When this presidential campaign began 10,000 years ago, Hillary Clinton was expected to cruise to the Democratic nomination. She had the resume of a president-in-waiting, a terrifyingly vast fundraising operation, and no prominent challengers on the horizon.

"Clinton is basically guaranteed to win the Democratic nomination with little opposition whatsoever," VICE contributor Kevin Lincoln wrote in April 2015. Back then, people were speculating about a possible Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden campaign—no one was talking about an angry old man from Burlington who kept yelling about how great the healthcare is in Denmark.

A year later, Bernie Sanders's emergence has resulted in one of the most substantive primary policy debates in memory. The fact that the fancy people in mainstream media and politics have had to grapple seriously with a guy who calls himself a Democratic socialist and says stuff like "the business model of Wall Street is fraud" is a moral victory for the Vermont senator.

But Sanders has also scored actual victories, too: In the past month, he's won caucuses in Idaho, Utah, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, and, as of last night, the Wisconsin primary.

Now here comes the part where, like every article written about Sanders, we note the obstacles between him and the Democratic Party nomination. Even leaving out unpledged "superdelegates," Sanders is well behind Clinton in the delegate count, thanks to her series of landslide wins across the South. He also remains several points back in polls in New York, Pennsylvania, and California, three delegate-rich primaries that will basically decide the contest over the next two months.

Given those realities, a Clinton win in Wisconsin would have more or less wrapped the whole thing up. Instead, Sanders not only beat the frontrunner, but eclipsed her by a large margin, outperforming polling expectations.

The victory lends credence to the narrative of Sanders's campaign: He can overcome the long odds if voters in the upcoming primaries can be convinced he has a legitimate chance to beat Clinton, and go on to defeat whatever rough beast slouches out of the Republican National Convention in July. After Tuesday, Clinton's still got the numbers on her side for now, but Sanders has the momentum.

"Momentum is starting this campaign 11 months ago and the media determining that we were a 'fringe' candidacy," Sanders said during a speech in Wyoming last night, according to the New York Times. "Do not tell Secretary Clinton—she's getting a little nervous... But I believe we've got an excellent chance to win New York and a lot of delegates in that state."

It wasn't just the media who thought that Sanders didn't have a shot at the candidacy. According to a Times story published Monday, which quoted several people close to his campaign, Sanders himself "was originally skeptical that he could beat Mrs. Clinton, and his mission in 2015 was to spread his political message about a rigged America rather than do whatever it took to win the nomination."

According to the Times,that outlook prompted Sanders to campaign only part-time for most of 2015, while Clinton devoted all of her energies to the race, and may have played a role in his early reticence to attack his opponent over her private speeches to Goldman Sachs and the ongoing scandal over her private email server.

Even now, Sanders is not quite willing to throw mud like a man who actually wants to be president. In an interview with the New York Daily News this week, he refused to say that Clinton wasn't "trustworthy," instead emphasizing that although he disagrees with her, "I have not attacked her personally."

The problem is, Clinton doesn't seem to have the same set of standards. In that same Daily News interview, Sanders seemed to stumble over the details of how exactly he would break big banks up and prosecute wrongdoing on Wall Street—questions that you'd expect him to have polished answers on. Immediately, Clinton pounced on him for being unprepared, with a campaign staffer tweeting, "At some point, you have to have actual details. How you'll break up the banks. Pay for your college and health care plan. Win the nomination."

On Wednesday morning, Clinton herself appeared on Morning Joe and said, "I think he hadn't done his homework and he'd been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn't really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions."

All this sets up a showdown at the Democratic debate scheduled for April 14, five days before the New York primary. There will almost certainly be a question thrown at Sanders about that Daily News interview, and the specific ways he would go about fighting Wall Street, as well as about his general preparedness to be president. He's got a week to cobble together a clear plan for implementing his policies.

Thanks to his Wisconsin win, Sanders has a path to the nomination, but a key step on that path is going to be dominating that debate—not just by laying out his positions and inspiring voters who already love him, but also by going after Clinton in a way that makes her appear shaky and defensive—something he really hasn't managed yet.

If he falters, and New York delivers the nomination to Clinton, we'll still have spent the last six months talking about bank breakups, student loan forgiveness, and income inequality for the last six months, largely thanks to Sanders. And that can hardly be called a defeat.

Illustrations by Michael Dockery

Sorry to begin with a downer ladies, but breast cancer is a disease that no woman (and no man for that matter) can afford to ignore. It is the most common cancer affecting Australian women, with one in eight women receiving a positive diagnosis at some point in their lives. It is also the second highest cause of cancer-related death in women after lung cancer. While the latest stats have yet to come out, it was estimated that in 2015 15,600 women and 145 men would be diagnosed with the disease.

Given that it's such a common and potentially lethal condition, it's important to understand what it is, what to look out for, and what to do if you think you might have it.

What is breast cancer?

Breast cancer most commonly occurs when the cells lining either the breast lobules (the parts that produce milk) or breast ducts (the tubes that carry milk to the nipple) begin to grow abnormally. Rarer forms of breast cancer include Paget's disease of the nipple and inflammatory breast cancer, which is a type that affects the lymphatic vessels in the skin of the breast.

Breast cancer can spread locally within the breast, via the lymphatic system to the lymph nodes in the underarm, but also through the blood to distant sites such as the lungs, liver, and brain.

What are the risk factors and can breast cancer be prevented?

There are many different risk factors for breast cancer, only some of which are avoidable. These include:

• Being female (not as obvious as you'd think—guys can get breast cancer)
• Increasing age (the average age of diagnosis is 60)
• Inheritance of gene mutations such as BRCA1 and BRCA2 (approximately 5-10 percent of breast cancers fall into this category)
• A strong family history of breast cancer
• A personal history of breast cancer
• Being overweight or obese (especially after menopause)
• Drinking alcohol

While there is no definite way to prevent breast cancer, some risk reducing strategies for high-risk women have been trialled. These include taking certain drugs if there is a strong family history, or "doing an Angelina Jolie," which basically means having both breasts removed if there's a genetic predisposition to cancer.

What should I look out for?

Most breast cancers present with a lump in the breast or the underarm (it's important to remember that breast tissue goes all the way up into the armpit). Other symptoms can include a rash or red swollen breasts, dimpling of the breast skin, breast pain, or changes to the nipple such as discharge, inversion, or sores. You can identify these symptoms by regularly checking your boobs.

How to Check

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners recommends that all women become aware of how their breasts normally look and feel. Becoming familiar with your breasts is easy if your perform regular breast self-checks at home:

• Stand in front of a mirror and raise both of your arms in the air. Look for any changes to the nipple and breast.
• Put your hands on your hips and push your shoulders forward. Again look for any changes.
• In a standing or lying position, roll the breast tissue under your fingers, feeling for any lumps or thickening. Make sure you cover the whole breast and feel right up into the underarm.
• Check your nipples for discharge by gently squeezing the breast tissue adjacent to it.

If you want to watch a thorough but embarrassing clip to help you out, watch this.

I've felt a lump! How do I know if it's cancer?

If you feel a lump in your breast or have any other worrying symptom go see your doctor. They can investigate the lump using an approach called the "triple test." The triple test involves:

Breast examination

A doctor will palpate (feel) your breasts to locate any lumps, as well as feeling for swollen lymph nodes in your underarms. The doctor may also get you to raise your arms or put your hands on your hips (just like in the breast self-exam) as these maneuvers can accentuate some lumps and breast tissue tethering.

Breast Imaging

This can be a diagnostic mammogram (x-ray), ultrasound, or MRI depending on your age and the density of your breasts.

Biopsy

A sample of the lump is obtained to see if the cells are cancerous. This can either be a fine needle aspiration where a thin needle is used to remove cells, or a core biopsy where a small piece of tissue is removed with a needle.

How is breast cancer treated and what is the prognosis?

The standard treatment for breast cancer is surgical removal of the lump and some surrounding tissue, and removal of one or more of the axillary lymph nodes on the same side. If the tumor is very large a full mastectomy—meaning removal of the breast—will sometimes be required.

Following surgery, patients often have a course of radiotherapy to remove any trace deposits of cancer that have escaped surgical removal. Additional therapy such as chemotherapy or hormonal therapy might be needed depending on the stage (spread), grade (how abnormal the cells are), and the presence of certain receptors on the cancer cells.

Like most cancers, if breast cancer is detected early then the likelihood of surviving is much higher. Of the 15600 women and 145 men predicted to get breast cancer in 2015, it was estimated that 3040 females and 25 males would die from the disease that year. Additionally, between 2007-2011 the five-year breast cancer survival rate was 90 percent.

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In this episode of VICE Meets, our host Aaron Maté links up with Marco Ramirez and Doug Petrie—the two showrunners of Marvel's Daredevil—to talk about the second season and how real life events might inform the gritty and often times violent series.

This video has been made possible by Netflix and Marvel's 'Daredevil.'

Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein. Image via

"A yearlong investigation reveals that Mossack Fonseca... has served as the registered agent for front companies tied to an array of notorious gangsters and thieves that... includes associates of Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe, as well as an Israeli billionaire who has plundered one of Africa's poorest countries, and a business oligarch named Lázaro Báez."

This was veteran investigative journalist Ken Silverstein writing about Mossack Fonseca, the shady law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal. His article, recounting what he'd learned tracing the company across three countries over the course of a year, was published on VICE in 2014—nearly 18 months before the Panama Papers came to light earlier this week.

It was explosive stuff. But when Silverstein's piece was released the reaction was nothing like we are seeing now. Iceland's prime minister wasn't forced to resign. There was no global uproar. And when I ask Silverstein about the Panama Papers, he says the story came as a surprise. "I heard a long time ago that the German newspaper had a lot of documents but I had no idea what the scope of their holdings were. I didn't know it was a leak of this size," he says.

Silverstein first discovered Mossack Fonseca while researching another story, digging into how criminals were buying up Miami real estate to launder their money. "It's a huge favored destination for the world's corrupt, whether they are government officials or private business people," he explains. "I found that Mossack Fonseca was setting up a lot of shell companies that were used in the purchase of properties in Miami."

He started poking around, checking in with contacts to see if anyone had heard of this group. "People were like, "Oh yeah, that's one shitty firm,'" he recalls. "You'd call former FBI people who dealt with money laundering and they'd be like, "Oh yeah, Mossack Fonseca. They are the worst.

"Inside those circles, everybody knew Mossack Fonseca was a sleazy firm."

Documents Silverstein got his hands on in the British Virgin Islands, a notorious tax haven, linked Mossack Fonseca to billionaire Rami Makhlouf—Syria's richest man. "Makhlouf is widely believed to be the "bagman"—a person who collects and manages ill-gotten loot—for President Bashar al-Assad, who during the past three years has helped cause the deaths of more than 200,000 of his citizens in the country's civil war," Silverstein wrote back in 2014.

