Jonathan Duhamel, WSOP Champion 2010. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Like most things in my furiously pathetic existence, my interest in poker is a result of watching compilations on YouTube. Usually TV poker is the preserve of insomniacs or lonely post-pub men eating cold curry on the sofa, but for hours on end, I will sit and consume video after video of "sick" hands, angry players "tilting," and something called a "slow roll," which is apparently the worst thing you can do in poker other than shoot Wild Bill Hickok himself in the back of the head.

Last night, after watching the fifth clip of "poker brat" Phil Hellmuth calling some poor man speaking in broken English an "idiot," I thought to myself: How hard can this actually be? If I follow the mantras of my TV poker heroes, like snaggle-toothed former drug case pariah Justin Schwartz, could I too win big? Could I be the next bracelet winner on the World Series of Poker?

While online poker is illegal in most of the US, it's regulated in the UK, so I downloaded poker app Full Tilt, stuck $50 of my own money in, and prepared to get down to some serious Hold 'Em. But first I had to get in the right mindset, and for poker, that means:

DOWNING ENERGY DRINKS

Photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart

Anyone with a brain and a vitamin D deficiency knows that the only route to success in any kind of online competition is a dedication to playing all night. And if you're too poor to maintain a cocaine regimen, then energy drinks will have to suffice. Setting up for this long old game of cards, I necked my first ever can of Monster, which—I don't mind telling you, readers—was gross as fuck. I had three sips, and my teeth felt like they had gained sentience.

WEARING SUNGLASSES

It seems that all the at-least mediocre players buss out the sunnies for the full poker face effect. I know I was playing online, but you still need some bottle when it comes to facing people digitally, as anyone who's had a protracted Twitter argument with a D-list celebrity will tell you. You're playing with poker nerds here. They'll be able to feel the scroll wheel tremble and rattle inside your mouse while you hold a pair of twos. You need to retain composure. I needed to retain composure. The glasses went on, and the Monster went in. I was ready.

I learned from the masters. All I needed to do now was:

BE A DICK

I'd never gambled before, aside from the stupid friend bets you make on the bus, where money is just a useful punch line in pointing out how a football team is shit and can't win anything. But now I was playing with real money it was time to get mean. With "Taurine" and "L-Carnitine" pulsing through my bloodstream, I thought it prudent to start jacking my fellow matrix men with some jibes. If I managed to lower their confidence to startling levels, they would be less inclined to fight back against my extortionate bets. Granted, I'd only gone in with $20 (and the blinds were less than a dollar each), but shit, you've got to start being a high roller somewhere, right? Rome wasn't built in a day.

ANNOY PLAYERS BY CONSTANTLY GUESSING THEIR HANDS

Canadian poker player Daniel Negreanu has won six World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelets in the past decade. He is also a motormouth who babbles incessantly during the play and continually tries (usually successfully) to read the hands of the other players, effectively psyching them out. I realized that, without my booming baritone voice and menacing cadence, this wouldn't have as much of an effect on the Full Tilt poker app for Mac—but if I didn't try, I'd be kicking myself forever.

I could feel the ninja and the pirate getting wary, and the dog was seconds from folding from this high stakes $1.67 pot.

But it doesn't work if you just do it once; you have to keep hammering the point home. You're a poker guru. You're the Nostradamus of online Vegas, and your competitors would do well not to test your superpowers, lest they lose all the cash in their pot (the amount of money it takes to buy a glass bottle of Coca Cola).

EXPERIENCE HEARTACHE

For all my blustering, I wasn't doing too well. After being dealt a full house of queens and kings, like the world's most handsome diplomat, I ended up royally fucked by the chip leader, who somehow had a better hand and made me feel like the a human toilet.

My already meager buy in of $20 was now down to a pitiful $4.48. I had disappointed my heroes. I'm sorry, Daniel Negreanu, Wild Bill, "Action" Dan Harrington. I'm just a loser like the rest of these loser-ass losers.

GAIN REDEMPTION

My power hour was up. I managed to claw my way back up to $16 or thereabouts, but my view on poker—having dipped my caffeinated fingers into its murky pools—was changed forever. I loved the thrill of winning money, but unsurprisingly, I wasn't keen on the horror show of losing it.

I thought being a poker ace was just a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of drinking green goo and being a prick, and I don't doubt it mostly is that. But I learned a more valuable lesson: Poker takes skill, and it's about confidence in yourself and your fellow players that matters the most.

I left the table at the right time, before I sunk into the abyss of gambling that has consumed so many before me.

Just kidding. Everything's gone.

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

OJ Simpson confers with his lawyers during a pre-trial hearing January 12, 1995. (Photo by Lee Celano/WireImage)

With a time code rolling in the lower left corner, a grainy hand-held video shows a black man being beaten by a bevy of white police officers near the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street in Los Angeles in 1991. It is quickly followed by news footage from the next year announcing that the four LAPD cops who assaulted him were found not guilty of assault charges in the attack. Riots break out in South Los Angeles as angry protestors loot local businesses, set buildings aflame, tip over cars and buses, and violently clash with police.

These archival TV clips set the stage for FX's new ten-part miniseries, The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. Leaning on a star-studded cast including Cuba Gooding Jr. as OJ, the true crime show chronicles the spectacle of Simpson's arrest and trial for the double-murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994.

That this dramatized version of events has captured the attention of millions of viewers and set an FX viewership record for an original drama premiere speaks to the enduring fascination of the grisly tale behind it. With a mountain of evidence stacked against him, including a bloody glove found at his house and a bloody shoe print at the crime scene that was just his size, Simpson's "not guilty" verdict in 1995 was the product of an explosive era in Los Angeles policing.

"The war on crime and the war on drugs were coming in full throttle," explains Joe Domanick, author of Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing. "The black community really saw the exoneration of OJ as their triumph."

In fact, the black community was so desperate for a win in the legal system—redemption for the acquittal of the Rodney King officers, among other civil rights issues—that "whether OJ was innocent or not was not their concern," according to Domanick, who serves as associate director of the Center on Media, Crime, and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, Cuba Gooding Jr. as OJ Simpson. Photo by Ray Mickshaw/FX

It didn't matter that Simpson probably got the "best treatment from the LAPD of any black person in Los Angeles," as Domanick puts it. After all, Simpson used to host officers at his mansion to take a dip in the pool or play a game of tennis, and he even attended Christmas parties thrown by the LAPD's West LA division. Simpson also beat his wife Nicole so badly that she ended up in the hospital, and he was finally arrested in 1989 after police had been called on eight previous occasions. (Thanks to a friendly judge, he did no jail time.)

In 1990, the LAPD was about 61 percent white, 22 percent Latino, and 14 percent black, according to data published by the Los Angeles Times. Homicide detectives and the LAPD elite within the predominantly white police force operated with independence and impunity in part because the police chief at the time, Willie Williams, allowed them to.

So it came as no surprise when Simpson's star-studded defense team accused police investigators of mishandling evidence, ignoring chain-of-custody requirements, and illegally searching Simpson's home. Detective Mark Fuhrman was accused of hopping Simpson's fence without a search warrant on the night of the murder and planting the bloody glove on his property. Adding to the sense of intrigue, the defense obtained audiotapes and transcripts of Fuhrman spouting racial slurs during an interview.

Fuhrman was in fact "cocky" and embodied the "hard-nosed white cop detective attitude" that was emblematic of the time, according to Domanick. In today's LAPD ranks however, it would be difficult for a cop like him to flourish.

"The LAPD is a very different department, both in terms of its policing philosophy and what it's trying to do... to change its relationship with minority communities," Domanick says.

These days, the department is 33 percent white, with the dominating demographic being Latinos at about 46 percent, according to February 2016 statistics obtained by VICE from the LAPD. While only 11 percent of the current police force is black, a downtick from 1990, LAPD ranks in general have moved closer to mirroring the actual demographics of the city the officers serve.

The end of the LAPD's wild west era came a few years after the Simpson trial, when in the late 90s dozens of officers in the department's Rampart Division were accused of gross misconduct, tampering with evidence, and physically abusing suspects. As a result, under the oversight of the Department of Justice and a federal juge, the LAPD was placed under a consent decree that changed the shape of the department, according to Lieutenant John Jenal, a 29-year LAPD veteran.

Cuba Gooding Jr. as OJ Simpson. Photo by Byron Cohen/FX

This legally binding agreement was intended to "promote police integrity" and established a new behavioral tracking system that tallied complaints, lawsuits, and use-of-force incidents against each officer so supervisors could keep tabs on shady behavior, Jenal explains. It also required police to conduct more extensive investigations into each use-of-force incident, and it mandated they publicize officer-involved shootings on the public LAPD website.

But even if the LAPD has changed, the OJ Simpson story remains irresistible. As the Black Lives Matter movement has gained momentum over the last year and a half, and the tally of black men killed by police climbs, the Simpson case lingers in the national imagination.

"What makes the story feel so topical is that it's fundamentally a story about race and the criminal justice system," says author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

The FX show is based on Toobin's book, The Run of his Life: The People vs. OJ Simpson. The journalist had a special role in the case from the start: As a reporter for the New Yorker in 1994, he was the first to publicize the defense's aggressive strategy of invoking racial bias on part of local law enforcement.

Until now, the Simpson case was one of the most famous events in American history never to be properly dramatized—a "perfect combination of everything that obsesses the American people," as Toobin puts it.

Murder defendant OJ Simpson listens to the not guilty verdict with his attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran Jr. in 1995. (Photo by MYUNG J. CHUN/AFP/Getty Images)

Those things include celebrity, sex, and murder.

"It's very hard to imagine the same set of circumstances because they were just so bizarre," Toobin says.

Fanaticism surrounding the case was largely a product of the pre-internet, pre-social media environment in which it took place. The country was collectively enraptured with the Simpson story and united by the relatively few news sources that were there to deliver it. If the case were to proceed in 2016, Toobin believes, it'd be much easier for the public to ignore it or get past the sensationalized coverage by changing the channel or clicking on a different website.

Beginning with the slow-speed Bronco chase that interrupted network broadcasts of the 1994 NBA finals between the Knicks and Rockets, Simpson's story played out in front of a national audience. Televising the more than 130-day proceedings was in and of itself controversial, as having cameras in the courtroom had a tangible impact on the Simpson case, Toobin maintains. Lawyers and witnesses often played to the cameras, trying to either get publicity for themselves or shape public opinion in a way that could ultimately influence the jury.

VICE reached out to many of the prosecutors and defense attorneys directly involved in the Simpson case. While some did not respond to emails, others declined to participate. Lead defense lawyer Robert Shapiro—played in the show by an effete John Travolta—wrote in an email that it's his "longstanding policy not to comment on the matter," while co-counsel F. Lee Bailey wished to see the entire FX series before commenting for this story.

OJ Simpson appears in court with attorneys Gabriel Grasso and Yale Galanter prior to sentencing at the Clark County Regional Justice Center December 5, 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada.(Photo by Issac Brekken-Pool/Getty Images)

Simpson may have been found not guilty of the criminal charges in this case, but in 1997, he lost a civil suit and was ordered to pay a total of $33.5 million to the families of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Then, in 2008, Simpson was convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery for busting into a Las Vegas casino hotel room and stealing hundreds of pieces of sports memorabilia at gunpoint. Simpson claimed the items, including relics from the hall of fame NFL career that made him a socialite in Laguna Beach, belonged to him, and he was merely trying to get them back.

Now 68, Simpson is currently incarcerated at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada, serving a sentence of nine to 33 years. The prison doesn't get FX or allow DVDs, so Simpson presumably hasn't seen the show chronicling his own case. But he reportedly thinks Cuba Gooding Jr.'s head is too small to play him, and he is "upset" that the show insinuates he's guilty.

