Ryan Barron photo via Facebook

Among Vancouver's massive 4/20 weed celebration at Sunset Beach, a crew of skateboarders will be lighting one up for a lost friend, Ryan Barron, who was killed in a hit-and-run Sunday.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Spain

On the 22nd of March, a Lithuanian man landed in Barcelona and boarded metro line 9 with his luggage, but without a ticket. Witnesses describe how he started behaving weirdly, and when security guards came up to him and asked for a ticket, he fell on the ground and started shaking and foaming at the mouth. The guards couldn't have known but that guy was a mule, or body packer: He had been carrying cocaine in his stomach in an attempt to smuggle it into Spain.

Transporting illegal drugs across borders is a business that can be as profitable as it can be lethal, while it has gained popularity in Spain since the economic crisis began. The man in question broke down because one of the bags of cocaine he carried in his stomach had ruptured. There wasn't anything the emergency services could do – 15 grams of coke ended his life. When forensic doctors investigated the body, they found 34 capsules of cocaine inside him.

Such cases are pretty rare – several doctors working in emergency units in Spanish hospitals told us that a patient who's had a packet of drugs rupture inside them comes in about once a year. If everything goes according to plan, the bags leave the mule's body in his or her stool. They're in an ideal shape to be excavated, and can stand the gastric acid that helps dissolve foods in your stomach.

This one time, I escorted a man in his sixties to airport security. He was in his own wheelchair, so we changed him into an airport wheelchair to get him through the scanner. Once it was all over and security hadn't found anything, I took him to the gate. The guy miraculously recovered, got up and walked ahead.

When things go wrong, however, it's hard for doctors to detect what substance the carrier has ingested, as they are either unconscious or plainly unwilling to talk about it. When the latter happens, "it's a bit like working with your eyes closed," as one doctor who wishes to remain anonymous put it. In many cases, the mules are more afraid of being caught with the drugs than they are of dying.

I got in touch with Dr. Fernando Caudevilla – a GP specialised in the physical effects of cannabis, cocaine and synthetic drugs. Aside from his day job, he's also a medical advisor for drug users on the deep web, and has also made a name for himself through working with Spanish drug risk reduction organisation Energy Control. He explained: "Body packers can carry up to 200 packs on each trip, with each pack containing between two and 50 grams of a substance. The packets are also often wrapped in yellowish latex tubes, between one and two inches long. When someone is caught through radiography at customs, they usually show no symptoms of having taken the drugs. In that case, they will be given laxatives to pass the pellets. A drug wrapper breaks rarely – only 0.6 to 3 percent of the time."

An emergency doctor from Barcelona who also wishes to remain anonymous because she has worked with patients who were body packers, added: "If one of those wrappers breaks, the body packer is in serious trouble. A cocaine overdose can produce a psychotic episode and a nervous state that ambulance personnel will try to treat with injectable Diazepam. If the drugs have spread throughout the body, one of the common effects is vasoconstriction – increased blood pressure caused by the constriction of blood vessels. Heart attacks and vasoconstriction are the most common causes of death in those cases. If we suspect that a patient has overdosed, we perform a barium x-ray. The barium also has a laxative effect. If we discover that it's indeed a severe overdose, we immediately have the drugs surgically removed from their system."

When inserted anally, the wrappers are relatively easy to extract – if they went through the vagina, the process is way more traumatic. In this case, the packs are removed manually and without utensils, to make sure that the wrappers don't tear. In Argentina, the problem is so frequent that a hospital close to Ezeiza airport near Buenos Aires has a special unit for treating body packers.

WATCH – Walking Heavy: Britain's Most Notorious Reformed Criminal

Of course, body packers have come up with ways to get around being detected and searched at the airport. Arnau works at Barcelona airport and used to be in charge of accompanying passengers with reduced mobility. Every time a passenger in a wheelchair had to go through the body scanner, he had to make them change into an airport-owned wheelchair. If the alarm went off, the wheelchair had to be changed and the passenger received a body search.