Silverman discovered Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's bagman, Rami Makhlouf, was linked to Mossack Fonseca. Image via

But it wasn't just dictators and criminals. Silverstein's reporting unearthed that scores of legitimate businesses were tied to Mossack Fonseca. The group had even opened up offices in the United States, something that hasn't been widely covered in the Panama Papers furore.

"I found all of these shell companies set up in Las Vegas, Nevada—where Mossack Fonseca had an office—by an Argentine oligarch who had been linked to corruption," he says. "Now, why would an Argentine oligarch use a Panamanian law firm to set up a series of companies in Las Vegas? It makes no sense. There's only one reason to do it: you're hiding money."

It can't be easy watching a story you poured a year of your life into becoming the scoop of a lifetime for someone else. And Silverstein concedes that there is a sting seeing his original reporting not be credited. "The one thing that annoys the shit out of me," he says. "I feel like, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—I know those people, I know they knew of my work."

In many ways Silverstein's experience speaks to the changing nature of investigative journalism. He was one journalist, knocking on doors, bribing his way into free trade zones where these companies were offshoring, turning up at Mossack Fonseca's offices in Panama and Nevada to ask questions no one wanted to answer.

The Panama Papers story emerged through journalists from hundreds of media outlets around the world combing through 2.6 terabytes of documents—the biggest leak of all time. In the age of big data, it's likely this will be the way big stories are broken. To cut through the noise of the news cycle stories will also need this massive co-ordinated push by multiple mastheads.

Iceland's prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson has been forced to step down over the Panama Papers leak. Image via

"You have to sell these stories harder than you do, say, a story about the royal prince having an affair," he says. "Money laundering is not a sexy topic. People don't understand that it actually impacts them."

The big question that's circling around the Panama Papers scandal at the moment is why more Americans haven't been implicated. Rumors are swirling in the comments section that wealthy Americans have bribed their way out of mention in the documents. But from his time researching money laundering, Silverstein believes the answer is more about Mossack Fonseca's client base, which he guesses is largely Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans.

"I think there still is an important American component to this story though," he adds."Which is that Mossack Fonseca was allowed to operate openly in the United States for a long time. That's outrageous." Barack Obama has long campaigned for international action against tax havens, as has David Cameron, even though the Panama Papers revealed his own father was squirreling millions away in one.

But Silverstein's overwhelming feeling about the Panama Papers coverage is excitement—that it looks as though Mossack Fonseca is finally coming down. "I'm really glad it's getting this kind of pick up. Mossack Fonseca, those people belong in jail," he says. "Their alibis, 'Oh we didn't know who we were working for,' and all their bullshit excuses are very, very unconvincing. I think there's going to be legal fallout for these people, finally."

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Look at Simon's Instagram, check out his webstore, and buy his new book from Fantagraphics.

Our new VICELAND show STATES OF UNDRESS is not your typical dive into the high-fashion worlds of Paris, Milan, London, and New York. The series explores the different and unexpected fashion scenes around the world, uncovering new trends and addressing issues that the mainstream industry tends to ignore.

On this episode, host Hailey Gates heads to the African nation of Congo, where fashion is a full-time obsession. As she encounters the eclectic style on display in the streets of Kinshasa, Gates talks with women about their beauty ideals and learns that typical North American runway standards are not the norm everywhere. Congolese women not only prefer more curves, but will go to very extreme lengths to get them.

In this clip, Gates gets a first-hand look at the home remedies that women are using to boost their "assets"—including liquid suppositories of Maggi seasoning that they are self administering contrary to doctors' orders and at serious risk to their health.

Watch the clip above and make sure check out the full episode of STATES OF UNDRESS Wednesday, April 6, 10 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

Mike McCormack in a rare moment of silence. Photo courtesy THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette.

Earlier this week, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne made a relatively benign concession when she agreed with Toronto Black Lives Matter protesters that "we still have systemic racism in our society." Wynne made the comments Monday in front of the provincial legislature, following weeks of BLMTO demonstrations outside Toronto police headquarters, Wynne's home, and at Queen's Park.

To most rational people, the premier was stating the obvious; admitting to the existence of systemic racism is hardly controversial, especially in light of what we know about carding, police brutality, and rates of incarceration, all of which disproportionately affect minorities.

What's puzzling then, was the knee-jerk reaction spouted by president of the Toronto Police Association, Mike McCormack. McCormack, seemingly incapable of dealing with even the slightest whiff of criticism directed at cops (more on that later), told the Toronto Sun he wants an explanation as to whom Wynne was referring.

"Is the racism in another provincial department? Or does she mean the Toronto police?" he demanded.

He went on to say it's "easy to draw a conclusion" that Wynne was talking about police because the BLM movement has focused heavily on racism in law enforcement, but he refuted that characterization as "not true and it's not acceptable to suggest it." Front-line officers are tired of accusations that they're racist, he noted.

"What I want to ask the premier is for her to show us the data that she is referring to when she says we still have systemic racism in our society."

He's right that race-based stats are hard to come by, partially because neither the police nor any formal agency in the country keep track of things like how many black people are killed by cops. The numbers we do have, often crunched by journalists after repeated FOI requests, and advocacy groups, don't paint a pretty picture—for example, in some parts of the GTA, you're 17 times more likely to be stopped by police—aka carded—if you're black. According to McCormack though, the suspension of carding is behind a rise in shootings in the city, because of "officers not having the ability to engage the public"—a claim that was rejected by Toronto police spokesman Mark Pugash.

Even RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson, while speaking to a group of Indigenous leaders about missing and murdered women and girls, admitted there are racists in his police force.

But McCormack's views are hardly surprising if you look at his track record.

Following the attempted murder conviction of Toronto police Const. James Forcillo, who shot teenager Sammy Yatim nine times, killing him and sparking major outrage over use of force, McCormack remarked, "clearly this sends a chilling message to our members and that's going to be a challenge for our frontline members."

Maybe it's a good thing if a cop has to think twice before unleashing a second round of fire on someone who's already severely injured/dead.

McCormack said the verdict was a "shock," which actually stands in contrast to his comments in Toronto Life that "there's a hyper-vigilance when it comes to investigating and convicting police officers."

Give me a fucking break.

Had Forcillo been found guilty of the other offence for which he was charged—second-degree murder—he would've been the first police officer in the city's history to have been convicted of murder for an on-duty killing, and an anomaly amongst Canadian law enforcement.

Then again, McCormack is the same guy who praised Toronto police officers for showing "amazing restraint" during the 2010 G20 summit. Yes, he's defending a weekend of egregious civil liberties breaches that included the illegal detainment of more than 1,000 innocent people who were kettled in the pouring rain, news photographers reporting being assaulted, and police allegedly beating a one-legged protester and taking his prosthetic. (Apparently, Ontario's Court of Appeal also disagrees with McCormack, having just granted detainees who were kettled the right to sue police.)

On perhaps the most contentious of all local police-related issues, the force's inflated $1-billion budget, McCormack is unwilling to entertain any talk of downsizing. He told Toronto Life, "we get told to go out there and do a job, we're not always given the proper equipment or budget to deal with that" and accused former deputy chief Peter Sloly of being "very suspect" for suggesting the organization could stand to lose some officers.

Fact is, Torontonians pay for 28 hours of policing a day; 4,638 officers earned more than $100,000 in 2015, up 500 from the year prior; and the force's new toys include military-grade assault rifles that critics argue are gratuitous.

As head of the Toronto Police Association, McCormack represents thousands of officers in the country's biggest force.

Clearly, he has a duty to speak up for them, which isn't in and of itself problematic. But by having a ridiculous hissy fit every time the cops are accused of wrongdoing, often ignoring facts in the process, McCormack is widening the rift between police and their detractors.

The hysterics are only making it harder for the officers he's trying to defend.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

All photos by DannyGirl

Whether or not our government wants to admit the legitimacy of sex work as an industry, there are thousands of women every day in Canada who run escorting like any other business. In Montreal, one person who is an integral part of this industry is a woman who goes by DannyGirl. Over the past decade, she has taken photos for thousands of escorts in Montreal to be put up on agency websites and independent escorting sites in order to lure customers into spending an evening with the women on the screen.

How has your perception changed over the course of your time shooting escorts?
The thing about working in the adult industry for so many years, is you become really desensitized to everything that has to do with sex and naked people. It becomes very human and normal. I often say, if you enjoy porn, strippers, and all the fantasy and lacy dreaminess that comes with all that, never work in the industry. It's like seeing behind the velvet curtain in The Wizard of Oz. You can never go back to that naivety and sense of sexy-time awe. You realize the normality of how it's all run, that it's just a business, and everything you've concocted in your head is all smoke and mirrors: Photoshop and great lighting. It has become so normal for me to say, "Tuck your labia back in, babe" or reach over and pull a G-string back over a bending girl's asshole. It's very difficult to go back to seeing these glossy images as some ultimate fantasy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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As America moves toward marijuana legalization and an opioid overdose epidemic shows few signs of waning, the question of how parents should talk to their kids about drugs is more urgent and complicated than ever. And with Generation X—the druggiest in history—now confronting teenage offspring, the issue of how to frame their own past use makes the discussion even trickier.

Almost everyone wants their kids to make smarter decisions about sex and drugs than they did. Yet no one has figured out a magic formula to get teenagers through those years when their brains pull them towards risk. Still, the generation raised on DARE and "Just Say No" in the 1980s seems to have settled on practical ways of reducing harm and avoiding tragedy.

Josephine Cannella-Krehl, 49, is a social worker and the mother of two teens and a 21-year-old. Raised in New York City, she now lives in Florida and recalls just how useless her own drug education was. It consisted of handouts that claimed to give "just the facts" about various drugs, while detailing their many purported dangers in sensational fashion.

"Learning that hallucinogens would make the world look like a cartoon come to life, or that weed would make me want to fly, actually sounded like great fun..."

"I remember thinking it was a bunch of lies," she says, explaining that her older siblings' friends were regular pot smokers. Far from being unmotivated or stupid, she tells me, they "were the most creative in their graduating class and almost all of them received full scholarships to top art schools... The rhetoric simply didn't fit my experience. I figured if they were lying about that, they were probably lying about all of it."

Juliet, a 34-year-old writer and artist living in Cleveland, has a 14-year-old son and remembers her experience with DARE as infantilizing—not helpful. When she was in sixth grade, cops from the program didn't exactly connect with her or her friends.