Simpson will be eligible for parole as early as next year.

Follow Hayley Fox on Twitter.

All photos by Mirko Lux

The prospect of Brexit looms large over Europe. The polls are getting tighter, and the tension is rising. This fear is felt more acutely in places like Berlin than it is in Bradford. The German capital is home to an estimated 5,600 Brits, most of whom are getting relatively squeaky-bummed about the potentially drastic change in their living and working arrangements.

One man worrying more than most is ex-pat journalist and campaigner Jon Worth. He took it upon himself to organize a meeting on the topic in a central Berlin pub. The idea behind it was simple: "I do not know many British people in Berlin," he told me. "I want to find out what they think. Are they scared? Angry? Ready to campaign? Or are they ready to get German passports if they need them, and do they prefer Berlin over any call back to 'home?'" To that end, more than a hundred people gathered in a pub basement last week to watch a panel discussion and engage in some great British traditions: drinking, worrying, and getting politely angry.

The crowd was pro-EU, as you might imagine from a room of predominantly expats, and in a flash poll at the end, only one vote was cast to leave. Still, the mood of unease was clear, so VICE spoke to a few of Berlin's Brits to ask them about the effect of the Brexit on their relationships with fellow Berliners, their motivations for coming to the meeting, and their messages to the folks back in Blighty.

Helen Turek from Essex

VICE: What do you think would happen to you if there was a Brexit?
I think that's the problem really. I think there's a lot of uncertainty and no one really knows. What could happen is that my rights to work would be taken away, but what I think is going to happen is that there will be lengthy procedures and new agreements. I assume that I'll be allowed to stay, but it's going to make life a lot more difficult.

How do you feel the German government should treat the British government concerning the referendum?
I think every country has a right to renegotiate its position within the EU and its relationship with the Lisbon Treaty. Every country has that right and should be listened to if it has concerns, but for me, the Germans think the British are pestering themselves.

What message would you send to people back home?
I know that the majority of the people who are going to vote to remain will have had the same kind of experience that I have had and many of the people here understand that privilege. I would remind British people of what a privilege it is. I came here for six months, and six years later I'm still here.

Tamarlane from London

What do you think Germans think about Brexit?
I guess I think the problem is that experts on either side of the debate don't know what's going to happen. On the one hand, there is a feeling that Britain leaving would do a lot of damage to the EU. At least in the short term, it would cause people to lose faith in it. But on the other hand, I could see why a lot of Germans would be pissed off at the British for wanting so many special conditions and that many might say that maybe they'd be better off if we did leave, and then every else that is left is more committed to the project.

Will from Cheshire

How do you feel the prospect of a Brexit is affecting your relations with Germans?
From European perspective, the British debate is a non-debate. We're talking all the time about in/out, but we're not actually talking about the important issues in Europe, and that's the main point for me. It's obscuring the debate. It's obscuring what we can bring positively to the European Union.

What would happen to you personally if a Brexit happens?
I think there's a lot of uncertainty, and nobody really knows. But I've lived here for five or six years, so I would go for German citizenship to try to avoid the uncertainty of potentially having to get a visa.

How do you feel the Germans should react the British government concerning the referendum?
It's confusing, because Germany has a very different relationship with the EU. It's much more integrated. Germans are very frustrated that Britain wants to leave because it has repercussions on its relationship with the EU, and particularly with regards to EU foreign policy. Britain will still have to negotiate with the EU on many different levels, and if we look at environmental policy and its consumer policies. Britain has been really helped by the European Union in raising standards.

Daniel from Middlesborough

How do you feel the perception of British people within Germany has been changed by this referendum?
Basically every time Brexit is mentioned among Germans, they just laugh.

What message would you send to people back home?
I would make sure that British people realize that the whole immigration thing works both ways. I came to Berlin because I was fed up of the UK mentality. People are only happy when they have something to complain about.

David from Devon

What would happen to you personally if there was a Brexit?
It'd be a lot more difficult to remain here, so the selfish option would be to vote to remain here. Nevertheless, I'm undecided, and that's why I'm here tonight.

What message would you send to people back home?
I would say to the average Briton to really vote in what they think is Britain's best interest. They shouldn't worry about us expats. If we like where we live and we've lived here long enough, we're already happy to take German citizenships. I come from a fishing and farming area, and everyone there has been anti-EU all my life. If it's what makes them happier, that's how they should vote.

Follow Mike and Mirko Lux on Twitter.

Our seats are arranged in a circle around a laptop connected to speakers. The track is "Dear Mama" by 2Pac—a poignant love letter from the late rapper to his mother, apologizing for the jail cells she had to visit him in. Everyone sits quietly, reading the lyrics as the song plays through.

One of the first lines resonates here: "When I was young, me and my mama had beef / 17 years old, kicked out on the streets."

"I feel him, like..." one teenager, quickly wiping away tears, says into a microphone after the song ends. "I got kicked out when I was 17, and my mom wanted nothing to do with me. And my dad, I don't even fuck with him."

The mic gets passed around, as the other members of the circle—all dressed in their brown jumpsuits, with white socks and black velcro shoes—react to the 1995 ballad. Some don't say much; others open up. The mic eventually makes its way back to another teenager who refused to talk the first time around.

"My mom is the strongest woman I know," he says. "She did everything for me, and she did it all alone."

He pauses, putting the mic down before shaking his head and continuing with a small laugh, "And now I'm in jail."

Prior to FromSoftware's Souls series, few gamers would be able to tell you who Hidetaka Miyazaki was. Heavily involved with the Armored Core franchise in the mid-noughties, the Shizuoka-born game director ultimately found fame through 2011's Dark Souls and its sleeper-hit predecessor of two years earlier, Demon's Souls. He's since supervised 2014's Dark Souls II and steered 2015's Bloodborne from concept art to classic status. And 2016 sees Miyazaki return to directing duties for Dark Souls III, the most anticipated of the Souls series titles so far.

Having played some of Dark Souls III, it's exactly how you might expect it to be, given the precedent set by previous series entries. The ruined gothic fantasy setting coupled with a notoriously harsh (but fair) approach to combat gave gamers what they wanted on prior adventures, and the landscapes seen in this new project aren't so distant from those we've died in, over and over again, before now.

The element of surprise, though, has gone—Dark Souls III, in the builds experienced thus far, isn't deviating too much from the tried-and-tested formula of fight effectively or be slain horribly. But then, if it's so very far from broken, why risk compromising one of the Souls series' greatest traits, just to open it up to less-committed gamers? Dark Souls is supposed to be tough, and Dark Souls III is just that. And a little familiarity might just have been what its makers had in mind.

"What we want to communicate to the fans is that there's an inherent beauty that can be found within everything, beyond all the withering and decay."

"Particular areas, notably at the beginning of the game, are 'classic' to the franchise," Miyazaki tells me, at a preview event held in Hamburg, Germany. "We've made it to resemble what players may have seen in the past." And so it plays out: red dragons, maidens with unspeakable power. Seen it, done it, got the blood-stained T-shirt, thanks. So what's new, here?

"As you progress through the game, players will see the development of an 'end of days,'" Miyazaki explains. "This is evoked through the sadness and melancholy of enemies in the world. We will be featuring a variety of new enemies, while still keeping memorable ones from earlier installments."

Some areas that we visit, notably The High Wall of Lothric, look noticeably brighter than previous areas explored in the Souls series. The palette was first filled with yellows and browns, moving onto unrelenting hues of purple and red in 2015's Bloodborne. Dark Souls has always been about fading flames, but Miyazaki clearly has different ideas in mind for Dark Souls III's aesthetic direction.

"The main concept of Dark Souls III is the first flame and its successors; the world has been in this cycle of reigniting the flame since the first game, but now it seems to be disappearing, almost dying. We're trying to draw out the aspects of this withering flame. We have also changed the game's palette to fit into this concept of withering beauty. The colors are more muted and sublime. The levels, dragons, enemies, monsters, even NPCs still have that sense of dignity.

"We emphasize sadness and loneliness, too, which can be seen in both the environments and life forms within the game. What we want to communicate to the fans is that there's an inherent beauty that can be found within everything, beyond all the withering and decay."

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Related: Watch VICE's film, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

Miyazaki became president of FromSoftware in 2014, meaning that he is in direct control of everything the studio green-lights and goes on to actually produce. Dark Souls III was already in planning before he earned his promotion, and just prior to that, FromSoft was bought by the Chiyoda-based Kadokawa Corporation. There have never been more eyes on the Souls series than there are, right now, in the run up to Dark Souls III. And, every so often, that pressure can lead to divisions within the ranks, even at the highest levels.

In 2015, Hideo Kojima left Konami, a studio he'd enjoyed working with for the best part of 20 years. There'd been growing friction between the Metal Gear Solid director and the Tokyo-headquartered gaming giant, and the drama that preceded his announcement of a new, independent Kojima Productions was very visibly played out in public. That situation makes me wonder if Miyazaki could ever find himself in a similar position, now that Dark Souls is becoming as well loved as the Metal Gear series—which means, naturally, that it's expected to sell in ever-rising numbers.

"I don't really know the details of what happened between Hideo Kojima-san and Konami, but at least from my perspective, I feel that there is a certain freedom when it comes to creativity. It's quite obvious that the Dark Souls franchise is reaching a turning point, and I'm happy that I have a greater budget for the third game, as well as the creative freedom to make my own decisions. But if there were some restrictions about what I was creating, I definitely wouldn't want to work on it."

Though its focus is on the Souls series right now, FromSoftware hasn't always been making teeth-grindingly difficult fantasy RPGs. In 2004 the studio put out the fantastically titled, Japan-exclusive Metal Wolf Chaos for the original Xbox console, a mechs-and-more third-person shooter that has since gained a cult reputation with copies trading on eBay for upwards of $150. Miyazaki joined From the same year as the game came out, and it's one of his favorite titles the company's put out to this day—and it's also a title that stateside indie publisher Devolver Digital has tweeted interest in porting for modern audiences.

"I want to work on a mix of fantasy and mecha genres, but other people at FromSoftware would think that would be an impossible idea."

"I really like Metal Wolf Chaos, but it's not my title," Miyazaki says. "You'd have to ask Takeuchi-san (Masanori Takeuchi), who is on our board of directors, about whether or not it can be revived. He's a pretty scary guy who used to be my boss, so I'm not going to speak for him! We can't say anything solid about whether we would do it or not, but if Takeuchi-san wanted to, then it's on the table."

Miyazaki also has fond memories of Otogi: Myth of Demons, a fast-and-furious hack-and-slash affair that From released in 2002 (2003 in the UK and US), again only for the Xbox. "Again, it'd be up to Takeuchi-san, but I really want to see a revived version of the Otogi series as well." (The original did receive a sequel—anyone for an HD special edition of both games together?)

'Dark Souls III', Shadows Ahead trailer

"We always look back at our back catalogue for inspiration for new titles," Miyazaki says, "but when it comes to very old things like the King's Field series, I'm concerned about just mimicking the style of what Naotoshi Zin, the founder of FromSoftware, created for the PlayStation original. I would rather not go back to it simply out of respect."

