'm eating my meat, but I'm fully aware of the reality of what it took to get it to the point of me consuming it.

Would the NCA video make you consider quitting?
I thought it was good, but I don't think it's really shocking enough to actually affect anyone. The cuteness of the video kind of diffuses the whole message in my opinion. You need something that makes users feel guilty enough to remember that feeling when they are pissed out their head on a Friday night. Most people won't buy coke when they're sober, yet they'll spend their rent money on it when they've had enough to drink.

So a harrowing documentary on the trials of narco-warfare might be more effective for you?
Yeah, I personally knew all the info in that video anyway and it didn't stop me before. If I'm going to get hammered on a Friday night, I'm not going to think about a cute cartoon. If you showed me a PETA-style video of a fox being skinned alive, that might come to mind.

So why did you stop? Was the ethical side anything to do with it?
Nope, it was far more selfish: health and happiness.

Thanks Jonny

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In this documentary, VICE meets up with Joe Nickell, a longtime paranormal investigator who's been called the real-life Agent Scully. We travel with him to Roswell, New Mexico, on the anniversary of the famous 1947 UFO crash to talk to believers, skeptics, and UFO witnesses alike to see if the truth is really out there.

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Bit of Santa banter for you there (Photo via Jack Picknell)

Oh, it's December again. God: it never stops, sometimes, does it? Because I'm pretty sure we had a December – with all its festivities, with its frivolities, with Noel Edmonds in a soft felt hat handing out Deal or No Deal-themed gift boxes to baffled sickly children – last year, and we had another December – with all its itchy Christmas jumpers and the fake snow window decorations and Jamie Oliver in a Sainsbury's advert gurgling "PROPER PUKKA BIT OF TURKEY GRUB"¹ and me stepping with my bare feet onto an especially fragile bauble – the year before it. So what the fuck gives, man? Why is this happening again? Why does this keep happening?

Because beyond the unrelenting joy of Christmas Day ("Uh, actually, I don't like Christmas Day" — twats and/or orphans), December is like one long Groundhog Day of the soul, 31 straight days of 'Extremely Epic Xmas Drinx!' Facebook invites and people not knowing when it is or is not unlucky to put Christmas decorations up or down. We are in a constant state of flux where we don't know whether a squiggle of tinsel will bring down upon us a curse from the gods condemning us forever to hell or whether we are just celebrating Christmas in a just and orderly fashion.

Anyway, how best to survive the repetitive hell that is December? With a shareable list of all the things that are going to happen to you over the coming month, of course, so you can be entirely prepared for them once they hit! Print this off and pin it to your Christmas stocking. Get this article iced on a big, dry gingerbread house. Hand this over in lieu of payment for an underwhelming Bratwurst at a seasonal German food market. Write this out by hand to the card that you're begrudgingly sending your nan.

'We should have our own Christmas dinner! It'll be really fun! We can have it a festive bomb shelter!' (Photo via Adrian Clark)

1. THE CONSTANT, UNDULATING TRUTH AND UNTRUTH OF WHETHER YOUR BABY COUSIN KNOWS ABOUT SANTA OR NOT

Every year I have to ask, and every year nobody seems to know. Does that eight-year-old kid you have to buy Lego for know about Santa, or not? His dad looks at him. Looks back at you. "Mmmmmmaybe?" When you were eight you knew about Santa. When you were seven you had your suspicions. There is always a hard kid in the school playground – with a thousand-yard stare and a kind of unwashable grubbiness and always seems to know about adult things two, three, maybe five years ahead of everyone else, that eight-year-old you're pretty sure you saw smoke once, the kid you could always turn to if you wanted to see a dead body by a creek, the kid who allegedly had sex with a woman at aged ten – and he told you, when you were seven, that Santa wasn't real. And now you have to buy this dumb kid £30 worth of Lego and you don't even get the props for it. My baby cousin is better than I am at Call of Duty – his reactions so sharp, his focus ethereal – but the dumb little fuck doesn't know Santa doesn't come and visit him and every other child on earth with some magical fucking sleigh. Like: he can spin a 360 and throw a grenade that lands directly on me, and he can watch my digital body explode into blood and pulp without his heartbeat raising even a beat, and he can say something like, "Ha–ha, Joel sucks at shoo–ting!", but mention that the magic beard man doesn't exist and he loses his entire mind. You know what? He's not getting anything this year. That'll teach him.

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2. SOME CUNT PRETENDING THEY DON'T KNOW SANTA ISN'T REAL

This happens at least once every December but maybe more: I'll say something throwaway like "Santa isn't real", and I'll turn around and Keith from Accounts is there, in his Santa hat and his novelty Christmas tie that when you press it plays a song, and he will clutch his chest and in faux surprise say, "Santa isn't real?" and he'll laugh, and yet – in front of a jury of my peers – I would undoubtedly be found guilty of murder if I did slaughter him for his own good right there where he stands, and you know what? The world isn't fair because of that.

3. YOU DRINK AN EXPENSIVE AND OVERCOMPLICATED RED PAPER CUP OF HOT CHOCOLATE

Oh, paid six quid and stood in a queue at Starbucks for 15 minutes because you fancied a 'hot choccie' halfway through a shopping trip did you, mate? Asked for marshmallows but they all got stuck to the plastic blast lid while you were unknowingly sipping and so you had to dig this sort of clot of marshmallow and accumulated cream off the bottom with a coffee spoon after you've drunk it, is it? Diabetic now, are you? You're a fool. You're a bloody Christmas fool.

A big pot of disappointment (Photo via Chatiry World)

4. YOU FALL INTO THE TRAP OF MAKING YOUR LUNCHTIME MEAL DEAL ANY MORE FESTIVE THAN IT NEEDS TO BE, WHICH IS ZERO PER CENT FESTIVE

Oh, look: Tesco have a turkey sandwich. Do you? It's part of the meal deal. Do you? No you do not. Here is why: because on Christmas Day, after hours of slaving in the hot kitchen, your mum brings the turkey out of the oven, and your dad brings through his famous glazed ham, and your cousin – the one who bakes for a hobby, and makes jams and preserves – has made a special Christmas chutney, and you look at the glory before you and go: is there any way you can spread a slice of bread with mayonnaise then put it in the fridge for eight hours so I can eat it with that? You inhale the unctuous aroma of the gravy and go: can I have some prawn cocktail crisps, to go on the side of this? Your grandma offers you plump, oven-roasted sprouts, thick with butter and bacon, and you go: is there any way you could put some extremely dehydrated stuffing in the mix, instead? You have ruined your actual Christmas dinner with relentless £3 sandwich after £3 sandwich. You cannot eat savouries anymore without a dessert spoonful of commercially saccharine cranberry jam. You ruined Christmas for yourself with a sustained campaign of festive lunchtime bolt shooting.

5. ATTEND A BAD TASTE JUMPER PARTY WHERE NOBODY TRULY KNOWS THE STATUS OF THE OMNISCIENT IRONY

Fundamentally the only reason a Bad Taste Christmas Jumper Party (hereby B.T.C.J.P.) is because the girl organising it – I am sorry, squad, but it is never a dude organising a B.T.C.J.P. – is actually in possession of an extremely cute Christmas jumper that makes her look extremely cute, and so you all turn up in those sort of square synthetic £7 high street jobs and she is there in some light-up reindeer cashmere situation looking positively supermodelesque. "Oh, this thing?" she's saying, handing you a weak Bailey's-based cocktail. "I think I picked it up on ASOS years ago, or something?" She is hiding an expensive-looking receipt that says HÅNDKRÄFTEN ECH SWEDEN on it and plying you with vegan Devil's on Horseback. This cosy angel is extremely, extremely sus. And now Here It Is Merry Christmas is playing, and you're drunk and sort of shout-singing through the synthetic jumper sweat, and someone puts reindeer antlers on you and you do not take them off, and like: are you secretly enjoying yourself, or is this just a bit? Are you having fun right now, or is this some many-layered irony thing? Someone just handed you a brandy cream mince pie arrangement and you genuinely enjoyed eating it. Look around you. Everyone is crumpling their eyebrows and legitimately having fun. The concept of irony is dead, now. It baked to death in a Primark Christmas jumper.

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6. YOU ARE GOING TO BE DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED BY MULLED WINE

There are three kinds of mulled wine:

— Mulled wine that you make at home with a decent bottle of red and an orange studded with cloves and sugar and spices gently crumbled and tied in muslin bags and warmed gently on the stove for hours until the kitchen smells like Christmas and then you take a special mug (you bought special mugs) and decant a cup and lift it to your lips and: oh, it's just hot wine. You've made hot wine. Two hours, that took. Hot wine.

— The kind of mulled wine they make it pubs when they drag out their special mulled wine cooker from the basement and haul it up onto the bar and do a cute little chalkboard outside that says 'MULLED WINE! WARM YOU UP ON COLD DAY. £5.', and then you buy some – you always buy some, you always foolishly buy some, you always fall for this trick, you always think how cosy the pub smells and how warm you've feel when you drink it – and then you lift the polysterene cup to your lips and: oh. It's just hot wine thinned to the point of being a soft drink with a load of orange juice. That's it. Pub mulled wine is just boiled Tropicana made red.

— The pre-mixed dirt you buy in supermarkets and warm by the mug in a microwave, and costs like £2.99 a bottle if that, and is so sweet it is essentially syrup, and is the only mulled wine worth drinking, no argument, no disambiguation.

You're going to be disappointed by mulled wine.

Just a bit of Christmas banter with the lads (Photo via istolethetv)

7. SOMEONE IS GOING TO OFFER UP THE SHITTY OPINION THAT 'MINCE PIES ARE BAD' AND THEY ARE GOING TO BE LOUDLY AND CONTINUALLY WRONG ABOUT IT

Oh you're at a party and someone thinks they are being really original and good with their hot take. "Raisins are bad," they are saying, "sultanas are bad. Brown unknowable sludge is bad. Heavy pastry is bad. Using those little tin bottoms for pistachio shells is bad. Mince pies are bad." Hey, you know what else is bad: your continued efforts to ruin the fine and upstanding tradition of Christmas weight gain, my buddy! So shut the fuck up saying stuff about mince pies that is wrong!

8. SOMEBODY IS GOING TO OFFER UP THE OPINION 'FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK' IS THEIR FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS SONG LIKE THAT OPINION IS IN ANY WAY NEW OR EXCITING

Everybody thinks this, everybody. Everybody on earth thinks this thing. You are not original in any single way. You are so basic Tesco could sell a tin of you for 24p.

Don't want to go all 'Lynne Truss' but that apostrophe is really causing me some pain (Photo via jayneandd)

9. YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO GET ON A LADDER TO HELP PUT A SINGLE DECORATION UP BECAUSE YOUR MUM CAN'T BE ARSED

Ah you've come home and it's Christmas Eve and you're in from the cold after taking three trains and a provincial bus all while holding a gigantic Duplo set for your distant niece and you open the door and expect a friendly sherry welcome with a mince pie and turns out no: your mum has just been saving all the high Christmas decoration jobs for you to do, and so you're given a ribbon with a load of Christmas cards hanging off it or a massive spaff of tinsel and a footstool and told to get hanging. "Don't look at me," your dad's saying, nodding to the corner where the slightly greying artificial tree he's been taking out of and putting back into the attic every year since 1990 is, four sad baubles hanging from its thinning branches, "you know I don't like it fancy." It's three feet tall, this thing. He has kept the box that it came in, despite it splitting down the side the year you learned Santa died. It's lashed together with the bungee chords he used to keep in the car. "Your mother insists on a real tree but that'll do me, that." Your mum wants you to pop down to the nearest pub garden and get a little seven footer for the garden, and you do, getting pins stuck in your neck that won't leave until the 27th. "Where," you croak, "where is the sherry?" They forgot to get sherry and the shops are all shut tomorrow.

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10. YOU GET A HEARTFELT CHRISTMAS CARD FROM YOUR NAN AND REMEMBER THE ONLY TIME YOU SPOKE TO HER IN THE LAST YEAR WAS WHEN SHE SENT YOU A £20 FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY – SHE'S NOT GOT MUCH, HAS NAN, HER PENSION ONLY STRETCHES SO FAR – AND YOU SENT HER A SINGLE TEXT, THREE DAYS AFTER YOUR BIRTHDAY, SAYING 'THANKS NAN!', AND EVEN THEN THIS CARD – HANDWRITTEN, IN THAT SWEET OLD LADY CURLY HANDWRITING SHE DOES – COVERS BOTH SIDES OF THE CARD, AND SAYS STUFF LIKE "I HOPE YOU ARE WELL BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY I DON'T HEAR MUCH ABOUT YOU THESE DAYS" AND "I TRIED TO GET ON THAT FACEBOOK SO I COULD SKYPE YOU BUT I JUST COULDN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" AND "I MISS YOUR GRANDDAD MORE AND MORE WITH EVERY DAY THAT GOES BY, MY HEART IS SO HEAVY NOW, SO TIRED" AND YOU THINK 'I REALLY, REALLY OUGHT TO BUY NAN A NICE CARD AND WRITE HER BACK' BUT THEN TOY STORY 2 IS ON AND THERE'S A WHOLE THING OF QUALITY STREET AND YOU FORGET AND YOU ONLY REMEMBER ABOUT IT AGAIN THE DAY SHE INEVITABLY DIES

Call your nan, you shit.