"The officer would bring in a teddy bear for one child to hold during the sessions, which included a coloring book. I found this approach age-inappropriate, juvenile, and condescending," she says. "Learning that hallucinogens would make the world look like a cartoon come to life, or that weed would make me want to fly, actually sounded like great fun was to be had. I wasn't persuaded not to use drugs or alcohol."

These experiences jibe with research data, which finds that such programs are either ineffective or actively counterproductive. Today, both moms are taking a very different line with their own children.

"My husband and I decided early on that we would have a truth-based approach," Cannella-Krehl tells me. "I find the best approach to be to 'sneak' in the important stuff when nobody's focused on it as opposed to sitting everyone down for 'the big talk,' and to keep things as lighthearted as possible."

Juliet, who has overcome her own drinking problem, uses herself as an example for her son, now a high school freshman. "I've been honest about my own mental health issues and how self-medicating is not the answer," she says. "I taught him that drinking is normal in our culture, but that normal is having a couple of drinks when you are old enough, and it's nothing that special that you need to try in high school."

Both moms see state marijuana legalization initiatives as a reason to talk about drugs and drug laws—not panic.

"I share my opinion that I'd rather see marijuana legal than illegal because I believe it is far less dangerous than alcohol," Juliet says, adding that refusing to make a big deal out of it helps prevent teens from seeing drug use as a sweet way to rebel.

"As cannabis becomes more mainstream, I think it's even more important that kids understand the true dangers," says Cannella-Krehl, citing issues with edible dosing and the fact that regular pot is much less risky than synthetic "pot like" substances sold as legal highs.

Jerry Otero is the youth policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and works to develop materials for parents negotiating teen drug use. The group's research-based "Safety First" program emphasizes honesty, accurate information and building a trusting relationship above all. Otero was open with his son, who is now 21, about his own marijuana use—and emphasized the importance of holding back to avoid fucking up college opportunities.

"I told him that I preferred that he wait and at every juncture, the decision should be reasoned and deliberate and always, with the question, 'Do I have to do it now?'" he says. Otero adds that his son, who's now in college, didn't try marijuana until he was 20 and has not had any problems with it.

Kathryn Bowers, a 48-year-old author with a 16-year-old daughter, came to use the same approach via research she did for her recent book, Zoobiquity, which looks at parallels between animal and human health. She was struck by data showing that early exposure to drugs is much riskier than later; in fact, 90 percent of all addictions start in the teens or early 20s, and the odds of developing an addiction later in life if you have never had one at that age are extremely low.

"My main takeaway is that the earlier the substances are introduced into an organism, the greater the effect and the more chance for addiction," she says. "The longer you can wait, the better... that was message I was trying to put out for my daughter."

All of the experts and parents I spoke to feel that the most important aspect of drug prevention has almost nothing to do with actual drugs at all. Instead, it's basically just about building a caring, trusting relationship between parents and children. Obviously, this tack won't always prevent drug use or addiction, but it can create a context in which, if problems do arise, they get detected and dealt with earlier.

This is completely different from Reagan-era tactics, which tended to view all drug use as immoral, emphasizing punitive and stigmatizing messages to try and prevent it with little consideration of what causes addiction. The catastrophic failure of the War on Drugs is clear to today's parents, who found the old way separated them from their own loved ones without preventing use or addiction.

You can get an even more visceral sense of how the 'talk' is changing when you consider how parents are talking about the current opioid epidemic.

Rather than calling for crackdowns on drug users, today's parents want access to the overdose reversal drug naloxone; rather than opposing needle exchange programs as "sending the wrong message," they are fighting to create them to prevent the spread of disease. And rather than prison and "tough love," today's parents want evidence-based treatment.

Julie Stampler, 43, a small-business owner in New York, is the mother of three, two of whom are teens. Her brother died of a heroin overdose, so her children are well aware of the drug's dangers.

"I always say that if my brother's death is going to help in any way, it's hopefully going to help save my children from a similar fate. So we talk about heroin, we talk about overdose prevention," she says. Stampler's stepfather, ironically, is the chemist who invented naloxone, the antidote to opioid overdose.

"Parents need to educate themselves," she says, and "have an ongoing conversation and open door policy for the children to be able to talk to them without fear of judgment or consequence."

For teens, "attention is the best prevention," Juliet concludes. So even if love and trust aren't always all you need, without them, parents are liable to just make things worse.

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Bernie Sanders campaigning in Arizona (Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

• Wall Street Players Identified in Panama Papers
  The names of US executives have emerged from the Panama Papers, including people accused or convicted of financial crimes. The leaked documents show that more than 200 people with US addresses set up offshore companies, including Benjamin Wey, the Wall Street financier recently charged with securities fraud. —USA Today
• Bernie Says Hillary Not Qualified to Be President
  Bernie Sanders said Hillary Clinton was not qualified to be president because of her special-interest funding and her vote for the war in Iraq. Sanders later said his rival "might want to apologize to the families who lost their loved ones in Iraq." Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon called Sanders' attack "a new low." —The Washington Post
• Woman Found Dead at Austin Campus
  Police in Austin are searching for a possible killer on a college campus after the body of a woman in her twenties was found at the University of Texas. The death has prompted the college to bring in additional safety patrols and shuttles for students during late nights, but classes are going ahead. —NBC News
• Tennessee Bill Could Stop LGBT Care
  The Tennessee House passed a bill which would allow mental health counselors to deny help to clients based on religious grounds. Opponents of the bill say it will be used to block care to LGBT individuals, and the Tennessee Equality Project has called on the state governor to veto. —Reuters

International News

• Panama President Promises Transparency
  Panama's president Juan Carlos Varela has announced that an international panel of experts will help create transparency in his country's financial industry. The latest leaks from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca show that three members of the Chinese Communist Party's most powerful committee have relatives who control offshore companies. —BBC News
• Bangladeshi Activist Hacked to Death
  A law student who posted pro-atheism comments online has been murdered, according to Bangladeshi police. Nazimuddin Samad was hacked with machetes by at least three men riding on a motorbike, then shot to death. It is the latest in a series of killings of secular activists in the country. —Al Jazeera
• France Introduces Prostitution Ban
  The French parliament has passed a controversial law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of $1,700 for those caught buying sexual acts. Supporters of the law say it will help fight trafficking, but some sex workers protested against the law outside parliament. —The Guardian
• Cyprus Agrees to Extradite Hijacker
  Cyprus has agreed to extradite the Egyptian man accused of hijacking an airliner last week. Held in Cyprus since he used a fake suicide belt to hijack an EgyptAir flight and forced it to fly to Larnaca, the extradition process for Seif al-Din Mustafa, 58, is expected to be fast-tracked. —Reuters

Kanye's speech at the Phife Dawg tribute in Harlem

Everything Else

• LAPD Investigates Sheen Murder Threat Claims
  The Los Angeles Police Department has opened a criminal investigation against Charlie Sheen over alleged death threats he made against ex-fiancee Scottine Rossi. Rossi also claims Sheen did not tell her he was HIV positive during their relationship. —CBS News
• Video Shows School Cop Body-Slamming 12-Year-Old
  Officials in San Antonio are investigating video which shows a school district police officer body-slamming a 12-year-old middle school student to the ground. The school district has placed the officer on paid leave. —ABC News
• CIA Helped Produce 'Top Chef' Episode
  Newly released details from a CIA watchdog reveal the agency "supported" a spy-themed episode of Bravo reality show Top Chef, along with movies like Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The agency wanted an "accurate portrayal" of CIA work on screen. —VICE News
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Done with reading for today? That's fine—watch our new film 'On the Front Lines with International Volunteers Fighting ISIS in Syria'.

A pregnant stripper shoots up; a woman in an Obama mask gives a blowjob in front of a cheering crowd at a militia rally; a junkie couple make love and meth on camera. These are but a few of the striking, disturbing scenes in Roberto Minervini's latest film, The Other Side, premiering in New York this Friday, April 8, as part of Lincoln Center's documentary showcase Art of the Real. The Italian-born Houston-based filmmaker's access to Bayou hedonism is unrivaled, but so too is his respect for his on-screen collaborators. Minervini avoids romanticizing the suffering of his addiction-riddled subjects—especially the central ones, Mark and Lisa, a local dealer and his girlfriend—while still capturing the beauty, darkness, and anger that pervades small-town Louisiana around them.

The Other Side is starkly divided in two. The first half centers on Mark and his family, his girlfriend Lisa, as well as his mother, grandmother, sister, and niece. The second half abruptly shifts its focus to a white militia in the area, documenting their training sessions and a rally. A sense of disenfranchisement and a hostility toward Obama pervade both halves. Together, the film connects personal frustrations with a sociopolitical climate, which feels particularly relevant right now.

Minervini met Mark and Lisa through his last film Stop the Pounding Heart (available on Netflix), which tells the story of a teen romance between the homeschooled daughter of a godly goat farmer and a rodeo bull rider. The teen bull rider's dad, Todd, is Lisa's brother. Minervini explained he has access to film these people because his relationships with them don't end when production stops. When I recently Skyped with him, he told me there were characters from both films downstairs at his house hanging out.

VICE: When did you get the idea to make The Other Side into two parts?
Roberto Minervini: It came along the way. In the story of Mark, there was an underlying anger toward the institution. I thought I could go work with the militia . I've known them for a while and I've been invited to document their actions for the past two years. That's where I thought I could create a link that was perhaps conceptual and political.

What do you think about the ethics of showing people shooting up in your films? How do you make sure that what you show doesn't cross the line?
That's one of the big ethical questions: How do you portray people who cannot portray themselves? The answer is that it must be a collective decision. Ultimately we have to define boundaries together.

are aware of the effects of shooting up or having sex on camera. They also believe in the bigger mission and vision of the film about showing the dysfunctional aspects of American society. It's about questioning the family institution and creating a larger political debate.

It didn't seem like there were very many boundaries, though. There's lots of sex and drugs on camera.
Whatever is in the film is within their boundaries. Some boundaries were harder to overcome—emotional boundaries, like men breaking down, falling apart emotionally, and showing their vulnerability. That's where they wanted to draw the line. As an example, when Mark breaks down in the end , making this ultimate confession to Lisa and admitting that he's looking for salvation in jail, after shooting that scene, he told me that he was done shooting. Mark told me, "I cannot go on with this. It feels too vulnerable."

The second part of this answer is that I trained as a photojournalist. My goal was to become a war photo reporter—I tried to freelance during the Thailand coup, and I failed at that career. One of the most important teachings I received was to choose an image that can tell a story that is way bigger, broader, wider, deeper than what I'm showing and to take full responsibility for it.

The pregnant girl , for me, is so important because of the social condition that people inherit, especially in America where there's not a lot of class mobility. For me, it's key to show the inheritance, that [this condition has] been passed along generations. Maybe this image will scare some people off, but hopefully I can shake things up politically with the discourse that this image will trigger. My intent is definitely to create a bigger discourse than just victimization, suffering, and addiction.