Post-release downloadable content, or DLC, has become a part of the Souls series—Artorias of the Abyss for the first game on console, the Lost Crowns Trilogy for II, and Bloodbourne received its Old Hunters expansion at the end of 2015. I figure, what with Miyazaki sitting right in front of me, I've the perfect chance to pitch some Dark Souls III DLC, relating to a game from his own past. Imagine, if you will, your avatar in gleaming armor, great sword in hand, so many enemies slain—and then taking that character into a gigantic, mechanized version of Demon's Souls' Tower Knight and taking on White Glint. Yep, I'm talking about a Souls-Armored Core crossover. Miyazaki laughs, of course, before answering:

"You know, we actually released a Dreamcast game pretty similar to that concept, named Frame Gride. It's a mix of fantasy and mecha genres, both of which I love working on. I'd love to work on a game that evokes the same themes as anime series like Aura Battler Dunbine and The Vision of Escaflowne, but it would be incredibly difficult to do so. I want to work on a game like that, but other people at FromSoftware would think that would be an impossible idea."

That said, surely if anyone in the industry right now has earned themselves a blank check to make whatever game they wanted to, it's Miyazaki. So, FromSoft's anime-inspired mecha-fantasy title for 2018 is certain to be announced soon. Probably.

Dark Souls III is released in Japan on March 24 and the rest of the world on April 12. Find more information at the game's official website. Special thanks to Brittney Cruz for her translation work. This interview was conducted at a press event in Germany, with travel and accommodation covered by Bandai Namco Entertainment.

Follow Sayem Ahmed on Twitter.

A homeless person takes refuge in a bus shelter in Montreal. THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Graham Hughes

The file on the conference room table at the Droit Devant legal clinic is about six inches thick, brimming with hundreds of sheets of paper. They are all fines, dating back over a decade, and represent a $110,000 worth of legal woes for one homeless man.

There's no way those fines will ever be paid to the Montreal municipal court. The man who owes them has left the province and there is no way of knowing if or when he'll be back in town, says Isabelle Raffestin, the coordinator of the Droit Devant, a legal services organization specializing in helping the homeless navigate the judicial system.

Artwork from the original releases of 'Red' and 'Blue'

Something extraordinary happened in the middle of the 1990s. Nintendo, a company fiercely proud and somewhat conservative when it came to its products, took a punt on a new idea by largely unknown development team Game Freak. The Big N were under the leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi at the time, a man notoriously harsh on external developers in order to ensure hard work and quality, particularly after the video games crash of the '80s that he had helped to fix. Regardless, Game Freak's young creative Satoshi Tajiri and his team won the patronage of Mario designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who would help them launch Pokémon.

Although Nintendo had long been carving its name into the annals of gaming history—with Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong in the throes of their peak years—this humble, little project, debuting in February 1996, would soar past all but one of their classic franchises. Today, Pokémon is the second-biggest-selling video game series of all time, with only Mario-branded productions ahead of it.

Offering personalized, collaborative gaming and a sense of friendship, Pokémon was social media before social media.

The original Pokémon games, Red and Green, were released for the Game Boy in Japan well ahead of ever coming to the West. By the time they did, reaching the US in 1998 and Europe the year after, Green had been swapped for Blue, issued in Japan in October '96. While they were almost identical, the differences between Green and Blue were mainly based around the Pokémon creatures exclusive to each version. Players would need to trade each other, using the Game Boy's Game Link Cable, in order to complete the Pokédex, an in-game encyclopedia of all 151 of the critters.

The charming tale behind the Pokémon concept stems from game director Tajiri's childhood, which he spent collecting bugs in the woods. When arcades began to surround his bucolic hiding spots, he aimed to reconcile his love of nature with his love of gaming and that's when his then-fanzine, Game Freak, would start their Pokémon journey.

Upon the launch of the first Game Boy titles, Pokémania hit the world in a major way. While Pokémon still boasts a huge community 20 years later, alongside formidable sales and a vast range of merchandise, today's kids and teenagers are never likely to experience the inescapable, ubiquitous phenomenon that followed those initial games, incorporating an anime cartoon, trading card game, comics, books, T-shirts, and virtually every other product you could slap a brand name on. Tajiri tried to capture the simpler, serene atmosphere of his youth, and he succeeded, creating an idealistic world that gave kids an escape from a buzzing digital age on the edge of a new century.

Leaving home in 'Red' and 'Blue,' all those years ago

By the time of the release of Red and Blue, Nintendo's consoles had played host to some of the most celebrated RPG adventures, including Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and A Link to the Past. What was special about Pokémon, however, was the extent to which players could imprint their own personalities on their party members. The sense of adventure was a lot more elastic—you chose your team of six, and then their nicknames and move-sets from the countless combinations. It wasn't as relatively linear as the role-players of old, in which you might get to choose your avatar's moniker and basic weaponry. Here in the setting of Kanto, you were in charge—the fantasy world of Pokémon was completely your own.

But an even greater part of the appeal was the aforementioned connectivity, which, in the days before Wi-Fi, necessitated a set of physical cables. Friends could pit their Pokémon against each other in battle or exchange them in a trade, a practice which is still a staple of the series and the only way to legitimately catch 'em all. Traded monsters carried histories, forever emblazoned with the name of their original trainer, making their way far and wide, one pair of connected Game Boys at a time. Swapping these creatures, into which each player had put time and effort, fostered a sense of widespread community, which undoubtedly helped engender a desire for the online, global gameplay that we enjoy today across various platforms. Offering personalized, collaborative gaming and a sense of friendship, Pokémon was social media before social media.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on the mystical universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

That said, Pokémon's attractive sharing side, its sunny everyman charm, only holds up if you don't buy into the unsettling urban legends attached to the game. If there's one thing a fanbase loves, it's fiction and theories, and Pokémon has been subject to countless amounts of speculation over the years. Grown-up fans try to find grown-up themes in their childhood games and, boy, do they find them. It's been speculated that the game subtly takes place in a post-war setting, and there's the much-repeated myth that the infamous Lavender Town music has driven Japanese children to suicide.

Looking back, Red and Blue are clunky anachronisms. Their dated aesthetics could render them unplayable in the eyes of a new generation.

But even as far back as the original lifespan of Red and Blue, fans' excitability expanded the boundaries of the humble, monochrome, 8bit land into vast realms of feverous legend, far beyond the fabled grass at the side of Pallet Town. Childlike wonderment also created tales of hidden "PokéGods" like Mewthree and Pikablu, and these were largely circulated by amateur Web 1.0 sites, the glittery animated .gif backgrounds of which will forever remain burned into the retinas of early players.

However, the real glitches and Easter eggs certainly helped perpetuate these playground stories. A mysterious truck parked by the SS Anne—which took some effort to reach—was the only sprite of its kind in the game and led to whispers of the elusive Mew hiding underneath, as though living up to its feline appearance. Then there was MissingNo., a jumbled mess of pixels that was created to serve as an error handler, but would appear as a wild Pokémon when exploiting the games' mechanics. The effect of this anthropomorphized piece of coding's effect on the fertile, suggestible minds of fans was so profound that its alien presence was accepted in the canon and it subsequently found itself the subject of academic studies.

But on that note of nostalgic fascination comes a harsh reality. Hype and sales of the recent 20th anniversary eShop ports will almost exclusively come from rose-tinted, decades-old fondness. Looking back, Red and Blue are clunky anachronisms riddled with broken mechanics and dodgy sprite artwork—Pidgeot was a winged head, and what the fuck was up with Moltres? They might serve as a sobering history lesson in the eyes of today's young players who have come to expect the comparative glitz of the DS family, but the dated aesthetics could render them unplayable in the eyes of a new generation.

The continued quality in modern games like X and Y, though, is the most fitting tribute to the phenomenon that Red and Blue spawned. The games' core concept has remained the same and their ideals exist today in an incredibly nuanced, deep, mathematical metagame, framed by beautiful 3DS landscapes teeming with fantastic creatures, regardless of what confusingly conservative genwunners might say. The beauty of the modern games is that while the competitive scene has become increasingly sophisticated, the story mode still offers a relaxing adventure for the newbie who wants to Earthquake and Hyper Beam their way to the end credits.

There is a demographic of 20- and 30-somethings who still get Butterfrees in their stomach at the reveal of 100 or so new cartoon creatures, whether they care to admit it or not. They'll have felt it 20 years ago when they chose Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle. They'll have felt it recently with the unveiling of the forthcoming Sun and Moon versions. And if the next 20 years are half as exciting, they'll feel it for a long time to come.

Pokémon, we chose you. And we wouldn't change a thing.

Pokémon Red, Blue, and the Pikachu-starring Yellow are available now for the 3DS, via the Nintendo eShop.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

Rise and shine. With barely four hours of sleep, I'm back at it, ready for an 8:30 AM flight to Dallas and then a quick ride over to Fort Worth to see Donald Trump, again. I've seen The Donald more times than I'd like to have at this point, but he's the front-runner in the Republican race, so I guess it's justified. By now, you've probably deduced that he's not exactly my cup of tea. Hell, I don't even like tea. Leaves me with a foul taste in my mouth. But people want to know what's going on out here, so here I am.

Hip-hop, as a culture, informs the American masses about what life is like in the inner cities. It also informs residents in those inner cities about the world outside their neighborhoods. I've been around hip-hop long enough to know what my duty is to those who come after me. No one is gonna give them the tools they need to graduate from the school of hard knocks, so it's on me to pull their coat tails and give them some game. That goes not just for music but for all facets of life, whether on the streets or even in the political field. And that's why I'm getting on this plane, tired as fuck, and heading back into the lion's den.

All photos by Ben Sklar

I land in Dallas and make a stop at the Quick Trip for cigarillos, car spray, and this blunt, before I hit the highway. I'm about to arrive at the Fort Worth Convention Center, where Trump is holding a press conference, when I find out the campaign has already given VICE's photographer Ben an ultimatum: He can enter the event without us, or he won't be allowed in at all. This is typical of the Trump campaign. Fuck outta here. The campaign's aggression toward journalists carries faint wafts of fascism, coming off the sports coats of Trump's security team like a cheap cologne. I don't want this trip to be a total bust, though, so I tell Ben to go ahead while I talk to some people outside. I see on social media that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is in there, endorsing Trump at the press conference. Bridge and Tunnel meets Park Avenue—a marriage made in heaven.

There's a huge crowd of protesters outside the venue, chanting "Racist Go Home!" as Trump's supporters line up at the entrance. We finally make our way to the media check-in, and to my surprise, we still have credentials. There are literally thousands of people here. It's insane. This is a space normally reserved for car shows, and it's filled to capacity for a political rally. It takes five minutes just to snake our way to the press pit. This is worse than trying to get a motorcycle jacket at the H&M x Balmain release. We find a spot between the risers and the sound board and lock in. People in the crowd are begging photographers in the pit to move because they're blocking the view. I've never been to an event where people had to stand behind the press risers. But this is a Trump rally. Facebook statuses must be updated, selfies must be taken, Snap stories must be told—and in Fort Worth, there's no one holding a candle to the celebrity of Donald Trump.

Christie is first up to speak, telling the crowd he's officially endorsed Donald Trump, that Donald is the guy who can bring jobs to the US and keep Hillary Clinton away from the White House. What a reversal of fortune for the Big Guy. It seems like Christie must be looking for the VP spot, or some other Cabinet post, because he's singing Trump's praises and gushing about how proud he is to be part of the team. When he asks the crowd if Texas is "Trump Country," the room shakes with a resounding, definitive "YES!"

Then he introduces the Heir Helmet himself. Camera phones go up all over the room, and the crowd starts to chant "USA!" Trump thanks Christie for the intro and starts to gloat about his debate performance in Houston, bragging that he won every online poll the night before. Which, of course, he did. He reminds the crowd that he'll destroy ISIS, and people cheer. At various points, people in the crowd will scream randomly, and it's hard to tell if they're pro-Trump or con. I assume pro, though, because I haven't seen anyone escorted out of the hall—yet.