11. IT WILL SNOW IN A REALLY SHIT WAY AND PEOPLE WILL ENDEAVOUR TO GET EXCITED ABOUT IT

"And this is the big one," every single weather forecaster is saying, with a creeping smile that says, this is it, a smile that says finally, people care what I'm doing with my arms, "and it looks like we'll have snow this Christmas!"

And then there is a photo of a car struggling to get through a blizzard that signifies: snow.

"But don't get too carried away – it's expected that less than a millimetre of snow will fall, and it won't even stick, and if it does stick it'll just make the ground white a bit – not enough to scrape up a snowball, but somehow enough to go slushy and grey in the crevice between the kerb and the road, a rock salt-like sludge that will stay their, filthy and cold and stinking for days after the original snowfall – but people will still try and get excited over it, they will still take photos of their frosted gardens and upload the photos to Facebook with the caption 'feelin festive' as if anyone fucking cares." I mean, very cynical, this weather forecaster, but I feel they have a point.

Everyone's having a laugh (Photo via Neil Piddock)

12. YOUR MUM WILL OFFER TO BUY YOU SOMETHING EXTREMELY PRACTICAL INSTEAD OF AN ACTUAL PRESENT AND YOU WILL SAY YES

Yes, you do want a pair of trainers, some box fresh pyjamas and a new Xbox for Christmas, but doesn't your car need the MOT doing? "Something about the battery," your mum's saying, over the phone. "Didn't you need a new car battery?" Yes: you do need a new battery. You need the car for work but you can't afford to straight up fix it yourself so you're just coasting it down the B-roads and hoping for the best. Oh, your dad's yelling through from the dining room. "And tyres," he's saying. "It needs new tyres." And so that's settled: new battery, two new tyres and a full MOT, and mum will do you a little stocking so you've got something to open on the actual day. Christmas for adults is shit.

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13. YOU WILL FORGET ENTIRELY HOW TO DRESS FOR THE COLD AND HAVE TO WEAR ONE OF YOUR DAD'S FLAT CAPS TO THE PUB TO SEE YOUR OLD MATES

You've gone home for Christmas but apparently left your sense of cold weather wearing at home with you, because all you've bought is a big coat and a couple of t-shirts. But now there's a cold snap and your hands, feet and face are all rendered in frigid agony when you go outside, and the pub you're doing Christmas Eve in is a good 20-minute walk away, and your dad is going through the big basket of musty-smelling hats and knitwear he has, trying to foist one on you. "There's a balaclava, here," your dad is saying, offering up something that looks like it very much survived an international incident in the early '90s. "That's warm. Or I've got this incredibly uncool grey fleece hat that I go walking in sometimes?" It has an insane toggle and flap situation that is meant to keep your ears warm. It had a reflective band so you don't get mowed down on country roads by a car. It smells like your dad, like someone decided to delouse a moth factory using exclusively Brut. You wear it and everyone takes the piss.

14. PEOPLE YOU HATE WILL INSIST ON HAVING "FESTIVE DRINKIES"

Best thing about Christmas is eating and doing nothing. Worst bit is when the kind of people who arrange trips to the pub via Facebook instead of just sending a text saying "pub?" invite you to festive drinks, or drinkies. Nobody just has drinks in December, it is always drinkies. It is always drinks rendered six or seven times more cutesy and irritating by being transformed into 'drinkies'. And it is always bad, novelty alcohol. Would you like a snowball? It is like someone phlegmed some custard into lemonade: no thank you. How about some mulled cider? The cider is hot and someone has put an entire cinnamon stick in it. Hot buttered rum, anyone? We have somehow ruined both rum and butter, two patently unruinable things. But you go, don't you, you always go. You put on novelty reindeer antlers and you go, and you'll do the same next year, and the year after that, every year until you die.

Ho ho ho (Photo via Bennett)

15. PUB AMATEURS WILL RUIN YOUR FAVOURITE PUB, AND YOUR LEAST FAVOURITE, TOO

December 1st, and they descend: the pub amateurs. An army of office lunches in cardigans and paper hats, who clutter around the big good tables and order at the bar like this: "One house red, one house white, one bottle of prosecco, three lemonades – Chris, what was it you wanted? Chris? Chris? No crisps, thanks. Oh: and five pints of Guinness." They are laughing loudly and pulling crackers. They have taken up an entire chair piling up their coats and bags. They keep standing in the way to the toilets. These people have never been in a pub in their lives, and now they are here, loudly asking the landlord to put some party songs on. This isn't a party, people! Pubs are where people with problems go to escape from you! Go back to the hell from which you came!

16. YOUR PARENTS WILL HAVE QUIETLY SCRAPPED YOUR MOST BELOVED CHRISTMAS TRADITION

Where's that tree decoration you made when you were five? Little papier mâché Santa turned monstrous through years in a cold damp attic? "Oh," your mum says, "we don't do that anymore." What the fuck is this, beef? "Oh," your dad says, "wasn't worth getting a whole turkey just for three of us, so we got a joint of beef in." WHERE IS THE QUALITY STREET? "Oh," they say, in deflating unison, "we got Roses this year, your dad likes the orange crèmes." Nobody likes the orange crèmes! Stop ruining Christmas!

SantaLADS (Photo via Bennett)

17. YOU'LL GO 'AND WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I EAT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY ADVENT CALENDAR CHOCOLATES, HUH? I'M A FUCKING GROWN-ASS PERSON' AND THEN FEEL REALLY BAD WHEN YOU EAT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR ADVENT CALENDAR CHOCOLATES

Sheepish little visit to Poundland for a replacement Minions calendar, is it? Congratulations: you played yourself.

18. YOU'LL HAVE TO ADMIT THAT YOU ACTUALLY LOVE CHRISTMAS

Yeah you do. Yeah, you do. With the crackling fires and the decadent roast meats and the chocolate for breakfast and the trifle for brunch and the alcohol and the alcohol and the log fires and the squidgy sofas and the family films and the late nights and the racist uncles and the endless WhatsApp groups with all your bored mates at home and the looming dread of New Year's Eve and that weird stiff feeling you get on the 28th when you realised you haven't significantly moved for four days and your mum getting worried about the bins and your dad getting close to an emotion when red-nosed on whisky and the dog getting a present and you getting a present and everyone getting presents that you got them, and liking them: you love it. Christmas is great, December is great. Festive drinkies are terrible but you'll endure. You love it, you love Christmas. Make the most of it.

@joelgolby

^{1. I am working on a theory that '90s-era Jamie Oliver – with his catchphrases and his loved-by-mums shaggy good looks and his inclination to declare things are 'naughty' when they were empirically unnaughty – wasn't so different to current well-profiled lad horror Dapper Laughs, and that all Dapper really needs to do for full redemption is to pretend to drum in a Toploader† video and tut at some Rotherham mums for giving their children carbohydrates.↩}

^{† Fun Toploader facts: their first – and let's be real, only – song, Dancing in the Moonlight, was actually a cover of the King Harvest song of the same name. Despite that they filled Wembley once. Correction: despite that they were the last British band to play old Wembley. Toploader: a sham band, for idiots.↩}

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Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

It's an unseasonably warm, sunny November day, and Greg Diatchenko is sitting in the visiting room of the Boston Pre-Release Center, four weeks from a moment that was never supposed to happen. On December 7, 34 years after he was sentenced to life without parole for a murder he committed at 17, Diatchenko's mother will pick him up in her car and drive him home.

For more than three decades, he tried not to think about his death in prison, a certainty that would eventually arrive. He stayed focused on his job at the prison's plumbing shop, on his schoolwork for the degree he earned from Boston University, on the Buddhist sangha and other groups he became involved with behind the walls. He got older. Then the Supreme Court handed down Miller v. Alabama in 2012, a ruling that laid the groundwork for his own case, Diatchenko v. District Attorney, which in 2013 outlawed juvenile life without parole in Massachusetts. Then there was the parole hearing he was suddenly eligible for; the court rulings were so new, no one knew what to expect. And then, grace—"parole is granted after 12 months in lower security...during which time Gregory Diatchenko must maintain good conduct and comply with all DOC expectations for programs, activities, and employment."

He'll be on parole for the remainder of his sentence—which, in Greg's case, is the rest of his life.

Almost a year ago, he was transferred from MCI-Norfolk, the medium-security prison where he spent the last several decades, and the countdown began. Now he rides the bus to and from his work-release job at a Panera Bread in a Boston suburb, where he clears tables and makes sandwiches.

As his release date approaches, Diatchenko's excitement and anticipation have increasingly been shadowed by uneasiness and anxiety—a little depression, even. He finds himself chasing away bad thoughts more often now, worrying over his future. What follows is his account of what it's like to get ready for your release after thinking prison was the place your life would end.

I get on a bus, I thought everyone was going to look at me and go, "Oh! He's a convict," "Oh, he's in prison." And it's not like that. People don't know you. They don't know your history or who you are or where you're from.

I have an itinerary I follow every day. I'm not supposed to stray from it, and I don't. We're not allowed to go in stores. We're not supposed to go in Dunkin Donuts and get a coffee or nothing like that. You go straight to work and come back. There are things I can't do. I can't even strike up a conversation with a woman that I see that I'm attracted to. I can, but I don't want to, because I'm still in prison. Last night, there's a woman sitting there with her computer—everybody brings computers into Panera Bread. I don't have a cell phone so I couldn't give my number, and I don't have an address yet.

Where do you live?

Oh, I live at the Pre-Release Center.

Oh, that's good. That's a good way to start up a conversation.

When I get out, my main thing is to set up some medical appointments. Dental—my teeth are terrible. My mouth hurts so bad. It's been uncomfortable like this for 15 years. It's like a lion with a thorn stuck in its paw.

You don't save money when you're doing a death sentence

I'm going to be looking for a job at Boston University. I was told to go on the BU website and check on what jobs I might like to do. They said I might have to start low. Everybody's telling me, you're coming out of prison with a degree, you have qualifications. Some jobs people don't want but maybe you can take it. Get your foot in the door.

After 34 years, I only have like $600 in my account; I was making $5 a day at Norfolk. But you spend that. You want to eat. You want to have coffee. You want to buy shampoo and toothpaste. You could split your money, your earnings, 50/50 in your savings and personal account. But lifers don't have to. What are you going to save money for? You don't save money when you're doing a death sentence. I'm fortunate that people are there to help me, show me: This is how you fill out an income tax return. You want to get a car? This is the paperwork. I've never done any of that stuff before.

Your 17-year-old son ain't coming home—I'm 51.

I wonder how I'll be accepted outside. When they find out where I'm from, and my past. I have that blemish on me. Once a prisoner, that's there forever. No matter what you do, no matter how good you do. It's just always there.

I don't know if my lifetime parole is going to be a battle with the parole officer. I've heard horror stories. Some people had parole officers that were all over them all the time. So I'm going out there after all these years and I really don't know what to expect. My mother said—we were actually arguing about it out here—"Look at Greg, he's getting out, he doesn't even smile like he's excited about it." And I said, "What do you want me to do? I'm going home. OK, I'm happy about it."

But I'm not just coming home and everything's hunky dory. Your 17-year-old son ain't coming home—I'm 51.

I'm under the thumb of the parole board. I'm going out to society not knowing how long I'm going to be free. I could be out there, have a house all built up, my job, a truck out in my driveway, and one or two children, little ones running around, and all of a sudden I'm snatched up and sent behind the walls for something stupid. I've seen some parole violations for some of the pettiest things. If you don't like me, and you live down the street, and you don't want me on your street, you call the cops, and say: Listen, my neighbor just threatened to punch my face in. word against mine. I ain't never said boo to that person. Cuff up. Parole violation.

Even though I'm out, if they find out that I die outside, they'll put me on the list as a lifer that died.

I'm leaving a lot of good guys behind. I remember when I left Norfolk, it was weird. I was in that prison for about 29 years. I knew a lot of lifers, I mostly hung around with lifers. There were guys up there who were just as deserving, if not more so, than me, for a second chance in life. Guys with three, four, and five decades in prison. It's sad, because they were out in lower security getting furloughs, before Willie Horton. And they're not going anywhere. Here I am, I had this opportunity, this blessing. This court ruling that opened the door for me. I feel guilty. I walked out that door, and these guys that were so sad to see me go—I can't even send Christmas cards to those people. As a parolee, we're not allowed to associate with convicted felons or ex-felons.

If this never happened, we wouldn't even be talking right now. I'd be at Norfolk. Working in the plumbing shop. Going to work every day and just doing my thing. Living. Existing. Waiting to die.

When you're in prison, at the end of the day, when it's nice and quiet, you're laying there at 10:00 after the count, a lot of thoughts are running through your head. At the Lifers Group, once a year they read off all the lifers that died in prison over the years. AIDS, cancer, diabetes, suicide. Murder. That list is so long. The board of directors would stand up and they'd go around and they'd each read five names and go around and around. Most of them I knew, even the ones that were in other prisons, because we've been around together for years and years. All these lifers are standing there for a moment of silence, and what's going through their head? They're probably saying,One day I'll be on that list.

Even though I'm out, if they find out that I die outside, they'll put me on the list as a lifer that died. I'm still a lifer.

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Emergency Vehicles

On Tuesday, I got an email.

"hi there. i just heard from our manager in nanaimo that the rcmp is cordoning off the store." from a storefront," Fisher said.

I understand that Fisher may be deriving his authority from the Freaked Out Grandmothers Act of 1934, but I'm not sure that is exactly iron-clad policing, there.

