Jeanette Winterson. Photo Sam Churchill

In 2016, it will be 400 years since Shakespeare's death. And as you'd expect, there are plenty of things in place to celebrate this landmark moment. After all, four centuries is a pretty long time for a body of work to remain relevant to, well, everybody.

So Hogarth Press has commissioned some of the world's most respected and popular writers—from Margaret Atwood to Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn—to "reimagine Shakespeare's plays for a 21st century audience."

Jeanette Winterson is the first author in the Hogarth series to have her "cover version" published. Choosing to eschew the obvious big-hitters, Winterson instead opted to adapt one of Shakespeare's "problem plays," The Winter's Tale. For those who don't know it, it follows the story of a King Leontes, a jealous husband who believes his wife Hermione is pregnant with his childhood friend King Polixenes' child. When Leontes refuses to believe that the baby, Perdita, is his own, he sends the child away to live with a shepherd. Winterson's novel adaptation, The Gap of Time, moves the story to contemporary, affluent London, Paris, and the deep south, changing the royals to bankers and video game designers.

It's not hard to see why Winterson chose this as the play she would rewrite, and it's not simply because, as she told me, "There's always some guy on the news gunning down his wife because he's decided she's sleeping with his mate."

With its themes of jealousy, abandonment, and loss—as well as hope—The Winter's Tale has echoes of Winterson's own life. As an adopted child, Winterson has particular kinship with Perdita—the lost child and heroine of The Winter's Tale. Like Perdita, Winterson was brought up by another family, and for years felt lost. In her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, the author wrote about the schism caused by the two possible lives which run parallel for adopted children. Her own adoptive mother was a fundamentalist Christian who kept a revolver in a drawer and told a young Jeanette that the devil had led her to Jeanette's crib.

I spoke to Jeanette about why this story of redemption, forgiveness, and hope is more necessary now than ever.

VICE: I loved The Gap of Time. It was really interesting how you brought The Winter's Tale up to date. The abandoned baby, Perdita, seemed very central to your story.
Jeanette Winterson: I decided that it was reasonable to make Perdita the shining center of the story because what Shakespeare really does is say, "look, this child is the capsule of hope and possibility. She's the thing which will let the play go forward."

It's a very pertinent message now. I mean, look what's happening with Occupy and the 99 percent: people all around the world, whether it's Syriza, or Podemos, or here with Jeremy Corbyn, are saying "actually we can't accept the world that we're inheriting, we want to do it differently because there's nothing here for us."

Related: Watch VICE talk film with Shane Meadows

When people say Shakespeare was for all time, or timeless, what they are really saying is he had this capacity to plug into the hotspots of the human situation, like sexual jealousy, betrayal, the way that old men just hold everything up.

You look at the world now and it's just full of old men, whether it's Bashar Al-Assad or President Putin. Shakespeare is so used to old guys getting in the way. So the plays are really saying: look, the world is how it is—but each generation has a chance to change it.

It's a fantastic message. It's very appropriate when we look at our political situation, and when we look at history of violence and hatred.

Is that why it's called The Winter's Tale? Because winter is followed by spring, new life, rebirth?
Well, yes. I think it is. And Shakespeare calls it an old tale, a fairytale. There was a sense of the play really having these magical properties, being the kind of thing you might tell around the fire on a winter's night. He's saying "look, maybe you need a bit of magic in the world." is a sort of Harry Potter moment. Why did all the grownups love Harry Potter? Because all of the magic had gone out of the world.

I'm interested in the relationship between Xeno (Polixenes) and Leo (Leontes) in The Gap of Time, because you make them lovers. In the play, they're depicted as old friends.
I think the subtext in the play is that there is an erotic element. And the strange thing about Polixenes is he doesn't have a wife, he appears never to have had one, and his son Florizel appears not to have a mother. So here are two guys who are very close, one of them got married, the other one didn't. The jealousy here is more triangular than simply a straight line. So I thought, I'm going to make Xeno gay. I'm going to make them have an affair at school as many boys do. Leo goes on to be a rampant heterosexual. Xeno doesn't. And this fits fine with the story—the friendship between Xeno and Mimi , because in the play there's obviously enormous tenderness between the two of them.

You've got a bromance in there and at the same time you have this real sexual jealousy, because Hermione is Leontes's prize. She's not the kind of woman you want to give up easily. And he feels he's been cheated on both sides of the bed.

You make references in the story to more up-to-date cultural touchstones. Rebel Without a Cause, Superman—Xeno's job in your novel is to design computer games. And at one point another character, Pauline, even references A Winter's Tale—but they can't see that they are in it.
Well, they can't, because they're not in it. They're in my story. They're not in The Winter's Tale, they are in their own story, living their own lives.

You dismantle the text of the play and you remake it—that's the brief. So it's not an adaptation. It's a cover version. It's got different values, as well as being true to the spirit of the play because it's a modern-day story. This one isn't the old story. This one is now.

Even when Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale, it was set in some far away time. It's got a Delphic Oracle in it and all. In the late plays he moves into landscapes that don't exist and haven't existed. I chose not to put it in a landscape that couldn't and didn't exist, and to set it in London and Paris.

And of course, the city in America, New Bohemia doesn't exist, but it's quite obvious it's New Orleans. So once you have the shape, you scoop it out so you still have the structure, you know? It's like stuffing a marrow. You take all the inside out and then you put it back in, while adding your own ingredients.

It's interesting how it relates to your own story—the story of the lost child, and the story of your own adoption which you wrote about in Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
Well it's not that we do choose a text, it's that the text chooses us in some way because it has its resonance. Everybody's got their favorite things, and when you look at it, you'll always find these are things that matter very deeply to them.

So I think when you're choosing something as important as what Shakespeare play you're going to work on, you want something with a very deep resonance. Not just something that you know, or you like, or you've enjoyed because this is actually going to take a year of your life. You're going to spend a lot of time with these characters and this story.

For me, it had to be this text—would I have done this earlier? I don't think I would. Although it's a play about giving a chance to the next generation, it's not like a young person's play. It's not like Romeo & Juliet.

Buy The Gap of Time here.

Follow Leslie on Twitter, Tumblr, and buy her books from Fantagraphics.

Miss Universe wasn't the only beauty pageant to take place this week. In the hinterlands of the UAE, Bedouin tribes from Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Emirates are currently gathering at Al Dhafra Festival—an annual meeting best known for its Camel Mazayna, or "beauty contest."

Men parade their finest dromedaries at auctions, races, and best-in-show events, and prizes are given for the fastest, "milkiest," and most beautiful creatures. Less fortunate camels are served for dinner at a nightly majlis.

The festival, which runs through December 30, is a celebration of the Empty Quarter's traditional heritage and way of life—a far cry from the contemporary turbo-Gulf culture seen nearby in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. That said, there's still big bucks to be made: Prizes totaling Dh55 million (around $14.9 million) are up for grabs.

Despite a last-minute hairspray of humps seen here and there, judges are on the lookout for natural beauties this year. "Camels that are found with drugs in the lips, shaved, dyed in any parts of the body, or with changes from natural form are not allowed ," states the entrants' handbook.

For more on the Miss Camel Beauty Contest, watch our past documentary on the festival here.

Visit Alexander's website to see more of his photo work.

Christmas brings us tinsel and trees, stiff drinks and peppermint everything, all manner of good cheer. Unfortunately, in America it also brings a deluge of mind-numbing dialogue about our nation's purported "war on Christmas." Framed as a manifestation of dominant secularism's antipathy towards Christianity, this endless and suspect debate makes it seem like celebrating Christ is exclusively for Christians. But it's not.

Although only Christians hold Jesus up as their paramount figure of worship, other faiths venerate Christ—chief among them is Islam. Jesus is so important to Muslims that some argue that they ought to celebrate Christmas as an Islamic holiday with just slightly different modes of emphasis than Christians. Yet, while Jesus is important to all Muslims, the Messiah's especially important to one group that both Muslims and Christians would not like to see him associated with: the Islamic State. Their self-proclaimed "true understanding" of Christ ought to give anyone laying exclusive claim on Jesus and celebrations of his birth cause for pause and reflection.

Everyone knows that the central prophet of Islam is Muhammad. Yet unbeknownst to many, some Islamic authorities maintain that there were at least 124,000 prophets before him. Each of them brought some inspiration from God and thus deserves respect. Jesus is one of the few prophets mentioned by name. But more than that, explains Professor Zeki Saritoprak, the author of the 2014 book Islam's Jesus, he's one of the five most important prophets in Islam, on par in most respects with Abraham, Mohammed, Moses, and Noah. Muhammad called Jesus a brother and apocryphal stories claim he protected images of the Virgin Mary while cleansing the idols of Mecca. Jesus (or Isa as he's known in Arabic) shows up dozens of times in the Qu'ran and hundreds of times in the Hadith, the collected stories about and sayings of Muhammad and his companions that are often treated as a source of Islamic learning and authority. Jesus is seen as especially important as the last Israelite prophet and the man who presaged the coming of Muhammad, the final voice of god on Earth.

Despite their common reverence for him, there are some major differences in the Christian and Muslim tellings of Christ's history. Islam still holds that Jesus was born to a virgin Mary ( or Maryam, also an exalted figure dubbed one of the four perfect women in history by Muhammad) as a basically sinless child, that he brought the word of God to the world, and that he performed miracles. But they deny that he was the incarnation or son of God and that died on the cross to save us from our sins. Instead, he survived, they say, (the method is disputed) and was risen bodily to join god in heaven until the end of times. Also, for what it's worth, Muhammad apparently saw Jesus in a dream and described him as a long-haired, well-groomed, but brown-skinned man—differing from modern mainstream Christian depictions.

Some argue that this view of Christ is similar to the beliefs of early Christian sects. Muslim, Christian, and secular scholars alike claim that much of our current interpretation of the story of Christ (including the nature of his divinity and salvation of humanity) is embellishment added by theologians working in the Byzantine world 200 to 400 years after his death. But while Islam's Jesus may have been similar to the Jesus of early Christians, perhaps even Christian sects with whom Muhammad would have been contemporarily or historically familiar, the fact remains that there's a blasphemous (from both faiths' points of view) difference in narratives.

Virgin and Child with angels and Sts. George and Theodore. Icon from around 600, from Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt.

Even if he's not the world savior, Muslims venerate Jesus as a key exemplar of a number of different religious lifestyles. The only known unmarried and childless prophet in Islam, he's seen as a model of asceticism. He's also viewed as a pillar of Islamic mysticism because of the miracles he enacted. And he's a paragon of social justice because he championed reform and compassion.