Then Tump moves in for the kill. He refers to Marco Rubio, who went after Trump hard that night, as the "lightweight senator from Florida," dismissing him as a "little baby" and a "puppy" a couple of times. He also declares that Texas Senator Ted Cruz, his other chief Republican rival, is smarter than Rubio, clearly trying to pit his opponents against one another and deflect their attacks on him. That's some 48 Laws of Power shit.

Trump cracks a joke about Mitt Romney, who's been telling reporters that The Donald needs to release his tax returns. Trump dismisses Romney as a "terrible candidate" and declares he knew the 2012 GOP nominee would lose because he "walks like a penguin." The crowd cheers again, and Trump does a little Romney-penguin imitation for them. He tells the crowd that he supported both Romney and John McCain in their presidential races, but that after both candidates lost to Barack Obama, he decided that he should just run himself. Clearly, the message resonates.

Later, Trump moves on to the issue of Syrian refugees—and that's when the protest breaks out. A group of demonstrators standing in front of the press pit break out their signs and start chanting, and the crowd turns on them, booing and chanting right back. It gets very close to a physical confrontation, when a middle-aged white man in a Trump jersey gets in the face of one of the protesters, a young black man. At this point, I'm thinking that whoever thought to make these campaign jerseys, connecting sports merchandise with political fandom to take advantage of how much Americans want to belong to a winning team, is a fucking genius. Maybe he can help Trump get Mexico to pay for that wall.

An elderly white man nearby asks me what happened. I tell him they were protesting Trump's the treatment of Muslims. What the man says next is hard to digest: "Muslims? Here? My god!" I can't make this shit up folks. As Trump goes on, I notice that his speech is more loaded with conservative talking points, that it's not as loose as it's been before. Whatever he's doing, it's clearly working, like an infomercial about the world's worst right-wing hair product. Not only is he the spokesman, he's the company president. Both the hair and the message are terrifying.

The rally finally ends, and the Stones play as the crowd is ushered out of the building. In the plaza outside, Trump supporters and anti-Trump demonstrators are shouting at each other about "the Wall." The Trump fans are giddy, eagerly lining up at the Trump campaign's Winnebago, which is parked near the exit and giving out yard signs and bumper stickers for supporters to pass out ahead of Super Tuesday. Campaign volunteers are stationed at a table, signing people up to canvass for Trump, and there's no shortage of folks willing to put their names down to help out.

We meet back up with Ben, the photographer, outside, and he tells us that he was confronted by a member of Trump's staff as he was getting ready to leave the building. He'd been taking a break, having a snack, when the rally ended, and he was told by a Trump flack that he would have to leave. He was getting up to go, when the flack came back with a police officer to escort him out; according to Ben, even the cop was confused about why he'd been called over.

On the drive back to Dallas, I realize it's time to start seriously pondering the possibility of a President Trump. As much as I've tried to lighten things up with hair jokes and anecdotes, the truth is, this shit is getting less funny by the minute. The crowds just keep getting bigger, and the protests get bigger too. The tension is thick, and it's only building. There were no fist fights today, but at this point, it seems like only matter of time before shit start to get physical.

Trump, meanwhile, doesn't seem concerned, and he even seems to enjoy the havoc he's wreaked. But thinking about someone who looks at becoming the leader of the free world no different than being grand marshal of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is making feel ill. He's running for HOTUS, Headache of the United States. Somebody pass me a Tylenol.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Yeah, that's definitely the premier standing next to a giant pink dick. Photo via Twitter/Robert Benzie.

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne dropped by a Toronto high school Tuesday morning to announce her government's free university tuition scheme to students.

What she wound up doing was taking a smiling photograph next to a couple of large, colourful dicks.

Wynne made a stop at Jarvis Collegiate, but prior to speaking to the kids about funding for post-secondary education, she assisted a couple students in performing a science experiment. As captured on this video, Wynne helped the students pour some chemicals into a test tube, which then seemed to "explode" and solidify into two giant dick volcanoes, one pink, the other green.

As the substances took form, Wynne appeared to grow momentarily uncomfortable, asking, "For what do we use this?"

Journalists posted photos of the scene on Twitter, which show Wynne standing behind the two phallic structures, grinning broadly. Standing next to her, Liberal MPP Reza Moridi looks equally enthused, though he seems unable to take his eyes off the pink dick before him. (We can relate.)

Reporters went to great length to describe the pink phallus without actually saying that it was definitely a dick.

"Pink blob takes over @Kathleen_Wynne's visit to Jarvis Collegiate," tweeted Robert Benzie, Queen's Park Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, while CP reporter Keith Leslie remarked, "What an explosion."

But members of the public weren't as easily fooled as those media rubes.

"That blob sure looks like a penis," tweeted @HavAnotherDonut, a common response to when a person sees a pink penis near a politician's smiling face.

Some took the opportunity to make a dig at Wynne's politics.

"Is that meant to signify the Liberals fucking the residents of Ontario?" asked Yechiel Marzel.

We think the students may have been attempting to do this foam experiment, without realizing that creating a massive dildo in front of the leader of the province was one of the possible outcomes.

But we 100 percent applaud their efforts.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

This wasn't how my wedding looked. Photo via Flickr user Leland Francisco.

Canadian Immigration Minister John McCallum just announced he's planning on making changes in the "next couple of months," that would immediately grant Permanent Residency to spouses of Canadian citizens, immediately upon their arrival to Canada. While this will do a great deal to tear down the existing system that believes marriage fraud is an elaborate threat to the integrity of the Canadian immigration system, the federal government website still warns, "Do not feel you must help somebody by being part of a marriage of convenience, no matter what the reason. It is not worth the risks."

Currently, the risks faced when sponsoring a foreign national with a marriage of convenience are refusal of the applicant's current visa and a possible ban from travel to Canada for two years. This stays on their CIC record forever. The CIC may even take legal action and will almost certainly deport you from Canada. The Canadian sponsor faces up to five years in prison and a fine of $100,000. While convictions in Canada range from light fines to community service, even the most severe cases of fraud are resolved without jail time.

But when you're dating an immigrant whose legal status is threatened by deportation, a marriage of convenience is the easiest way to keep your current life. Under the pressure of time, it isn't fraud, it's the only option Canada provides.

When my partner's visa application was suddenly shortened by eight months, we knew we had to act fast. We were faced with three choices: marriage, a breakup, or leaving Canada. We knew a breakup wasn't on the table because we were engaged. Leaving Canada wasn't an option because we both have lives we love here. We met with a lawyer who presented us with many options to avoid deportation, but were advised that marriage was the fastest way for some foreign nationals to get status in Canada.

We had been engaged since for a few months and had been dating for nearly two years. We had planned to get married in 2017 outside of Canada. But every day we waited left us closer to losing each other.

So two months ago we headed to our local government office and bought marriage license. It's that easy!

However, getting married (currently) isn't simply a ticket to citizenship or permanent residency in Canada. You then have to submit a sponsored application for permanent residency. The application process is daunting and requires you to provide excessive amounts of proof regarding the authenticity of your marriage. This includes shared bank account statements, a certificate of marriage, text message backlogs, up to date medical exams, gigabytes of photos, letters from friends and family, screenshots of Facebook relationship status, Facebook wedding announcement threads, shared bills, signed tenancy agreements, vacation itineraries, a strict timeline of your relationship, and numerous shared receipts.

The experience of mining that data in the month leading up to your wedding is heartwarming but painfully meticulous. If you're anything like us, you probably don't keep most of that stuff handy.

The time leading up to our wedding was nothing short of a nightmare. My partner's status as an underclass citizen put a huge strain on our relationship. Dating an immigrant means relegating yourself dealing with paperwork and tight deadlines. As my partner's work permit expired, they were left without work while we footed about $5,000 in legal bills and application processing fees, and with one half of our partnership becoming financial deadweight put an incredible strain on the relationship. There were tensions leading up to the "big day." We were at each other's throats for a month in between bouts of makeup sex. There was a great deal of paranoia on both sides.

There was something perverse about the whole ordeal for everyone on the outside. We had a ton of family who didn't understand but wanted to be involved. We didn't invite any of them. We got married for us, in our way.

Beyond the stress of waiting three weeks for the marriage license to arrive so we could start the application process before my partner's visa expired, there was the application itself. To navigate the documents necessary to apply and have a successful application is nearly impossible on your own, and getting any answers takes far too long. If you look at all these forms—you can't do this fast without a lawyer. Even then, it takes about a year and a half to process.

We got our application in two days before my partner's legal status expired, which means right now they're in working status limbo. I can't attach my name to this for fear of getting flagged. We're incredibly committed to one another, but the rigorous application process and limited time frame doesn't leave any margin for error. Even though our marriage is legal my speaking out could potentially send my partner back to their home country. As of right now, we're still in waiting to see if our application was accepted. At any point we could be called in for an "interview" and could face a home inspection. Our lawyer told us to memorize things like what side of the bed the other prefers, and the color of each other's toothbrushes. Apparently shit gets pretty meticulous in these marriage fraud investigations.

Most people don't get married within the confines of a 500-square-foot apartment. Leading up to my wedding there was no noise of perceived panic in my head. Instead I chilled out in a fancy suit watching Bernie Sanders on YouTube. I didn't fully comprehend what was about to happen. Having a civil marriage ceremony is like having a weird and very small party in your house. Except the party only lasts 20 minutes and you have pay the guest of honor once it's over.

This wasn't the way we wanted it. We felt strange about making this a big event since we want to have a bigger wedding in the future. Inviting all your friends and family to celebrate your wedding twice felt indulgent and selfish.

The ceremony was odd, and a little improvised, but our vows were incredibly memorable and impactful. Leading up to the day, I wasn't aware of what was really happening. I had a vague understanding that we were going to commit to one another forever, but the gravity of it doesn't hit you until you're at the altar, or in this case my living room coffee table.

Everyone gets married for different reasons. But I'm positive we're not the first to marry to expedite a legal process, and we won't be the last.

A view of Christ of the Ozarks on top of Magnetic Mountain, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, October 1972. (Photo by Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The easy assumption for me, even as a small boy in the Arkansas Ozarks, was that people who took the Bible at face value had to be kidding.

My dad's side of the family hailed from south Arkansas, which was well in line with the spiritual underpinnings of the pentecostal revival. In his heavy build, his joviality, and his musicality, my grandfather resembled an archetypal revivalist preacher, though he was more reserved in his faith, and late in life, he enjoyed playing piano and singing hymns at the old folks' home down the road. His ex, my grandmother, was more of a tell-don't-show type. She'd unspool Bible fables for me and my brothers and expect us to accept this Santa Clausian malarky as, well, Scripture. Did you know that Noah's grandfather Methusula lived to be 969 years old? Even a kid knows to ask:

Wait, what?

Well, people used to live a lot longer.

How? They didn't have surgery or antibiotics. How did people live longer?

Well, they also didn't have as many diseases back then.

That conversation really did happen about 25 years ago, but in hindsight, I can't blame my nana for trying to make the effort to rationalize it for me. There probably were fewer deaths by exotic cancers during the Old Testament epoch, when people likely succumbed to war, starvation, dysentery, malaria, poxes, and minor infections that festered and then hit the bloodstream. It's also true that she first heard these tales before the atomic bomb was invented, before we identified DNA or could launch satellites, before Google made answers so easy to find. The religious superstition of the creeks and hollers where the aftermath of the Great Depression endures has already fended off so many advances in rational thinking that it's impenetrable by now.