Now, perhaps Fisher and the Nanaimo RCMP were a bit bored. The last press release from his RCMP detachment, from five days prior, is entitled: "Who took Dan's hockey gear?"

Who, indeed, Nanaimo RCMP. Who indeed.

The problem might be with Canadian cops more broadly.

Now, most cops are great. I don't want to throw undue shade at cops. I in no way carry a grudge from that time two riot cops in Montreal clubbed and arrested me. No grudge.

But the last few years have completely turned the tables on the relationship between the police and the people they're policing, and the cops have often been slow to recognize that.

Snowden blew apart confidence in the intelligence-collecting programs of cops and spies. The painfully-common police shootings of unarmed black youth, and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement, put a spotlight on the huge racial impact of policing.

Here at home, the cops have had it good over the past decade. But a number of incidents—everything from the how-the-fuck-are-you-still-doing-this debate around carding to the High River gun grab, the clusterfuck that was the 2010 G20, and the sexual assault allegations in Val d'Or—have forced the police to actually explain themselves to the public, which is not something they're tremendously used to.

Toronto during the 2010 G20 summit. Photo via Flickr user andrewarchy

For one, the RCMP were supposed to have bought body-worn cameras more than a year ago. Instead, they've piloted some cameras, then scrapped them, then they wrung their hands for a bit. Now, they're back to the drawing board again.

The RCMP also won't give us details about how many people they shoot in a year. Beyond the raw numbers, we know very little about how often they shoot at Canadians—even though they manage a database on that very topic that we're not allowed to see.

In August, regional police chiefs voted to ask for new powers to obtain Canadians' personal information without a warrant, search your mail, collect information on law-abiding citizens, and to confiscate and sell your cellphone if you're making door-to-door pot delivery calls, which should freak out even the most statist big-government weirdo.

Then, this fall, the government of Ontario finally moved to fix one of the craziest regulations in the country—it is impossible to suspend an officer without pay, unless they're convicted of a crime.

And then, this week, the RCMP repeated its request to have warrantless access to Canadians' information from their internet and cellphone providers, even though the courts said that power was unconstitutional.

"We are committed to exploring how Canadians expect the police to enforce the laws on the internet, and one of those may or may not be warrantless access," said Jeff Adam, Chief Superintendent of the RCMP, in response to a question from the nerds over at Motherboard.

There is, however, some hope.

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson (his name is Bob Paulson) seems like he's beginning to see the light on this whole thing.

At a speech in November to a group of security specialists, Paulson repeated that he wanted access to Canadians' information without a warrant (boo), but that he understood why Canadians would be freaked out by that (yay).

"We're chasing the wrong Holy Grail. I am all for new legislation, I am all for warrantless access to subscriber info," he said, but (rightly) concluded: "that's not my call."

While Paulson said that he's still looking to "chase down the laws where we can" by convincing Canadians that the police need the powers or else child pornographer terrorists are going to hack all of our cellphones (or something), he seemed to tip his hat to Canadians' concern with having the RCMP reading their emails all the time.

Paulson seemed to concede that he might not get crazy new investigative powers, and that he might just have to deal with that.

So maybe, just maybe, the police are starting to get the message that they have to answer to the people that they're policing.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Fresh supplies from a needle exchange. Photo via Flickr user Todd Huffmann

Marc Lewis traveled the long, tenebrous road of opiate addiction, but he emerged out the rabbit hole a neuroscientist, science writer, and author. His best-selling memoir, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, chronicled his descent into substance abuse, splicing the narrative with neuroscientific lessons about the brain's reaction to each chemical. His latest literary endeavour, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, asserts labeling addiction a disease is not only specious, it's downright harmful. VICE caught up with the University of Toronto Professor Emeritus, and current faculty member at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, via Skype.

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VICE: You're critical of the rehab industry because, according to you, it pulls addicts in under the ruse of medical treatment, however, it offers little more than 12 frivolous steps and pep talks. You've called it a canard; can you elaborate for me, please?
Marc Lewis: I don't see it as an evil conspiracy, exactly, but it depends where you are. In the US there are a lot of violations, a lot of improprieties. Treatment is inadequate. Opiate substitution doses are wrong; the period of time for getting off it is often wrong. Individual care is lacking. They have generic policies, which often don't benefit people, and the medical care is a fairly small aspect of the program in general. Eighty to 90 percent of the program is dominated by 12-step methodology. You also throw in a whole bunch of group sessions, in which people are lectured on anything from how to stop making excuses to all sorts of hodgepodge rants. For some people it can work, because they get them out of their environment and drugs, so they dry out. But it doesn't work for long because they go back to their environments, and all the triggers are there. They don't get the psychological skills addicts need to move on. What you do need is a number of skills: they have to self-regulate and be conscious in order to put their lives into perspective.

I've never been to rehab, so I don't know much about the ways in which they treat patients. Do they claim their methods are predicated upon medicinal practices, and why do some rehab centres charge exorbitant sums of money for treatment? What does that money pay for?
That's exactly the point. When you get to the upper end, $50,000 to $100,000 for a month, you're basically paying for five-star luxury treatment. I know people who have done that and they're getting gourmet meals, over a Pacific Ocean view, and foot massages. The nuts and bolts of treatment doesn't cost that much. You're also paying for the time, the doctors and other professionals. But a lot of people running rehabs are underskilled, recovered addicts who got a crash course. They're unregulated and unsupervised. It's a big mess. If you don't pay a large amount, there are state-run rehabs, but often there are waiting lists and other compromises that you need to go through. The waiting period itself can be a real problem because people are often willing to (get sober) within a small window. But that window closes, so timing is also important.

Do rehab centres purposely send patients down a path towards failure so they return and spend more money?
That's a subject of debate these days. I don't know if anybody really knows. I don't think that's the norm, but I think for some that can be a strong motivator, and that's just speculation, because who knows?

Some of the centres in the States are run by a consortia that operate a number of rehabs in different locations. Some patients can be snuck from one location to another in sneaky, insidious ways. You start off in residence in a house with eight people, and a few weeks later you're sent to another house, which is a dormitory. They feel like they're being trampled on and frustrated, and there isn't much they can do because they're in the system and they've made a huge financial commitment. They're stuck and nobody's watching over these guys. It's basically a free-for-all.

I'm criticizing the way the medical model is used both to conceptualize addiction and to underpin, support, and reinforce the philosophy of the rehab industry. Because it fails people so often, the medical model and definition of addiction should be seriously challenged, but it isn't and there's something really wrong with that. It's a self-reinforcing system that waves this banner that says you have a chronic disease that will kill you, so you better come to us.

The rationale that they have a disease has a lot of weight, especially because it's backed up by a lot of high-level bodies, like NIDA (National Institute on Drug Abuse). NIDA funds about 90 percent of addiction research in the world, according to some reports. You're giving money to people who are doing research on the biological or cellular mechanisms involved in addiction, but they're not giving money to people who are challenging the disease model, so that in itself is a self-perpetuating system.

Read: Can You Really Become Addicted to a Drug After Just One Hit?

In other words, medicine does not have much to offer addicts? Does that mean treatment is really a testament of will?
Will has an awful lot to do with it. A lot of addiction experts feel that self-empowerment, self-motivation, self-directed activities, self-designed goals for is quoted as saying addiction is "a medical issue that has disastrous social consequences." That's very typical. Take those words, turn them around and you have something that's much more accurate: It's a social issue that has disastrous medical consequences.

Throwing people in jail and prohibition are responsible for a lot of the harm that comes with addiction. The prohibitions create this narrow passageway by which addicts have to squeeze themselves through, which drives them into crime, which breathes life into criminal organizations and cartels that get rich on the War on Drugs. What Morhaim is proposing, though, is basically giving heroin to heroin addicts in Maryland, making it free by doctors. That's a very credible idea these days. It's been tried it in Switzerland, Germany and Denmark, and it certainly reduces crime.

Your new book, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, eponymously puts forward that addiction is not a disease, and calling it such gets in the way of proper treatment.
Firstly, defining addicts as patients makes them passive. It makes them fatalistic and it makes them pessimistic. If you're told you have a chronic brain disease that causes you to do all this nasty shit, you don't think you'll ever get free of it. But, in fact, most addicts do recover and the statistics are very clear on that, whether they're soft drugs or harder drugs like heroin. So, it's a chronic disease? Really?

The second thing is it tends to overshadow other approaches to treating addiction that relies on much more individualized psychological methods. There are various kinds of psychotherapy, counseling, support networks, and mindfulness meditation approaches that are also being shown to be very effective. If you believe you have a chronic disease and so does your care provider, they're not very likely to recommend mindfulness meditation, but it's been shown to be very effective.

While opiate and alcohol withdrawal can wreak physical havoc on addicts, you argue that addiction is purely behavioural rather than physiological, like, say, cancer is?
That's another discrepancy. You have substance addiction on one hand, and behavioural on the other: gambling, sex addiction, porn addiction, a number of eating disorders, internet gaming. The cool thing is when you do brain scans, you get the same neural activation patterns in behavioural addictions as you do in substance addictions. That should be enough to knock out the disease model. If addiction is a disease, then people who spend 12 hours a day playing videogames are suffering the same way people who are addicted to heroin do.

What all these patterns have in common is they involve deep learning—a set of assumptions of what you need to get through the day; that learning gets entrenched through repetition and you're addicted, but there's nothing disease-like about it. People recover from all addictions, which means it's all about neural plasticity. It's not that you go back to where you were, because development never goes in reverse, it's that you learn skills that help you overcome your impulses and you learn new cognitive habits. All learning involves changes in synapses, which means creation and strengthening of certain synapses, and the weakening or disappearance of synapses that aren't being used.

Read: A British Mom Is Mad That Her Cigarette-Addicted Son Can't Vape at School

It isn't unreasonable to presume your theories are unpopular in the addictions treatment industry. Have you drawn criticism, and have you been publicly undermined?
Yeah, I've been chastised. A review in the Washington Postcalled me a "zealot." Mostly people in the medical camp, they try to ignore people like me and other people who also endorse a learning model or developmental model of addiction. They just ignore us. But this is part of a rising wave; I'm not the only one here. The only difference with me is I can talk their language because I know the brain. I've talked to Nora Volkow, . What I said doesn't just apply to humans, it applies to other animals, too. Isolation is really bad for you and it's the underlining factor of addiction.

Destruction in a northern Syrian town. Photos courtesy of GOAL

This week, Britain joined the coalition of countries dropping bombs on Syria in an effort to disrupt the Islamic State's operations, though some experts think airstrikes alone won't have much of an effect. Meanwhile, many Syrians feel their voices are often ignored as global powers play out an extended proxy war on their country.

The Turkish town of Antakya has become an ad-hoc refuge for Syrians fleeing the escalating conflict in their country. Thousands of people escaping airstrikes near the Turkey/Syria border live in dilapidated buildings scattered around the city without food, heating, or water. I asked five young Syrians there—some of whom risked their lives crossing the border between the two countries—how they felt about foreign involvement in a war that has killed over 300,000 Syrians and displaced millions. Many didn't want to give me their full names or have their faces in pictures as they cross the border regularly and fear for their families.

Ayham

Ayham from Damascus
If you are a pilot and you are carrying out an airstrikes you don't know who you are killing, you don't know who is underneath you. Can they be certain there are no women, children, or normal people under them? Some terrorists will die but thousands of women and children will be killed. They are being killed. I don't want to see any more killing. I don't want to see blood. I don't want people to die because of airstrikes or weapons of bombs. Death is everywhere in Syria. I just want this war to end.

If I give you a flower what are you going to do with it? If I give you a weapon what will you do with it? Weapons are designed to kill, airstrikes are not designed to make peace they are designed to kill. They need to focus on stopping this war, without using more weapons. The international community needs to stop supporting one group over another this will not stop the war.

If there's killing in Europe or the US the whole world will shine a spotlight on it. In Syria, we have been suffering for five years but no one is shines a spotlight on all those people who died. No one is asking us our opinions and feelings, no one says, "Why are these people being killed?" "How many people have been killed?" or, "How can we stop this war?"

In one night they used a chemical weapon inside Syria and on that night 1,800 people were killed at the same time. That was very close to my home in Damascus. The social media community focused on it for half a day and that was it. People need to hear the voices of Syrians.

Aram

Aram from Damascus
I suppose in a way, I support the British army and the French army mainly because of the way Europe has helped refugees, including my family, but airstrikes are useless if we don't have troops on the ground.

I don't trust the Russian government—they're supporting the regime and we know Assad must go. He has committed so many crimes against his own people and the suffering of Syria is a direct result of his power. Hundreds of thousands of people in my country are dead. People who do not support terrorism are being killed by airstrikes everyday. All these countries have another agenda in Syria.

This week ISIS took over two villages in north Aleppo because of Russia airstrikes. So two places that were not under ISIS control are now in the Islamic State. How is this fighting terrorism? I want Europe to help us but they need to put in ground troops, otherwise it's not going to work.

Amer from Damascus
Everyone is bombing us to suit their own interests, This is a new cold war between global superpowers with Syria as the playing field. Airstrikes are not going to destroy terrorism. We need ground troops to finish the war.

Airstrikes can act as a support, but you have to pull terrorism out from its roots, so we need to stop the people funding it. I think the world should support Syrian moderates exclusively by providing them with money and weapons. I don't trust foreign powers inside Syria and I think the strategic location of Syria in the Mediterranean created this war. Everyone wants to export gas through Syria and Russia wants to prevent that in order to preserve its own interests. We all know about what happened in Afghanistan and how foreign interests supported extremists there.