What do you think Mark and Lisa's motivations were for wanting to participate with you?
I think one motivation, which is perhaps human nature, is just wanting to be heard and seen. Also, having a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have the spotlight on them and to be taken seriously. Scaring people away and shocking people is part of their performance. They are aware of the effects of shooting up or having sex on camera. They also believe in the bigger mission and vision of the film about showing the dysfunctional aspects of American society. It's about questioning the family institution and creating a larger political debate. They believed in that and they became players.

Mark's story wasn't just a portrait of depravity and suffering. There were many moments where I was actually quite jealous of how much love he had in his life.
The truth is that I went into this film with my own broad set of prejudices and judgments that I had to fight against. I remember vividly that when I started working with the drug addicts and I started seeing their love being physical and verbalized, I was thinking that this story was going to be a disaster. How am I going to convey the idea of pain when there is so much love? I was falling into a particularistic idea of suffering and falling into the idea that I could be a savior, in a way. Then I saw that they could provide love for themselves. They didn't need me or the elite, which I inevitably belong to. I realized I didn't know shit about love and suffering and how they can go together.

Do you think you can get better access because of your foreigner status when you're making films in America?
Perhaps. I've been in America for 15 years and I am an American citizen. I bring a European perspective and I think it is welcome by people because I am not part of the system, in a way. At the same time I live here. I'm here to stay. I don't go anywhere to collect a bag of footage and bring it to my French producers.

As we're talking, downstairs having a coffee are people from The Other Side, from Stop the Pounding Heart , and the family of Lisa and Mark. They know me. They know where to find me. We hang out. That's a big factor for establishing trust. I'm a foreigner but less of a foreigner than another American [who might leave after production]. It's crucial. There would be no film without the pre-condition of living here.

I read that where you grew up in Italy, there were parallels with poverty and addiction. What was it like where you grew up?
We grew up in a very difficult situation, at 14 you're quitting school and going to work as a teen making only $1,000 a month until we died, without any mobility. At that age, working and making money, people fell into addiction and hard times. I grew up with these difficult images. I was six and I remember not understanding, thinking everybody was so tired because everybody would fall asleep standing up, not knowing that everybody was on heroin. So many of my friends died, medicating the nothingness, that sense of void. We inherited this condition. Drugs were the only way to soothe the pain of seeing the oblivion in front of us.

I was saved randomly by the fact that someone told me that by studying computer programming I could get to the big city, so I did. I didn't go to work at 14. I went to high school and then I became an insurance salesman, and then I even went to college later on.

What attracted you to come to the States and to make films here?
I left Italy for Spain looking for jobs because I spoke Spanish. I was a singer for a punk rock band, stuff like that. I never looked back and I just started traveling all over until I fell in love with a woman. In just a few days, I was in New York City, not speaking any English. That's just how I live my life. I do things first and then I think afterward.

I thought that the United States was the cancer of the world and I thought I was going into the belly of the monster. However, I had overlooked completely the human factor of the people. The American people are why I am not going back to Italy, because I can't abandon them. America taught me the most important lesson in my life, which is that you can talk with an "I" statement. I can speak for myself and this is how I can become intimate with people whereas in my country you speak with a "you" statement, which is very confrontational. I'm very sure that coming to America saved me. It would be hard for me to leave America. There's a certain gentleness in this country that scares the whole world.

Your film made me think about the fact that America is so big and people have very distinct cultural identities in different states. If we didn't have propaganda, people wouldn't feel united as a country because it's really so fragmented in a lot of ways.
There's a big disconnect between the people and the institutions that push people to find their own messages of unity.

I find that the type of thing people are feeding themselves with is often really contradictory because it's anti-government but pro-America.
That's one of the biggest of the militia. "Let's bring down the government for America." That's their vision, but I get it. I get why they think that way.

In your film, you have these poor white people blaming all their problems on black people even though poor white people and poor black people have a lot of the same interests.
Even geographically we were working in a white ghetto that was across the street from a black ghetto. They were constantly reminding us that the other ghetto was worse, ultimately because they are blacks and so it's just worse by default. They felt reduced for being compared to black people and it became their antagonist. It's the biggest wound of America, you know. It's just never healed.

Watching this film, I realized how much backlash there's been with Obama as the president. It's insane how much racism there is.
Yes, Obama is black, and some of America wasn't ready for that. And that's pretty much a fact. It's very important to me to create discourse where there's no message from the film. I don't want to add footnotes to something by labeling actions as racist or politically charged. It's very important for me that this film creates fear because fear is the biggest door toward vulnerability. That's where there can be intimacy and discourse.

I want this film to go beyond labeling because racism might be a way to explain the reaction toward Obama, but it's also important to consider that perhaps there are other reasons. The anger for the institution comes from people who feel used by the government. I think it is a very important reflection on today's America. I mean, Trump might become the next president, but to dismiss Trump as just a racist lunatic is definitely counterproductive. It's a very elitist and dangerous position to just discard these people as a bunch of misfits.

Photo by Chris Bethell

Charlie Hebdo is very concerned about our flaky pastry. In its recent editorial on the Brussels attacks, "How Did We Get Here?", the magazine presents the great cultural contest of our time as being fundamentally a question of what to do with baked goods, an exterminationist war fought for the sanctity of bits of meat packed between bits of bread. The Muslims, they tell us, want to forbid any criticism of their religion, and they're doing so through the medium of patisserie.

First they write about the liberal scholar Tariq Ramadan, currently lecturing on Islam at Sciences-Po, a prominent French university. But because Ramadan is himself a Muslim, the author writes, he shouldn't be allowed to teach anyone about the subject; his students will somehow mysteriously "not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam." He is like "a Professor of Pies who is also a pie-maker," "judge and contestant both."

But Ramadan, with his insidious plot to teach people about his area of expertise, is only part of a vast conspiracy, involving the entire Muslim population, to follow their religion.

The editorial goes on to talk about an entirely imaginary bakery, a beloved local institution that makes really great croissants, but whose new Muslim owner won't put ham or bacon in his sandwiches. The fake baker has no intention of gunning his clients down with a Kalashnikov or blowing them up during their morning commute, but thanks to him they're getting used to the idea of a sandwich without any dead pigs in it. "And thus the baker's role is done." It's a small role, but it's part of a grand production that ends in bodies on the streets and sharia law ruling over all of Europe. Somehow—it's not entirely clear how—this baker is fighting a culinary jihad.

But if you're going to have a Professor of Pies, shouldn't they at the very least know how to make one? It's a very strange argument, especially when you try to extend its logic: If it holds, shouldn't professors of literature be forbidden from ever trying to write a novel? Shouldn't doctors be banned from commenting on public health? Charlie Hebdo seems to be objecting to Tariq Ramadan and to its devious baker not because of anything they've actually said or done, but simply because they dare to make pastries or lecture while being Muslim.

There have been plenty of people pointing out, with a kind of myopic shock, that all this sounds a lot like racism. And it is: It's racism of a very old sort, the type that we could almost pretend had gone away forever; not just a vague personal antipathy, but properly genocidal, eliminationist racism.

What Charlie Hebdo is afraid of is not the idea that Muslims can never fully integrate into western society, but the fact that actually, they can. Not all Muslims are terrorists, Charlie Hebdo admits, only a vanishingly tiny percentage—but all of them, every single one of them, are Muslims; nasty, scary Muslims. They're scared of the baker they invented precisely because he's well-integrated into the community around him, because he's helping his neighbors understand that Muslims are just ordinary people. For them, this is far more dangerous than any act of terrorism. And there's nothing the baker can do. What if he started offering bacon and ham in his sandwiches? Then it's even worse: He's lulling people into a false sense of security, cynically aping French traditions while remaining unbearably other. What if he renounced his faith entirely, and turned into an already-lapsed Catholic? The secular guard dogs at Charlie Hebdo would almost certainly start going on some paranoiac rant about taqiyyah. Charlie Hebdo won't say it themselves—that's for the others—but what can you do with a population that's congenitally evil, that's a threat by the simple fact of its existence? Imprison them all, expel them all, or kill them all.

Of course this stuff is racist; it's deliberately, proudly racist, and pointing out that it's racist doesn't achieve very much. It'd be far more useful to think about exactly what this racism is and where it comes from; that way there's a better chance of fighting it. And in the end it really does all come back down to the pies.

At the end of the editorial, there's a very strange line: Charlie Hebdo complains about the "bakery that forbids you to eat what you like" and "the woman who forbids you to admit that you are troubled by her veil." As far as I'm aware, Muslim-owned bakeries in France are not hiring gangs of thugs to snatch the ham sandwiches out of people's hands—pork products are still widely available and often delicious. Nobody should be obligated to serve every conceivable type of meat at their local bakery; nothing is being forbidden from the charcuterie-eating majority. The idea that bacon is being somehow banned comes out of the same mindset that thinks Jeremy Clarkson was "banned" from the BBC, or that people disapproving of catcalling is a restriction on free speech. It's a narcissistic fury, in which not getting everything you want whenever you want it, and not being immediately applauded for everything you do, is the worst kind of oppression. But there is a movement in the opposite direction: schools across France are being forced to remove pork-free options from their lunch menus, directly victimizing Jewish and Muslim kids in the name of secularism.

WATCH: Rise of the Right

Similarly with the veil. The magazine insists that it's forbidden from finding the veil troubling. But in fact the French state itself finds the veil so troubling that it has actually, literally banned it. Not in the sense of a bakery "banning" pork by not serving it—if you wear the veil in public, a policeman will come along and give you a fine. And the idea that it's somehow become impossible to criticize the veil is somewhat contradicted by the fact that this idea has been printed (in English, for maximum exposure) in Charlie Hebdo—a magazine that, let's not forget, has become almost the official pseudosatirical wing of the state, with the government directly financing its print run after the attack on its offices last year. The racism of Charlie Hebdo isn't a difference of opinion, it's an absolute inversion of reality. And while Muslims across Europe are terrorized by street fascists, smug satirists, and the state, Charlie Hebdo knows where real travesty is, it screams, a greedy child with sticky fingers and a pig-eyed indifference to the suffering of others. Where's my ham sandwich? Where's my pork pie? I want my ham sandwich. I want my pork pie right now.

I read Raymond M. Douglas's gutsy, remarkable memoir On Being Raped in practically one sitting. Employing a frank yet eloquent writing style, the slim book traces a path from the author's rape as an 18-year-old in 1980s Europe to the ways our society stigmatizes victims into silence, shame, and helplessness while, at the same time, allowing perpetrators to go unpunished for many years, if ever at all. As Douglas himself notes, "Statistically, it's virtually certain that everyone who reads it already knows a man who has been raped; they're just not aware of it." Although the subject of male rape is finally entering larger awareness, thanks in part to films like Spotlight, the amount of literature remains lacking. On Being Raped throws a light on the subject with clarity and thoughtfulness. It is, in short, urgent, necessary reading. VICE is proud to present the opening chapter below.