He's also, as in Christianity, a key figure in Islamic eschatology. According to a number of generally accepted Hadith, when the end times approach, Jesus will descend from his place in heaven (as a mortal man who will eventually die a natural death) to gather the faithful and oppose the Islamic version of the antichrist. Although no one's supposed to know when the apocalypse will come, that hasn't stopped Muslims from speculating like crazy. Saritoprak found over 100 books written throughout history by Islamic scholars on the role of Jesus in the end days, debating the time of his coming and all the details of his arrival. As you might imagine, in times of great chaos and confrontation with Christians ( think the Crusades), claiming that their connection to Jesus—especially the eschatological Jesus who will help Muslims in their time of need—is more legitimate than that of Christians can become especially important.

Not all Muslims take a literal view of the highly allegorical apocalyptic tales of Islam and Jesus's role in them. Saritoprak likes to see most details of the end of times as highly metaphorical, casting it in his own reading as allusions to an impending era of cooperation between monotheistic faiths ushered in by Christ's return to Earth. Others go even further and claim that most of the Hadith about the apocalypse is false and fabricated. But quite a few folks take these tales literally. And these stories become even more salient to people living in conflict zones, according to some reports.

"Once I asked a literalist, 'So you believe in a Jesus who comes from the sky and CNN and ABC will have interviews with him?' And he said, 'Yes, that's exactly what will happen'..." says Saritoprak. "Muslims aren't thinking of nothing but the descent of Jesus. But it is important ... And I think that's why groups like ISIS use these eschatological terms."

Watch: 'The Islamic State'

The Islamic State presents itself publicly as a millenarian group, purporting to see and want to help quicken the approach of the imminent apocalypse. Their propaganda magazine is named after the town in Syria where Muhammad purportedly predicted the Islamic and Roman armies would face off in the end times. A recent New York Times report suggests that leaders of the movement have long portrayed American interventions in the region as a sign of the apocalypse, casting us in the role of the Rome's infidel armies and even trying to lure us into conflict on fields of apocalyptic significance. They killed the former US Army Ranger Peter Kassig in Dabiq, the site of a key end times battle in some apocalypse tales, while making copious references to the Day of Judgement and our nation's role in their vision.

Commentators disagree about how serious and widespread the Islamic State's apocalyptic beliefs are. Their own documents apparently claim that many of their rank-and-file aren't exactly great Muslims. Saritoprak believes that apocalyptic theology is just something the State manipulates to justify itself, inspire its followers, and poach impressionable, excitable minds. But there seems to be some evidence that at least major decision makers in the State deeply believe in their own apocalyptic rhetoric. That means that to these true believers, Jesus is a prophet of special and impending importance in the Islamic State. The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium says that they've seen photos of billboards from Islamic State territory admonishing their subjects to mind the example of Christ, and heard his name mentioned in at least one State-produced video concerning their worldview. Their analysts see parallels between the actions of the Islamic State and the path to the return of Christ.

It's impossible to stress how drastically the Islamic State's veneration of Jesus differs from that of the vast majority of Muslims. As Saritoprak stresses, many Muslims respect Jesus most for his teachings on how to live a moral life of compassion and asceticism, and act in accordingly genteel ways. And of those who focus on Jesus's eschatological significance, literalists and interpretivists alike, the vast majority aren't out to usher in his return with bloodshed and mayhem. The moronic irony of honoring or associating a compassionate figure with chaos is as apparent to most Muslims as it is to most Christians. For many who believe in the apocalypse, but aren't so rash as to think that they can predict or trigger it, venerating and emulating Jesus as a figure of aid, justice, and unity in the end times is more salient.

It's also worth noting that some Christian groups are also trying to trigger the return of a very particular vision of Christ to bring about the end of days. Back in the 1990s, a Pentecostal preacher slash cattle breeder from Mississippi made it his business to supply a group of Orthodox Jews in Israel intent on rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem (the center of Jewish worship until its 70 AD destruction) with a red heifer suitable for a reconstruction sacrifice. He did so out of the genuine belief that it would speed up the grim, apocalyptic return of Jesus. Some actually argue that all or most Evangelical support for Israel serves the same purpose—since the restoration of the nation to the Jews is another precondition of Jesus's return.

It's probably tempting for the many who believe in a milder Christ to reject violent and fundamentalist interpretations of Jesus as illegitimate—un-Christian or un-Muslim. But denying that those who believe this stuff are acting out of deep religious impulses is counterproductive in tackling extremism. All of that's to say that no one has a lock on the interpretation or celebration of Jesus. Almost as many Muslims as Christians interpret and revere him in their own way. And within both faiths, nut jobs galore think that they are Jesus's true homeboys, awaiting, quoting, and even celebrating him with even more fervor than that of moderate believers.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

Images courtesy of Dino Stamatopolous

Moral Orel was originally supposed to be a 1950s-style live action sitcom featuring Iggy Pop, but the rock star didn't read the script. Instead, it became a satirical stop-motion show that started weird and ended bleak.

When the now-cult classic originally aired on Adult Swim in December 2005, the network intentionally ran the premier season's final episode first, confusing and alienating viewers. But to those who stuck around for three seasons, the program revealed itself to be a rare gem that inverted what to expect from Adult Swim, especially since it evolved into something that was anything but funny. A decade after its cancellation, the show's final moments involving a literal light at the end of a tunnel are still ingrained in the psyches of many of its diehard fans.

Created by Dino Stamatopolous (Mr. Show, MAD TV, Community), Moral Orel was a black comedy about a fundamentalist Protestant Christian town called Moralton in the direct center of the Bible Belt. It follows a kid named Orel Puppington, whose commitment to doing right by God ends up getting him into situations that would give any holy person anxiety, from getting a Prince Albert piercing and becoming an alcoholic, to selling his urine.

It was inappropriate, biting, and funny, sort of like a Davey & Goliath for stoners. But as the series progressed, the tone skirted further from being haha funny and delved into something where you weren't sure whether to laugh or cry. The humor was replaced with character studies, often dealing with subjects like child abuse, realistic dysfunctional families, and death. And Adult Swim did not like it. The third season was cut from 20 episodes to 13, and it opened, maybe tellingly, with the Mountain Goats song "No Children." But to many, the third season's dreary, sincere exploration of big concepts like morality and mortality was what made it so memorable.

For Moral Orel's tenth anniversary, I got ahold of Dino Stamatopoulos on Skype after a marathon binge of all its 43 episodes and its one prequel special. After telling him this, he said, "I hope you aren't too depressed."

VICE: Can you tell me about how the show came about?
Dino Stamatopolous: I had written a script about ten years earlier for Iggy Pop because I had just seen him in concert. I wanted him to play a kid in a live action show, so I wrote a script where he was a good kid who just fucked up a lot. The first episode I wrote ended up becoming the urine episode of Moral Orel in season one called "Waste." I met with Iggy and gave him a copy of the script and he seemed very distracted at the time. We were at Life Cafe in New York and he kept being like, "Sorry, man, there's just so much pussy." I don't think he ever read it.

What was it about older programs like Davey & Goliath that made you want to create a parody show?
I hesitate to use the word "parody" because I don't even remember [ Davey & Goliath]. I knew it was a stop motion thing about religion. When I finally went back and looked at the show, it was nothing like Moral Orel, really. It was about this kid who did bad things and got lectured by his parents about how God would react to what Davey did. Orel and Davey are very different characters. Davey knows he's bad. He's not trying to do good all the time. He's a normal kid living in a Christian society. Orel is superhuman when it comes to his love of God.

So why exactly did you want to explore religion in a TV show?
I just thought it was perfect timing. They wanted me to do the show in stop motion, Bush was in the White House, and the religious right was out of control. They still are, but 2005 was sort of the scary beginning of it, I feel. It was just the perfect storm for this show.

There are moments throughout the first season that stand out as particularly sad compared to the rest of the episode they appear in, like at the end of the Halloween episode when Putty is eating alone at church, in silence, as his window gets egged. How did the depressing tone start to emerge?
I had to write season one very quickly. Adult Swim wanted the scripts very fast, and they wanted the show to happen right after Robot Chicken. I was brought in to the Robot Chicken studio, Shadow Machine, and I wrote those first ten scripts in about a month. I used a very basic template. I didn't think much of it, but I knew I wanted this family to be very real. I realize I'm in the minority here, but the first season of The Simpsons was the best season because it was about the most real family on TV. I wanted Moral Orel to have the opposite of the progression that happened in The Simpsons, which went from being a real family into a very cartoony family.

Adult Swim, of course, wanted the funniest show possible. Mike Lazzo still swears that season one of Moral Orel is the best one, and I disagree completely. At first, I just gave him what he wanted—a funny show. But as I was writing, I began understanding who the characters were more and more, so as we got deeper into season one, it started to become darker and more interesting.

Why did Adult Swim decide to air the Christmas episode, the first season's finale, as the pilot?
Adult Swim loves bad decisions. I don't mean that in a derogatory way, I mean they literally love bad decisions. They thought this was the funniest thing that we could do: Air this serious Christmas episode that ends in a cliffhanger and confuses everyone. They love that as much as they love April Fools Day.

So it's 2005, and season one isn't starting because Standards & Practices is too afraid to put this show out. December and they said, "It's almost Christmas now. Let's have that episode be our debut. This is one of the strongest episodes in terms of blasphemy. If we can air this episode and show S&P that no one is going to picket us, then you got a better chance to air all the episodes."

I really wanted the shows to air in order, or else we'd be fucked. But by then, I was fucked anyway. So I agreed to just do it. I had an inkling that people were going to be confused and angered, and I don't think we ever got our footing after that. A lot of people wrote off Moral Orel forever.

Going into season two, what did you want to do differently?
I wanted to learn more about the entire town, so the focus changed to another character in every episode. You'd have an episode with Reverend Putty, an episode with Coach Stopframe, and I used season one as sort of a workbook. I would find non sequitur jokes and build whole episodes around them.

If Adult Swim liked the really depressing Christmas episode, why didn't they like some of the darker aspects of the third, final season?
I don't think Lazzo wanted to get that serious all the time. In some ways, I sabotaged . I did season two and tried to make it as funny as season one, and it turned out that Lazzo loved the two-part episode "Nature" and said it was the best episode of TV that was ever on at that point. I felt that was a green light to go ahead with my plan and make season three serious.