Election years tend to give outsized clout, or at least attention, to Protestants in the South, but Christians in America are a fading group altogether: A 2014 Pew survey found, since 2007, the median adult age of Christians in America increased by three years to 49 years old, even as non-Christian faiths and "unaffiliated" categories got younger. They're less educated and more likely to leave the faith than non-Christian religious Americans. But they are concentrating in the West, and in the South particularly, and notwithstanding the occasional tsunami like Obergefell v. Hodges, they still seem to drive an outsized chunk of national policy.

These days the primary strains of religiosity I see in hilly west Arkansas fall along a few fault lines. The small-town clapboard churches that sprang up in the shadow of revival tents actually strike me as the most beneficent: I gather that they function as de facto Narcotics Anonymous chapters where people really do pray for one another, where their kitchens double as food pantries for down-on-their-luck congregants, where people sing together in a group of friends every Sunday and legitimately do head to the Old Country Buffet feeling happier than when they woke up. These are the finest of the churches, and yet they're having difficulty replenishing their congregations. Why would you need an opiate for the masses when it's so easy these days to get actual opiates?

The second, and growing, strain of Christianity can be found in megachurches, massive congregations inside buildings that resemble convention centers led by pastors who resemble motivational speakers or business gurus. People pray for one another in these places too, but the spiritual aspect is entwined with the sort of corporate conservatism you can find inside companies like Walmart. That chain's founder, Sam Walton, was the rare billionaire who maintained a modest, borderline shitkicker public profile; my dad likes to tell the story of once finding ol' Sam broken down on a roadside and helping get his pickup back and running. But in the generation since Walton's death, the culture around Walmart's world HQ in Bentonville reflects more conspicuous consumption, and its churches are relatively short on brimstone.

The third strain is more dismal and hateful. That you will see the further you drive into the woods, or echoed out of the state's degenerate legislature, or on the other end of the phone in your kitchen when local brood mother and Christian celeb Michelle Duggar is on a robo-call jag. Last time I got one of those, it was right before my hometown tried to pass an anti-discrimination statute that would have, among other things, prevented landlords from refusing to rent to gay or trans tenants. Her argument against this statute, delivered on the recording like a vacuous Helen Lovejoy, was to use the old bathroom hypothetical in which a formerly male sex predator now dressed in a skirt ambushes little girls behind closed doors. This was, it's worth noting, before her son Josh was exposed as an incestuous, abusive perv. She may have been coming from a sleazy place, but I have no doubt she was speaking from the heart—albeit her own overzealous one.

The Duggars' mass-market brand of King James–style bigotry, however, elides the only sensible reading of Christ's example, one that I keep hoping, to my continuing disappointment, will rise and redeem the benighted religious South. That reading, popular among no one I know, holds that Jesus wouldn't have put up with any of this smear-the-queer bully-pulpit horseshit. Not in a temple, not on a mount, not at a supper. Christ's most radical and brilliant notion, that you shall love thy neighbor as you love thyself, leaves gay-baiters on the same side of history as slave owners. A man possessed of such an omniscient, omnidirectional love would certainly have partaken in the physical act, and he would've made no distinctions among lovers for their superficial qualities (certainly not for something so fickle and arbitrary as gender). Christ would've loved the poor, the dispossessed, the evicted, the dropped-out, the overwhelmed by student loans, the haven't gotten a raise in ten years, the never gonna get to retire, the obese, the infirm, the depressed, the isolated, the addicted, the meth-mouthed. It doesn't matter who you are, 'cause Jesus, a fully-outed pansexual love revolutionary, would definitely have made out with you at a party.

I mean, c'mon. They didn't even have diseases back then.

Follow Sam Eifling on Twitter.

To find out more about the impact of religion in the Ozarks, check out "Tent Preachin'," the first episode of BALLS DEEP airing today on VICELAND at 7PM EST. Watch all the first episodes of our shows now at VICELAND.com

Marissa Shephard was arrested Tuesday in Moncton. Photo via Facebook.

After 10 weeks on the run, Marissa Shephard, the 20-year-old wanted for the murder of Baylee Wylie, has been captured by RCMP in Moncton.

Shephard disappeared after Wylie, 18, was found dead in a burned out triplex in mid-December.

She was arrested around 12:30 PM Tuesday in Moncton, according to Codiac Regional RCMP.

Read More: Moncton Woman on the Run After Brutal Murder

Cops had issued a Canada-wide warrant for her arrest on charges of murder and arson. They released images of her that showed she was capable of dramatically changing her appearance.

Shephard's family told reporters they feared she was dead.

Two other suspects, Devin Morningstar and Tyler Noel, have already been charged with first-degree murder and arson in connection to Wylie's violent death.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Hillary Clinton. Photo via Ted Eytan.

US News

Trump and Clinton March Ahead
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both won seven states each in the Super Tuesday primaries, taking commanding leads over their rivals in the delegate count. Bernie Sanders won four states, including a surprise win in Colorado, while Ted Cruz won two states and Mario Rubio won his first in Minnesota. —NBC News

Apple Files New Appeal In FBI Battle
Apple has filed an appeal against an order demanding it help federal investigators gain access to data on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers. Apple's lawyers said the FBI is asking the company to "give them something we don't have." —USA Today

South Dakota Vetoes Anti-Trans Bill
South Dakota's governor Dennis Daugaard has vetoed a bill that would have required transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their sex at birth. The ACLU said the decision put the state "unequivocally on the right side of history." —CBS News

Secret Service to Investigate Agents Over Time Photographer Incident
The Secret Service is to investigate agents who manhandled a Time magazine photographer at a Donald Trump rally. Officials said agents are only supposed to intervene when someone verbally or physically threatens a candidate. —The Washington Post

International News

Bin Laden Left $29 Million for Jihad
The al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden left a fortune of around $29 million which he want to be used "on jihad", according to a newly released will. He referred to the money being in Sudan, but it is not known whether any of the money made its way to his heirs. —CNN

Syria Peace Talks Delayed
The United Nations will delay the next round of Syria peace talks by two days, until March 9, to allow the partial ceasefire to "better settle down." Although there have been some violations of the truce agreement, the UN is pleased violence has decreased. —Reuters

Shell Sued Over Nigerian Oil Spills
Oil giant Shell is being sued in London for the second time in five years over spills in the Niger Delta. The Ogale community in Rivers State, who are mainly farmers or fishermen, say spills have spoiled drinking water and farmland. —TIME

Abuse Victims Want Meeting with the Pope
Australian victims of child sex abuse who are watching Cardinal George Pell being questioned via video link say they are unimpressed by his testimony and want a meeting with Pope Francis. "We need to speak to the boss," said victim David Ridsdale. —BBC News

The Rolling Stones. Pto via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Stones to Play Free Show in Cuba
The Rolling Stones have announced they will play a free concert in Havana, Cuba, later this month. The band said the March 25 show will be a "landmark"—the first open-air concert in Cuba by a British group. —Billboard

Making a Murderer Lawyers Go on Tour
Lawyers for Steven Avery—the subject of Netflix series Making a Murderer—will discuss his case during a 26-city speaking tour that begins this spring. Dean Strang and Jerry Buting have called the tour "A Conversation on Justice." —Rolling Stone

Tunnel Named After Robin Williams
A rainbow-arched tunnel connecting the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County in California has been officially named the Robin Williams Tunnel. The new $3,000 signs were paid for by private donations. —SFGate

Researchers Need $400,000 for MDMA
A drug research nonprofit is raising $400,000 for a kilo of MDMA it needs for clinal trials by hosting "psychedelic" dinner parties. The group wants to legalize the drug for medical use, but needs enough to experiment. —Thump



Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'How the Philippines's Strict Laws Have Driven Women to Seek Backstreet Abortions'

Quincy Jones. Photo by Matt Misisco/courtesy of Jones

There's an old comedy saying, commonly attributed to Carol Burnett, that humor equals tragedy plus time. Tig Notaro disproved the theory during a 30-minute set in 2012. Recorded just days after being diagnosed with breast cancer, Notaro delivered a show that Louis CK described as "masterful." If cancer was the elephant in the room that night, she continuously poked and prodded it for prime comedic meat. At one point, Notaro talked about how a technician wanted to know the secret behind her flat stomach during a mammogram. The comedienne obliged: "Oh, I'm dying!"

Thirty-two-year-old Quincy Jones, a Los Angeles-based comedian (no relation to the producer), will try to debunk that formula under similarly weighty circumstances. He was diagnosed with stage four mesothelioma last July and was given one year to live. Through the grim circumstance, Jones speaks with excitement and anticipation as he talks about what he describes as his legacy: a one-hour stand-up special.

After doing almost seven years of stand-up, Jones got the special funded by a Kickstarter started by his friend Nicole Blaine, who met him at a comedy show. The original goal was $4,985. The page tripled that goal in ten hours before finally reaching a total of $36,242.

But Jones knows a show brought together by kindness must be powered by skill. So in between chemotherapy and battling the consequent fatigue, Jones has been performing as many as four sets a night to perfect his routine. He isn't scheduled to shoot the special until April 3 in Santa Monica, California (his team is still figuring out how they're going to distribute it), but he's spending these weeks making sure the material he's staking his legacy on is at its best. Before doing one of his comedy marathons last Friday, he spoke candidly with me over the phone.

VICE: How have the past couple of days been going?
Quincy Jones: It's been a crazy whirlwind of love between me starting to literally train for this special—doing multiple sets a night. Four, five sets a night to make sure that I'm working out these jokes, and every day fine-tuning and tweaking material to make sure that it flows together piece-by-piece. Monday I had chemo, so I didn't do any . It's basically a day-by-day thing. I don't know how I'm gonna feel. Like, today, I just felt really nauseous. It fluctuates. It's easy sometimes to forget I even have cancer.

Is it different coming up with jokes with so much leaning on this special?
Now it's about reviewing, fine-tuning, and tweaking material, because I have over an hour and a half of stuff. Now it's, "OK. I'm not just saying jokes for an hour." It has to flow smoothly. Depending on how long the chemo controls my cancer, this is my introduction to the comedy masses. So I want to make sure it's something I'm proud of. People still watch Patrice's Elephant in the Room. People still watch Chris Rock's Bigger and Blacker. I'm not just happy to do an hour; I'm ready to do a great hour.

The Kickstarter beat the original goal by a huge margin. Did you expect that?
I didn't really pay attention. I was surprised, but I feel like I've been a good person to a lot of people. There's still a lot of good left in this world. Yeah, it's depressing, and there's a lot of darkness. But there's a lot of good. And this is one of those feel-good stories where it's like, "Man. We could make a Disney movie out of it or something like that." Like the local kid gets sick, and the town pulls together. We get to fund Timmy's surgery.

If you get told you're dying, you're thinking about: What have I done? Am I just Instagram posts? Am I just Facebook comments? What is my legacy? What am I leaving behind?

You're coming from a positive place, but it seems like a lot of comics work out some sort of darkness on stage. Do you feel any difference coming from your perspective?
I'm a positive person. I view the world in an usually positive light, but that doesn't mean every joke is going to be Care Bear, sunshine, and rainbows. It's gonna be real. You saw on the Kickstarter that I have a police-brutality joke. I have all types of jokes.

And it feels good, but I'm definitely not going into it thinking, "Aw, man. This is such a positive thing! I gotta have an hour's worth of cotton candy for everybody." I'm going to have real jokes, but it's not going to get depressing to where it's like, "And then I'm dying, right." I will acknowledge that everyone has come together for this, and I appreciate it, and I love everybody. But now, let's get to what we came here for.