—James Yeh, culture editor

Gloucestershire, Great Britain, 1992. Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

The Story of My Rape as a Young Man

It's not evil that's banal, it's evildoers. Great crimes have a grandeur to them, a dramatic sweep that compels our attention. Even petty offenses can be interesting, like the wave of kidnappings of lawn ornaments for ransom in the northeastern United States a few years ago. But the perpetrators of even the most atrocious deeds seem to have nothing in common beyond their personal insignificance. Adolf Hitler was an awkward nonentity, his stock of knowledge drawn from the early 20th-century Viennese equivalent of the Reader's Digest , with herbicidal bad breath and an over-large nose to divert attention from which he grew a still more ridiculous mustache. Joseph Stalin was a failed priest. Bonnie and Clyde were, respectively, a part-time waitress and an unsuccessful turkey thief. Hermann Goering played with trains. Hence the frustration of biographers who peel away layer after layer of the psyches of history's greatest criminals only to discover, in Gertrude Stein's words, that there is no there there.

The man who raped me conforms all too faithfully to this pattern. I knew little about him before the attack, and have not seen any reason to find out much more since then. Undistinguished in his career, unexceptional in appearance and demeanor, there was nothing about him that would make him stand out in a crowd. It was my bad luck to learn that he was also cunning, violent, and someone who obtained gratification from causing others to suffer. But even those traits are not particularly unusual in today's world. Not the least embarrassing aspect of this entire episode is that my life should have been so deeply affected in so many ways by so entirely mundane an individual.

Through the intervention of some inexplicable chronological constant, rape is always now.

As for the rape itself, it too, as best as I can judge, was mundane. To be sure, that's largely guesswork on my part. There is only one rape that I can claim to know about with any degree of authority, and that is my own. And yet even as I write about it, I can see the words fade and lose definition before my eyes. How many billions of times have such things happened in human history? How many tens of thousands of descriptions? Everything lapses into a terrible sameness, a story that isn't worth telling because it is so infuriatingly familiar. What makes my rape different? "Well, it happened to me" hardly seems like a compelling justification for banging on about it. No bore like a rape bore.

But there's the difficulty. My rape, in all important respects like everybody else's, fits every pattern but my own. Since it happened, I've been trying to find a slot for it in my biography, with clearly marked boundaries like all the other highlights (birth, school years, first job, rape, university, grad school...). But it refuses to stay there. Even today, it's continuing to rewrite the computer code of my life, like one of those pieces of Web malware that covers the screen with pop-up windows faster than I can close them down. I've experienced other crimes, as most people have: burglary, property theft, minor assaults. There one can speak of a "before" and "after." The baddie was identified and prosecuted, or not; the goods were recovered or the insurance policy paid off; the drunken creep who started swinging wildly in all directions was thrown out by the bouncer. Only in this instance are things different. Through the intervention of some inexplicable chronological constant, rape is always now.

I suspect that this is true for others also, though since being raped, I've become much more cautious about telling anybody else what his or her experience is like. The really difficult thing is to say why I have found it so. There have been many events in my life that I, at any rate, found momentous: some good, some gruesome. Why can't this single night, out of all of them, be relegated to the place it belongs—an unpleasant experience from my past, but one that was survived and surmounted?

The answer, I think, is that rape—my rape, anyway; probably most other people's also—doesn't allow for that kind of separation between the event and the self. Rape is knowledge, but not the sort that does you, or anybody else, any good. When I was raped, I learned things about myself and the world I live in that it would have been far better never to know. And for most of my adult life, the knowledge has been killing me.

I was 18 years of age. My second job out of school was as the lone security guard on the night shift at a teacher-training college: six days on, Fridays off. I patrolled the seven-acre campus with a flashlight and a dog that did its damnedest to bite me every time I put the leash on until I finally insisted that the canine lunatic be taken away. The hours were long and the pay abysmal, but I liked the work and the responsibility.

One rainy February evening on my off night, a priest of my acquaintance telephoned my home and left a message with my mother asking me to come down to the parochial house, where he was having a gathering. I knew him to talk to, though this was the first such invitation I'd received, and I hadn't laid eyes on him in months. He'd been a kind of unofficial chaplain at my school, much involved in conducting spiritual retreats, and a lot of the older students used to go across the street and hang out in his upstairs living room during my last year there. His music collection was locally famous, and would have been sufficient to meet the needs of a small radio station. He was in his early 40s, mordant, cynical, and quick-witted. We all thought he drank a bit too much. He made clear that we were welcome to share the stock of his impressive home bar to our hearts' content, though surprisingly few of us used to take him up on the offer.

The party, when I arrived a little after nine, was something of a downer. Another priest and half a dozen or so of my erstwhile school friends were already there, three of them sitting by the fireside in the living room with grimly polite expressions on their faces. I found the remainder skulking in the adjacent kitchen, where they evidently intended to remain as long as they decently could. Our clerical host's mood, we knew, tended to ebb and flow with his alcohol consumption. When I arrived, he was visibly hammered, standing at the fireside and waving a tumbler of neat whiskey around while delivering his favorite harangue of a conventionally anti-Vatican variety. We'd heard it all before, many times. As the evening dragged on, his gestures became wilder, his eyes glassier, and his rate of intake more rapid. One of my more astute friends, recognizing the danger signs, volunteered to mix the drinks. By midnight, the priest seemed not to realize, or to care, that the glasses we were handing him contained little more than amber-tinged water.

Rape is knowledge, but not the sort that does you, or anybody else, any good. When I was raped, I learned things about myself and the world I live in that it would have been far better never to know.

Around two in the morning, the other cleric having long since fled and with no end in sight, most of us ducked into the kitchen for a quick council of war. We agreed that our man was in no condition to be left on his own; apart from anything else, his car stood outside the house, as it always did in readiness for a late call-out to some dying parishioner's bedside, and none of us knew where he kept the keys. Clearly he had no intention of winding down operations as long as the party was under way. Straws were drawn, and it fell to me to stay with him after the others departed; ensure that he did not go on any midnight drives by himself; and pour him into bed whenever the impact of the booze he had already consumed finally knocked him over. More than an hour later, the fire having gone out and a chill having descended on the room, the priest finally agreed to my diplomatic suggestions that it was time for us both to grab 40 winks. His bedroom lay directly off the living room, via a pair of sliding wooden doors. He rummaged around the wardrobe, pulling out a couple of blankets and a pillow and coming back to toss them on the sofa for me while I raked out the last embers from the grate. I was a little surprised when he crossed over and locked from the inside the door of the apartment leading to the hallway. "Oh, I always do that," he said, "we've had several break-ins over the years." I didn't think much of it at the time.

Manual dexterity problems delayed the process of retiring for the night. After watching my host sitting on the side of his bed, fumbling ineffectually at his laces for several minutes, I knelt at his feet, removed his shoes, and helped him laboriously undress and struggle into his pajamas and his bed. This done, I turned to leave. "No, wait a minute," he called in alarm. "I can't get to sleep on my own in the dark. Stay with me until I drop off. I've had a skinful. It won't take long. Please?"

Anything for a quiet life. I drew up a chair. "No, don't be ridiculous," he said crossly. "You can lie down on the bed. There's any amount of room. I'll be out like a light in ten minutes. Just kick your shoes off. I don't want you messing up my quilt." Without waiting for a reply, he reached across and flicked out the bedside light.

At this point, you're doubtless drawing the conclusion that if I fell for that one, I deserved anything I got. And now we have the first invariable component of the rape script: the list of charges. Prisoner at the bar, how could you have been so stupid? What did you think he was going to do? Don't you realize that you were asking for it? Do you really expect the members of the jury to believe that you didn't know what was coming next?

In fact, I didn't. The thought never so much as crossed my mind. He was a priest. I was a parishioner, and a former pupil. I was also a virgin, although that was hardly relevant because the notion that anything sexual might occur in my current surroundings was as remote to me as the idea of an asteroid's materializing that night to demolish the Earth.

The long curtains were very effective. Not a chink of light reached the bedroom from the dim illuminations outside the window. In the pitch-blackness, I groped my way to the edge of the bed and stretched out gingerly on the left-hand side. He was right; there was plenty of room. Lying on my back, I listened for the sound of his breathing, hoping that it would soon become slow and regular enough to allow me to crawl away quietly to the sofa that awaited me. It had been a very long day, and I too badly wanted my sleep. If I wasn't careful, it would be all too easy to doze off where I was.

Perhaps ten minutes passed. Then a hand emerged from the darkness and attached itself to my waistband. The other followed, working at my belt buckle. Startled, I began to sit up. The first hand disengaged, placed itself on my breastbone and pressed me firmly down again. A voice spoke in low but emphatic tones from what seemed to be a range of inches into my right ear—an authoritative voice, brooking no argument.

"I want you to suck me."

Ours was an unsophisticated culture at the time. Americanisms like "blowjob" had not yet entered the vernacular. For a comical second or two—had anybody had a pair of infrared goggles, my expression must have been priceless—I tried to fathom what this cryptic request might mean. Renewed vigorous jerks at my trousers, though, caused the penny to drop fairly quickly. Again the voice, this time louder and more menacing. "Suck me."

Not good. Time to be elsewhere. I rolled toward the edge of the bed, a sensible idea that occurred to me a second too late. The weight of a body landed squarely on top of me, not gently. For the first time, I had reason to notice that the priest was much heavier than I was and seemed a good deal more powerful into the bargain. I lunged upward. A heavy forearm came down like a bar across my throat, pinning me to the surface of the bed by my neck. It hurt like blazes, and I would have produced a yell of pain and surprise if it had not also cut off my breathing. With his other hand, the priest reached across and turned on the bedside light. Now he leaned back, releasing my neck and straddling my hips, with his knees near my shoulders, staring down at me as if awaiting my next move.

There is a conviction that all males over the age of 12, or nearly all, share: When the chips are truly down, if you are fighting for your life, you will find within you the strength to prevail over anyone who isn't fighting for his.