Syrian moderates are the only people I trust. I wish British airstrikes could distinguish between innocent people and terrorists but unfortunately they can't and killing innocent people is not going to lead to peace in my country—it's going to make it worse. I think the British government should focus its attention on the people who give money to terrorists, I think they know who they are and this is something they can do that would make a big difference.

Related: Watch Photographer and videographer Robert King document the war in Syria

Mustafa from Homs
Over 75 percent of my city is destroyed. My home was destroyed by a bomb. I saw pictures on social media and my home is now gone. Imagine your home, all your memories, your childhood wiped out by bombs. Syria now is just numbers, numbers of deaths, numbers of weapons and numbers of bombers, we just keep counting. Now we're at hundreds of thousands but they are people, these are lives. The whole situation is so complicated and no one with a sane mind can predict what's going to happen or what are the right moves to make. We are Syrians and we don't know what's going on. If Syrians themselves don't know, how can others?

Our lives are just pawns in a chess game. We are good people, we don't want more bombs and more weapons in our country, we don't want to join the army. Right now if I say to someone, "My home was destroyed" they'll reply, "OK it's the same for me." This is no life for us.

Mohammed

Mohammed from Idlib
England has now entered the war with airstrikes but this won't help to end the war. I think it will make things worse. More people will die and I think there's going to be even more migration from moderate Syrians to Europe and Turkey.

Six months ago I was with my brother and we saw a black point in the sky, suddenly it became bigger and bigger it was coming for us so we ran into our home and hid underground. It was a barrel bomb. Most of the families in Idlib and nearby villages have moved out, they are sleeping in tents because they are frightened of bombs.

We don't know who is bombing us, usually when we see a group of planes we think it's Russian because the others fly alone, but we don't know. These airstrikes will not help to stop terrorism in Syria, the armed groups have places where they can hide underground. Innocent people will be killed.

Follow Norma on Twitter.

Norma Costello is with GOAL, a Dublin-based international aid agency, which is delivering aid to over 1 million people inside Syria.

Illustrations by Adam Waito

I was in Doha, the capital of Qatar, with bits of four days tospare and an empty hotel room with the promise of a constant supply of clean sheets and towels, so I figured I'd check out the hook-up sites and apps to see what was up.

I travel a lot, and in addition to talking to bookstore clerks about who the big local writers are, seeing what the latest architecture looks like and trying out cool new boozes, talking to and having sex with the locals is one of the things I like most about travel.

But maybe Qatar was different. It was the first stridently religious Muslim country I'd ever tried any of the apps or sites in. I'd heard the emirate, still far more traditional than its frantically Westernizing UAE cousins to the south, was slowly liberalizing on the road to its 2022 World Cup. Women with off-the-shoulder dresses were no longer being hissed at in the streets, for instance. But I'd also heard there were plans afoot to somehow identify gays at the border, and gay publications, as well as soon-to-be-ex FIFA chief Sepp Blatter were already warning football fans about maybe not kissing your boyfriend after a big goal.

I'd looked into the laws about such things, as I always do before travelling to a new place. In Qatar, the maximum penalty for same-sex sexual activity is death. I could see how that could put a damper on the hook-up scene.

I'm no Ben Carson, but I think there may be a direct neurological link between empty hotel rooms and sex drive. Someone should look into it. Anyway, despite the pall of death, I logged in, and within about a minute, I started hearing those familiar little moist-sounding electronic pops.

"Hey"

"Hey"

"Hey"

"Hi"

"Hey"

"Hey"

You gotta love it. The human sex drive is a mighty and hilarious thing, and these apps and sites are the gateway through which this veritable force of nature is released across the planet.

For men looking to fuck each other, anyway.

I should point out that I was not subject to the death penalty. As far as Qatar is concerned, I'm lost anyway, soul-wise. I'd just get put in prison, maybe tortured, I'm guessing raped, and then deported. But if you're Muslim, the law says death, or at least imprisonment and 100 lashes. And these guys popping up on my screen with their endearingly displayed body parts all looked pretty Muslim.

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that sex trumps death. It's the same penalty for all forms of extramarital sex in Qatar and several other countries. People have fucked through plagues that killed a third of the known world and the more recent one that seemed engineered to specifically kill the world's most enthusiastic fuckers. I once had sex with a guy who told me he climbed into his young wife's hospital bed and they fucked, joyously, memorably, and I'm guessing painfully, just days before she died, and just weeks before we fucked.

Except it is surprising, because this is the non-secular Muslim world, and everything we've been thinking for about the last 14 years points to a monolith, a medieval set of values and choice of punishments, not just among the crazies in the hills of Tora Bora or the ruined ruins of Homs, Aleppo, and Palmyra, but in millennia-old civilizations and enthusiastic economic and military allies of the West.

This is one of the many powers of travel. A place never looks the same on the ground as it does from the height of Google Earth or the arm's length of even a responsible news report. This emirate is as against men with other men's penises in them as they are against calling their Prophet a naughty name. But, look at this glowing screen. Look at those hopeful, horny, possibly brave, mostly young men, erupting out of this tiny desert nation with Goldblumian inevitability. Life will find a way, at least if by life, you mean semen.

I had meetings and lunches and suppers and drinks, but amid those, in the early mornings, late nights and occasionally stolen hours in between when the thing I was doing happened to be in the lobby of my own hotel, I had some sex, and learned a thing or two about the religious Muslim world in the process.

At first, I thought vaguely that these sites and apps would be a good way to track just these sorts of people, my sorts of people, were the government to want to do that sort of thing. Saudi Arabia, just a few kilometres west, has been caught doing just that. And the first couple of guys I messaged back—apologies, guys—were asked more questions than I usually ask about where they were and who they were and could they take an incriminating picture posed just like I say so I know it's you and not some be-robed cop using stolen porn to reel in the unwitting unholy.

I didn't always get their names, but with the exception of the one guy in the polo shirt and basketball shorts who didn't have more than two or three words of English (or at least didn't offer more than that to me), I did talk with them. I really like postcoital get-to-know-you talk, with its combination of intimacy, honesty, and stakes-free carelessness that seems to lead to conversations that mostly sound pretty honest instead of fabricated, which would be just as easy.

I want to be careful about the guys' personal details here—all but a couple of these guys were Muslim and most were Qatari and so would be candidates for the chopping block—so I'll make some up to obfuscate.

There was the body builder who lived with his boyfriend, whom he considered his husband, or the guy with the sprung, rabbit-like body, all nervous energy, who got impatient with my leisurely approach to fucking him, and flipped me in what must have been a practiced wrestling move and got most of the way into me—which I'm fine with but dude, roll on a condom—before I kicked him over and restored order. He worked for a big Qatari corporation. Our conversation was much like it has been in other hotel rooms in other cities, talking about home, other trips, other sex. I asked him if it was tough, having sex with guys here with the laws so strict and scary. He laughed a laugh I've grown accustomed to on the road, the oh-you-stupid-callow-foreigner laugh. No, he said, it wasn't tough. There's a quotation inscribed in the entrance hall of Doha's grand Museum of Islamic Art from the 13th-century historian Rawandi: "He should be aware of his enemies, like a chess player who, while observing his own move, also watches over his opponent's." These guys seem to have gotten the hang of it.

Doha Airport. Photo by the author.

Then there was a builder who re-upped his annual contract more than half a dozen times instead of going back to his home country. I went to his apartment, which he shared with one other guy who seemed to be out. I asked him about the working conditions I'd heard about on the news. "It's not good," he told me as he walked around the room towelling the cum off his belly and picking his clothes up off the floor—he wasn't much of a cuddler, this guy—"but it's better than at home."

I asked another quiet, serious guy, about whether there was any way to meet people in Doha offline. He said there was a hotel bar he went to. Qataris aren't officially allowed in hotel bars, but it turns out that if you're not wearing your thobe, you aren't assumed to be Qatari. I went to the bar later to see for myself. It certainly wasn't a gay bar, but there were single, young, brown men who ordered drinks they didn't drink and stood at the bar making the same kind of anxious, hungry, hesitant eye contact I've read about in novels and memoirs that describe the North American scene five and six decades ago.

There are many different sorts of what we might call sexual miasmas in the world. There's the confident cruising of catching someone's eye on a street at a time and in a place where catching someone's eye is playful instead of dangerous, or the pressurized pick-up in a club or at a party where the whole reason to be there is to find someone so not to at least try is basically failure, and there's the desperation of that same club or party as the crowd starts to dwindle and you've got no one on the line. There are more extreme miasmas, like window shopping in a bath house, the mash-up of a group thing, or what I assume is the basically RPG approach that takes over in prison.

Doha felt like none of those things. Doha felt distinct. The closest thing I can come up with is what I imagine a lumber or oil town might have been like a few decades ago. It had that kind of avidity, an enthusiasm just this side of desperation, a focus on sex to the exclusion of any consideration of relationship or friendship, but with an abiding interest in at least some shared words to place you, place themselves, pick up a story or two, the talk about pent-up unspeakable things as much an attraction for some as the sex. Most of these guys weren't trapped here by any means—they could fly to Berlin or New York whenever they wanted to—so the restrictions were contingent, fungible.

On my last night in town, I took a walk through the souk. It's new, but looks old, and even has intentionally run-down bits where the spice and fabric shops for the foreign workers are. I'd wandered around for about ten minutes when a tall, broad, beautiful man fell into stride beside me and asked where I was from. I told him, and angled into a gift store. He followed. His English was vestigial—he was from Sri Lanka—but he was persistent, and friendly, and hot, so we talked and we walked, and he offered to show me his favourite spots. He told me about his work, and how he lived in a dorm with five other guys, but that it was OK, because the room was free, and he was making more here than at home. After another five minutes, he grabbed my little finger with his and squeezed. Four or five minutes after that, he led me into an alleyway, grabbed my crotch and asked if I had a place where I could fuck him. We walked around a little more while I figured out whether this was a good idea. Deciding it totally was, we headed to my hotel. I asked him to wait outside while I made sure it was OK that he came in. A last-minute twinge made me want to check something. So I got to my lobby, hooked up to the wifi and plugged the words Doha, souk, gay, and police into Google.

The first three results told me that police occasionally pick up foreign workers caught in compromising same-sex situations and, in exchange for not arresting and deporting them, turn them into bait. The rights of foreign workers are not highly developed in Qatar, and this seemed to fall right into line with other stories of passport and wage withholding. I'd noticed my guy texting a few times as we walked, and when I came out of the hotel, he was texting some more. I told him I'd changed my mind, and he left.

So, that was either a close call or a missed opportunity, but whatever the case, the episode—as well as the whole atmosphere of these meet-ups, secret but not secretive, the guys more furtive than frightened—called to mind not the secret police of East Berlin or whoever enforces Iran's codes of conduct, but someone I met a couple of weeks ago in DC. He was in his 60s, and told me about how things were there when he was a teenager. There was a wooded area just outside town where guys would wander and meet at night. And every once in a while, he said, there'd be a big search light that would sweep through the trees once, twice, and then out. He never saw the police come in and make any arrests, though everything the guys were doing was at least three kinds of illegal. The cops just wanted you to know that they knew you were there, and that they'd let you do all those things you were doing as long as you didn't step out of line and force them to do anything about it.

It's not a happy and healthy gay-for-all, but it's not being thrown off tall buildings either, and it's not the way I'd gotten used to thinking about life in the religious Islamic world. The news gives us triumphs and disasters; everyday life, by definition, isn't news. But for what it's worth, everyday life for a man-fucking man in Qatar, citizen and guest-worker alike, seems un-dramatic, un-frightening, operating on pretty much the same principles as it does anywhere else in the world with an internet connection and selfies.

Follow Bert Archer on Twitter.

Look at Ines Estrada's work on her Instagram, Twitter, website, and online shop.

Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Personally, I think 2015's been a pretty great year for video games. I've laughed, many times. I've not quite cried, but I've certainly been moved. I've watched cities fall and heroes born, societies form and villains crushed. I've reconnected with characters I've known since my childhood, and fallen for others I never thought I'd want to spend an hour with, let alone well over 100. I've also played games entirely without precedent, that seem to have appeared from nowhere, their makers immediately impressing their singular approach to games making on an industry that forever craves originality. Which isn't to say that some of this year's best aren't sticking to tried-and-tested formulas—they are, but they're absolutely excellent at executing them.

I don't feel there's any point in writing acres of text about each entry in this top 20, but I should explain how it was arrived at. A total of 47 VICE Gaming contributors submitted their personal top fives of 2015—with the game at one earning five points, the second four, down to the fifth-placed title being awarded one. These scores were added up, and the game with the most points is our game of the year. Simple.

When games were tied on points, the number of votes for that game was considered—the more votes, the higher the game placed. This is actually what separates the games at four and five. And when the vote count was equal, the number of individual top-spots was counted—which is what separates numbers 15 and 16. The cut-off point for votes was December 2; any games released around or after this date that ultimately impress in the coming months will be considered for inclusion in next year's list.

Clear? I hope so. I ranked The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as my number one, but it didn't quite take the top spot overall. That went to a game that not only arrived carried by great expectations and just a little controversy, but might also represent a series swan-song for one of gaming's most individual directors.