So, in some ways, they were getting what they wished for?
Yeah, but Lazzo realized I had killed his favorite character, Orel, as an innocent. He's right. I fucked up. I fucked up . I love season three and I feel like I could still go three or four more seasons and get into Moralton as a town.

I think Lazzo felt personally affronted by what I did to Orel and cancelled it a little bit out of spite. I like Lazzo, I still talk to him, we're still friends. He wants to do another Moral Orel special, but he said, "It better be hilarious. I know you got it in you." I don't know how to make Moral Orel hilarious anymore. To me, the seriousness has humor in it.

Why do you think they cancelled the show?
Lazzo wrote me after reading the episode "Numb" and said, "There's only one joke in this script." I wrote him back, tongue-in-cheek, and said "Well, tell me where the joke is and I'll take it out." He said, "Well, I hope they get funnier." And they do.

But then I delivered a rough cut of "Alone" and then delivered him a follow-up script called "Raped." He read it and said, "That's it; I gotta pull the plug." It was really a one-two-three punch, but "Alone" is what did it.

Despite the popular conception that people from around the world visit NYC for Christmas, the metropolis can feel totally deserted on December 25. Save for the tourist influx in Midtown, those seeking food below Houston, and other small pockets throughout the city, the whole island was a ghost town this year. There might as well be stray tumbleweeds rolling up and down 5th Avenue.

Yes, people still ice skated in Bryant Park and Rockefeller Center, but this year it was so hot there were little puddles of water in the rinks. Most people were wearing Santa hats without coats. There was no snow to speak of and people were sweating, making the decorations sprinkled throughout the city feel like some sort of prank.

Whereas the streets were empty, the few restaurants that remained open were flushed with customers. Old school institutions like Katz's Delicatessen had a line outside that stretched around the block, while Russ & Daughter's had about an hour wait. Both iconic eateries are unsurprisingly Jewish spots.

In Chinatown, every restaurant that had an "A" rating was equally mobbed. Small crowds formed in the streets and drivers in SUVs honked trying to pass. A server called out a name and three different people responded, claiming that it was their reservation.

From Chinatown, the walk to the Financial District was eerie. I went five minutes without seeing another person. At Zuccotti Park there were monks, vendors selling 9/11 paraphernalia, and lost tourists taking photos. As I entered the subway at the Fulton stop, a woman in a "It's Fucking Christmas" T-shirt asked me where "Time Square" was.

Visit Jackson's website for more of his photo work.

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out VICE isn't the only magazine in the world. This series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide to which zines, pamphlets, and publications you should be reading when you're not reading ours.

Kolbrún Þóra Löve is a bit of a Renaissance woman, running and photographing nearly half of every issue of Iceland-based, biannual print publication Neptún Magazine. Although artists from around the world are regularly featured on its pages, Neptún's main concern is the local Icelandic scene.

Being a photo editor often means being able to connect amazing local photographers with interesting stories. When I see things like Neptún, I get excited about using it as a resource for future collaborations with artists from the region that I might not be familiar with otherwise. I recently chatted with Kolbrún about the creation of the magazine and some of her favorite artists coming out of Iceland.

VICE: Why did you start Neptún?
Kolbrún Þóra Löven: Basically, it grew from a desire to collaborate with friends and make something nice while I was at it. In 2013, we were all newly graduated from art school and looking for the next thing to do. My friend, Helga Kjerúlf, had been planning on making a publication with two of her friends, and I was really into the idea. That summer I quit my job in New York and decided to move back to Iceland. Then, little by little, things started to happen and Neptún in its current form was born. Currently, the two of us make it, working among Iceland, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

What was your goal with the publication?
There was, and is, a need for a publication that focuses on the creative scene in Iceland, especially on the younger, lesser-known artists. We also make a point of showing work from a wide range of artists, in terms of age, medium, and level of establishment—in order to show a spectrum of the work being made here.

For example, in our first issue we interviewed the graphic designer that created the Icelandic banknotes and passport. In our second issue, we interviewed my grandmother. She has worked as a crafts teacher in a retirement home for decades, but also makes amazing artworks. Her sculptures even made the cover of that issue!

In our third issue, we interviewed Steina Vasulka, an Icelandic artist based in America. She is one of the early pioneers of video art and founded The Kitchen in New York in the early 70s. Basically, we try to be really open to new ideas and expand our own notions of what the magazine can and should be.

How do you feel about independent publishing? Do you feel like it's making a difference?
Yes, I do think it makes a difference. I think it's important to be able to access publications that are not a part of big media, especially in Iceland. It creates a space for things typically not represented in the larger publications. Also, small scale galleries and exhibition spaces have been disappearing from Iceland in the past few years, basically because of hotel-building for tourists. So, in addition to all-around cuts to funding for the arts, this creates a certain dilemma for artists, especially the younger ones. So I think it's important to try to counteract in any way possible and provide some sort of space for artists to show their work and speak their minds.

What kind of editorial choices do you like to make with images in the mag?
I do a lot of the photography for the mag, while Helga handles the graphic design, and we both do interviews. We basically just trust each other to do our thing and then meet and talk about what could be better, or done differently, etc. I don't really go into shoots with a plan, I just try to be open for surprises and see what comes out of it. It works better for me than planning ahead. I don't use a lot of equipment, just my 35mm Nikon and a flash. I also like to make GIFSs from the images. I'm really interested in digital culture and how it can work with print, so I think it's a fun juxtaposition.

What's the photography scene like in Iceland?
Iceland is super small so the photography scene is small, as well. There is a bit of a divide between "photography" and "art" in Iceland. For me, it would be really exciting if that line would blur a little bit. In Iceland, photography has traditionally been considered a technical craft rather than an art medium—although that is changing. Basically, Iceland is a weird place, I like stuff that encapsulates that weirdness instead of just riding on clichés. That's what we look for in Neptún.

Below, Löven picked some of her favorite artists coming out of Iceland and explained what makes them so awesome.

Petra Valdimarsdóttir

Petra Valdimarsdóttir is featured in the third issue of Neptún. She is Icelandic, but mostly grew up in Holland, and now lives in Berlin. She is a graphic designer who also works with photography. Her project "A man is (not) a mountain" (a collaboration with Charlie Berendsen) is an interactive website that displays Petra's photographs of her uncle, his farm, and the Icelandic countryside.

Sunna Ben's

Sunna Ben's illustrations are featured in the third issue of Neptún, but she works with photography, as well. Her photographs are nicely chaotic, candid, and playful.

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson is an Icelandic artist that mostly grew up in Norway and now lives in Berlin. His book A Sudden Drop displays images of articles of clothing that he found on the street, photographed, and eventually turned into sculptures. I also recommend his book Portraits by Waiters.

Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir

Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir does a great job of capturing the weirdness of the everyday. Her project Fog Patches is "a collection of eternal moments, non-erupting mountains, and groundhog days. This is an attempt to show the unremembered stillness of a place, its textures, poetic reality, and the fragmented dreams of the people who inhabit it."

Björn Árnason

Björn Árnason is an Icelandic photographer, based in Reykjavík. He has a distinct style and his photographs are clean, minimal, and controlled.

For more on Neptún, visit the mag's website here.

Images courtesy of TOKYOPOP and Stu Levy unless otherwise noted

The anime boom hit America like a seismic energy blast in the late 90s and early 00s with franchises like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon, and Mobile Suit Gundam, which all became ratings juggernauts with extensive merchandising empires. As the anime wave struck, via Cartoon Network and Toonami, its print counterpart, manga, saw a similar rise in popularity among teens anxious to soak up the culture. In 2004, 1000 volumes of manga were produced for US audiences, nearly doubling the total from the year before. That same year, manga sales hit the $100 million mark in annual sales in America. At the center of manga's English print phenomenon was TOKYOPOP, a Los Angeles publisher founded in 1997 that helped to bring many popular titles to the States.

TOKYOPOP established itself early as a major player in English language markets, publishing popular shonen series like GTO, Love Hina, and Saiyuki; popular shoujo series like Cardcaptor Sakura and Fruits Basket; and popular seinen series like Lupin III, the manga adaptation of Battle Royale, and several Mobile Suit Gundam titles. It also brought Akira to American readers. It became the biggest producer of English-language manga rather quickly, nabbing nearly 50 percent of the US market share by 2004.

TOKYOPOP's early brand was built on authenticity, bringing Asian literature to English readers uncompromised. It printed and licensed titles that represented the very best of the manga experience—reissues from the East that were both acclaimed and big sellers in Japan—and the company saw great success with this model. In 2004,it made $35 million in revenue, leading competitors by a wide margin. In addition to traditional manga series, it introduced manhwa—the Korean equivalent of manga—to Western audiences, and even created a few original English manga titles. Along with Viz Media, TOKYOPOP pioneered the cine-manga format, which took popular animated series and films and turned them into colored print editions. Titles included popular Nickelodeon cartoon series like Avatar: The Last Airbender and even Spongebob Squarepants.

Over the course of a few years, the publisher created a distinct production style, selecting titles that bridged the gap between Western and Eastern cultures—series like Samurai Champloo, which re-imagines Edo-era Japan through a hip-hop lens; or Priest, a Korean manhwa that follows a Christianity-based narrative through the Old West—as well as producing its own Western-based stories in manga form. It carefully curated titles as they pertained to its primary mission, intent on making manga and manhwa that was produced as closely to its Asian counterparts as possible. For a long time, it succeeded.

Image via Flickr user Ollie Harridge

But after years of prosperity operating as the medium's flag-bearer in the US, things began to rapidly go south. The manga bubble burst and graphic novel sales started to nose dive. The internet torpedoed print media and the manga industry took a big hit. In 2008, a company restructuring resulted in 39 layoffs at TOKYOPOP and reduced the amount of manga produced by the publisher by 50 percent. Later that same year, the company laid off eight more staffers, including three editors. The next year, Kodansha, the largest publisher in Japan, allowed all of its licensing agreements with TOKYOPOP to expire, leaving several series unfinished. By 2011, the company was in full-on turmoil with several more layoffs and the resignation of President and COO John Parker made in a distribution deal aimed at saving the entity, which was crippled when Borders filed for bankruptcy. On April 15, 2011 TOKYOPOP finally announced its decision to cease operations in the US the following month. TOKYOPOP was dead.

The closing hit many manga fans hard. Several YouTubers mourned the loss in videos and comment sections. Eulogies were written. It was the end of an era. TOKYOPOP's titles slowly vanished from retail shelves around the country.