I don't believe that either of us said anything for several moments after that. I know I didn't. The situation seemed quite clear, with further discussion unnecessary. What was less obvious was what I should do next. Ludicrously, resorting to a tactic that seemed more appropriate to the school playground than the situation in which I found myself, I tried to heave him off me. When you are lying on your back with someone sitting on top of you, the only movement of which you are capable is a series of rapid upward pelvic thrusts, a grotesque parody of the motions of sexual intercourse. The irony was lost upon me at the time. Anyway it didn't work. My captor held his position with ease while I thrashed and flailed beneath him, waiting for me to stop. He didn't seem nearly as alcoholically impaired as he had been 20 minutes previously. My arms were still free, so I fought. It wasn't any kind of conscious decision, no weighing of tactics or options. Had I had time to consider my position, I might have concluded that in this situation, compliance was the better part of valor. But the impulse to ball my fists and start doing some real damage seemed to me as natural as breathing. Nor was I expecting to fail.

There is a conviction that all males over the age of 12, or nearly all, share: When the chips are truly down, if you are fighting for your life, you will find within you the strength to prevail over anyone who isn't fighting for his. I don't think that this is the result of the influence of Hollywood films, or at any rate not of those alone. It's the nearest thing I know of to a core constituent of maleness, our psychic ace in the hole. It allows us to go through dangerous parts of town without worrying, or even thinking, too much about it. It makes us believe that if we have to fight in wars we may perhaps die, but we certainly won't be the first ones to be killed. The reason films like Die Hard resonate among men may in fact be that they appeal to this sense already preprogrammed within us, that those reserves are there to be called upon when we need them, and that they will not then fail us.

So I lashed out, as violently as I could, with every ounce of adrenaline-fueled desperation that I possessed. I was trying to hurt, putting all the strength I could muster into my blows from my less-than-favorable prone position, looking for vulnerable spots, throwing elbows as well as fists. I would probably have sunk my teeth into him if I had been able to reach him that way. I had never behaved in a more primitive manner in my life, leaving nothing I could think of untried, grunting with effort like a Wimbledon tennis player with each punch, scrabbling for sensitive places where I might gouge, squeeze, or twist.

It wasn't nearly enough, not by the longest shot. And I can truthfully say that the making of that discovery produced greater consternation in me than anything that had occurred in my life to that point. I had connected with a few punches, to be sure, but the priest absorbed them with relative ease and deflected the rest. Now he responded. The first riposte (fist? elbow? implement? I still have no idea) came out of nowhere, catching me on the right side of the skull, above the ear, with unimaginable force, jerking my head to the edge of the bed and causing me to bite my tongue, it seemed, almost in two. A second was not necessary. My peripheral vision disappeared, so that I could see only a narrow field filled almost entirely by his face directly above me. A wave of nausea, accompanied by electric shocks of pain that were synchronized with my pulse, monopolized my consciousness. To my shame, that single devastating blow was all it took to subdue me. I could not absorb another. The fight drained out of me like a discharged electrical battery, and I lay completely still. This, it seemed, was what the priest had been waiting for. He raised himself up from across my thighs; slammed a sharp knee into the pit of my stomach, driving what little breath I still had out of me; wriggled out of his pajama bottoms; and started.

An excerpt from On Being Raped by Raymond M. Douglas, arranged by permission from Beacon Press.

Raymond M. Douglas is the Russell B. Colgate Distinguished University Professor of History at Colgate University. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

The now defunct "behavioural contract" from Brandon University. Photo courtesy of Stefon Irvine.

The Manitoba university that was exposed Tuesday for forcing a gag order upon complaintants of sexual assault has now been accused of hastily introducing new sexual assault guidelines by borrowing them from another university.

Brandon University, which killed its controversial "behavioural contract" yesterday (after coming under fire for pressuring sex assault complainants to stay silent or face possible expulsion), introduced their official sexual assault task force policy today. However, in documents obtained by VICE, the new policy's wording is a near word-for-word match of Queen's University's task force on sexual assault, introduced in April 2015.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.

In the UK, the average ounce of weed will set you back about £200 an ounce.

So to hear that "luxury" cannabis strains with names like "Birthday Cake," "Mochi," and "Chicken & Waffles" are being sold on Britain's streets for up to £700 an ounce comes as a bit of a surprise. What's more surprising still is that there's actually a market for this stuff. The main reasons? Clever marketing and (almost) guaranteed consistency.

The legalization and, more importantly, commercialization of cannabis markets in the US has spawned cannabis-producing brands whose products can only be bought in states where weed is legal. However, with the marketing of these brands living partly online, cannabis users all over the world have become aware of them, spawning international followings for these must-have "artisanal" products.

Dump this on top of the illegal cannabis markets of places like the UK—where relatively poor-quality weed is on offer from street dealers—and you create a global demand for products that are illegal in many of the places they're most sought after.

In their marketing campaigns, these brands offer reliability and consistency. And they're not lying: when buying name brand weed, you're more or less guaranteed to get the same thing the next time you buy it. The same can't be said for the scattershot you get off British street dealers. To top things off, the fact you get this weed in a fancy branded baggie or jar—as opposed to an old bit of cling-film—surely can't hurt either.

I met up with a cannabis dealer who calls himself "Collado." He's based in the West End of London and says he often sells this kind of product to dealers—not for them to re-sell, but for their own "persy" smoke.

"My prices range between £20 to £30 . People who come to me are usually not concerned with money. They have cash in their pockets."

A £25 gram of King Kush from Collado, which comes in its original dispensary packaging. Photo by the author

Collado got some of his weed out. It was certainly more pungent and fresh-smelling than the average 20-bag of haze.

"It isn't just about potency," he said. "Some of the types I sell are less potent than some of the street weed. But they're much better. Smoother smoke, banging flavor, and clear-headed stone. The people who've grown these flowers do it for the love and passion of cannabis; it's not grown in some dirty apartment by a Vietnamese slave who knows nothing about what he's doing."

Essentially, Collado's weed compared to your average street dealer stuff is like the difference between a 50p pack of peppers at Tesco and single, organic £1.50 pepper from Waitrose. But, just like the price discrepancy between those peppers, is the going rate for this imported weed really justified? I called some cannabis dispensaries in California and Colorado to find out why people are paying way above market rate for this supposedly superior weed.

Kristin Aichinger, Cultivation Manager at Green Man Cannabis, said: "One major factor is how clean our weed is. Here in Colorado, the fruit and vegetables on your counter have more pesticides and non-organic chemicals than the weed in your joint. We have outrageously strict testing regulations here. The weed is also tested for mold and mildew, and potency levels are a legal requirement on our packaging."

When I told her about the UK prices for this American weed, she said: "Holy moly! That's insane. I guess people want a brand; when you find a brand you like, you are also finding a type of cannabis you like."

Andy Klein, President of Denver's Preferred Organic Therapy, summed up the difference between American and British product: "The reality is that Colorado and California have the top growers in the world working in legal environments where the atmosphere is completely controlled," he said. "We're also able to acquire the cream of the crop as far as genetics go. We have some of the top breeders on the planet living here in Colorado and California."

Combine that high quality with the hassle of importing it all the way from the US, and the cost starts to make a little more sense: low supply and high demand equals pricey product. Still, says a member of the London Cannabis Club, "however good it is, that's just too expensive—£30 a gram was unheard of before. There are great flowers from Spain for much cheaper, or, even better, growers here in the UK who are growing proper strains in the proper way. If it's good weed, sometimes they just say it's from US to sell it at a higher price. US weed has become a brand."

Last month, the Liberal Democrats put forward their proposed framework for a legalized cannabis market in the UK. In their report, they concluded that "plain packaging should be mandatory for all retail cannabis, with standardized non-branded designs along the lines of prescription pharmaceuticals."

This wouldn't go down too well with someone like MC Berner, an entrepreneur and rapper who has established a successful accessory, clothes, and cannabis brand called "Cookies Co." Berner has worked with expert growers in the hills of California to produce strains—such as "Girl Scout Cookies"—which could be some of the most sought-after in the world. "Where can I get some cookies?"—or something along those lines—is a sentence that plagues the cannabis community's online forums and comment sections.

Berner is highly skilled when it comes to making people want his product. He recently told Frank 151: " is a very unique strain, but I believe the branding and marketing helped a lot. It worked its way into the music community and then expanded all over from there."

Cookies Co doesn't necessarily produce the best cannabis in the world, but it certainly knows how to sell it. And this is just the beginning: only a few American states have legalized cannabis and allowed brands to market it to this level; once the rest of the country catches on, we'll no doubt end up with something that looks similar to the alcohol market in terms of scale and competition—which may well lead a reduction in price when it comes to these premium imported products.

Of course, in the UK, the quickest way to make this kind of weed affordable would be to join the numerous countries taking a progressive approach to cannabis policy and just legalize it outright. It's hard to predict when that might happen, but the UN special assembly on drugs—happening in New York at the end of this month—could at least give us an indication of where we're heading.

Follow Ali Cedar on Twitter.

The British Virgin Islands. Photo by kansasphoto

Like us, you probably read the Panama Papers with a growing sense of disbelief.

WTF? How did all these wealthy bastards get away with paying no tax while we're still coughing up extra cash on every purchase. What's the trick?

Well take heart. If the big boys can do it, you can too, little guy. It's actually much easier than you think to muscle in on some of that sweet no tax action.

How? Start by reading our handy consumer guide to which tax haven is best for you.

The sailing flag of the British Virgin Islands. Photo by Matt & Nayoung

BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
The British Virgin Islands were Mossack Fonsecca's number one go-to territory. Need we say more? Fonsecca also "aged" companies for clients through the BVI—starting them up themselves on paper, then "selling" the paper shells to clients once they were four or five years old. Useful for those who want their new company to have an air of history. And a snip at only $6,120 apiece.

WHAT SORT OF COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Be assured, your money will be hanging out it with some of society's most distinguished semi-laundered funds in a massive cash mask ball to beat them all—a report by KPMG in 2000 estimated that a full 45 percent of the world's offshore companies is in the British Virgin Islands.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Absolutely. The British Virgin Islands are an earthly paradise with just enough temperature variation—historic lows of 60ºF and highs of 96ºF—to offer a vague sense of seasonality. Bring the hypothetical sun-block, it's yet another semi-fictional scorcher!

The Matterhorn. Photo by Transformer 18

SWITZERLAND

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
The Swiss know how to keep schtum. These legendarily tight-lipped Alpine dullards even managed to extend their no-questions-asked bank account policy to the guys in black jackboots who kept turning up with bags full of gold teeth throughout the early 1940s. The ideal of the anonymized, number-only Swiss account still holds much sway over the public imagination.

WHAT'S THE CATCH?
Unfortunately, in reality, the UK signed a deal with the Swiss only five years ago, meaning that British taxpayers can now have their accounts snooped on. A similar deal with the French followed, then the American IRS sued a Swiss bank so hard that it collapsed. Meaning that the famed banking secrecy laws have had some hefty chunks bitten out of them.