1
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
(Konami; multi-platform)

Should the likely-Konami-leaving Hideo Kojima never lead another Metal Gear team, he can at least retire from the franchise knowing that The Phantom Pain is perhaps the greatest entry in this long-running stealth-action saga. A super-massive time-sink of multifarious player approaches, rewarding ingenuity while also allowing for brute force bluntness, The Phantom Pain is almost overwhelming in its flexibility. It invites you to truly go your own way—be that under cover of darkness and silence, or calling in air support while blasting "Kids In America" through enemy ranks as the bullets fly.

On VICE Gaming:
'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain' Is the Perfect Stealth Game
The Final Word on 'The Phantom Pain,' a Video Game About Video Games

2
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
(CD Projekt RED; multi-platform)

It's Game of Thrones drama crossed with Red Dead Redemption gameplay, it goes on forever and it's absolutely brilliant. The Witcher 3 is one of those wake-up call games that gets its invested player seeking out the deeper fiction behind its story, investigating not only the two games preceding it but also the source fiction, the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski. While it's got all manner of monsters to track and kill, for money or to further the game's central quest, there's a grim reality to The Witcher 3 that even those usually turned off by fantasy can connect to—the role of the wandering warrior, the horrors of war as it ravages its way across a landscape, and the people disrupted by evils greater than any that breathe fire or haunt the crypts of this incredibly vibrant game world.

On VICE Gaming:
The VICE Gaming Verdict on 'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'
Just Passing Through: 'The Witcher 3' and the Legacy of the Rōnin

3
Bloodborne
(FromSoftware; PlayStation 4)

FromSoftware's break from its (Dark) Souls series might have been different in several regards—combat flowed faster, its setting was more gothic nightmare than high-fantasy otherworldliness, and its enemies more grotesque than anything the studio had previously realized. But at its heart, Bloodborne remains true to its sister productions. Testing in the extreme, with gargantuan boss encounters and merciless death rained down on the naïve player, this is the sort of challenge that can turn some so white they fade to nothingness and never return to the viscera-slicked cobbles of Yharnam. Those who persist, though, know it to be an experience of dark wonders and exquisite treasures.

On VICE Gaming:
I Played 'Bloodborne' for 24 Hours Straight

4
Life Is Strange
(Dontnod Entertainment; multi-platform)

For its second game, Parisian studio Dontnod took a step back from brawling to present an intimate and affecting adventure game where whispered words were usually stronger than thrown fists. Released in five episodes across 2015, Life Is Strange took the very relatable scenario of a teenager returning to her home town after several years away, reconnecting with the locals and an old best friend, and stirs in a healthy dollop of sci-fi—protagonist Max discovers she can rewind certain spells of time, to alter the outcomes of encounters both fraught and trivial. By episode five, things have gotten incredibly sinister, with the inviting golden-hour aesthetic of the game's beginning pushed aside by catastrophe on a massive scale. Life Is Strange is a riveting twist on the adventure genre that just about beats the contemporary masters of the style, Telltale, at their own game.

On VICE Gaming:
We Were Younger: 'Life Is Strange' and Nostalgia for the Moment
'Life Is Strange,' But It's Best When You're Sitting Down, Doing Nothing

5
Rocket League
(Psyonix; multi-platform)

The best online multiplayer game of 2015, with the most wonderfully simple premise of anything listed here. Rocket League is essentially soccer, but the ball's the size of a shed and the players are all jet-powered vehicles, usually in silly hats (mine's decorated with a pirate tricorne and Jamaican flag, because why not). Sounds ridiculous on paper, and it can be in play; but Rocket League's also capable of producing the most jaw-on-the-floor incredible moments, plays that take the breath away and bury it under the patio, and its simple controls make it a game that's immediately accessible but a real challenge to truly master.

On VICE Gaming:
You Really Should Be Playing 'Rocket League'

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Related: Watch VICE's documentary on the world of eSports

6
Fallout 4
(Bethesda; multi-platform)

Possibly a victim of over hyping, the immersive wastelands of Fallout 4 have nevertheless enraptured hundreds of thousands of obsessive players, scouring the post-apocalyptic shell of what was once Boston and its surrounding area for all manner of secrets—treasures to loot, materials to process, and mutants to slay. The game's core narrative is too easily derailed by an abundance of secondary quests, which leads to an imbalanced overall story, and there's too great an emphasis on killing, but there's no denying that Bethesda are world-builders of rare distinction—and it's the sheer scale of Fallout 4 that makes it such a spectacular achievement, forgiving any rough edges.

On VICE Gaming:
Return to the Bunker: 'Fallout 4' Through the Eyes of a 1990s War Child
'Fallout 4' Is Massive, Ambitious, and Really, Really Good

7
Splatoon
(Nintendo; Wii U)

Four versus four online multiplayer shooter action is easy to come by in modern gaming—but nobody has seen it like this before. Nintendo being Nintendo, its take on the quick-turnover battle for territorial supremacy turned generic bro-dudes into girl and guy squids, all "deaths" are temporary, and the goal of the game isn't even to claim the most "kills"—Splatoon is all about splashing ink across a crackingly creative selection of cartoon environments, and ensuring you cover more square feet than the other team manages. Much like 2014's Mario Kart 8, Splatoon absolutely nails the just-one-more-round sensation that keeps players glued until the early hours of any given school night. There's a single-player mode, too, but much like Call of Duty games in recent years, that's really not what you want to pick this up for.

On VICE Gaming:
Nintendo Is Perhaps the Only Games Developer That Understands 'Play'

8
Undertale
(Toby Fox; Windows, OS X)

The indie darling of 2015, Undertale is old-school role-playing as you don't quite remember it. While the game looks simplistic, built using Gamemaker: Studio, how it plays really is something else. You encounter an array of monsters on a quest to escape the dangerous Underground, but rather than slice and dice every creature that steps across your path, you can attempt to, basically, befriend them. Do you spare, or do you slay? The choice is yours, and the way you tackle each potentially blood-spilling situation has a direct affect on how the game ends. Threadbare on the surface but possessing incredible depth, Undertale announces the arrival of a new voice in games creativity, Toby Fox. Whatever he does next just earned itself a whole lot more attention.

On VICE Gaming:
'Undertale' Is One of the Most Remarkable Video Games Ever Made

9
Super Mario Maker
(Nintendo; Wii U)

Design and share your own side-scrolling Mario stages—that's what Super Mario Maker promises, and absolutely what it delivers. Millions of playable levels are online as of right now, all unique, all shaped using the game's intuitive building tool. There's really not much else to Maker, but there doesn't need to be—this is the perfect game for anyone who grew up with 8- and 16bit Mario games, and always dreamed about bringing their own fantasy courses to life.

On VICE Gaming:
'Super Mario Maker' Teased Me Into Making My Own Game, But It Went Terribly
The Sadistic 'Super Mario Maker' Is the 'Dark Souls' of Cute Platformers

10
SOMA
(Frictional Games; PlayStation 4, Windows, OS X)

The newest release from the makers of the spine-bendingly creepy Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the most unsettling horror game of 2015. SOMA puts the player in the shoes of Simon Jarrett, who finds himself in the decrepit confines of the underwater research facility PATHOS-II, deep beneath the Atlantic. How he got there, he doesn't know; and what plays out in the following hours is unrelenting in its keep-you-awake weirdness. Simon, it turns out, might not be Simon at all, but that's not even half of his worries—there's the small matter of a bunch of hostile robots, and just who is this that's talking to us, anyway? SOMA keeps its player guessing just as much as it does its protagonist, and the reward is a climax you definitely weren't expecting at the start.

An article examining SOMA will run on VICE Gaming soon.

11
Her Story
(Sam Barlow; Windows, OS X, iOS)

Work out whether a young woman is responsible for a murder using a throwback interface that mimics a 1990s PC. Sounds unremarkable, but Her Story is sensational, as its rising number of awards and accolades make abundantly clear.

On VICE Gaming: Watching as Detectives: The Truth Behind 'Her Story'

12
Until Dawn
(Supermassive Games; PlayStation 4)

One of the year's sleeper hits, Until Dawn lines up a gaggle of (older-looking) teenage stereotypes in order for the player to attempt to keep them alive in the face of isolated mountainside terror. Except, once you realize you're directing proceedings, it's just as much fun to bump a few off. After all, what good horror film lets everyone live?

On VICE Gaming: The Schlocky Slasher Game 'Until Dawn' Is Actually a New Horror Classic

13
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
(Capcom; 3DS)

It's Monster Hunter, in 3D, on the move, and it's just the most absorbing distraction for commutes when you don't really care that your stop actually passed you by half an hour ago.

On VICE Gaming: How to Avoid Sucking at 'Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate'

14
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
(The Chinese Room; PlayStation 4)

It's the end of the world like you've never known it. Rapture presents the player with an abandoned British village to explore and a mystery to uncover, and as beautiful as it looks throughout, the longer it goes on, the more disquieting it becomes.

On VICE Gaming: Gaming's Gentle Apocalypse: On 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture' and 'Submerged'

15
Batman: Arkham Knight
(Rocksteady; PlayStation 4, Xbox One)

While it has its problems—well, problem, namely a Batmobile that moves like a broken shopping cart—there's no doubting that Arkham Knight is a fine finale to Rocksteady's Arkham trilogy, pitting the Caped Crusader against a brand-new enemy, as well as familiar villains and a certain back-from-the-dead (not so) funny man.

On VICE Gaming: After 24 Hours with 'Arkham Knight,' I Can't Feel the Real Me

16
Tales from the Borderlands
(Telltale Games; multi-platform)

Might it be Telltale's best game yet? Probably. Tales... doesn't require any prior knowledge of the Borderlands series to enjoy, and very quickly has the quips flowing as freely as it does the blood of its bandit scum. Even its robots are funny. But it's really touching, too, something few will have seen coming from a franchise based on headshots and loot-grabbing.

On VICE Gaming: 'Tales from the Borderlands' Is the Gaming Equivalent of an Addictive TV Show

17
Rise of the Tomb Raider
(Crystal Dynamics; Xbox One)

Lara Croft's latest is a development on 2013's franchise reboot in every way: she's stronger and more determined, the odds stacked against her have never been higher, and the body count gets absolutely astronomical. But it's so flipping gorgeous that you can just about forgive the excessive force, and some of the puzzle tombs are the work of wicked geniuses.

On VICE Gaming: 'Rise of the Tomb Raider' Falls Just Short of Greatness, but It's Still Very, Very Good

18
Guitar Hero Live
(FreeStyleGames; multi-platform)

How the hell did this ever work? Whatever magic's going on at FreeStyle, it's pretty potent stuff, because GHL is the standout rhythm action title of 2015 by a clear margin. Full-motion video, so many years after the death of the Mega-CD: who'd have ever called it? Its online streaming service, Guitar Hero TV, is a 24/7 feed of songs to play along to, and can keep you glued to your TV for hours on end.

On VICE Gaming: 'Guitar Hero Live' Is the Rock God Simulator I Never Knew I Needed

19
Invisible, Inc
(Klei Entertainment; Windows, OS X, Linux)

Turn-based gaming that never leaves the player cold with repetition, Invisible, Inc succeeds where so many other strategy games of its ilk go stale by making every single decision feel significant. It demands that you completely qualify your actions, or punishment will be served—and that's rarely good for your already thinning team of secret agents.

An article examining Invisible, Inc will run on VICE Gaming soon.

20
Destiny: The Taken King
(Bungie; PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox One and 360)

Destiny came good, and how. Granted, the entry fee went up somewhat, and it's still more polished mechanics than memorable story, but so far as shooters in 2015 go, this is right up there.

On VICE Gaming: Does 'Destiny: The Taken King' Live Up to Its Promise and Hype?

Thanks to everyone who voted in this top 20, who are, in no particular order:

Matt Porter, Jake Tucker, Chris Schilling, Andi Hamilton, Paul Rose, Andy Kelly, Ewan Wilson, Stephen Maurice Graham, Jason Nawara, Danny Wadeson, Paul Weedon, Jem Alexander, Matt Lees, Joe Donnelly, Ewen Hosie, Emma Quinlan, Oliver Lee Bateman, Sean Cleaver, Adam Cook, David Whelan, Giaco Furino, Richard Cobbett, Suriel Vazquez, Javy Gwaltney, Chris Scullion, Ian Dransfield, Kirk McKeand, Dave Cook, Sean Thomas, Sayem Ahmed, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Dan Maher, Jonathan Beach, Andy McDonald, Ed Smith, Max Wallis, Jagger Gravning, Ria Jenkins, Mike Stubbsy, Carolyn Petit, Brad Barrett, Gav Murphy, Sam White, Julia Hardy, Leigh Alexander, Steve Haske, and me.

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Thursday saw unrest at the refugee camp outside Idomeni on the Greek/Macedonian border after a refugee was killed by an electric shock as he tried to climb on a train. There were reported clashes between Macedonian border police and refugees fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The situation could escalate in the coming hours as Greek police get involved. The refugees, mainly from Iran and Morocco, have effectively blocked the neutral zone on the border between Greece and Macedonia and intervention by the Greek police is looking increasingly inevitable.

On Thursday in parliament, Greek Deputy Minister for Migration Policy Giannis Mouzalas spoke about the situation. Mouzalas noted there is an "operational plan" in place before adding that "there will be a solution in Idomeni. It's obviously not going to be a walk in the park. It's going to be a difficult situation for the government and for everyone else. We are going to offer a solution and try to avoid any further escalation of the situation." The deputy minister also noted that this issue will be resolved within four to five days and that "that won't involve physical violence but it won't involve flowers either."