After you got the diagnosis, when did you get to the point where you're thinking, "OK, I want to stick my legacy on this special?"
For me, I was at that age where I was like, "Dude, I ain't got no wife. I ain't got no kids." If you get told you're dying, you're thinking about: What have I done? Am I just Instagram posts? Am I just Facebook comments? What is my legacy? What am I leaving behind? That's when I was like, "Yo, I want to do a special." If it was a Make-a-Wish foundation, I'm already living out my dreams by doing comedy in one of the greatest scenes in the world. It's .

Did you get inspiration from Tig while you came up with the special?
Inspiration? No. Motivation? Yes. She was one who showed me that comedians are strong. We could do anything. We could fight. We could do this. It's temporary.

How did your family react to news of the Kickstarter's success?
My mom wasn't the biggest fan of the finality of my death. But what I took from it, it's more so about whether I have the energy to perform a great hour. If I'm not feeling up to it, what am I gonna do? Then we're not gonna do that special that day. I'd rather not do it than put out a mediocre hour just to be like, "Oh, I did it."

It's about going out with your best.
That's what I'm trying to do. I got into this to be a big dog. I've worked with Bill Burr. Chris Rock has seen my set. I performed at Judd Apatow's show. I met Sarah Silverman. I met all these people. As saddening as it is to have cancer and have my life limited somewhat, I'm not mad at the alternative that it's taken. I always tell everyone that more good than bad has come from this cancer by far. Even staring at mortality in the face, who knows when or if I would've ever had any opportunities like this before.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

For Democrats, Super Tuesday was an early night. By the time Donald Trump and Ted Cruz delivered closing remarks to their respective conservative fans, their Democratic counterparts had long gone home. Hours earlier, soon after the first polls had closed, most media outlets had quickly announced their projections in that race, predicting big wins for Hillary Clinton across most of the 12 states that cast ballots for Democrats on Tuesday.

On one of the most decisive nights of the presidential race so far, Clinton scored resounding victories over her democratic socialist rival Bernie Sanders in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and her former stomping grounds in Arkansas. In Massachusetts—one of the few states where the results were close—she edged out Sanders by just a few points. Sanders, meanwhile, managed to take Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, and his home state of Vermont—a strong showing, but not nearly strong enough to diminish Clinton's aura of inevitability.

Crucially, the results translated into a huge delegate haul for Clinton, pulling her a tiny bit closer to the 2,383 delegates needed to win the Democratic Party's nomination. In one night, the former secretary of state nearly quadrupled her delegate tally to 544, while her opponent trailed with 349—and those totals don't include the party's "superdelegates," the overwhelming majority of whom are backing Clinton.

The key test for Clinton Tuesday was whether she could activate the broad coalition of voters who rejected her eight years ago—the so-called "Obama coalition" comprised of black and Latino voters who make up a huge bloc of the Democratic primary electorate, especially in the South. In the end, she crushed that test, beating Sanders by huge margins in states like Georgia, where she pulled in nearly three-quarters of the vote.

It wasn't the routing many would have predicted when Sanders first got in the race last spring, but Clinton seemed satisfied with the results—satisfied enough, at least, to dispense of attacks against her rival and turn her attention toward juicier, general election targets. After weeks of hammering Sanders at post-primary rallies, Clinton zeroed in on the Republican Party on Tuesday, previewing a general election message against her likely GOP rival Donald Trump.

"It might be unusual for a presidential candidate to say this, but I'm going to keep saying this: I believe what we need in America today is more love and kindness," she told a jubilant crowd at a victory party in Florida. "Instead of building walls, we're going to break down barriers and build ladders of opportunity and empowerment."

Sanders, meanwhile, was hemmed in by demographics once again, unable to expand his appeal beyond the white liberals and young millennial "Berners" who have fueled his dark horse campaign. Although the Vermont senator showed no signs of backing out Tuesday night, his remarks at a victory rally in his home state on Tuesday seemed to tacitly acknowledge that the race probably isn't going to end with him in the White House.

"I know that Secretary Clinton and many of the establishment people think that I am looking and thinking too big. I don't think so," Sanders told the crowd. "What I have said is that this campaign is not just about electing a president. It is about making a political revolution." What he left out, however, is that the prospect of that revolution had just gotten a little bit dimmer.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Furo Warikbo, the protagonist in A. Igoni Barrett's debut novel, Blackass, is a normal young guy in Lagos, Nigeria—until one day, on the morning of a job interview, he wakes up to discover he's been transformed overnight. His black skin has somehow been turned white, with the exception of one thing: his black ass. The novel follows Furo's transition into his new identity, along with the challenges that arise from his past, intertwining issues of race, sexual identity, and the chance to look at society's racial bias from a new perspective.

Barrett, who is Nigerian, published his first collection of short stories in 2005. Though Blackass is his first novel, it certainly doesn't lack ambition. Barrett uses humor to bring up darkly serious themes, and his prose reflects on racial identity in Nigeria. I spoke with Barrett about the idea behindBlackass, his desire to change the narrative surrounding Nigerian culture, and the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity.

VICE: Blackass is pretty provocative. Where did the idea come from?
A. Igoni Barrett: I have a notebook where I write down ideas and basically went like this: A young Nigerian man wakes up on the morning of his job interview to find out that he's white. I very quickly realized this was similar to Kafka's Metamorphosis. So after I had written about a paragraph, I went to re-read Metamorphosis, which had been a favorite of mine for about ten years. When I re-read it, I realized the similarities, but I also found myself kind of responding negatively to Gregor Samsa, the main character. I realized my character was going to be the opposite, and so it almost felt like a conversation—where Gregor Samsa remains at home, Furo does the opposite. And once he stepped out, he began to feel like a newer image of Samsa, in my mind at least. He was doing the opposite of everything Samsa did. He was running away from his family, he cut off ties, he was determined to succeed, and he was not going to be beaten down by life. That part of him I found admirable.

Especially because it was my first novel, I wanted it to be strange, to be new, to break new grounds. I wasn't interested in writing another Nigerian novel about war, another African novel about family or loving each other; I wanted something new and something I felt reflected the second generation of Nigerians, and so I kind of brought all of those wants into writing this book.

The book discusses identity in a couple different ways: Race inequality, racial identity, and then sexual identity, specifically within the trans community. How did all of that come about while writing?
While writing the book in 2012, the United States—a country that had elected its first black president, and the world applauded it for that move—started having these stories of unarmed black people getting shot. So once I realized the book had this racial thing embedded in it, I began to subconsciously respond to that narrative coming out of the States, also trying to juxtapose it against Nigeria. Nigeria is a country with nearly 200 million people, and most of them are black. In Nigeria, people are fond of saying that we don't have any racial issues, but Nigeria does have issues, and this story allowed me to explore that. I began to see that yes, the issue of race does not manifest in Nigeria the same way it does in the States or the way it does in parts of Europe, but it's still an element there. It's still present in the way people treat each other. And once I realized it was going to be about race, it became about identity.

Also around the time I was writing this book, Nigeria passed a law outlawing homosexual relations. I felt it was necessary to reflect that in the book.

Right, there's a trans character, who happens to share the same name as you.
This was a book dealing with identity, and I wanted to reflect sexual differences and people's choices. I've had people react strongly to the book, but And I had to tell them, "Actually, I am not the character in the book."

"Nigeria has over 300 indigenous languages, but the language of education and the language of business and government is English, which says something about how we see ourselves in the world."

Throughout the book you include different quotes from other writers. There's one quote, by Frantz Fanon, that really struck me: "For the black man there is only one destiny and it is white." What was the significance of you using that?
Frantz Fanon was this black man from the West Indies who lived in France. He wrote a book called Black Skin White Masks about the effect of racism upon the victim and how the victim adjusts to society's perceptions of them. For most people, that's a controversial statement, especially if you're black. That quote resonates elsewhere in the book, and in Nigeria in general. For example, in Nigeria today our official language is English. Nigeria has over 300 indigenous languages, but the language of education and the language of business and government is English, which says something about how we see ourselves in the world. So I felt that resonated with the Fanon quote—the world we engage with today is based on a Western model. In the end, the destiny of the black man so far has been to become white, and that will only balance out when it's become the destiny of the white man to become black. The only way the white man will want to become black is when blacks finally begin to own their own cultures. So that's why the quote resonated with me; I felt it was painful but honest.

For touching on such serious topics, the book is really funny. Was that a conscious choice?
Sometimes topics are so sensitive that it's difficult to speak about them seriously. You want to be serious, but you also have to find ways to deliver the pill with some honey, and I found that in this book, humor allowed me to do that. I was able to both be a comic, but at the same time, cynical. I was dealing with serious issues—in some cases, life-and-death issues—and it was very serious to me. But the only way I could deal with these issues without becoming too serious or becoming preachy and tearing out my hair in frustration was humor. I think for many reasons, in Nigeria especially, it made it acceptable to talk about these issues. And with this book, I felt I wasn't going to let any taboos or anything stop me from writing the book I wanted to write.

Furo, the main character, goes through this physical transformation from black to white, but his attitude begins to change as well.
Yes, it does.

So what were your ideas behind the shift in his perspective?
No matter what you write—fiction or whatever—in the end, you're probably writing about yourself. As I was trying to understand the main character's mindset, trying to empathize and experience what he was experiencing, I also began thinking about myself, and I realized the person I was five years ago isn't who I am now. We're so close to the narrative of our own lives that we don't quite see that change. As readers, and me as the writer, we are standing at a distance, and we can look and judge, we see those changes happening to him, and we see the ways in which he's learning from past experiences, from things that have been done to him and what he's done to others. He's learning how to adjust to the world and that needed to be reflected in the ways in which we grow. And so that was important for me to reflect the psychological changes that are coming upon him due to his society and how society sees him.

You published your first collection of short stories in 2005; now, ten years later, you've published this book. Has that made you think differently about being an author?
Definitely, a lot has changed. For one, I realize now I have begun to find my voice. I'm definitely a work in progress, but now I know where my strengths lie, and I know what my interests are and what I want to do with my writing. When I published my first stories, I was learning to be a writer—I was playing with sentences, and I was more interested in the poetry of writing than the effect of it. Now, I'm more aware of the way in which writing can affect an individual, can change a life. You could say I'm braver and more courageous about the topics I engage in but that also comes from confidence. I now know that this is going to be my life's work, so I would say what has changed is more self-awareness.

What do you want people to get out of the book?
That's a difficult question. will get different things from the book. I've found Nigerians will get different things from the book than British readers. But I tried to write a book that anyone, regardless of whatever society you are in, can get something out of—if it's to empathize with or understand Nigerians better, or if it's to understand yourself better. Or if it's some young Nigerian who's in the closet and thinks that nobody understands what he or she is going through, and someone reads the book and says, "Oh, that might be someone trying to reflect my preoccupations in a place in fiction." That's also something for someone to get out of it as well. There's the human story of this young man who's trying to deal with his situation that he perhaps doesn't fully understand, and he's just trying to deal with it in the best way that he knows how. There's a lot I want people to get out of it. It's difficult for me to narrow it down to one thing.

Follow Kwele Serrell on Twitter.

Blackass: A Novel comes out today from Graywolf Press.

Natalie Dormer in Game of Thrones (HBO), The Forest and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay

Natalie Dormer has about 30 fake Instagram accounts and three—three—fuck yeah Tumblrs. Over the last few years, she's blown up globally, mostly as a result of America's weird penchant for very English period dramas. First she played opposite Heath Ledger in Casanova, then bagged the role of corseted, conniving Anne Boleyn in TV fuckfest The Tudors. She put on yet another intense outfit for the final two Hunger Games installments and currently plays the scheming Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones.