WHAT SORT OF COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Impeccable European and Middle Eastern aristocracy, sir. Details are hard to come by, but according to the so-called Lagarde List, obtained in 2010 after a raid on the home of an ex-HSBC employee, your money can probably look forward to rubbing shoulders with the famous monies of Arab royalty, super models, sports personalities ,and bad-bastard bankers.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Absolutely. Not only that, once they're done on the slopes, they can do each other in the après-ski saunas of your imagination.

The Panama canal. Photo by @thyngum

PANAMA

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
Why be further from Mossack Fonsecca than absolutely necessary? The Panamanian state began registering US ships as their own in 1919, until what was once a fairly small tax dodge bloomed to the point where, by 1982, more than a 100 banks had offices there. By 1989, the military junta of Manuel Noreiga had effectively nationalized the money-laundering industry. This worked well, until the US got so pissed off about the nation's reputation as a narco-laundering hub that they overthrew him. Even now, financial institutions are prohibited by law from giving information about foreign account holders.

WHAT COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Real high flyers. In fact, HSBC's chief executive, Stuart Gulliver, had a Panama company set up by Mossack Fonseca. This was to manage a personal account at HSBC in Switzerland, in order to keep his £5 million bonus private from his colleagues.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Possibly. While notoriously muggy, with a rainy season lasting from May to January, Panama is at least outside of the hurricane belt, and with temperatures ranging from 89ºF down to 69ºF, the non-existent people living in your asset-folder will at least never have to put on an imaginary sweater.

Run Point, the Cayman Islands. Photo by H. Michael Miley

CAYMAN ISLANDS

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
"Cayman Islands" feels very 1980s as a tax-dodge brand, true, but little has changed in the small Caribbean archipelago since it first became famous for helping the wealthy to help themselves to a bit more. Despite having only 56,000 citizens, the Caymans control assets worth $1.5 trillion —a full 15th of the world's total banking wealth, making it the fifth largest banking center in the world.

WHAT COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Every Tom Dick n Harry, unfortunately. The Caymans are now so popular that if British planes started bombing them tonight, they'd be nuking 100,000 paper companies—two for every inhabitant.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Temperature-wise, yes, but storms remain an issue—the tropical cashbox took a direct strike from a hurricane in 2004, which ended up damaging 83 percent of the nation's buildings. Thankfully, the money remained unharmed.

Amsterdam. Photo by Raymond van Mill

THE NETHERLANDS

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
It's as easy as opening a PO Box. There are an estimated 120,000 "letterbox" companies in the country—so-called because all you need in order to set one up there is a Dutch address. Which could be why 48 percent of Fortune 500 companies pass their operations through there, and why the White House made special mention of the country as a tax haven in 2010.

WHAT COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Rockstar company, baby. Bono, Mick Jagger—many of the biggest names in popular music have had letterbox companies there for years. Your money will be treading a path that Starbucks used to leverage itself to global supremacy, mainly by exploiting the loophole that says that profits from (formally) foreign subsidiaries (like, say, "the US") are untaxed when returning to Dutch headquarters.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Uh uh. It's basically a below-sea-level England, isn't it? Dank and gloomy and freezing. You'd better tell these non-existent people who live in your letterbox to wrap up warm.

Mont Orgueil Castle, Jersey. Photo by Herry Lawford

JERSEY

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
Proximity. For 40 years, this island off the coast of France with a population of only 95,000 has been a commutable exile for a range of fat cats who want to be able to fly their business colleagues over for weekly meetings on this tax exile Fortress Of Solitude.

WHAT'S THE CATCH?
The proles might rebel. Starting in 2009, after British pressure, the island signed up to a range of new tax disclosure protocols, meaning that the amount of money managed through there has shrunk dramatically. In turn, this is destroying the tax base of the island, and it is projected they will be £125 million in the red by 2019. Totally bankrupt, in other words.

WHAT COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
Expect classic Brit banker pedigree. Ian Cameron, for instance, the PM's father, was a director of Jersey-based Close International Equity Growth Fund and held 6,000 of its shares.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
Enviable! On the same latitude as many of France's better wine-producing regions, warmed by the Gulf stream, and Jersey's capital, St. Helier, has one of the best sunshine records in the British Isles. But given that secrecy is no longer guaranteed, your hypothetical employees will probably be packing up their imaginary belongings and preparing to escort your very real money elsewhere pretty soon.

Luxemboug. Photo by Flavio Ensiki

LUXEMBOURG

WHAT'S THE BIG ADVANTAGE?
Achingly respectable yet also a total pisstake, The Grand Duchy Of Luxembourg combines the best of blue blood Old Europe with the crony capitalism of the New. Investors will be but an hour's train ride from Brussels, where you can militate for greater subsidies, while at the same time failing to pay the corporation tax that would underwrite those.

Just how much could you end up saving? Well, Shire, the company behind Adderral—ended up paying corporation tax of less than $2 million in four years, on interest income of $1.9 billion. What's more, their subsidiary in Luxembourg had a staff wage bill of only $55,000. What's 1.9 billion minus 55,000? A pretty decent rate of return.

WHAT COMPANY WILL MY MONEY BE KEEPING?
IKEA, FedEx, Pepsi. Amazon until they stopped a few years back. Plenty of blue chip companies who've made insane amounts of money and definitely shouldn't be giving any of it to the countries they made it in. And after all why should they? This money's just too good to tax.

WILL THE HYPOTHETICAL EMPLOYEES OF MY SEMI-FICTIONAL SHELL COMPANY ENJOY THE WEATHER THERE?
If they like a median winter temperature of zero degrees, they'll love it. And given their entirely hypothetical nature, it's really easy to imagine a parallel reality in which they would.

Follow Gavin on Twitter.

Read: The Voice Actor Behind Admiral Ackbar's 'It's a Trap!' Has Died

Last April, the world collectively sobbed over that now-iconic The Force Awakens trailer featuring Harrison Ford decked out as Han Solo for the first time in three decades.

Well, it's April again, which means we get a whole new Star Wars trailer for the world to shed gentle tears over. This time, its a teaser for Rogue One, the first of Disney's Star Wars "anthology" movies, a.k.a. movies that are set in a galaxy far, far away but aren't focused strictly on the Skywalker bloodline.

Rogue One is kind of a space heist prequel movie, centered around the Rebellion's quest to jack the Death Star plans that wound up inside R2-D2 in A New Hope.

The trailer doesn't have quite the same kick as last year's—seeing Mon Mothma in her white cloak thing doesn't inspire the same visceral nostalgia as Han in his vest—but it's still full of Stormtroopers and AT-ATs and more than enough cool-ass Star Wars shit to get you excited for the movie's release on December 16.

Disney's basically planning to roll out a new Star Wars movie each year from now until the films stop making money or humanity is extinguished by the death of the sun, whichever comes first. Episode VIII is coming in 2017 and a Han Solo origin story is slated for 2018, with more to follow, so get used to bugging over a new trailer each April or May from now on.

Just a dude who loves his seeds. Photo via Facebook.

Longtime Vancouver weed activist Dana Larsen, who recently sent a gram of pot to each of the 184 Liberal MPs, was arrested in Calgary on Wednesday night while hosting a seeds giveaway event.

Larsen is currently making his way across the country on his OverGrow Canada tour; his plan is to hand out one million pot seeds to anyone who wishes to grow a "victory garden."

About 150 people turned out to the event, held at a Days Inn in the city. When Larsen stepped outside holding seeds in his hand, he was arrested by Calgary police for "drug trafficking."

Calgary was only the second stop on Larsen's tour.

A Calgary police Facebook post says "under the Canadian Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, it is illegal to distribute marijuana in any form regardless of whether payment is provided." The cops are set to host a press conference about the arrest sometime Thursday.

Speaking to the CBC, fellow activist Cindy Heemeryck, said she's more upset police seized the group's van "with all our goods in there."

"People are waiting all across Canada for their seed packages and now the police have them seized in our van as well as some medicinal cannabis, which was mine."

Larsen previously said the point out of the tour is to normalize weed.

"It is civil disobedience against the unjust pot prohibition laws that has gotten us to the verge of legalization."

Despite legalization pending under the new federal Liberal government, cops are continuing to enforce current marijuana laws.

Both Trees Dispensary on Vancouver Island and Chilliwack, BC's WeeMedical were targeted by RCMP this week. Officers raided Trees Wednesday afternoon, confiscating all money, flowers, and concentrates, but they left behind edibles. Branch manager Ben Hinton was also arrested and released without being charged.

In a statement, Alex Robb, community liaison for Trees, said he believes the RCMP left behind the edibles to give medical marijuana patients access to them.

"I think this is an acknowledgement by the RCMP that access to edible marijuana products is fundamental to patients' rights to effective medicine," he said.

"Products like our high-CBD caramels are health products, cannabidiol-infused products have practically no mood or mind-altering narcotic effects. When people take cannabidiol they do not get high, their symptoms are relieved, and they feel better."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Photo courtesy of Jay*

There's a special kind of reaction to dudes with inked eyeballs—it's what Vancouver tattoo and body modification artist Russ Foxx calls "shock and awe." Though the (still experimental) practice of injecting pigment into eye whites has been around for nearly a decade, it's still considered one of the last frontiers of tattooing.

Foxx himself has inked 71 individual peepers since he started four years ago. (Some prefer getting one at a time, I'm told, in case of vision complications.) He says all kinds of people ask him for eye ink, from construction workers to circus performers. VICE called up a few of them to find out what it's like to have old ladies mistake you for the devil.

Photo courtesy of Dan Malette

Dan Malette, Toronto
Eye ink: black

VICE: When you're out on the street, what's the number one reaction you get?
Dan Malette: I normally wear glasses, so a lot of people don't notice. A lot of people ask if it's contacts—that's the number one question. It kind of bothers me actually, they'll say, "Oh I love your contacts," and I'm like, they're not contacts!

Some people are idiots about it, they ask prodding questions or say, "Well that must have hurt." It didn't, there was no pain whatsoever. People call me stupid, say good luck getting a job. I've never had a problem getting a job, I work in construction and do sideshow for fun. They say girls must not find me attractive—well I have a beautiful girlfriend of almost two years.

I've had old ladies give the sign of the cross, or people don't sit beside me on the bus—that kind of stuff is their choice, not mine.

Photo courtesy of Dan Malette

Do those old ladies say anything? Pray for you?
Most of them speak Italian or Portuguese, so I don't really know. I live right across the street from a church, it's actually one of the biggest churches in Toronto so there's always big Sunday processions and stuff. Many, many times, little old ladies will walk by and get startled, walk quickly and grab their purse. I just kinda laugh and shrug it off, whatever. Toronto's a bigger city, so generally 90 percent say it's awesome.