The body of the deceased, a few moments after his death. Photo courtesy of Antonis Repanas

According to police sources, 6,000 people were gathered at the camp early on Thursday morning, 2,500 of whom do not have permission to cross the border. Shortly after 10 AM, a 22-year-old Moroccan died of electric shock while attempting to climb on top of a train carriage at the Idomeni rail station and chaos ensued.

His compatriots as well as other refugees surrounded his body and put it on a makeshift stretcher. They began marching towards the border. Macedonian police responded with tear gas and the refugees hurled stones. Some also set fire to blankets and other items, filling the air with heavy smoke. At least two injured refugees were transferred to the local medical center.

Antonis Repanas, a journalist who covers the developments in Idomeni, said, "The intensity of the situation is like nothing we have seen before and it's only going to get worse. There is a war in Idomeni. Both Europe and Greece should be ashamed, subjecting human lives to this game of chess."

After the skirmish between Macedonian police and the refugees finally ended, the refugees handed over the 22-year-old Moroccan's body to emergency services.

The desperation of the refugees is clear. "They tell me that I should go to Athens. What am I going to do there? Where will I stay? Where will I work? I have no money," said Mohammed Salim, a 36-year-old from Pakistan. "They have to let us through. I want to go to England. That's where my wife and two daughters are—my daughters are five and eight years old."

At around noon on Thursday, a Greek National Railway train arrived in Idomeni to gather any refugees wishing to return to Athens or Salonika, free of charge. Eventually the train departed with just 50 passengers. While the borders between Macedonia and Greece remain closed, hundreds of train carriages full of food, fuel, and Christmas products sit stranded, damaging trade and hitting transportation companies hard.

As the crisis continues, there are renewed rumors that Greece will temporarily exit the Schengen Treaty that ensures open borders between European countries. Meanwhile Frontex, the EU's border agency, has announced that it will increase its activity on the Greek/Macedonian border.

But Bloodborne isn't a 'real' open world game, you may be thinking. You're comparing apples to oranges. Or radscorpions to mole rats, if you've been playing Fallout 4 a lot. Either way, you have a point. FromSoftware's PlayStation 4 debut isn't like those other open-world games, the balmy oceans of trials and rewards poured out by companies like Bethesda or Ubisoft. It isn't some groaning cauldron of secondary objectives and collectible scrap.

In contrast to a Fallout or an Assassin's Creed's willingness to cater to the player's whim, the choices that make up this diseased masterwork are strictly, even punitively defined. You can't head in absolutely any direction that suits your fancy, trailing the frayed ends of partly-completed quests. You can't track down your archenemy in the world and slay the bastard before the overture has faded, nipping reams of plot development in the bud. There is no horse, wingsuit, VTOL, or conveniently pliable dragon to spirit you across the skybox, and you can't bumble down to the endgame dungeon by following the edge of the map.

Bloodborne is a different breed. But at the end of the day, apples and oranges are both types of fruit—and if From's offering seems peculiarly harsh and arid when compared to, say, the recent Just Cause 3, it's still a continuous, non-linear environment that's yours to rove at more or less your own pace. It's just an open-world game that asks you to pay much more attention than most to what's right under your feet, lest what's right under your feet bite a chunk out of your neck.

Lesser open-worlders trade in distance for its own sake—rousing stretches of canyon, forest, or mountainside, much of it destined to be heedlessly trampled as the player hurtles towards a waypoint marker. Bloodborne offers a considerable expanse, but it uses the space much more malevolently. The game's moon-crazed Yharnam is a mass of branching paths—smoggy streets, dripping tunnels, and crumbling cliffside walks that roll under and over and back into each other with serpentine abandon. Every path crescendos in a boss that serves as a gatekeeper for entire stretches of map, and toppling these horrors—to say nothing of the torch-waving villagers, slavering wolfmen, and walking brains that populate the nooks and crannies—typically involves hours of pattern analysis, loadout-twiddling, and hair-tearing frustration.

It's a structure that refuses to be gainsaid or circumvented the way you can a tank convoy in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, or a story encounter in Fallout 4, and it can, very often, feel like you're head-butting a wall. But this isn't a Call of Duty campaign. There are hardly any cutscenes, and zilch in the way of QTEs or scripted sequences. You're never outright forced to continue down a path or fight something, save for when you stumble into a boss creature's lair.

Shortcuts and secret chambers are myriad, some hidden then—once you start to think along the same fiendish lines as the level designers—given away by piles of breakable crates and coffins, others betrayed by the flickering pools of gore that indicate the activities of online players. However vindictive Bloodborne can feel, there's always a choice to be made—weighing up the merits of this or that route, or whether it's worth making an XP run through a pacified region before heading into uncharted territory—and the care with which the game asks you to mull over your options means that you marvel at the environment's diabolical intricacies all the more.

This also, of course, applies to Bloodborne's spiritual ancestor, Dark Souls, and it's still an important contribution to the corpus of game design. Virtual geography has never been grander than it is today, and one unfortunate byproduct, I think, is a slight undervaluing of the local and specific. That's even true of the games that lavish the most attention on the fine details. I love Fallout 4's knack for an evocatively tumbled heap of bones, for example, or the way scattered props knit themselves together at the back of your mind into narratives as you poke through some long-forgotten bunker. But the sheer abundance of stuff, the relative ease with which I'm able to traverse the game's supposedly unforgiving wilderness, and the continual tugging of a dozen objectives (which passively accrue as you speak to people, or overhear conversations) stops me from giving these flourishes the attention they deserve.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain fares a lot better. Each of its bases and outposts is a spiderweb of dynamic guard behaviors that must be gingerly unpicked, and the world map has a whiff of Bloodborne's deranged hydra-headed design to it, with valleys forcing you to approach bases from certain broad directions. It's a framework that puts a strong emphasis on the here-and-now, and the emotional payoff when you apply just the right combination of tools and tactics to a situation can be immense. But it's also a game of sweeping plains and dusty roads, in which you'll spend lots of the time holding down the sprint button, your mind galloping ahead to your next objective.

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Related: Watch 'VICE Talks Games with HALO Developer Frank O'Connor'

An Infinity Ward developer once told me that his favorite part of Modern Warfare 2 was an alleyway with some prettily arranged rubbish in it—a thought that unsettled me, as this is exactly the kind of tiny brushstroke Call of Duty's avalanche of a campaign formula teaches you to ignore. I get the same feeling—infrequently, but often enough to be telling—while wandering the Zanzibar of The Phantom Pain. There are so many nuances to savor (or strap to a Fulton balloon), but the structure doesn't always persuade you to care, particularly when it comes to the missions that are just bog-standard resource hunts, or glorified remixes of previous missions.

Not so Bloodborne, in which it's possible to spend 40 minutes inching through a castle library for fear of what might rise shrieking out of the floor. There's plenty of grinding to be done—well, assuming you aren't among the prancing hotshots who've beaten the game without leveling up—but every second of the game demands complete focus, thanks to unpleasantly underhand AI and the ease with which threats escape detection in amongst the ornate Gothic trappings. You'll take a step through a door, pause, glance behind you, peer mistrustfully at a figure slumped behind a table, take another step, suck in your breath, strain your ears for ominous rustles of movement. A hint born of long Souls experience: never trust an empty room, especially if there's a glowing object on the floor at the other end of it.

As you'd expect, the game's handling of space is never more exacting than when you're locked in a death-struggle with something befanged and/or tentacular. Souls mastermind Hidetaka Miyazaki's decision to dispense with shields, much to the horror of greener players, has wide-reaching effects. The immediate result is that you're forced to be aggressive, sliding between attacks rather than letting them bounce off—an upping of the stakes that's reinforced by the "Rally" system, whereby you can regain a smidgeon of lost health by counter-attacking straight away. The longer-term payoff, though, is that you have to mind-map the terrain around you much more intently even than in the original Dark Souls, with its devilish origami architecture.

In a game that sets such store by darting and dodging, you need a pin-sharp mental picture of the layout at your back—where the furnishings are that might box you in or interrupt an opponent's charge, whether there's an incline that might allow you to slip cheekily under a horizontal swing. You'll also become closely attuned to the play of AI trigger lines in a level—an earlier area could offer a tactical advantage if you can lure an opponent away from its post, but shrinking from contact might cost you dearly if you retreat straight into another foe's aggro zone. In this way, you come to know and appreciate Bloodborne's theaters of bloodshed in a way you never quite do the most convoluted of Fallout 4's dungeons, and even MGSV's fortified bases seem a bit superficial by comparison. It's too often a question of waiting for a guard to turn his back, or where to take cover.

I don't want to sound too down on the likes of Metal Gear or Fallout. They do what they do enormously well, and which you enjoy the most is obviously a question of taste—for many, the spaciousness, playfulness, and the ability to plot your own course will be worth the occasional lack of rigor and suspense. But as video game worlds grow ever more gargantuan, their capacity to rouse fear and wonder smeared ever more thinly across the geometry, I relish more and more the games in which every square foot could be my undoing. Bloodborne commonly deals in passageways a meter or two wide, but it always feels terrifyingly vast. How do you like them apples?

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I first met Don when I lived in Prestwich, North Manchester in 2005. At the time I was working with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, co-authoring his autobiography, Renegade. Don (real name Gordon Charles Montgomery) and Mark go back. Occasionally they'd drop acid and get shitfaced together in the 80s with John Cooper Clarke and Nico—two other ex-'wich residents.

At age 66, Don was a fixture around the area (he still is, despite his recent cancer scare). But it wasn't until a mutual friend of ours sent me a text earlier this year urging me to look at a series of photographs he'd taken from the late 70s—early 90s, when he was working as a boiler man in Prestwich Hospital, a psychiatric facility, that I started to see him as a true undiscovered artist.

The images looked familiar to me the first time I saw them because that's the way I see the world. It's all about temperament. The closeness of the pictures, his democratic gaze; they abjure any embrace of obvious nostalgia. He drags you in by playing down his subject: local disorder. And if you can't take art personally, then what's the point?

I met up with Don to talk to him about his life as a photographer, and to find out what it was like work at the hospital.

VICE: You've told me before that you've never been influenced or even aware of other photographers. With this in mind I'm curious why you started to take these images. What was the initial spark?
Don: I joined the hospital in '79. I was 30 and I'd just started taking pictures of people pissed up in pubs. There weren't many people taking pictures in the pub then. I used to like catching people by surprise. Is that weird or what? They'd be like: "It's him again—fuck off with your photographs," but in a nice way.

Then the corridors in the hospital used to get my attention when the light was right. Nothing was considered. I just took the shots quickly, without too much knowledge or too much thought.

As long as the boiler ran smoothly, there wasn't that much to do until the end of the shift when you cleaned all the ashes out, checked all the oil, so I'd either read, wander 'round, or take photos.

There's something very attractive about discovering work that isn't available on the internet. You say you recently rediscovered all these images in an old suitcase. I find it fascinating that you're not overly aware of the brilliance of them.
I got no passion for anything. People have passion for music, passion for football. I got fuck-all passion. It's great. And I've got perfect blood pressure. The dog's bollocks of blood pressure.

I never thought I'd do anything with the images. I got rid of about three Tesco bags recently that were full of photographs. I'd take one roll of real film and I'd have one or two good photographs out of it and the rest were just shit. And they were expensive to process at the time.

I was always skint. I remember giving my wages on a Friday to my ex-wife in the mid-80s, paying the bills for that week, and having just enough for two pints of Stella. I thought what am I going to do for the rest of the week? This is when I started selling a bit of herb.

You told me once that you used to take acid sometimes when you were at work. That's some location to be out of your head in. Surely, it had some influence on the images?
Not really. I was taking acid in the Navy before I worked in the hospital. Proper Acid: microdots; 25p to do your head in for 12 hours. It was horrendous sometimes. Oh my God—how long is this going to go on for? You just had to try and get through it the best you could. Once you start coming down when you've got used to it, that's when the fun begins, when you've cracked it and you're still buzzing.

I used to smoke weed regularly and take speed. I had acid in the hospital but nothing too strong. I could handle it OK.

We used to have parties down in that boiler house as well. Nighttime. Weekends. Wine and beers. Make a few spliffs up, go and sit in the boiler room, nice and quiet, listen to Frank Zappa, Kevin Coyne.

The parties weren't planned. Main boiler man phoned me up once saying: "There's a young lady looking for you here, climbing up the coal stack." She was there with a bottle of wine in one hand, trying to find me. He said: "I'll bring her down." This is when I was single.

Growing up near Prestwich as a kid, we were always suspicious of "mental patients." We didn't know any better.
It didn't take you long to get used to the place. At first you think—they're all nutters in here—but that doesn't last. There were some dangerous and violent ones, but they weren't dangerous and violent all the time otherwise they'd have been elsewhere. I used to go into the locked-up wards where they could only get out if the nurses let them out but I never got any mither.

Kids used to take the scare stories on board. Pretty shit really. Instead of making friends with them, they taunted the patients. But you didn't see that so much around Prestwich.

You'd see some of them and they'd never speak, never get a word out of them. But every one of them was different. You could go in the wards in the evening and they'd all be sat there, talking. They had their own relationships. Used to get quite a lot of shagging going on in the bushes. One was called the Petrol Pump because his dick was like that. He was always shagging in the bushes. He'd shag men and women. I didn't see a lot of it myself.

Then you had people like Terry—there was something wrong with him. He wasn't a complete full shilling, but he could sit in the pub and have a laugh and a drink with you and you'd think: Maybe he shouldn't be in a ward. But that's all he knew. And he was quite happy to be in a ward and go out and have a few beers.