Her latest project is basically the opposite of what she's done so far. The Forest is a horror film in which Dormer's character Sara goes in search of her twin sister in Japan's Aokigahara Forest—or 'Suicide Forest' as it's colloquially known. While praising Dormer's acting, critics attacked the writing for its insincere portrayal of a very real forest and major public health issue in Japan. The criticism is pretty valid—the film is very much scary dead people in trees hurtling towards Dormer's character—but as a horror, it's not that bad. It's jumpy as hell and succeeds in being uncomfortably creepy in between scares.

I met Dormer at a press junket for The Forest in a fancy hotel in Soho, which was odd because a) press junkets are awkward with journalists side-eyeing each other, hoping the person next to them hasn't got better quotes, b) there are free cookies and you want to eat them all without the PR being disgusted, and c) you only get ten minutes with the famous person. But here's how it went.

This piece was published in partnership with The Influence.

The arguments for the war on drugs are collapsing all around us. Today, some 53 percent of US citizens think this war has not been worth the cost—while only 19 percent think it has. As I saw when I traveled to a dozen countries for my book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, whenever a state or nation decides to move beyond the drug war, there's a three-step dance. It is massively controversial, and there's a lot of anxiety; then people see in practice what it means; and then support goes up, and stays up.

After Colorado legalized marijuana, and people saw the legal, tax-paying, kid-proof stores in practice, support went up—and now 58 percent support it, and only 38 percent want to go back to prohibition.

After Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, and transferred all the money spent on punishing addicted people to improving their lives, injecting drug use fell by 50 percent. Even the cop who led the opposition to the decriminalization publicly changed his mind, and he told me he hoped the whole world would now follow Portugal's example.

After Switzerland legalized heroin for addicted people over a decade ago (called heroin-assisted treatment, or HAT), literally nobody has died of an overdose on legal heroin, and crime fell significantly. That's why even the Swiss electorate—who are highly conservative—voted to keep heroin legal by 70 percent in a nationwide referendum.

As this debate starts to become more mainstream in America, there are lots of misunderstandings and misapprehensions being passed off as fact. That's natural—this is a complex subject, and the people who are anxious about it are overwhelmingly decent folk who want to protect their kids and prevent harm. But their fears are overwhelmingly unfounded. There are three major concepts that help dispel some of the concerns around legalization.

Concept 1: The Risk Premium

The worst aspect of the war on drugs—I believe—is the violence caused by drug prohibition, in precisely the way that alcohol prohibition created Al Capone. When a substance is illegal, dealers are forced to resort to violence to protect their turf.

As I wrote here, imagine you run a liquor store. If someone steals a bottle of vodka and you catch them, you can call the police—so you don't need to be violent, or intimidating. But if you're selling cannabis or crack, and someone tries to rob you, you have to fight them—you have no recourse to the law. And you have to fight them in a way that will make sure nobody else tries to mess with you ever again. The war on drugs, as Charles Bowden put it, creates a war for drugs—fought out with guns and blood.

But many people respond by arguing that legalization will not, in fact, bankrupt drug-dealers, and they will, in fact, carry on in the same way afterwards. The conservative British commentator, Simon Heffer, made the case that legalization would still allow a black market of illegal traffickers and dealers to flourish because legal drugs would be more expensive. And Guardian commentator Deborah Orr says in an otherwise on-the-money piece that gangs will "always be able to sell cheaper... than a taxed and regulated market could or should."

Many people believe this. But both arguments are based on a failure to understand the "risk premium" involved in a prohibited market.

The best way to explain it is with another thought experiment. Imagine if I asked you to carry a bottle of rum across your city, to deliver to my aunt for her birthday. You wouldn't ask for much money—it's a fairly menial task. Now imagine I asked you to carry her not some rum, but a bag of cannabis, or a bag of cocaine. You'd be pretty wary. You'd likely say no. And if you were going to do it, you'd want to be paid a lot more than for carrying the rum—to cover the risk you are taking of getting a criminal record, or of going to prison.

That difference is called the "risk premium"—and it happens at every link in the chain when a drug is illegal. The farmer who grows the cannabis, or opium, or coca—in Colombia or Afghanistan or Morocco—has to be paid a higher premium for the risk he takes. The guy who then makes it into your drug in a lab has to be paid a higher premium for the risk he takes. The people who transport it across borders—usually a chain of people—have to each be paid a higher premium for the risk they take. And the guys who sell it to you directly have to be paid a higher premium for the risk they take.

Each time, that risk premium pushes the price up, and up, and up.

When you legalize—and transfer the market to legitimate businesses—there's no risk premium for legal businesses. They aren't taking any more risks than they would if they were selling potatoes, or copies of the Bible. And once the risk premium is gone, the legal product will be significantly cheaper than the prohibited product.

This shows us why the picture Simon Heffer and Deborah Orr (and, to be fair, many others) are promoting isn't right.

Now, there's a different and opposite concern they don't raise. You don't want there to be a big collapse in price when you legalize, because that might increase use. (If you make something cheaper, more people can afford it: If I halved the price of beer tonight, more of you would drink it.) So you make up the gap with taxes on those drugs—just as they have in Colorado and Washington. This is how you hold the price steady while bankrupting the criminal gangs. You also get the bonus that you can then spend on lots of great things, like schools, and proper compassionate care for addicted people to turn their lives around.

And if you doubt that legalizing this way bankrupts cartels, ask yourself: Where's the Pablo Escobar of gin? Where's the El Chapo of Bacardi? Since the end of alcohol prohibition, there has been no such person. When alcohol prohibition ended, the Al Capones of alcohol ended. Illegal businesses didn't persist in supplying the drug because the risk premium meant legal businesses undercut them every time.

Concept 2: Prohibition, a Vast Investment Bank for Crime

Many people argue that when you end the war on drugs, criminal gangs will simply transfer to other forms of criminality—whether it's human trafficking, or prostitution, or kidnapping, or even more depraved "trades," like child pornography.

In fact, there are two arguments that should help us to think about this differently.

The late 1920s and early 1930s are widely regarded in the US—darkly—as the golden age of kidnapping. Everybody remembers the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby and his eventual death. But it was one of a widespread rash of kidnappings at that time, one which has long since ebbed away.

Why would there be a sudden spike in kidnappings at that time?

In trying to solve this puzzle, it's worth noting that Colombia had a big spike in kidnappings in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. And today, northern Mexico is the kidnapping capital of the world.

Why did they also spike at that time?

There's one reason that's pretty clear. Let's imagine you and I decided to kidnap a rich person's child and hold him or her for ransom. (Before you call the FBI, I'm only thinking out loud here.) We need to spend a lot of time scouting out where the victim goes and where he can be snatched. We need a car. We need a driver. We need a place to keep the child where nobody will hear him. We need a team of people to watch the kidnappee round the clock. We need a detailed plan for how to demand the money and where the drop will be. And on, and on.

Kidnapping, it turns out, is a capital-intensive business. You need to invest a lot up-front.

You have to get that money from somewhere. There are no kidnappers' loans at your local Bank of America. You have to get it from other criminals.

Now you can begin to see why it spiked up in the US at the peak of alcohol prohibition, and in Colombia and Mexico at the height of drug prohibition.

When you ban a popular substance—alcohol or cannabis or cocaine—it doesn't vanish. It's transferred from legal businesses to criminals. Suddenly, those criminals have a lot more money than they had before—billions more. What do they do with their money? Some they take home as profit—and, like any businessmen, they invest some of the rest in other business enterprises. Like, for example, kidnapping.

Prohibition, in effect, creates a vast investment bank for crime. They use that investment bank to spread criminality to other spheres.

And that's why reclaiming drugs from criminal gangs likely won't increase kidnapping and other forms of crime; it'll decrease it. When alcohol prohibition ended, the famous kidnapping cases in the US bled away. When the center of the drug trade shifted from Colombia to Mexico, the eruption of kidnapping moved with it. That should tell us something.

Concept 3: Why Criminals Commit Crimes

Some people will respond to this by saying, "Yes, but some people are just inherently criminal. If they can't commit one form of crime, they'll just commit another form of crime because that's their nature." There's a certain quantity of the population who are inherently criminal, and all we can do is catch and detain them. You could call this the "quantity theory of crime."

So after we legalize, the criminals will move onto another area of crime—like the ones I listed above.

But there's a different way of thinking about crime. It suggests that criminals are people who are motivated like the rest of us—by incentives. If I asked you to smuggle a bag of cannabis or cocaine across the US-Mexico border as a favor to me, I bet you'd say no. If I offered you a million dollars, you might think twice. If I—as some weird drug-obsessed deity—offered you a billion dollars, I bet you'd think very hard about doing it. Think of this as the "incentive theory of crime."

Which of these theories is right? It turns out we can, in fact, test them to see. And the evidence is very clear. There's a whole field of sociology known as the "economics of crime," and we know its findings.

Criminals are, in fact, human, and they do, in fact, usually respond to incentives. It's why when youth unemployment goes up, generally crime by young people goes up: Crime seems more financially appealing when there are fewer alternatives. It's why when wages go down for low-skilled workers, crime generally goes up too: You can earn more, Walter White-style, through crime. And on, and on: There's a good summary of the evidence by two professors at the London School of Economics here. The evidence that crime is affected by incentives is overwhelming.

So if you take away control of one of the biggest industries in the world—with a 300 percent profit margin from production to sale—you take away a large incentive to commit crime. And this evidence suggests that lots of people will transfer out of crime. They're not doing it out of some criminal essence buried in their bones, but because they want a slice of the cash, and the excitement, provided by a prohibited market.

If the amount of money to be made in, say, plumbing fell by 90 percent in 2016, would there be more or fewer people who were plumbers in 2017? The same principle applies to the drug trade. When you reduce incentives, you reduce numbers of people who take up the incentives.

Some of them will try to go into other forms of criminality, of course—but those markets are already, alas, being met. Let's think about the most commonly-cited alternative to dealing drugs: pimping. There is already a market among men who want to pay for sex, and it is already being met. The day after a drug is legalized, there won't be more people who want to pay for sex than there were the week before. That market already has a group of (vile) criminals who control it. Without an increase in demand, there won't be a big increase in incentives, so there won't be a big increase in people taking them up.

Again, this isn't theoretical. In Switzerland, after it legalized heroin for people who were already addicted to the drug, the country didn't see an increase in prostitution and pimping. In fact, as I learned when I reported there and interviewed people on the ground, the opposite happened. Because women working the streets were given legal heroin and support to turn their lives around, street prostitution virtually ended, and it has never gone back to the level it was before, when heroin was in the hands of criminals.

If the people who believe in the quantity theory of crime were right, that would make no sense—the drug dealers would have transferred to being pimps. But pimping was in reality radically reduced. It is there for us to learn from.

There's a lot, of course, we still don't know about ending the war on drugs. To paraphrase what Barack Obama said when he was running for the White House about ending the war in Iraq, we need to be as careful getting out of this war as we were careless getting in. But there are plenty of things we do know, from the experiment with alcohol prohibition, and the experiments with ending drug prohibition that are now happening all over the world, from Uruguay to Washington to Switzerland.

But there is one thing I learned above everything else—one that led me to these concepts. As we end the drug war, we have to be guided not by fear, but—at last, at long last—by cool, hard facts.

Johann Hari is a British journalist and author. This article draws from his New York Times best-sellling book Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. His last column for The Influence was, Why Is Marijuana Banned? The Real Reasons Are Worse Than You Think. Follow him on Twitter.

This article was originally published by The Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow The Influence on Facebook orTwitter.