Then, rumors began to circulate that the once-prolific publisher could bounce back, but without reopening its presses or printing manga again. In December 2012, the company relaunched its website, introducing a new, refined purpose in a memo that mentioned embracing "eBook and print-on-demand technologies" in order to move forward and survive.

Stu Levy, the company's founder and CEO, piggybacked on this in a statement a month later, shedding light on the publisher's demise and hopes for a resurrection: "Unfortunately our Japanese licensors did not move fast enough to provide a legitimate alternative to piracy, and piracy shows no mercy. As a result, TOKYOPOP had to shut down its LA office and the licenses to Japanese titles expired, reverting to the Japanese licensors. What that means is TOKYOPOP is evolving as a company." All signs pointed to TOKYOPOP returning, but as a shell of its former self. That is, until this June, when the company announced its return to publishing at a panel at the 2015 Anime Expo. Now, after five years of dormancy, TOKYOPOP will once again print manga in 2016.

Fans and former readers of the publisher responded to the announcement online with excitement and intrigue, but also skepticism. One Reddit thread captures the full breadth of reactions. "They're coming back? Holy shit. I wonder how it's going to be now since they've already fallen once," one redditor wrote.

"Honestly this sounds great as long as they don't go too crazy with series that people don't really want and it doesn't look like they will," commented another. "It will be nice to see them back now that the industry is at the best it has been in a long while and interesting to see what new series they bring since they lost all of their old licenses."

Several users sought the return of Beck, one of TOKYOPOP's most popular original series. Another Reddit thread was less positive. "At this point, Tokyo Pop is the joke that publishes American-made Manga that doesn't sell, then blames piracy," one wrote. "Sigh. Still salty about the licenses they took and manga I'll never see again printed," another quipped. All parties seem unsure of what to expect.

What they can expect is a new approach. The reboot comes with a restored interest in bringing Asian pop culture westward, but hopes to add a host of new features, chief among them a new brand, POP Comics, which, along with TOKYOPOP, will publish under its holder company's banner, POP Media Holdings. POP Comics will be TOKYOPOP's first real foray into digital media, a service that allows users to create and share comics with one another using the platform. It's a non-exclusive, user-generated experience in which creators retain their rights in the process. Levy, the man still behind the manga company, wants it to be a major part of the TOKYOPOP rebrand, a neutral platform that allows fans and creators to connect, which he referred to as the "YouTube of comics and manga" at the Anime Expo panel.

"All users can also be creators and upload their own stories—and those stories are 100 percent owned and controlled by them," Levy tells VICE over email. "Creators can upload and everyone can enjoy the app for free. It's all about the creators being in complete control." This is TOKYOPOP for the digital age.

Still, Levy suggests the reboot won't stray far from the ground broken by the old one: "TOKYOPOP's new mission is fully consistent with our history—to bridge Asian pop culture with the Western world. Of course, manga has always been central to that mission, even though we've been involved with all forms of Asian pop culture throughout our history. In particular, I'm a believer in visual storytelling, and that manga is not an ethnocentric form of creative expression, but instead a medium that creators worldwide can be influenced by and even influence."

There are, however, a few key differences with the reboot, which hopes to avoid the same pitfalls that forced it to shutter its North American division in the first place. First and foremost, the publisher is more or less starting over since it lost many of its licensing deals with Asian publishers, and there will be a conscious shift toward introducing brand new titles in the US, compared to energy spent reissuing foreign titles.

"While in certain markets, like Germany, we continue to bring the best of Japanese manga to German fans via our brand TOKYOPOP, our role in North America, and English-language manga, will be different," Levy explains over email. "There are several reasons for that. First, the market has radically changed in many ways—less retail outlets, a plethora of new product, digital distribution, and a fan base that is open minded to a wider range of pop culture.

"Second, TOKYOPOP's near-death experience inevitably left us without easy access to a number of key Japanese licensors who for various reasons are unwilling or unable to work with us in the very near future—mainly because they either have their own direct company in America, or because they are nervous about our financial situation. I understand that and believe it is my duty to 'reboot' TOKYOPOP in the English language markets by creating value for fans, licensors, and creators while navigating the waters of today's market."

Initial talk surrounding the reboot suggested that the publisher would be looking to renegotiate licenses for older series, especially series that got cancelled when the company ceased operations in 2011, but that appears to be a secondary goal in the early phases. "In the beginning that will not be our focus," Levy writes. "However, I am very hopeful that we'll be able to work towards that. It's not my decision since those rights belong to the licensors in Japan or Korea, but if we earn their trust financially, I am hopeful that we can get there."

Many of TOKYOPOP's most popular titles were picked up by competitors like Dark Horse Comics (which nabbed fan-favorites like the award-winning Cardcaptor Sakura) or are simply reproduced by American subsidiaries of their Asian publisher like Kodansha Comics USA. But Levy hopes to gauge fan interest in some of those titles to see if they are worth saving: "We may consider utilizing Kickstarter so we don't hurt ourselves or our licensors financially and we can properly measure how large each title's fan base is. The challenge is that fans are very passionate about their favorite titles, but in publishing there's a minimum threshold that must be met for a title to be profitable... We certainly can't go through what we went through from 2008-2011 when many of our titles were losing money. That's not sustainable."

The hope is that the new TOKYOPOP will be able to continue to produce the same kind of manga it has in the past, introducing American audiences to new titles, while making decisions that are more fiscally sound and in line with the current climate. The publisher will be adding to its already active print-on-demand service (through its partner RightStuf) for its older English language titles like Peach Fuzz, Bizenghast, Pixie, and Priest: Purgatory with the print release of new manga through physical and online retailers. But the primary goal is to create more original titles designed specifically to captivate audiences here in America. There's secrecy surrounding what these title will be, but back in July, Levy hinted at plans to work with Disney.

Only time will tell if this iteration of TOKYOPOP will once again position itself as an industry leader in manga. But is there even space for a comic-based company to start from scratch, much less thrive in an age where print media is slowly being ground to dust by the internet? Sales numbers for manga have been fluctuated in recent years, but numbers seem to indicate the industry is bouncing back. According to ICv2, manga sales are up 13 percent in America since last year, which marked the second year of growth for the medium. In fact, the comic industry as a whole is on the rebound. Comic and graphic novel sales hit a new 20-year high of $935 million in 2014. If there was ever a time to hop back into the comic business, now might be the time.

Yet Levy wants to branch out beyond print manga and delve into other mediums. He hopes to secure film and TV rights for some of the publisher's original English language properties. "Short-term, between the re-launched English-language publishing, the mobile publishing platform POP Comics, and a number of film and television projects, we are slammed with work, so successfully launching these initiatives is key," he says. "Long-term, our goal is to become a significant contributor to the world of pop culture—and hopefully continue to bridge fandom with fascinating cultures and creative material. We would like to put TOKYOPOP on the map as an innovator and game-changer, just like we have been in the past."

Follow Sheldon on Twitter

For more of Nina's work, visit her Tumblr.

It's a little unsettling to talk to H. Jon Benjamin on the phone. More than anyone else, the comedian can claim to be the voice of a generation—literally, it's his voice behind the titular cartoon protagonists on the widely adored and seriously funny Archer and Bob's Burgers, not to mention Coach McGuirk from the cult TV Movies and Ben from Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. Benjamin's is the most distinctive voice this side of Gilbert Gottfried: deep and resonant, but also layered with a childlike uncertainty. His characters tend to be insecure braggarts who love to talk and have hearts of gold buried under several layers of jerk. A classic H. Jon Benjamin line reading begins at a place of complete confidence, wavers, gets distracted by a tangent, and ends on a note of obsessive stoner speculation.

2015 has been a good year for Benjamin, not just his voice. He had a supporting role in Aziz Ansari's acclaimed Netflix series, Master of None, showed up in the Wet Hot American Summer revival, and, in a semi-trolling move he describes as "indulgent," put out a full-length jazz record on Sub Pop. It's called, fittingly, Well, I Should Have...* (learned how to play piano). He even wrote an inconspicuous essay for the latest issue of the literary magazine Apology, titled "Suspiria Cannabis Profundis." In a parody of the types of purple-prose weed strain descriptors you might find on sites like Leafly, the 49-year-old fabricated pot names like "Daddy Issues," which "leaves a deep feeling of regret and existential dread with a lingering premonition that things will just get worse."

"Jews like us can't handle weed today," he joked when asked about the essay. Frankly, I agree.

Recently, I chatted with the multi-faceted funny guy over phone and email about some of his favorite stuff from 2015, as well as what he thinks the funniest thing he did this year was.

VICE: Of all the various projects you were involved with in 2015, which one stood out the most and why?
H. Jon Benjamin: I am recognized a lot for Master of None. It seems like that show really touched a cultural nerve in a good way. I've also been to three restaurants featured in that show—Bamonte's, the Dirty French, and Morgenstern's Ice Cream—and people approached me at each and were like, "Oh my God, you're here." Now, I feel like people think I'm that asshole actor who shows up at the places that the TV show he had a small part in was shot at, but I swear it was coincidence.

What do you think is the funniest thing you've done professionally in 2015?
I would say a comedy bit called "Mystic River Pizza" where Larry Murphy and I performed a scene from the movie Mystic River word for word for about ten minutes, then a delivery guy comes in at the end with a pizza. Boy, that actually doesn't sound funny now that I write it.

Do you personally think it was an especially busy year for you as a live actor?
Well, it's mainly been the case where I do very few live action roles not out of choice, but more out of not getting asked. This year, though, I was offered two roles in very well-received shows that were shot pretty close to one another, time-wise, so I suppose I worked more this year as an actor. But, to be clear, it might have been a total of eight days between the two shows I actually worked.

You're a pretty dynamic comedian—you write, voice act, live act, do sketch comedy, etc. Which comedic form do you enjoy the most?
Pretty dynamic? I'd say unbelievably dynamic. Writing is the hardest for me. It doesn't come as naturally as the other forms and I feel far more dread during the process. Acting and voice acting are more mercurial and maybe come a little easier to me. I guess that stems from wanting to be a writer when I younger, and not really considering acting or comedy as a viable profession.

How do you distinguish between voice acting as Bob and voice acting as Archer? If you did a Pepsi Challenge–style test where you heard a sound byte and had to guess which character said it, how would you fare?
Yes, I would win that challenge 78 out of 100 times. I think there are subtle distinctions. Archer is never not confident in his tone and Bob is always a little apprehensive, like a guy who's never quite sure of the next thing he's going to say. Also, Archer is always drunk and Bob is rarely so.