"This one time, I escorted a man in his sixties," Arnau says. "He was only carrying a little suitcase and a jacket. He was in his own wheelchair, so we changed him into an airport wheelchair. He kept shouting 'ay ay ay ay!' throughout the experience. When he went through the scanner, the alarm went off so he was taken into a small room nearby and searched. Again, every time they tried to touch him, he would scream. The security officer gently frisked him but didn't make him take off his shoes or jacket. It was so hard to tell if he really was in pain or not but I felt terrible that we were putting him through this ordeal. Once it was all over and they hadn't found anything, I took him to the gate. The man miraculously recovered, got up and walked ahead."

On other occasions the signs were subtler: Arnau has regularly been asked where the wheelchairs were by people happy and seemingly spry on their feet, who would minutes later appear riding in one.

When it comes to cocaine, most busts in Spain take place in ports, where drugs arrive in tonnes. Drug mules work individually, and the stash they carry can be easily replaced if they get caught or worse. There are statistics on drug mules in Spain, but there's a big chance they're not representative because police and anti-drug operations always focus on the big fish – a coke filled cargo ship leading to some drug kingpin is always more exciting than a poor soul, who had to resort to smuggling drugs because they found themselves in a bad financial situation. Those smuggling 15 pellets of cocaine in their intestines are the weakest links in a chain that seems impossible to break.

Previously: What It Feels Like to Smuggle 700 Grams of Cocaine In Your Stomach

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

US News

Obama to Warn UK on Danger of Leaving EU
President Obama flies into the UK later today and is expected to call on the country to stay inside the European Union. The UK has a referendum June 23 on whether to remain in the EU or leave. Obama will warn British voters that leaving would jeopardize their special relationship with the US.—USA Today

US Agents Discover California-Mexico Drug Tunnel
US officials uncovered a cross-border tunnel complete with its own rail line used to transport cocaine and marijuana from Tijuana to San Diego. Seven tons of marijuana were seized along with $22 million in cocaine, reportedly the largest-ever seizure associated with a California-Mexico tunnel.—VICE News

Volkswagen to Buy Back US Cars
Volkswagen is expected to announce a deal today to buy back some of the almost 600,000 US diesel vehicles affected by the emissions cheating scandal. The deal could see the German company spend about $1 billion to compensate owners of the affected cars.—Los Angeles Times

CIA to Pay Family of Benghazi Contractor $400,000
The family of Glen Doherty, a CIA contractor killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack, will receive $400,000 from the agency under a new "enhanced death benefits" program. The CIA said it would provide extra money for employees killed overseas "in the performance of duty."—ABC News

Canada wants to legalize weed (Photo via GoToVan)

International News

Mexican Oil Plant Blast Kills Three
A large explosion at a state-run oil plant in the Mexican city of Coatzacoalcos has left three people dead and at least 136 injured. Coatzacoalcos residents were told to stay indoors because of the potentially toxic nature of the smoke, but it has now dissipated. The cause of the blast is unclear.—Reuters

Canada Wants to Legalize Marijuana
The Canadian government will introduce legislation next year to make the sale of marijuana legal, according to health minister Jane Philpott. She said the government wants to keep weed "profits out of the hands of criminals," and will launch a task force within weeks to explore regulation.—The Toronto Star

UN Evacuates Syrians from Besieged Towns
The United Nations has begun evacuating hundreds of people from besieged Syrian towns as civilians try to flee the latest outbreak of fighting. People were given safe passage on UN buses from rebel-held towns near Damascus and government-held towns in northwest Idlib province.—Al Jazeera

Mitsubishi Offices Raided in Japan
Japanese officials have raided and searched Mitsubishi Motors' offices following the carmaker's admission it had falsified fuel data. The government said it would deal with the company in "a strict manner" after Mitsubishi admitted it altered data to flatter mileage rates on more than 600,000 cars.—BBC News