Naomi, left, and Mykayla, right

It is now widely accepted that weed is effective in treating nausea, pain, loss of appetite, and many other side effects associated with traditional cancer treatments. What's less accepted is the use of pot to treat children suffering from life-threatening illnesses. In the premiere episode of Weediquette, our VICELAND show devoted to the science and culture of all things stoned, we visit a number of families who are using THC to medicate their seriously ill kids. Some of the parents even believe that marijuana on its own can cure cancer, and they are using it as an experimental treatment.

While the idea of a small child stoned out of her mind on dank nugs might be what most people imagine when they picture this form of medication, the kids profiled in the Weediquette episode are smart, funny, and full of life. One of them, a seven-year-old named Lauranne suffering from leukemia, takes a dose cannabis oil that is equivalent to "ten bong rips of high-grade medical marijuana," according to host Krishna Andavolu. While Lauranne's mother admits she can definitely tell when her daughter's medicine kicks in, the reaction isn't nearly as pronounced as one might expect from such a high dose of THC, and Lauranne is able to communicate coherently and play outside.

Watch the first episode of 'Weediquette,' above.

To further test the idea that kids being medicated with weed function similarly to kids who aren't getting baked on the reg, I interviewed two ten-year-olds, one of whom medicates daily with cannabis oil, and another who does not. I asked the girls the same set of questions, some of which I pulled from school workbooks available online. Read through their answers below, and see if you can tell which one is on weed.

VICE: Hi, Naomi. My name is Jonathan, and I want to ask you a few questions about your day and what you like to do, and then I'm going to ask you a few fun pop quiz type questions. Is that OK?
Naomi: OK. That's fine.

Do you have a favorite TV show? What is it?
Hmmm, probably Brain Games.

Brain Games?
Yeah. It's an awesome show about your brain and how to make it work better and stuff like that.

Wow. That sounds really cool.
Yeah. Really weird tricks. Eyes trick your ears, and your ears trick your eyes, and your mouth tricks your nose!

Cool! Do you have a favorite game you like to play when you're not in school?
When I'm not in school, I like to read, but I have a question for you. Could it be, like, a video game? Like, a dancing game or something?

Yeah, it could be a video game.
OK. Fantasia.

What's your favorite non-video game that you like to play with your friends?Chess.

Very cool. And do you have a favorite book?
Probably Harry Potter.

What do you like about Harry Potter? Is it the magic?
For me, it's the adventure. I love the adventure in the story.

Do you have a favorite adventure that Harry's been on?
Goblet of Fire.

Do you have any pets?
We have three fishes in our home, two birds, and three chickens.

Do you have a favorite animal?
A dog.

OK, so this is kind of an imaginative one, but what would a flower say to a ladybug?
"Hi Ladybug! My name is Flower. Why don't you come and live in me? I'm a nice, pink one!"

That's good, I like that. Can you tell me something that you learned in school yesterday?
That's kinda hard because I had a substitute teacher yesterday.

So the substitute didn't teach you too much, huh?
No.

OK. I'm going to ask you a few pop quiz questions now. Are you ready?
Yeah.

A teacher bought a sticker for each of her students. There are 30 students in her class. If she gave 15 of them away, how many stickers does she have left?
Thirty students... How many stickers did she have?

She bought a sticker for each of her students, and there were 30 students in her class.
She has 15!

That's right! Good Job. OK. Thomas was counting by fives. He stopped at 85. What number would come next?
Ninety.

That's right! Is a dog a mammal, a reptile, or a fish?
A mammal.

Good job. And what's the closest star to the earth?
The sun.

How many states are in the United States?
Fifty.

OK. What's the capital of the United States?
Washington, DC.

Where does the president live?
In the White House.

What continent is Canada in?
North America.

Good job! Here's a science-y one: What happens to water in a puddle as it dries?
It evaporates!

What is the force that holds your plate down on the table?
Gravity.

You got them all right! I'm very impressed. You did a great job, Naomi. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Thank you! You too.

VICE: Hey, is this Mykayla?
Mykayla: Yes.

Hi, how are you?
Good.

Good. My name is Jonathan, and I'm going to ask you a few questions, if that's OK?
Yeah.

OK, cool. So, what did you do today?
School.

How was school?
Good.

Did you learn anything in school today?
Yeah, I did math and reading and the history of Lewis and Clark.

What was the history of Lewis and Clark like?
They had 31 men and out of all of those 31 men only one died from a burst appendix.

Wow, they were quite the explorers, huh?
Yeah. They had to eat candle wax.

Wow, they had to eat candle wax? I didn't know that. That's cool. Do you have a favorite TV show?
Yes.

What is it?
Kickin' It.

Cool! And do you have a favorite book?
Yes.

And what is it?
It's Ranger in Time.

What's it about?
It's about a dog, a rescue dog that finds a metal first aid kit in his backyard and it takes him back to the Oregon Trail. They go from West Virginia to Oregon to find new land to grow.

Wow! That sounds really cool. And do you play games? Do you have a favorite game that you like to play?
I like to play board games.

What's your favorite board game?
Totally Gross. It's a science game.

What's your favorite animal?
Bunnies and doggies.

Do you have any pets?
I have a fish and a dog.

Cool! What are their names?
Olivia is the dog, and Nova is the fish.

Here's a creative question for you: What would a flower say to a ladybug? Buzzzz buzzz?

What's your best subject in school, or your favorite subject?
Reading and spelling.

Cool. OK, so now I have a few pop quiz questions for you. You ready for these?
Yes!

OK. So, here's the first one. A teacher bought a sticker for each of her students. There are 30 students in her class. If she gave 15 stickers away, how many does she have left?
Fifteen?

That's right! Good job. OK, here's the next one. Thomas was counting by fives. He stopped at 85. What number would come next?
Eighty-six?

I'll read that once more. So he was counting by fives and he stopped at 85...
Oh! It'll be 90!

Ninety, that's right. Good job! Is a dog a mammal, a reptile, or a fish?
Easy. It's a mammal!

That's right. What is the closest star to earth?
The sun!

Good job! How many states are there in the United States?
Fifty states.

And what's the capital of the Untied States?
Washington, DC!

And where does the president live?
Washington, DC, in the White House.

That's right! What continent is Canada in?
North America.

Very good. Here's a science question for you. What happens to the water in a puddle as it dries?
It evaporates.

Very good. And what force holds a book down on your desk?
Gravity.

Very good. Those are all my questions. You did such a good job, Mykayla! Thank you so much for talking to me.
You're welcome!

---

Mykayla is currently in complete remission from t-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and she completed her chemotherapy treatments one year and four months ago. She is finished with pharmaceutical treatments, and she takes 1/20th of a gram of cannabis oil per day. She will continue that regimen until she has been cancer-free for five years (she is currently at three years, seven months), and until she receives the blessing of her oncologist to stop the medication. For more information on Mykayla visit her Facebook page, Brave Mykayla.

These interviews were lightly edited for clarity.

For more on the use of marijuana in pediatric medicine watch the premiere episode of Weediquette, "Stoned Kids," on VICELAND and also right here.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Photo via West Midlands Police Flickr account

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

On the evening of November 13, just hours after the terrorist attacks in Paris, French President François Hollande declared a state of emergency. Initially announced to last 12 days, the state of emergency was extended by the parliament for another three months, until February 26. On January 22, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared to the BBC the state of emergency would be in place "until Daech is eradicated."

The state of emergency extends the rights of the police. According to article 11 of France's state of emergency law, officers can search your place at any time without a mandate from a judge under the state of emergency, provided "there are serious reasons to believe the location is frequented by an individual whose behavior represents a threat for the public security and order."

That is exactly what happened to 23-year-old education student Bruno (whose name has been changed for this article). He lives with his parents in a small and remote village of the Haute-Savoie region, and he is one of the 3,189 people whose houses have been searched under the state of emergency. We met up in a coffee shop in the center of the department's capital, Annecy, where he told me his story.

I've been a practicing Muslim for about two years. My parents were pretty open about everything that concerns religion and spirituality, so that's how I was brought up. When I was about 18, I started asking myself questions about the meaning of life, and realized I unknowingly had always been interested in Islam. My parents bought the Quran for me, and I decided I wanted to learn more about the literature of the religion. I discovered there were many interpretations of Islam, and Sufism in particular caught my interest—which is basically the opposite of Salafism. Sufism is pretty mystical. We don't only study the form of certain verses of the Quran, we study what different things could mean—we put them into context. It's a spiritual approach to Islam and that's what attracted me. So I chose this path and it feels right for me.

My friends and close family know I'm Muslim, but in my town nobody knows about it—it's not something I advertise. I don't have anything to hide but it's a private matter. A lot of people won't understand the choice and besides that, given the situation in France, you have to be careful what you say and to whom you say it.

A few days before the police came to search my house, I was on the phone with a friend when I saw a police car pass my house slowly. I live in a village of 500 people, so that's pretty rare. I laughed and told my friend, "That's it, they're going to pay me a visit."

Photo via Flickr user Chris Yarzab

A week later, around 5:45 in the morning, I heard some heavy knocks on the door, and my dog started barking. It woke up my dad too, and when he looked out of the window he saw a dozen police officers and soldiers carrying weapons, circling the house. I heard someone shout "Police, open!", so I went downstairs and let them in. They immediately had me go back up to my room and asked me if I had any weapons, a flag of Islamic State, or any other suspicious objects. I told them I hadn't, of course. They searched the entire house, from the attic to the basement. In my room, they took pictures of all my books about Islam.

It took them about an hour. They searched my computer, checked its search history, and my hard drive. Looking back on it, the search was probably pretty mild. So much so, that I wonder whether the officers themselves were even convinced it was necessary. They asked me why I had been reading up about the situation in Syria. I told them I had because I wanted to understand what was going on, not because I wanted to join ISIS. They wanted to know where I had bought my books and where I had recently traveled. That was basically it: they didn't knock down my door, they weren't violent, and they didn't yell at me.

Looking at my travel itinerary, you could maybe think I'm an Islamic extremist: I went to Turkey by myself, I went to Israel, to Palestine, and to Morocco for an exchange program. Every now and then I'll pick up my backpack and go on a trip—sometimes with friends, sometimes with my parents or my girlfriend, and sometimes alone. That's it. But the fact that I went to potentially dangerous countries on my own didn't work in my favor, in this case.

Another thing that might have put me in this position was that last year, when I worked as a supervisor at a secondary school, together with some parents I mobilized a protest against the deportation of an Albanian family. The police told me that was when they first took notice of me, although the link with terrorism remains a mystery to me. The school where I work is next to a mosque, and I often go there between noon and 2PM. An Imam or a Muslim police officer might have reported my being there.

I don't think I did anything wrong, but the officers did manage to make me feel strangely guilty. And after the search, even my parents were suspicious of me and kept asking me who I was hanging out with. The search warrant stated that the police suspected me of being in touch with individuals involved in terrorist activities, but they never indicated who these people are. It made me think that I have to be more careful about what I'm doing but that's a dangerous thought: I shouldn't be more careful, I didn't do anything wrong.

Photo via Flickr user laetitiablabla

I've always been very critical of extremism and my place was still searched. My family ended up telling the neighbors that there had been a robbery because we couldn't really brush that kind of police force off as nothing important. We told them we had seen some thieves in the neighborhood and had called the police, who had come by with a bigger force than they usually would have—because of the state of emergency.

As they left, one of the officers told me: "We'll keep an eye on you." What does that mean? Is my phone being tapped? Are they checking what I do online? It's a weird feeling. With the extension of the state of emergency, there will be many more searches in the coming weeks—if not months. I understand why the situation in France is the way it is and I do believe the police only obey orders by casting a wider net. Yet still, it bothers me to be seen as a public threat by my own country.

Follow Matthieu on Twitter.