Looking back at 2015, what are some cultural things you'll remember the most outside your own work?
Well, I just saw the Dinosaur Jr. anniversary show, which was pretty great. The singer from Negative Approach, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, and some of Sonic Youth performed with them. For movies, I liked Ex Machina , When Marnie Was There, The Visit, Jafar Panahi's Taxi, It Follows , and I'm not sure it counts as this year, but I really enjoyed seeing Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain while really drunk with my friend Leo after a huge sushi meal when no one else was in the theater so we (or just I) farted a lot. Also, Eugene Mirman's wedding was a cultural touchstone, which included a really well delivered poem by Derrick Brown.

Can you tell me about how your "jazz" album happened? Did you approach Sub Pop with the idea?
I had been approached a couple times to do a comedy album, but I'm always too lazy to put together a set that would work. I had been doing this bit live where I would have a keyboard on stage and I start waxing on about how I grew up very privileged in a predominately poor city where many people had not a lot of options, except music, which elevated a lot of people out of the doldrums. Then, I would tell the audience that I wrote a song about it, but would just play a bunch of nonsense on the piano cause I can't play.

The bit never did that well, but I thought about expanding the idea to try and do an entire jazz album with me on piano where I'm not able to play at all, but the rest of the band plays through it as if it were a normal session. I called Tony at Sub Pop to see if he knew a label that would do something this indulgent and he said they would.

What genre should this record be kept in at record stores?
I'm really not sure—maybe in the bargain bin.

Who are some other voice actors who you think killed it in 2015?
There have been a few guests on the shows I work on whose characters I really like a lot. David Wain's character on Bob's Burgers is really funny and silly and makes me laugh. Trump's been really funny to listen to. Also, I guess not technically voice work but the entire cast of Kung Fury. I watch animation mostly via my son, so we're watching a lot of Bob's Burgers, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bojack Horseman.

What do you have store for 2016?
I've been working on an anthology erotica show for IFC, where I play the narrator of a bunch of erotic tales, sort of like the Red Shoe Diaries meets The Diary of Anne Frank.

Did you achieve your New Years resolutions for 2015?
I promised to reduce income inequality. This year, I'll resolve to buy something extravagant. I'm like one year on, one year off the progressive agenda.

What are you looking forward to most in your own life next year?
More and more I do less and less; it's mainly about trying to get a good night's sleep at this point.

Follow Zach on Twitter. See more of Bobby's work on his Tumblr.

All photos by Nate 'Igor' Smith

On any given day there's a good chance you're going to come across a "natural" sex supplement. Packaged as pills, liquids, or raw herbs (or added to everything from coffee to chewing gum), and sold under ridiculous names like "Sex Man" or "Stiff Nights" with cryptic, hokey labels—these cheap and plentiful products promise to improve your sex drive, stamina, sensation, and, if you have a penis, give you a granite-hard erection. You can find this crap everywhere, from sex shops, gas stations, and corner stores to the pop-up ads and emails clogging up your spam filter. Part of a bustling trade in limp-dick quick fixes that stretches back through time immemorial, these products are so ubiquitous (and silly) that we rarely even notice them on the shelves.

Yet in October this smarmy background noise came to the fore when former NBA-star and Kardashian consort Lamar Odom was found passed out at a Nevada brothel. Odom had been using hard drugs, but reports linked his collapse in part to his consumption of ten "Reload" pills, an "herbal Viagra," over the course of three days. Supposedly a natural supplement, the United States Food and Drug Administration had long warned that "Reload" actually contained the same pharmaceutical ingredients found in erectile dysfunction medications, which when consumed in conjunction with other drugs can be dangerous. This case wasn't an outlier. According to a study conducted by scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chenega Government Consulting, and the FDA that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in October, up to 617 people visited emergency rooms each year between 2004 and 2013 thanks to ostensibly herbal (but likely contaminated) sex supplements. Within the past decade, sex supplements have been implicated in over a dozen deaths—one of the most publicized recent cases being the 2013 death of a Kansas City man who keeled over after popping a "Stiff Nights" pill, a brand alleged to regularly contain prescription ED drugs.

(VICE tried to reach out to "Stiff Nights" to discuss allegations of contamination in their products, but has received no comment as of yet. As such, we can't confirm that the "Stiff Nights" we contacted was the one cited; names and manufacturers of these supplements may drift. Nor has VICE received a response from any of the nine other sex supplement distributors or manufacturers, some accused of contamination and some not, whom we tried to reach out to for this story.)

Sex supplements have always been mildly risky to consume, but it seems as if trade in them has grown larger and more dangerous over the past couple of decades. Although findings vary, multiple studies suggest that contaminations with sometimes-massive amounts of pharmaceuticals (or analogues, chemically altered yet unstudied variants of existing pharmaceuticals) affect well over half of all products on the market—tabulations range from 66 to 81 percent. No one's sure how this worrying trend started or why. But many suspect it's a simple byproduct of increasing demand, weak regulation, and hustlers' ingenuity. Although there've been attempts to clamp down on and reverse this shift in supplement risk levels, it appears as if regulatory efforts to date are only scratching the surface of the ever-evolving, robust trade.

It's seemingly impossible to trace the market for natural sex supplements to its origin. It's probably as old as civilization. Most men throughout history have, at some point in their lives, struggled with tumescence and sought randy remedies accordingly. Ancient snake oil salesmen, doctors, and writers alike promoted any number of foods and herbs as aphrodisiacs—sometimes with nothing behind them but the placebo effect, sometimes with cause. Although some early aphrodisiacs were mundane, these early rosters included many bizarre products still marketed today, such as Spanish Fly. Perhaps the most famous "herbal Viagra," thanks to 20th century comedians (including Bill Cosby, who in a 1969 routine talked about using it to dose women's drinks), Spanish Fly is derived from a chemical secretion of blister beetles. An incredibly inflammatory substance that can blister skin, when ingested in small doses and pissed out it causes swelling in the penis, which is often mistaken for a raging, painful hard-on. Perceived as functional, people have managed to get their hands on this and other natural products for centuries. And you can bet as soon as folks could package and sell them en masse, the invisible rosy-palmed hand demanded they do so.

There have always been some risks in natural sex supplements. Spanish Fly, for instance, if over-consumed, can basically attack your organs and kill you. That's allegedly what killed the 1st century B.C. poet Lucretius, sickened a small legion of French soldiers in Nigeria in 1869, and got the Marquis de Sade in trouble for attempted murder after he reportedly accidentally poisoned some prostitutes with Fly-laced chocolates. Some are dangerous enough that governments have put serious restrictions on them, even if they are "natural products." Some poorly manufactured substances could be contaminated with things like metals, pesticides, and paint, as well. But until doctors and authorities became aware of the potential dangers in recent years, the products' adverse effects were believed to be minor, severe harm was rare (or at least rarely reported), and most users' biggest fear was that the pill they dropped a few bucks on wouldn't have any herbs in it or would do absolutely nothing.

When asked about sex stimulants' effectiveness, Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who now runs the medical hokum clearinghouse Quackwatch.org, told VICE, "If you look at the vast number of herbal products," including over-the-counter aphrodisiacs, "the majority of them will neither harm you, nor help you."

But according to FDA spokeswoman Lyndsay Meyer, the agency picked up on a new systematic risk in sex supplements around 2007: contamination with PDE5 inhibitors, the active ingredients in ED drugs like Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra. Unlisted on supplement boxes ( which rarely contain warnings of any sort), the hidden presence of these drugs makes it impossible for consumers to titrate their doses, predict interactions with other medicines, or accurately notify their doctors of the substances that might be in their systems. When PDE5s interact with the drugs many people take to treat everything from diabetes and high blood pressure to cholesterol and heart diseases, they can cause a dangerous and potentially fatal drop in blood pressure. Given that some of these supplements seem to contain multiple active ingredients each, at doses up to 31 times beyond recommended therapeutic levels, they can even be potentially lethal on their own. You can find that same variability with other substances as well, but PDE5 inhibitors are among the most common and risky.

The few studies on these products in aggregate, like one released by Pfizer (the manufacturer of Viagra) in 2013 that analyzed 58 random supplements, seem to suggest that, in some regions or cases at least, over three quarters of sex supplements likely contain a noticeable quantity of pharmaceuticals. Some might be skeptical of claims published by a pharmaceutical giant with a vested interest in reducing the market for supplements and increasing sales of its own products, but a study published this January in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis by university researchers found that over half of the sex supplements they analyzed were tainted with prescription ED drugs, which helps to bolster Pfizer's findings. So every time you buy a fuck pill at a gas station, there's a high probability that what you're buying is not just an herbal product, but actually a counterfeit drug or untested analogue. Depending on how it's contaminated or what drugs you're already taking, swallowing one of these pills might lead to a very bad night.

By the time the FDA caught on in 2007, sex supplement contamination was already an entrenched reality in the marketplace. Dr. Brian Donnelly, a member of Pfizer's Global Security team who became aware of and started investigating "herbals" around the same time that the FDA put the issue on its radar, recalled to VICE the scale of the first case he looked into for the pharma giant:

" was called 'Boom' ... This was a manufacturing operation in the United States where they were actually mixing the active pharmaceutical ingredient with cocoa powder, like a chocolate powder, in a cement mixer inside of a storage container in New Jersey... I think the was able to confirm that they'd done it over a number of years. That would have given you a starting point of around 2001... They'd made upwards of a million doses and they'd sold the product not only in the United States, but throughout Europe, Israel, and some other places as well."

Meyer says that the FDA can't definitively pinpoint when these types of contaminants made it onto the market, or track how they spread, up to 2007. No one else I spoke to could come up with a firm answer either. In one sense, this isn't surprising. The adverse effects of sex supplements pale in comparison to the scope and potential risks of other sketchy dietary supplements. ( Think ephedra, the dangerous stimulant found in many weight loss supplements in the early 2000s.) Given the limited resources of regulatory agencies and the tens of thousands of individual supplement products on the market, it's logical that sex supplements wouldn't have been a major concern until they posed a proximate, lethal danger. But it's still disconcerting that, according to Dr. Donnelly, many in the medical world weren't aware of the rising contaminant trend until the turn of the last decade when groups like Pfizer and the FDA started to raise the critical concern alarm.