They're not so visible nowadays. Used to be able to tell them a mile off. Nowadays, most patients are young: There are hardly any geriatric types. Back then, that wasn't the case. The way they were dressed, the medication, the way they walked, things like that; they looked dated. A lot of the time, the trousers didn't even fit properly—they were from another era, from the 50s, far away from their ankles. Their clothes would get mixed up, so the nurses would dress them up in anything. Mix and match. And some patients used to nick each other's trousers.

The Black Eye series of images: How did they come about?
It didn't start off as a black-eye competition. I just managed to take a few photographs in the pubs. One of them was a present: "Here you go Don, picture of me with a black eye." I then thought, Bloody hell, I've got quite a few black eyes ones here. What gets me is that most of them seem to be laughing, well chuffed with their black eyes.

Have the people in the picture ever seen these images?
I remember taking the photographs into the Ostrich pub, 10-15 years after I'd taken them and all the lads were like: "Fucking hell, look at me." They still thought they were funny.

Do you still own the camera that you used to take these photographs with?
After I lost my job at the hospital in the early 90s, I took the union to court and got 10 grand out of it. And that was at the same time I split up with my missus. I blew it all on holidays and getting pissed. Like you do when you're in that sort of situation. I was with her for 17 years. You can actually feel the pain. Horrible. She smashed most of my things. Threw all my gear out. Camera went out of the window. Should have taken a photo of the camera, smashed on the road.

I only take pictures on my phone now. My last phone camera was great: NOKIA. It sort of put me off a bit because it was so good.

And how are you feeling after your recent cancer operation?
It was cancer of the oesophagus. I've not started eating properly again but I'm much better. I've had a good run for my money. I've had no big health problems all my life. I can't complain a bit, drank like a fish since I was 16. What pisses me off is people saying: "you alright, you alright?" I had one bloke the other night in the pub, who hardly ever speaks to me: "You alright... do you want me to walk you to the taxi?" Christ almighty.

Austin Collings's latest book is The Myth of Brilliant Summers (PARIAH PRESS).

A NSW roadside drug testing unit. Image via

Last weekend, Australian police in New South Wales (NSW) ran a roadside drug testing blitz in several regional areas around the state, which found one in five drivers testing positive. On Monday, the NSW government announced plans to triple the number of tests by 2017. The crackdown comes in response to one in ten drivers failing the roadside tests for drugs, ­compared to one in 300 for alcohol.

The reason this is concerning is that drug tests don't check for drug intoxication, but for certain chemicals in saliva. In the case of NSW this is marijuana, MDMA, and amphetamines. And we only know this because NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge used freedom of information laws to obtain NSW police documents.

Testing for minute traces of drugs is affecting people like Burri Jerome, who's an Indigenous artist from the Tweed Valley. The Dainghutti-Gnargu man has been taking hemp seed oil for three years since having a triple bypass operation. "I need to take the oil to give me an appetite, as well as settling the nausea I experience," he explained. Although the legally sold oil is made from hemp—and contains almost no THC—Jerome has failed roadside tests twice. "I mean, what amount are their machines detecting?" he asked.

This is also a question asked by Steve Bolt, a solicitor at Lismore law firm Bolt and Findlay. He's been watching hundreds failing tests in the NSW Northern Rivers region, which is having an adverse effect on the local court system. Of the dozens of cases he's dealt with, the usual situation put to the court was a person smoked cannabis hours or sometimes days before, and weren't intoxicated when tested. "The test is very sensitive," he explained.

After acquiring NSW police standard operating manuals, Shoebridge was prompted to ask what levels they were testing for. "They had no idea," he said. "They just sent it off and the lab was testing for the smallest possible trace elements."

Shoebridge cites the 2013 WOLFFE Report, which was commissioned by the UK Government to gauge the level of drugs necessary to impair driving. The report found that prescription painkillers and benzodiazepines, such as Valium, were actually some of the drugs that most heavily affect driving. "The police should be testing for impairment, regardless of whether it's a legal, illegal, or prescription drug," said Shoebridge. "If the drug impairs your driving, you shouldn't be on the road."

Roadside drug testing began in NSW in 2007. Andrew Kavasilas, secretary of the Australian HEMP Party, has been a vocal opponent all along . He points to the 2006 Rosita project report, which found none of the oral fluid testing devices studied were reliable enough to be recommended for roadside screening. They were, however, shown to have a deterrent effect in the state of Victoria, where they were introduced in 2004.

Kavasilas believes the production of hemp seed for consumption is still illegal in Australia because it "will interfere with the saliva testing." He also holds grave concerns for the legalization of medical marijuana for the same reason, stating that "as they're doing with hemp seed food, they will fight medicinal cannabis tooth and nails."

Visiting fellow at the Australian National University, David McDonald researches health and justice. He agrees that testing for minute traces of drugs is not just chasing the wrong issue but is potentially unlawful. "It's a significant breach of human rights to have a driver guilty of a driving offense—any detectable level of the drugs in the body—when there is no evidence of impairment," he says.

According to McDonald, roadside testing should measure the quantities of drugs in the body, like the successful Australian model for alcohol does. This technology is already being utilized in the UK. "If you exceed the cut-off then you're guilty," he explained. "The cut-offs are based on solid scientific research about what quantities of the drugs create an unacceptable risk of a crash."

Despite this, Bernard Carlon, acting executive director at the Centre for Road Safety, Transport for NSW, staunchly defends the practice of roadside drug testing. As he told VICE, in 2014, 16 percent of road fatalities involved a driver with an illegal drug in their system. And this is why the state government is increasing its roadside drug testing to 97,000 a year by 2017.

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On Thursday exactly a year ago, New York City was practically on fire.

The startling decision last December 3 by a grand jury to not indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer behind the videotaped death of Eric Garner, blew the lid off a razzled metropolis whose citizens were already familiar with police brutality and discrimination. By then, of course, protests had spread across the country, due to the nearly concurrent decision with Michael Brown's case in Ferguson. In New York, as in Missouri, the anger was palpable—like you could reach out and touch it. And it stayed that way, for a while.

For weeks and even months, there were protests—massive ones, everywhere you looked, shutting down traffic for miles. Headlines buzzed with the latest die-ins, and videos of violent arrests up and down Broadway filtered through Facebook feeds. There were even counter-protests, which, in retrospect, seem like a ugly precursor to Donald Trump's perverse campaign rallies. It was this rare cultural flash where the seams of the city's society were suddenly stretched to a breaking point.

While local politicians were forced to take sides on divisive issues relating to police violence and racism, the fatal chokehold of the 43-year-old black man on Staten Island set into motion a chaotic sequence of events that made for one of the tensest times in New York's recent history. Two NYPD officers were gunned down by a mentally-ill man who was apparently enraged about Garner's death. It was an execution that infuriated pro-police forces, and some cops later turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio in a symbolic show of force. Then, a coordinated slowdown infiltrated the city's police department, and for days on end, arrests came to a virtual standstill.

The streets of New York functioned, for months, as a living exhibit of where America was at, race-wise, in 2014. But the issue cut even deeper: For the first time in decades, it seemed as if these issues had fully permeated the national discourse. It was something you and everyone you knew, both young and old, had to have an opinion on. If nothing else, it seemed like pretty much every New Yorker did.

All photos by Jason Bergman

Since those days, however, the crowds at protests have declined, and so has the attention. Still, on Thursday night, on the one-year anniversary of the Garner non-indictment, a crowd gathered in front of Gracie Mansion, where the mayor sleeps, demanding the firing of Officer Pantaleo. After the group blocked the quiet street, there were a handful of arrests, but the cops were ready for them—the last 12 months had prepared them well. But back then, there were thousands; this time, barely a hundred.

The kinetic energy of protest has transmitted itself to other cities similarly gripped by these issue, like Cleveland, Baltimore, and Chicago. Names like Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott and, most recently, Laquan McDonald have more power right now—all black victims who died at the hands of white officers. But Garner was the first in this cruel viral lineup, and oddly enough, his death, and his killer's subsequent non-indictment, can be seen, almost, as something that had to happen, an aggravated assault on justice that was necessary in order for it to be served elsewhere (There have been indictments in three of these other four cases, and Rice's killers may be indicted in the weeks ahead). New York City—and, for that matter, the country—will never be the same.

In honor of the Garner non-indictment's anniversary, I asked experts, advocates, and protesters to weigh in on what's happened since.

Christina Greer, political scientist at Fordham University and author, Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American DREAM

Because of what's going on nationally, a certain segment of people who may have not properly understood the protests last year are now starting to see that these fears, this anger and frustration, are actually valid. And then, I think, for a certain portion of population who didn't respect the protests or appreciate them, I still don't think they respect or appreciate them. Even today. Even with all the information that's out there.

But it's also very clear that the criminal justice system, if you can even call it that, has rewarded the Staten Island District Attorney with a congressional seat . It's very clear to a lot of people that we are not monolithic in how we view police brutality, racism, white supremacy, and these structural injustices that are still going on in New York City. And to the country, New York is this liberal bastion, but it's clearly not.

With those other national examples . That's actually extenuating circumstances. Laquan McDonald was murdered over 400 days ago! So if it weren't for a random civilian risking their life and career to speak up for a poor 17-year-old boy, how would we even know? So yeah, it's a win, but it's like a back-door win.

The thing that we don't want to happen is to start feeling like this is just what happens, right? Because that's when we're in a really dangerous place, where it's like, "Oh, this is just the norm." I think for some communities, they think that this is just what police do. We're sort of shocked at seeing this, but let's also be clear: There are lots of people who have been ringing the alarm for years. The police just come into our neighborhood and knock us around and there's a murder and you get no justice and that's just what it is. And with people like Eric Garner, and Akai Gurley, those are just the names we know.

Eugene O'Donnell, professor at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice and retired NYPD Sergeant, former prosecutor

I think the mayor deserves credit for a lot. He's done what many thought couldn't be done, which is keep the city safe. The crime numbers are spectacularly low still, and he's cut a lot of these unnecessary adversarial police interactions. It also really makes being a cop a better job; I don't think the cops relish the idea of going face to face with people every day and having to do certain kinds of enforcement, even if that's what the higher echelon required. They may not say it out loud, but I think the quality of their lives is probably better now than it was then.

Then you have to say that Bill Bratton deserves some credit, because Bratton knows to acknowledge that things are broken. You think he's not saying that out loud, but he is saying that. After Garner, he said the truth, and the truth is, New York City cops have no physical skills to make arrests. They're your neighbors; they're ordinary people. So they don't really have skills. So he, at least, said we're gonna run everyone through a couple of days of hands-on training. Not every police chief would do that—there's a tremendous amount of denial there.

I paneled the Nassau County Bar Association, on Long Island, the other night, and a white lawyer told me the usual horror story about parking in a bus stop and getting verbally abused by a cop. And it just rings true. And the lawyer's father was a cop. That's their issue, and they got to fix that issue. It's these ordinary interactions that still leave a lot of people bruised. It doesn't have to be painful. And the cops don't have to make it feel personal, or disrespectful. It's not a requirement. That's a cultural issue beyond New York that we really got to work with.

Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform

A part of what's remarkable about New York City, when we look at this past year, is if you look to the year prior to it. 2013 was this local landscape where there was this whole grassroots movement against racial profiling and other discriminatory profiling. With the Floyd v. New York case, and the growing opposition to stop-and-frisk—which is certainly not new to New York—because of data that was just made available a few years prior, we were able to make a much more compelling case, especially to those communities that are not directly affected. The local New York City government was able to respond to the growing grassroots demands for change, and pass landmark legislation in many ways, at least for the City Council, with the Community Safety Act.

One year later, we're in 2014, and up until now, there's been this whole growing national movement that's influenced electoral politics, policy, and we're seeing it even influence the presidential race. In spite of that, what's ironic is that the local government here is going in the opposite direction. The rest of the country, in some ways, is responding and trying to make some advances forward, while, in New York, things are pretty reactionary. Like adding 1,300 new cops to the Council budget, plus the additional 400 that are moving from desk to street, which we still have serious concerns about. And there's been no legislative action since last year, not only after the killing of Eric Garner in New York, but also Akai Gurley. So that's the irony of this context.

Right around this time last year, we did an action the day after the non-indictment, with some 20,000 people in Foley Square, and we followed that up with another 11 days of action. And we chose 11 demands, because people could hear Garner say he couldn't breathe 11 times. And only two have been met, and they were the two that relate to the Governor in regards to statewide things. So Governor Cuomo had the executive order for a special prosecutor, and also vetoed the attempt by the police union to have discipline in part of contract negotiations. But the local government has done nothing. As far as we're concerned, there hasn't been meaningful or substantive reform at the local level.

So I think this is a moment right now where it's gonna be up to all of us—not just across the nation, but in New York City—to continue to build this movement that's really trying to end systematic violence and systematic injustice. This is the moment we're in, I think.

Reverend Jim Kast-Keat, middle Collegiate Church

I think what has changed is that more people have become a part of this conversation. Because it's one year later, and we are still seeing Officer Pantaleo employed by the New York Police Department. And when Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, is choked to death by a public servant who's hired to protect him and his community, justice deserves not only an indictment but the termination of employment for Officer Pantaleo. I think the one thing that's changed is the uptick in awareness and the conversation, which is why we see so many people gathered here today.