Photo courtesy of Dan Malette

Any other moments that stick out in your mind?
I was at a Tim Hortons once and there was a little girl looking up at me, and I could see she was a little afraid. Her mom poked her and she came up to ask me why I have all the tattoos. I told her I'm like a Christmas tree, you don't put it in your living room bare, you want to decorate it and make it look pretty and shiny.

Photo courtesy of Jay*

Jay,* Victoria
Eye ink: one blue, one yellow

VICE: What's the strangest thing someone has said about your eyes?
Jay*: I've really only had one thing happen that was quite weird. I had a much larger gentlemen, probably in the 300 pound range, start following me around in a grocery store convinced that I was possessed or some sort of demon. Like any situation you just approach it with confidence and hope they don't skin you alive and wear you as a suit.

Is that standard demon protocol? Were you worried?
No, I wasn't afraid for my safety... You're going to remember the first time you see something quite different. Going out to dinner, usually somebody will ask about them. Tonight I had two construction guys and the waitress ask me questions while out with my wife and grandfather. That's pretty standard.

Photo courtesy of Burns the Dragon

Burns the Dragon, Vancouver
Eye ink: purple

VICE: Hey Burns, are you really a dragon?
Burns the Dragon: I view myself, in final form, turning from head to toe into a dragon. Everything I've done is just a step toward looking like what I really feel like. I split my tongue. Recently I tattooed it purple. I have my eyes, and ears both pointed... I have horn implants. I've had kids say, "Hey mommy, look it's a dragon!" But as far as adults go it's more, "Hey, it's a demon."

What's it like having inked eyeballs in your line of work?
Sideshows and circuses are my main gig, so most people think they're pretty rad. My act is mostly pain-related things. I'll hammer a nail into my throat, or put hooks in my back. At the end of a show I might let people staple five or ten dollar bills to me. I started doing suspension as a performance... I don't do very many, but I do kids parties. Festivals. Bars. Burlesque shows.

I travel in a carnival sometimes. One time I was managing this Wacky Wizard midway game. Somebody looked at my eyes and asked me, "Do you work here?" I was like yeah, I work here. Later that day I got fired because they were family members on the board of the Calgary Stampede, I guess they said I was the devil. I had that job for four years.

Photo courtesy of Burns the Dragon

That sucks. Do you have any response for the haters?
There are people who say negative things, like you're an idiot. If they receive a response from me, I say I enjoy my life, I get to experience a lot of fun things, all my fun's covered. Because I work where other people go on vacation to have fun.

*Name changed for privacy.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Bunch of kids watching someone get horribly maimed, probably via Flickr

Unless you're part of the infernal Snapchat generation, watching Pewdiepie videos, drinking e-liquid, talking about whether you're a fucking panromantic something or other, then you will have had a truly old-school shocking moment online. We all remember the first time we went on a bad website. Mom in the other room, you getting your designated time on the giant Dell like a prisoner of war. But today you're being sneaky. Today's the day you click that pop-up with the tits. The tits are covered in a kind of off-white glaze. What is that? Well, you're about to find out!

Dr. Lindsay Ip, a child psychologist associated with the Private Therapy Clinic, says that this sort of pre-sexual online activity can spell bad news for kids. "Early exposure to pornography can be very disturbing to children. I've seen it in my practice as well. Some of them are really scared of the images, which can be quite lasting in their brain. It increases their risk of being sexually active earlier, a victim of sexual crime, or even a perpetrator, as well."

It's not just sex that fucks us up, either. An unfortunate by-product of the internet's rampant no-man's-land attitude to content is the introduction of gore websites. These sites are frequented by either sicko adults or teenagers who have the brains of sicko adults. "When they're older, they have more context and other resilience skills," Ip tells me. "Their prefrontal cortex is not as developed , so they're more likely to act impulsively and with less inhibition. They're also more likely to just watch things if they feel like it, and not think about what it means to them."

This was certainly the case with me. I started off being terrified of pornography. A shocking visit to 'boobs.com,' which should have really been fairly light in touch, was replete with pulsing, veiny cocks being shoved into the throats of petite, blonde, red-eyed women with running eyeliner. I didn't really know what to do with it. I told my mom not to come into the room the computer was in because I was playing a game and I 'really needed to concentrate.' It was after this that my journey into the abyss of Sexcetera, Laid Bare, internet porn, and other things began. But as I got older, porn became less of a shocking thrill and more of a necessary evil. It was only after I began going on a site called 'Ogrish' (which turned into LiveLeak overnight) that I really started to over step the mark. I can recall endless beheadings, animal killings, torture, hangings, and other morbid detritus, but the one thing that made me renounce all of it was a video of a kitten. The camera was place in what looked like a barrel of water, somewhere near the bottom. It looked up into the blurred blue sky above. From out of shot came a man's hand holding a kitten. He submerged the cat in the water. At first it looked confused and began searching around the barrel with its big eyes. Then it began a painfully weak struggle. I had to close the tab around a minute or so in. It remains the worst thing I have ever seen. Its pointless cruelty, and the sickening desire to capture it, brings a pain to my chest even now.

Anyway, here are some other harrowing tales of internet deflowering.

'I SAW A WOMAN SUCKING OFF A CLOWN'

In the sweet early days of dial-up, during which I was in Year 5, I was allowed an hour online after school. I'm not sure if Messenger existed but me and a few friends did have email addresses. I'd just read It by Stephen King on holiday which fueled a pre-existing clown phobia. A female friend was also terrified of them, so we'd go home after school and send each other emails full of clown photos we'd found online with snippets of scary dialogue and narrative pulled from our perverse brains. These quickly escalated; each one had to be scarier than the last. One evening during a scavenge I came across a picture of a woman sucking off an impish clown with a cracked grin. I remember going cold, spinning around on the computer chair to see if my mom was in the vicinity. I followed the picture to its root site and found an early clown porn site. The pictures loaded slowly like Venetian shutters, each unfolding to reveal another loaded cock or circus gangbang. I shared, or rather burdened, my friend with this discovery. At some point emails were intercepted by my mom, which put an end to our little tête-à-tête and landed me in serious shit.

Looking back, those images must have seared into my mind permanently, particularly that first one. Had clowns been sexual in my mind's eye previous to this? No. But I would have satiated this desire to stoke at the core of what terrified me in some other way. If you go looking for shock, you'll find it, on or offline. It's inevitability. Maybe it did fuel a love of horror and extremes in art but then I was reading the master of macabre at nine so I'm reasonably sure my brain was just wired that way.—Hannah

'I AM NOW DESENSITIzED, WHICH MIGHT BE BEST'

I was always paranoid about getting a virus on my parents' home computer so avoided any websites that weren't BBC. In college we didn't have the internet at home—only in computer labs you had to wait in line for at 3 AM to access JStore journals. So it wasn't until I was around the age of 26 that I saw something on the internet that really made me feel uncomfortable. It was at my friend Jiro's house and he showed me a video of a Vietnamese policeman who had been run over by a truck and cut in half just above his pelvis. I like to think of myself as fairly impervious to internet crap, but that video—the policeman's confused, yet oddly calm face—looking about like he's slipped off a curb rather than moments from a grisly death—and the people milling about around him not really helping, made me feel very uncomfortable. It was the first time I felt that maybe it would be better if people didn't share that sort of thing. But my friend saw my reaction and decided to send me links to horrific shit daily for about a month—so now I am desensitized. Which might be best.—Bruno

'WE ONLY HAD A 56K MODEM SO I LOOKED AT PHOTOS OF BARE BOTTOMS'

I'd been looking at pornography since the age of 11. Mainly photos of women's asses because we only had a 56k modem back then and I couldn't even get a Quicktime video to load so I had to just scroll up and down a few photos of bare bottoms over and over again. Porn very quickly became very normal to me. Until one day at school. We had a library lesson, which meant that we basically sat around unsupervised for an hour in the school library. There was a computer in there.

Me and my mate Max went to fuck about on the computer for a bit because we were 14-year-old boys with access to a computer and being on the computer was more fun than reading a Malorie Blackman novel about heroin addiction or whatever. So there we were, and I was ready to spend a bit of time playing some fun Flash games on Miniclip. Max had other ideas. Max knew about a funny website that we should definitely look at. A slightly meek teenager, I was naturally submissive in these matters and let Max take control of the sticky mouse and clacky keyboard. Max directed us first to Rotten.com but I'd seen everything on there before and wasn't as shocked as he'd hoped I was going to be. So he went elsewhere. We ended up on a website called, I think, Camel Style. Camel Style, from memory, was like a prototype for the Lolporn tumblr we'd come to know and love in the near future.

One video featured a couple shagging, and that was the word for it—this was very much shagging rather than banging or fucking or making love—on a table. Now, in and of itself, this isn't that shocking but bear with me. The table snaps in two. Just like that. Just like Mick Foley dropped from the heavens onto these two tanned and toned shaggers. They lie there, for a second, dazed and confused and not sure what to do. The women looked in pain. The bloke, though, the partner administering the shagging, brutally, and I mean brutally shoves his dick right back in her and gets straight back to his shagging. I remember, at that moment, being shocked by it, because that was the moment I realized that male sexuality knows no bounds, that male sexuality is a horrible potent, possessive thing, that the phallus rules all. I forced a fake laugh out to appease Max. Inside, strange things were happening to me.—Josh

'I BECAME INDIFFERENT TO HARDCORE PORN'

Look, watching gory videos online just wasn't worth it. Not because I had better things to do—I was a deeply suburban teenager with no chores, no job, and afternoons that revolved around a corny covers band made up of my best friends. Spare time yawned forward in abundance. But the dial-up internet where I finished secondary school in Harare, Zimbabwe was such a pain in the ass that I never prioritized doing anything more bandwidth-intensive than running a few MSN Messenger chats or logging into a pre-Facebook social network (shoutout to Hi-5).

The closest experiences I had to watching sexual violence or gore came from TV. Sometimes, at sleepovers when I was at primary school in Switzerland, my friends and I would sneak glances at the late-night porn. I mean, this was western Europe, so basically after about 11 PM regular channels would start broadcasting escort dial-in service ads and porn films. The TV in my mom's bedroom was connected to our living room one, so it would change the channel to reflect whatever was being watched downstairs. If she were also watching TV, and were to catch what we'd put on, we were potentially fucked.

I once remember flicking over onto a harshly lit close-up shot of a woman's labia right as a guy shoved his dick into her and pressed down on her neck. They were both deeply tanned and she was sort of screaming hysterically. My friends and I were about nine years old, so couldn't tell whether she was meant to be having a good time or not. We didn't love it, so we changed over to one of those 1970s-looking classics with soft focus and pubic hair but soon got bored of that, too. The seeds were sown early for my general indifference towards hardcore porn.—Tshepo

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