Despite the trend's murky origins, we can still hazard a few educated guesses about the rise of ED drug-contaminated "herbal" sex supplements. The 1998 release of Viagra, combined with the popular impact of a 1994 study on the ubiquity of ED, brought impotence to the global forefront and showed people that there were very reliable ways to address it. Those with conditions or on medications that precluded the use of Viagra and its competitors, or without the cash to pay for them, likely turned toward already cheap, seemingly safe, and bountiful herbals, boosting the market. Others too embarrassed to seek a legitimate prescription simultaneously created a market for (also cheap) counterfeit and analogue drugs. Barrett of Quackwatch suspects that these counterfeits came onto the market in 1998 or almost immediately thereafter.

Counterfeits and analogues likely worked their way into herbals relatively quickly because weak regulatory laws make it easy to sneak such drugs into the United States in supplements. The saga that got us here is a bit complex, but in 1994 Congress neutered a bid to strengthen the FDA's oversight on supplements, crippling the regulator after an effective campaign by major supplement makers. As a result, today "herbals" don't really need to inform regulators what's inside of them, meet proper drug testing standards, or ensure that their packaging, warnings, or marketing are accurate. And the FDA can't crack down on them until they're already causing problems for people. This assumption that supplements are safe until proven otherwise helped to massively expand the herbals market in general (including the sex supplements market) from 1994 onwards, clearing the road for the increased scope, scale, and contamination dangers that we're witnessing in sex supplements now.

"They know it's hard for us to keep track," Meyer of the FDA told VICE. "They know if they market... or label their products as dietary supplements, they don't have to go through pre-market approval."

Some products are wholly manufactured from abroad, while other sex stimulants are made in America, often using ingredients shipped in from elsewhere. And similar cases of illness from and contamination in these supposed sexual enhancers have been reported in places like Singapore, too, making this a global rather than just American problem. Professor Pieter Cohen of Harvard University claimed in an editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May, 2013 that herbal makers may embrace drug contamination in their products to try to make their often weak products seem more effective, garnering repeat customers on the cheap. The products remain available even after crackdowns due to the work of diffuse, emergent, and shifting networks cobbling together ingredients that constantly surface and vanish. Sometimes the same product will show up under many different names at the same time or sequentially. Other times, the makers of one product, sensing trouble, will pack up shop, move to a new storage locker or basement, and make a slightly different product to the same ends. Sometimes products will emerge on the market with no listed manufacturer whatsoever.

The networks behind today's sex stimulants are so complex and fluid that the FDA admits it can't keep up with each new product, much less get a holistic sense of the market and its size as it stands now, has evolved in recent years, and may evolve in the future. It doesn't help that, as Cohen's paper points out, the number of new analogues has exploded over the past decade—not unlike other synthetic drugs—and each one requires a learning curve to detect. Low reporting by shy victims means that our sense of the medical impact of these herbals-cum-drugs is probably woefully understated as well. Donnelly and his team at Pfizer want to start trying to map contaminant patterns in herbals to better understand and tackle detrimental products and the networks behind them, but that's still more of a thought than a reality.

Since 2007, the FDA's done what it can to try to stymie the market through consumer alerts cautioning against the consumption of specific herbals and recalls. Meyer says there've been 674 notifications issued since 2007; one came out on December 11, just before we first spoke, for a product called "Fuel Up." Working with border control officials and their own investigators, they've gotten better at catching contaminants or contaminated products as they come into the country. They've even had a bit of success prosecuting some manufacturers; starting in January they'll also have more power to destroy confiscated shipments rather than ship them back to senders, as they've had to do in the past.

But even with all these efforts, many manufacturers and other folks in the supply chain still manage to ghost, pivot, and reposition themselves in the market. Through constant innovation in their networks, business models, and production and distribution tactics, as well as through the sheer scale of their operation, they constantly pop back up, arguably as potent as ever.

"It's kind of like a game of whack-a-mole," says Meyer.

Donnelly says that it's impossible to tell whether anyone's made a serious dent in the market. "All I can say is that products are certainly in the stores," he says. "A high percentage of these products are still tainted."

It's even possible that the market for such herbals is expanding, despite all the public education about their risks and the crackdowns. According to speculation by some researchers, health alerts on the active ingredients in supplements could actually convince some men to try them as a cheap and reliable way of getting ED drugs, though no hard data is currently available to prove such claims.

Demand for such cheap drugs will likely never vanish. It's an extension of the demand for aphrodisiacs that's been with us as long as we've been able to correlate our consumption habits with our cocks. But observers believe there are a number of ways that we could make it much harder and costlier to wantonly contaminate the herbal sex supplement market.

First and foremost, Donnelly thinks that regulators should probably start requiring herbal products to demonstrate the authenticity of their ingredient and dosage listings, given the problems vagueness in this realm has created. From there he hopes that regulators and watchdog groups can fund and pursue more aggressive tracking and prosecution policies to wipe detrimental products out of the market faster and make the business costly for no-goodniks. Short of that, Barrett suggests that regulatory agencies try to restrict the advertising channels and retail venues through which these tainted products are sold. But all of that would require massive changes in the way America treats the herbal industry, which officials don't seem to have the will or inclination to push.

At present, the best most observers feel they and others can do is to raise awareness. Informing doctors about contaminants and their risks can mitigate deaths from today's sex supplements. Making consumers aware of the risks involved in taking them may reduce demand somewhat, blunting the market or directing it back toward purely herbal, uncontaminated products. It can also help consumers to understand which products to avoid—you can find a solid list of warning signs identified by the FDA here.

From there, all they can do is hope that a barrage of publicity and slow regulatory chipping at the market can change popular attitudes, shifting regulations and the calculus of herbal manufacturers far enough to spur a new stage of evolution in this strange, ancient industry. They'll never totally eliminate the risks of sex supplements, which have always been there. But if the risks of popping a boner pill can come back down to the rarity of a Spanish Fly overdose through a market where most products available are weak, ineffective, or fake and harmless, then fornicaters everywhere will likely be better off—granite-hard erection or not.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

Photo by Curran Hatleberg from Lost Coast

Hi there, we're Elizabeth and Matthew, VICE's resident photography experts. Last year, we did a roundup of our favorite photos featured by VICE in 2014. We thought it was cool, and who doesn't like looking at pictures, so we made another gallery of our faves from 2015. But, before the images commence, here is a quote from Thomas Roma, the renowned photographer who runs Columbia University's photography program. It's one of many moments of sage wisdom that was cut from our latest interview with Roma, and it captures one of the many reasons photography is so important to us.

"I don't read a book constantly thinking about the author. Books I love I constantly relate to on my own—I think of myself, they're part of my life. Same thing when you look at a film, it becomes part of your cultural, psychological, political experience. You go out in the world after seeing a certain film, you see the world a little differently. Read Beloved, you read Toni Morrison, and you think, all of a sudden everything looks different. Read The Catcher in the Rye when you're young, all of a sudden you think differently. Art is supposed to raise your consciousness, if only temporarily."

These are some of the photographs that changed our world in 2015.

Photo by Dru Donovan from Positions Taken

Photo by Martin Slepcik from Lunik IX Buds

Photo by Lara Shipley from Workampers

From Jason Lazarus's ongoing project Too Hard to Keep

Photo by Zora J Murff from Corrections

Photo by Sohrab Hura from The Lost Head and the Bird

Photo by Kevin Zucker from Wintering

Photo by Pete Voelker from An Insignificant Impact

Photo by Michael Coles from Witness to a Massacre

Photo by Stacy Kranitz from her ongoing series Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold my Body Down.

Photo by Juan Madrid from Catskill

Cover of The Earth Died Screaming Issue by Steve Smith

Photo by Manon Quérouil and Véronique de Viguerie from The Sand Looters

Photo by Andrew Litchtenstein's series Life in Prison

'After Marcel Duchamp' by Anthony Costa, Jessica Frankl, Mikaela Keen Lumongsod, Frankie Mule, Gabrielia Priyma, Balazs Sebok, and Valeriya Vaynerman from Artsy Nudes

Photo by Michael Bailey-Gates from Angels

Photo by Matthew Leifheit from Leif: Boi Wonder

Photo by Elizabeth Renstrom from Fruit Salad with Laurie Anderson

Photo by Bryson Rand from The Love Trip

Photo by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert from Drag Queens of San Francisco

Photo by Joseph Maida from A Place in the Sun: The Goth Scene in Hawaii

From Jaimie Warren's Horrorfest 2015

Photo by Lauren Poor fromPalo Alto Suicides

Photo by Eli Durst from Bowling

Photo by Bobby Scheidemann from Combustible Materials

Photo by Lindokuhle Sobekwa from Deep Hanging

Photo by Meredith Talusan from How the Killing of a Trans Filipina Woman Ignited an International Incident

Photo by Thomas Roma from In the Vale of Cashmere

Photo by Lijie Zhang from Portraits of Blind Children in Rural China

Photo by Robert Melee from Mommy

Photo by Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos from Night Journeys in Sète

Photo by Josef Hoflehner from The Air Marshall

Elizabeth Renstrom is photo editor of VICE, and Matthew Leifheit is VICE's photo editor-at-large. See more photos we love here, updated daily.

A selection of legal highs in the government's NPS test lab (Photo by Rob McCallum)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In some ways, 2015 was a very normal year in Britain's drug world. Prisoners got wasted on the latest substance that couldn't be picked up by random jail drug tests, clubbers fell in love with E again and the media found a new drug to freak out about. Meanwhile, drug users continued to die in record numbers from overdoses.

But amid all the usual happenings, tensions began to quietly play out between those who come up with drug policy and those who enforce it: the government got itself in a muddle working out what it actually means to get high, while the police came to the conclusion that chasing people for drugs was not only futile but largely counterproductive.

Announced in the Queen's Speech in May, the Psychoactive Substance Bill 2015 was drawn up for a logical reason: The government could not ignore the fact there were shops selling powerful drugs—your Gocaines, your El Blancos, your Psy-clones—to people on Britain's main streets.

But in trying to tackle this problem, Home Secretary Theresa May appeared to have entered a scientific and philosophical hall of mirrors, in which she got so bamboozled by the complexities of human intoxication that she stumbled out and decided it was best to ban anything that affects a person's "mental functioning or emotional state," be it harmless or not (as long as it's not something not worth millions of pounds to the Treasury, such as alcohol, caffeine, or nicotine).