I think I see a change in the country in that people are finally waking up to what's been going on for far too long. In one way, you could say this is just an issue of violence or police brutality, but I think it still stems to race—America's original sin. And I think the events of this past year, with the death of Eric Garner and what happened in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, they simply remind us of this ongoing civil war that continues to exist in our country.

With Eric's video, it makes me sad for how many times events like this happen that people aren't aware of because it wasn't captured on video. As a Christian minister, I believe that God always stands with the oppressed, God hears every cry even when no one hears it. So regardless if videos are being captured, there is too much injustice, and God is always standing on the side of the oppressed, working for justice in our country and our world.

These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

The author of this piece was critical of VICE's Chemsex Week on Twitter and his blog Fagburn earlier this week. We invited him to respond in more detail here.

Listen, do you want to know a secret?

Right now lots of people all over the world are engaging in activities they enjoy.

They could be watching The X Factor, playing crazy golf, reading a book, or having a wank.

Good for them, eh?

It is quite a spectacular achievement for one group of people's particular pleasure to be singled out and demonized. And for other finer, more upstanding citizens to be endlessly told that they are not having fun. Quite the reverse; this is something scary, sad, sordid, seedy, even deadly.

And so it is with chemsex, the media's latest "moral panic." The Observer recently called it "A Horror Story." The headline to this scary story also informed readers gay men were "Addicted to chemsex." But of course, this could only be a crazed compulsion: They literally can't help themselves?

On November 3 of this year the British Medical Journal published a short report: What Is Chemsex And Why Does It Matter?

This was promptly covered in just about every British paper.

No matter that we are talking about a section of a subculture within a subculture—something the BMJ noted was "practised by a small minority of men who have sex with men"—this was Bloody Big News. It's impossible to know how many gay men are regularly going to chemsex parties, though plucking a fantastic figure from the ether is a piece of piss. The BMJ presented no new research, but quoted the Sigma Research's Chemsex Study, based on interviews with just 30 men, and the EMIS (European MSM Internet Survey), which was online and self-selecting, these are not known for their reliability. That only asked about respondents use of the the drugs usually associated with chemsex: GHB, ketamine, and mephedrone.

Phrases were lifted verbatim, then hyped up. These chemsex sessions could last "for up to 72 hours." Journalists were seemingly unable to translate this into "three days." Or to see that this meant something less staggering—some people might spend a weekend doing this sometimes (the BMJ report said that some didn't eat or sleep for days).

The BMJ said that "addressing chemsex-related morbidities should be a public health priority." In the Guardian, this became "a public health timebomb," caused by a supposed chemsex "explosion."

Blimey. It certainly sounded scary; was this like mad cow disease or ebola? Links to these news stories were frequently retweeted, often with people saying this could be like the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. As if chemsex could represent an existential threat to gay men, presumably with thousands dying. Few made the obvious comparison that the media used AIDS to fuel homophobia and hysteria.

But the current chemsex panic has been fueled as much by narcophobia as homophobia. In the flurry of articles that have appeared it was almost always pathologized and problematized; it was a very, very bad thing that must be stopped. These gay men must be deeply damaged; chemsex was a symptom of our insurmountable stigma and shame. Homophobia had been internalized, and chemsex was always a sign of low self-esteem. Unable to cope with "intimacy," and so full of self-loathing they were pre-programmed to self-destruct. The chemsex party scene was reimagined as if it was akin to a gay suicide cult. A journalist for GT (Gay Times) mused that it was "a sad and lonely lifestyle." And much like gay men a generation or so ago, participants in this "sad and lonely lifestyle" were written about as tragic victims in desperate need of help, of salvation. This was a sickness to be cured. Those who had stopped were held up as heroic "survivors."

That chemsex parties might be demonstrations of gay men's intimacy, that they were a social activity as much a sexual one, was a heretical, almost impossible thought.

We have been here before, of course, and shall doubtless return again and again. From the opium dens of Victorian London and Reefer Madness, sex and drugs have long been 'sexy' subjects for the media. And gay sex and drugs are thus a lethal cocktail, both literally and metaphorically.

In an article for the Independent's Voices section, Having a moral panic about chemsex? Here's why it's not as bad as you think, Jamie Hakim pointed out that, "As for the connection between chemsex and HIV transmission, there is little academic consensus on this." He concluded his feature by stressing, "I am not a so-called 'chemsex denier.'" It's a sign of how debased this 'debate' has become when such a term—with its echoes of denial of something like climate change—can be thrown about.

Nobody is arguing that a chemsex scene does not exist. Nor that some men who take part have experienced serious problems. Those who are trying to help them deserve praise, though it's just plain daft to imagine that the gay men presenting themselves to drugs support services will be typical or representative. The problem here is how chemsex is being framed by the media as always and only a problem in itself.

Follow Richard Smith on Twitter and read his blog about gay men and the media, Fagburn.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Kris Mole hanging out with Lenin in Poland

In 2007, Kris Mole set out to reach every capital in Europe without handling any money whatsoever. It took him just under six months to travel 9,763 miles. Charming his way across borders, the challenge saw him nearly starve, give an impromptu motivational speech for AIESEC, eat a dish of pasta while a man masturbated next to him, and also raise some cash for Cancer Research.

Obviously a young man going backpacking is nothing new, but a guy who deliberately sets himself up for a bad time feels like a breath of fresh air from the stream of wearily familiar travel photos on social media. I caught up with him recently to ask him all about it.

VICE: Hi, Kris. Why did you make the trip?
Kris Mole: Basically because I wanted to travel and didn't have any money. It was also kind of that English tradition of doing something crazy for sponsorship. One night I drunkenly told a friend I was going to do it, and a week later I had a plane ticket to Sweden, where I started the journey. I didn't plan it anywhere near as much as I should have.

The trip was obviously intended to be a struggle, but what were your biggest problems?
Finding somewhere warm to sleep, obviously, and then the fact that I couldn't buy any food. While I was on the plane I suddenly realized I couldn't even buy a bottle of Coke, let alone a train ticket from the airport to Stockholm, where I'd arranged to meet a CouchSurfing host. Beyond Stockholm I'd have to get to another 26 capital cities. It was the first time I thought, 'Wait, what am I doing?'

Was that a recurring thought?
I had it every day after that, but fear of losing my pride kept me going. Even family and friends had told me, "You'll be back in a week, ten days at the most." I can say with honesty I'd rather have died on a motorway somewhere than go home and tell people I'd failed.

So that was your sole motivation for six months?
Pretty much, but it's weird how normal it all became. I'd wake up in the morning in Berlin, for instance, and know that day I'd have to get to Poland somehow, just like you'd wake up and know you had to buy bread and clean the floor that day. It was almost like a job. There were days that proved particularly difficult, though; one was when I was trying to get from Warsaw to Vilnius in Lithuania. I'd stupidly done the first part of Eastern Europe in a massive coat and been more or less prepared for the elements.

Then I went west and did France, Spain, and Portugal, where they had an early spring—a proper T-shirt weather one—so I ditched the coat and all my warm clothes, expecting to do the last leg of the trip in sunshine. When I arrived in Poland it was a little bit colder but still sunny. When I woke up the next day there was about three feet of snow. That was a big problem.

I ended up hitchhiking through a genuine blizzard. I was so hungry, cold, and tired that I had a moment of madness where I decided to walk 185 miles. After finally getting a ride, I got dropped off by this guy in the middle of a forest road, in the dead of night, and still in blizzard conditions. It was like a spaghetti junction kind of thing but with no lights anywhere. Cars were going by and I was wearing dark clothes. I kept falling in the snow because my shoes had just filled up by this point. There were a few situations like that, but that was the time I was most sure I was going to die.

Kris Mole, not dying somewhere in Europe

How many trains did you bunk?
I don't know exactly, but it was easily more than 30.

What did you do about all the fines?
I realized right at the beginning when I was first asked to give my passport over that there was no address written inside, so I wrote the only other address I could remember off by heart in there, which was Tottenham Hotspur in London. I think the only fine that found its way to my actual address was from a German train company about a year-and-a-half after I got back.

How often did you drink while you were out there?
Alcohol helped a lot; it really is an instrument of bonding. Whenever I'd turn up at a host's place I'd get offered a drink almost without exception. Sometimes I hadn't eaten for a couple of days when I arrived, but I was 24 and wasn't going to turn down any amount of alcohol offered to me.

The kindness of strangers prevails. Did you stay with any weirdos?
The weirdest person was a guy in Luxembourg, a Frenchman. He hosted me on CouchSurfing and masturbated over me. Well, not literally over me, but he started masturbating in his pocket while I was eating some pasta he'd prepared me. That was a bit uncomfortable.

Did you finish the pasta?
Yeah, I finished it; I was hungry.

Taking into account the millions of people trying to find refuge from violence and atrocities in their own countries, how do you feel about being able to get around Europe as easily as you did?
Yeah, when I see what's happening now the irony isn't lost on me. It makes you realize how messed up the world is. I was able to do what I did just because of where I was born and the passport I have. I mean, especially in Eastern Europe people were almost afraid to treat me badly because of possible repercussions. I know it's a cliché, but the privilege of being a white European did help me a lot. But it is what it is.

You've released a book about the trip, what's the response been like?
Yahoo was nice—I got an email from a journalist saying that they'd seen the story and they wanted to cover it for Yahoo travel, which I thought sounded like a brilliant idea for publicity. The thing is, the journalist managed to omit the fact that the trip raised money for charity, so I was basically painted as a bum just trying to mooch around Europe sponging off people.

Anyway, it turns out that the people who read Yahoo travel are the kind of people who watch Fox News. Every other comment was about me being a "dirty Syrian refugee" or "a dirty Afghan refugee." There were even suggestions I'm a terrorist from ISIS.

Kris and a poster of wanted ETA members

Yeah, from what I've seen in terms of response, there does seem to be a bit of a race thing going on.
Yeah, that was the case even when I was doing the challenge. Quite a few times my British passport wasn't taken at face value; there was always a lot of extra investigation. People would ask me where I'm from, I'd say "England" and they'd say, "No, where are you from?" For instance, I was on the French/Spanish border, in Hendaye, where they have a problem with Basque separatists. The morning I was there I'd passed a poster with a load of Basque terrorists on it. All of them looked like me. Every single face looked like he could have been my brother. So I was sat in the train station, minding my own business. Four armed police suddenly approached me and took my passport away for about ten minutes. They didn't believe I was English. They scanned my passport, sent it back to headquarters to check. Eventually they let me go, but they still didn't believe I was who I said I was.

What's your advice for other people trying to travel for free?
Use CouchSurfing or similar websites, like Hospitality Club. Basically, try and find likeminded people that are willing to host you. Make sure you're willing to participate in the spirit of that whole thing, though—it's not just using these places as hotels; it's a cultural exchange. Now I'd say hitchhike. At the time I didn't do it so much because I wasn't used to it, but since then I've done it a lot. Do your research, though: look on Hitchwiki and you can see what thousands of other people have said about the same route. If you're going to take the risk of bunking trains, be confident, have a lie ready, and don't be embarrassed to use it. I just looked at it like I was stealing from a big rail company that wasn't losing anything if one guy rode for free. Don't just refuse to pay, either—I got kicked off plenty of trains when I had a good excuse, so being a dickhead won't work.

Do you think the challenge has changed your outlook on life at all?
When I went away on the trip I thought most of the world was shit, that people were just out for themselves. Then I came back as a bit of a hippy and thought, Wow, no, everyone's amazing. Now I've found balance again and I can see there are a lot of nice people, but also a lot of corrupted people.

Have you got another challenge lined up?
Yeah, a couple. I'd say within a year I'll be on another one, with a budget this time. I'd never repeat what I did on this trip in any part of the world because it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I lost about two stone (28 pounds) in weight and I'm not a big guy. In terms of morale I was completely at the mercy of other people; if people didn't help then I couldn't help myself. I think next time I'd like to be the one helping.

Kris has written a book about his experience, Gatecrashing Europe, which you can buy here.

Not sure what all the fuss is about. Photo via Halifax Original Donair.

Halifax city staffers say they don't have enough information to weigh in on whether or not donair should be the municipality's official food, confirming everyone's fears that using public funds to investigate the status of a saucy meat wrap is a GIANT WASTE OF TIME AND RESOURCES.

Citing a lack of "detailed staff analysis including consideration of supporting processes to identify and evaluate other official foods," the authors of a new report on donairs said they are unable to make a proper recommendation.

If councillors want, they can authorize Halifax Mayor Michael Savage to declare the donair the official food of Halifax, the report says.

At the height of the recent donair frenzy, Halifax Regional Council ordered city staff to research the possibility of granting the late-night food for drunks official status. At the time, councillors expressed concern that other cities like Edmonton could claim the donair as their own before Halifax was able to do so. Some also seemed to think officially linking the city to a mystery meat sandwich will boost tourism, though it is somewhat hard to believe that anyone outside of Halifax gives a shit about any of this.

In the midst of the excitement, local rapper Quake Matthews filmed a video for his donair-inspired single "Down with the King," in which everyone gets covered in sauce that quite frankly looks like jizz.

But the dryly-worded city report was less enthusiastic in its assessment of the donair situation, simply stating, "There is nothing to prevent Regional Council from recognizing the donair and drawing attention to it by directing the Mayor to make a proclamation declaring the donair the official food of Halifax." It also lists one alternative: "maintain status quo."

Reading between the lines a little bit, we think staffers are effectively telling council to make a decision so we can all shut the fuck up about these sweaty meat wraps.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.