So when the Bill is enacted in April of next year, nutmeg, nitrous oxide, poppers, and a host of mildly psychoactive garden centre products such as morning glory seeds—as well as substances that haven't been invented or discovered yet—will likely be outlawed alongside the potent synthetic drugs that were the original targets of the legislation. However, the government has accepted that personal possession of the newly-banned drugs will not be an offense because it would criminalize otherwise law-abiding people.

Yet, as the government tries to ban its way out of a hole, while still parroting the fact it would not touch decriminalization of old-school drugs with a bargepole, its street-level enforcers appear to be edging away from the war on drugs.

In July, three police forces—Durham, Derbyshire, and Dorset—declared they were not going to bother pursuing cannabis smokers, nor people found cultivating a small number of cannabis plants (an offense that carries a maximum sentence of 14 years). They said there were more important things to be doing with limited resources.

While there are still ridiculous, Gulf State-style cases where people are being slapped with a criminal record for possession of barely enough cannabis to make a spliff, there is evidence to show that these three forces are not the only ones briefing their officers to ignore low-level drug offenses.

Despite steady levels of cannabis use over the past four years—and the fact it's not exactly hard to detect people smoking skunk in public—the number of people being booked for weed possession has fallen by almost a third over that time, from 145,400 in 2011-12 to 101,905 in 2014-15.

Cannabis warnings (the first stage of enforcement action) have fallen too, from over 100,000 issued in 2009 to 60,000 in 2014. Penalty Notices for Disorder (on the spot fines commonly used for the crime of cannabis possession) fell from 16,277 to 11,417. What's more, over the last year, there has been a 17 percent drop in police raids on cannabis farms and a fall in the number of people cautioned and prosecuted for cannabis cultivation.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: I Tried Getting 'High' on Drugless Psychedelic Alternatives in the Suburbs

Cannabis is not the only drug police are walking past. Between 2011 and 2014, the number of cautions handed out for all drug offenses fell by over a third, down from 42,700 to 29,600. This included a fall in cautions for class A drugs. Drug prosecutions and convictions have fallen across the board, and it's unlikely that this is down to criminals becoming more cunning.

What's more, there are signs the police have eased off chasing down the big guys. The number of surveillance operations carried out by police, such as phone taps, bugging, lengthy stake-outs and undercover work—many of which are used to catch drug dealers—has fallen, from 14,000 in 2011 to 8,300 in 2015. The use of informers, another tactic used to catch drug dealers, has also plummeted.

So what is going on? Are Britain's cops, who aren't well known for going easy on drug users, revolting against the war on drugs? To some extent, according to Gavin Thomas, Vice President of the Police Superintendent's Association of England, they are.

"The approach by forces such as Dorset, Durham, and Derbyshire are becoming more widespread in my experience," Thomas told me. "Arresting large numbers of people for possession of drugs will not solve the problem in isolation. Yes, it's against the law, but 40 years of history have told us this approach is not the solution. The argument for this kind of decriminalization is that it allows us to focus on the big dealers. And if it's a choice between targeting people for possessing drugs or for stopping children from being sexually exploited, you look at what is causing greater harm."

A man enjoying a spiff and a balloon at the Hyde Park 4/20 smoke-out (Photo by Jake Lewis)

However, this is only part of the story. The Tories would never admit it, but the key driver behind the police's retreat on drug crime is the government's policies. Their decision to cut 17,000 police jobs and impose large cuts to budgets has reduced the police's ability to properly deal with the drug trade, all the way from weekend weed smokers to professional crack suppliers. Many police forces have decided that, with such limited resources, arresting people for minor drug offenses is not worth prioritizing.

The riots in England in August of 2011 came at a time when relations between young black men and police were highly strained because of stop and search. The trigger for the riots was the shooting of Mark Duggan, but the buildup—according to feedback from the rioters—was the police's heavy use of stop and search, primarily to look for drugs.

In reaction to the riots—and to research that showed police unfairly targeted black men for drug shakedowns—Home Secretary Theresa May ordered a scaling-down of stop and search. In London there were nearly 50,000 stop and searches a month in the run-up to the 2011 riots. Now, there are just over 10,000 a month. Even though most stop and searches do not result in a drug bust, this policy is widely seen as a key factor behind the drop in people being booked for cannabis possession.

People are also less likely to get stopped for cannabis possession now because police have less to gain from it. Until recently, booking someone for cannabis was the easiest way individual officers and their forces could meet exacting detection targets. Police used to get the same amount of "points" for solving a rape or murder as they did for arresting someone for having a bag of weed, hence officers being encouraged to sweep known smoke-spots for the low hanging fruit of easy cannabis arrests. Since the government took away this incentive and police forces weaned themselves off easy-win cannabis arrests, officers are far less bothered about hassling people in the streets for drugs.

WATCH: Our documentary 'Wolf of the West End,' about the infamous fraudster and socialite Eddie Davenport.

There is a tacit agreement, both centrally and locally, to take the foot off the gas on drug crime. Although the Tory government enabled regional police forces to pursue their own agenda on crime (very few forces have prioritized drugs), police chiefs have been instructed by the Home Office to focus on child sexual exploitation, people trafficking, firearms and cyber crime.

"It would not be surprising if inspectors and sergeants had responded to falling officer numbers by telling those that remain to focus on the offenses that really matter to their local communities, which may not be drug possession offenses," one criminal justice expert told me.

Backing away from the frontline of the drug trade suits both the police, who have little desire to chase down drug users, and the government, which has more pressing priorities for its shrunken police force.

That, in 2015, the government is pushing to get tougher on drugs while also facilitating—even inadvertently—a culture where police are less tough on drugs is just the latest in a long line of drug war paradoxes: a nighttime economy fueled by drugs, a heroin treatment system that allows the sick to be slung in jail, and teenagers cornered into buying substances that become more obscure and dangerous every year.

You would think that, at some point soon, the government might have the balls to ignore the scaremongers and resolve to banish these paradoxes by getting stuck in and managing the drug problem, rather than continually swatting at thin air. But yet another year down, it's sadly not looking any more likely.

Follow Max on Twitter.

Residents watch flooding from the Pea river, Dec. 26, 2015 in Elba, Alabama. (AP Photo/ Hal Yeager)

US News

At Least 43 Killed in Christmas Storms Tornadoes and flash flooding have left at least 43 people dead and have forced the states of Missouri, Oklahoma, and New Mexico to declare states of emergency. The region's misery is not over yet: Tornado warnings have been issued for Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Mississippi. - NBC News

Chicago Cop Kills Two
A Chicago police officer shot and killed Bettie Jones, 55, and her upstairs neighbor, 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier, after cops responded to a call in the building. In a statement, the Chicago Police Department called the incident an accident. Both Jones and LeGrier were black. - Chicago Sun Times

Colleges Ease up on Athletes Smoking Weed
At least one-third of college sports departments are punishing athletes less harshly for testing positive for drugs like marijuana than they were a decade ago, according to the Associated Press. The chief medical officer of the NCAA wants the governing body to stop testing for recreational drugs altogether. - AP

Trump Slams GOP's Loyalty Pledge
Donald Trump has attacked the Republican Party of Virginia for its plan to make primary voters sign a pledge confirming they are Republicans. Trump, who has attracted support from first-time voters and those disenchanted with traditional politics, issued a series of tweets about the "BAD" policy. - The Washington Post

International News

Iraqi Forces Take Ramadi Back
Iraqi forces are now in "full control" of Ramadi according to government officials, but "pockets of resistance" from the Islamic State remain around the city. A source told the BBC it might still be a few days before "full liberation" of Ramadi, taken by the Islamic State back in May, is declared. - BBC

Syrian Rebels Evacuated
Thanks to a deal arranged by the UN, a group of Syrian rebel fighters and their families will be evacuated from Zabadani, a town near the Lebanese border besieged by government forces. - Al Jazeera

Japan Sets up 'Comfort Women' Fund
Japan and South Korea has reached a deal to settle a long-running dispute over the "comfort women" forced to work in Japanese brothels during World War Two. Japan offered an apology and will pay 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) into a fund for victims. Only 46 former "comfort women" are alive. - BBC News

Tensions Between Israel and Brazil
Brazil's reluctance to accept a new Israeli ambassador, a former head of the controversial West Bank settlement movement, has left Israel warning it could downgrade diplomatic relations with the South American country. The appointment of Dani Dayan has not been confirmed by Brazil's left-leaning, pro-Palestinian government. - The Guardian

Peyton Manning. Photo via Flickr user Jeffrey Beall

Everything Else

Peyton Manning Denies Using HGH
The Denver Broncos' quarterback is "furious" and "disgusted" by an Al Jazeera report claiming he has used a performance-enhancing human growth hormone. Manning says he will "probably" sue. - ESPN

'Borat' Star Gives $1 Million to Syrians
Sacha Baron Cohen and his wife Isla Fisher have donated $500,000 to Save the Children to pay for Syrian kids' measles vaccinations, and another $500,000 to the International Rescue Committee to help refugees. - CBS News

North Korea's OS Secrets Revealed
Researchers have examine "RedStar OS," North Korea's Linux-based operating system. The totalitarian state uses it to enforce rigorous monitoring of its citizens. - Motherboard

America's Biggest Manga Company Relaunches
TOKYOPOP was once the no.1 producer of English-language manga titles, before collapsing in 2011. Founder Stu Levy says a reboot in 2016 will give creators "complete control." - VICE

How to Make Money by Returning Expensive Shit
One woman has been scamming the beauty industry for two years by concealing used products in new boxes. - Broadly

Since around this time last year, photographer Alice Zoo has been pointing her camera at stuff in fairgrounds and amusement parks for a project titled Be Happy or Leave.

Alice sent us some of the photos she's taken at Winder Wonderland, the sprawling attraction in London's Hyde Park where you're just as likely to see a young family eating hot dogs on an ice rink as you are eight very drunk men quite aggressively singing along to Mariah Carey in the Bavarian beer tent.

See more from Alice at her website.

Cocaine seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Photo via DEA official website

One hundred years ago this March, the Harrison Narcotics Act came into force, heralding the onset of American drug prohibition. It promptly spread across the globe. 2015, however, may well be remembered as the year that the cure for criminalization broke the drug war fever.

If nothing else, there have been an awful lot of encouraging signs since January.

For starters, 2015 was marked by a hastening of the end of the national war on pot. Two new states—Oregon and Alaska—joined Colorado and Washington in implementing recreational marijuana legalization, as did Washington, DC, (albeit in a bizarre fashion that doesn't actually provide a reliable source of legal pot other than growing your own.)

Gallup polling in favor of complete national legalization also matched an all-time high of 58 percent, with support having roughly doubled since the 1990s, and more than a dozen states could vote on pot legalization either through ballot initiatives or legislatures in 2016. The only apparent setback was the failure of a legalization initiative in Ohio. But that was a special case, as it was clear that what voters didn't like in that case was creating another rich oligopoly by limiting sales to a small group of companies—they didn't oppose legalization, per se.

The top two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have both expressed some openness to allowing states to legalize, with Sanders going further and suggesting that marijuana be removed from federal drug prohibition laws, as well. And even Republican candidates Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz are in favor of letting the states decide—an unprecedented level of mainstream political support for what as recently as the 1990s seen as a fringe position.

While some Republican contenders like Marco Rubio remain firmly opposed to legalization, the lack of a clear frontrunner in the GOP race means that it is distinctly possible we have an election where both the Republican and Democratic candidates agree on allowing states to legalize pot. The Obama administration, moreover, just urged the Supreme Court to reject a case brought by neighboring states that seeks to end legalization in Colorado because it is supposedly flooding Nebraska and Oklahoma with dank.

The good news goes far beyond marijuana, however. Although Republican candidate Chris Christie still staunchly opposes legalization of any type, a speech he made urging that addiction be viewed as a disease rather than a criminal justice problem—one that sounded like it could have been written by legalizers—went viral in late October, garnering millions of page views.

Not long thereafter, "drug czar" Michael Botticelli appeared on 60 Minutes making the same case. "We can't arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people," he said. "We've learned addiction is a brain disease. This is not a moral failing." So now the White House office once devoted exclusively to promoting the drug war is at least saying a public health approach to all drugs is better, though the national drug control budget still suggests otherwise.

Even the cops began taking steps towards drug decriminalization in 2015. A formal initiative, started in 2011 in Seattle and known as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), showed stunning results in an outcomes evaluation published this year. The idea of LEAD is to bring the concept of "harm reduction" into policing: Rather than trying to force drug users to quit by arresting and incarcerating them, the program aims to cut harm by attracting users into recovery, or at least less-harmful use instead.

In the study, LEAD participants—typically, homeless and often mentally ill people with addictions—were around 60 percent less likely to be re-arrested, compared to those who were simply booked as usual, in the six months after being evaluated. To spur recovery, LEAD offers services like housing, health care, and treatment. Unlike in drug courts, participation is voluntary and abstinence from drug use is not required.

LEAD has been so successful that it is already being replicated in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Albany, New York—and a White House conference was held in July to get the word out to representatives of at least 25 police departments, including New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

This is nothing like your parents' anti-drug policy.

And LEAD isn't even the only police-driven step towards drug decriminalization. Other departments and officials made moves in the same direction, like Leonard Campanello, thepolice chief of Gloucester, Massachusetts. After seeing repeated overdose deaths, he announced on his department's Facebook page that he would offer amnesty from possession charges and help get treatment to drug users who came to the station. The post went viral and the program he eventually developed has now been picked up by roughly 40 departments in about a dozen states.

Opioid harm-reduction also expanded dramatically this year. Last month, the FDA finally approved a nasal spray version of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, and it seems like every day, a new police force, fire department, school, or program for drug users and their loved ones announces a distribution and training program. Shortly thereafter, without fail, reports of lifesaving use of the drug have followed. Pharmacies like CVS began making naloxone available over the counter in 14 states, including California and New Jersey, and Rite Aid is now joining in to do the same in New York.

Perhaps more important, conservatives and liberals in Congress actually joined forces to craft legislation that would cut mandatory minimum drug sentences and pledged to seek additional ways of ending what everyone now—disparagingly!—labels "mass incarceration." Sadly, complete elimination of these harmful and ineffective sentences is not on the table, but since the proposed law would be retroactive, it would at least help bring many people who have been incarcerated for far too long home.

Of course, no consideration of drug policy in 2015 could be complete without highlighting the resilient Black Lives Matter movement, which arose following the police killing of unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in 2013 and Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014. This year, BLM confronted both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, taking her to task in particular for her role in supporting the harsh drug policies of her husband.

Racism has played a starring role in American drug policy right from the start. Indeed, the Harrison Act was passed with clear racist intent, with Southern states traditionally opposed to federal intervention embracing a ban on cocaine because it supposedly made black men both harder to kill and more likely to rape white women. Around the same time, California banned opium because it was said to allow Chinese men to seduce or rape white women.

Now, however, many media outlets are emphasizing that the latest drug epidemic—heroin and prescription opioids—is mainly a white problem ( actually, this has been true for decades). At the same time, support for criminalizing users is crumbling—and this is obviously no coincidence, even the New York Times noticed. While it's shameful that framing addiction as a white problem may be what it takes to end or dramatically scale down the drug war, at least it helps move the needle in the right direction. One hundred years of using drug laws to demonize and repress minorities while continuously increasing the harm related to addiction—rather than addressing it—is more than enough.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Nineteen-year-old Quintonio LeGrier wasn't exactly in the holiday spirit last week. The honor roll student who ran in a marathon for charity two years ago skipped dinner on Christmas, and when his father, Antonio, returned home that night, they argued. At one point before dawn on Saturday, LeGrier—who had recently been hospitalized for dehydration and hyperactivity, and whose mother says he was mentally ill—began brandishing a metal baseball bat. His father called the cops, and warned a neighbor, 55-year-old Bettie Jones, about what was going on.

Jones and the teenager were both dead by sunrise, shot and killed by a Chicago police officer.

In the latest incident of violence by America's second-largest police force, family members say officers unloaded multiple shots into both Jones and LeGrier upon arrival at the scene, as the New York Times reports. After weeks of unrest following the delayed release of the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald getting shot 16 times, the incident quickly added fuel to the fire of local resentment of police and represents the latest headache for embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Responding officers attributed the shootings to a "combative subject," with police suggesting LeGrier came charging down the stairs with the bat and that Jones—a grandmother who was active with local anti-violence community groups—was accidentally shot in the mayhem. But family members and activists say the incident just speaks to how poorly equipped cops are at dealing with people who are suffering from mental problems—and, of course, itchy police trigger fingers.

"You call for help, and the police are supposed to serve us and protect us, and yet they take the lives," Janet Cooksey, LeGrier's mother, told the Times. "What's wrong with that picture? It's a badge to kill?"

According to initial autopsy reports, Jones was fatally shot in the chest and LeGrier suffered several wounds; the final reports, which have yet to be released, may shed light on the discrepancy between the number of shots tallied by family and the county medical examiner.

Since the McDonald video exploded onto the scene , Emanuel has ousted his police superintendent and replaced the head of his city's notoriously inept independent police review body. Earlier this month, the feds finally added Chicago to the various cities whose police forces' the Department of Justice is probing for excesses. But Emanuel has recently been re-elected, meaning that those who blame him for the city's policing problems will have a while to wait to hold him accountable.

"There are serious questions about yesterday's shootings that must be answered in full by the Independent Police Review Authority's investigation," Emanuel, who's currently vacationing in Cuba, said in a statement Sunday. "While their investigation is underway, we must also make real changes within our Police Department today, and it is clear changes are needed to how officers respond to mental health crises.

In the meantime, the officer who did the shooting has reportedly been placed on administrative leave but has yet to be identified to the public. LaGrier's father told the Chicago Sun-Times that the cop knew "he had messed up" and was standing outside, distraught and yelling, after the shooting.

Given the Windy City's abysmal track record when it comes to holding cops accountable for crimes of any kind, it's safe to say local activists aren't exactly holding their breath. Protesters were reportedly planning to march from McDonald's family church to City Hall on Monday.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Tamir Rice. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Calling the death of a 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of police on a Cleveland playground last year a "perfect storm of human error," Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty announced on Monday that a grand jury had declined to indict any officers for his killing.

Rice, who had been playing with a toy gun at the city's Cudell Recreation Center that day in November 2014, was killed by Officer Timothy Loehmann when he fired two shots almost immediately upon rolling up in a cruiser with his partner, Frank Garmback. Family members and activists have been clamoring for murder charges ever since. But McGinty—who has been sharply criticized for a bevy of publicly-revealed expert reports suggesting the shooting was justified—did not recommend that jurors press murder charges, and insisted at a Monday press conference the video evidence that the child was reaching for his replica gun at the time of the incident was "indisputable."

Therefore, McGinty told reporters, Loehmann—who was forced out of at a previous policing gig when he lost his shit during a gun drill—was not criminally liable.

"The death of Tamir Rice was an absolute tragedy but it was not, by the law that binds us, a crime," he said Monday, adding that he informed the child's mother of the decision before going public. "It was a tough conversation... She was broken up."

The 9-1-1 caller who spurred the initial police attention to the park that day told the dispatcher the suspect was likely a kid and the gun "probably fake," but those key details never reached Loehmann and Garmback. Now Rice's family, which released its own reports suggesting the shooting was not justified, is left to hope that the feds get involved with a case of their own. That's not impossible, given the consent decree reached between the city and the Department of Justice over past police excesses in Cleveland, but for now, the yearlong investigation represents one of the more glaring instances of American prosecutors being reluctant to indict cops.

This has been a great year for VICE documentaries. We released a true crime series called Red Right Hand, started a daily variety show, and took home ten Webby Awards in 2015, including Best Documentary Series for our show The Real and the People's Choice Webby for Best Individual News and Politics Episode for one of our Russian Roulette dispatches.

To cap off 2015, we asked some of the bigwigs around the VICE office to put together lists of their favorite documentaries from the past year. Today, we've got a list from VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi.

Alvi's top ten docs of 2015 includes episodes from Noisey's Atlanta series, VICE News' investigation of Canadians joining ISIS, and the time Action Bronson met Mario Batali.

Give the ten videos a watch above, and get ready for a whole new slew of documentaries in 2016.

The third season of our Emmy-winning HBO show wrapped up last summer, and ever since then, we've been hard at work on our next string of episodes about the pressing and untold stories happening around the globe.

Now, HBO has announced a release date for that new season. VICE will be back on the air Friday, February 5 at 11PM, exclusively on HBO.

We've got a ton of new and exciting stuff planned for the 18-episode season, from Thomas Morton checking out what life on Mars would really be like to Gianna Toboni heading to Paris for the first large-scale vigil since the tragic shooting last November.

You can watch a trailer for the new season above, and keep an eye out for the premiere of season four in February 2016.