Father John Misty (Photo by floshe24)

Everything Else

Father John Misty Calls Bullshit on Bathroom Bill
Singer Father John Misty will donate the proceeds from his upcoming North Carolina show to LGBT support center Time Out Youth. He said the state's anti-LGBT bathroom bill was "obviously bullshit," but still wanted to play for his fans.—Rolling Stone

Snapchat's Marley Filter Causes Blackface Outcry
A new Snapchat filter that allows users to look like Bob Marley, complete with dreadlocks and brown skin, was widely condemned as a digital version of blackface. Kylie Jenner was criticized for using the filter.—The Guardian

Ben Carson Wants Harriet Tubman on the $2 Bill
Former presidential candidate Ben Carson disagrees with the Treasury plan to replace Andrew Jackson with abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 bill. "We can find another way to honor her - maybe a $2 bill," Carson said. The $2 bill was last issued in 2003.—CNN

Schilling Fired by ESPN for Transphobia
ESPN has fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling for a Facebook post making fun of transgender people. Next to a photo showing an overweight man wearing a wig, Schilling wrote: "A man is a man no matter what they call themselves."—The New York Times

Mosquito-Trapping Billboards Pop Up in Brazil
Two advertising agencies have released mosquito-trapping billboards to help fight the Zika epidemic. The billboards emit a lactic acid-laced mist that simulates sweat to lure mosquitoes in, where they are trapped and die.—Motherboard

PostSecret Creator Shares Creepiest Things
Frank Warren, creator of the PostSecret blog, has selected the creepiest secrets people have ever sent him. They include making a cat drink bleach, masturbating into salad, and cutting holes in condoms.—VICE

Done with reading? Watch Kenny Holz Trolls the US Presidential Race:

Sister Jackie Mahlalela and Dr. Koshi, an administrator at Good Shepard Hospital, take inventory of their antivenom. Photos by Mark Shoul

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

About a decade ago, Thea Litschka-Koen developed a keen interest in snakes. Litschka-Koen, an owner of a management company in her native Swaziland, embraced her newfound fascination with all that slithers, and she immersed herself in studying them. By the late 2000s, she'd completed a set of handling courses, opened a snake-rescue park, and became a (largely self-taught) black mamba expert. Providing snake-removal services, she made her name known locally—and internationally, via a 2009 BBC2 documentary on her work. Given her reputation, it was only a matter of time before someone arrived at her door with a festering snakebite.

Zamokuhle, an 18-month-old girl, had been playing in her house when a Mozambique spitting cobra found its way inside. Averaging three and a half feet in length, these tawny gray serpents with flaring hoods are particularly deadly. Usually, they hock blinding venom at anything they consider a threat. Their poisonous spit can reach a distance of six and a half feet. But Zamo got too close too quickly, so it bit her leg. After visiting four clinics, and receiving only painkillers because there was no antivenom, Zamo and her mother reached Litschka-Koen. The cobra's venom, a necrotizing fluid, had destroyed most of the flesh between her calf and her ankle—so completely, you could see her bones.

Litschka-Koen took the girl to a nearby clinic, where doctors tried to arrest the child's mother for abusive neglect, but she informed officials of the mother's efforts and the other clinics' failures to help. This clinic, despite its judgments, couldn't do anything either. No one in the country could. Litschka-Koen had to call Dr. Sean Bush, an American snakebite expert, who evacuated Zamo to the US for seven months of treatment.

That's when Litschka-Koen realized how major the problem with snakebite treatments in her nation was. Later, she realized it wasn't just Swaziland. All of sub-Saharan Africa is in the middle of a decades-old snakebite crisis. Largely ignored by the media and health officials, the epidemic is vast and growing.

Last September, Doctors Without Borders put out a press release about Fav-Afrique, the most effective polyvalent antivenom in Africa. Production of the serum, used to combat the venom from ten deadly species, including spitting cobras, lapsed at the end of 2014, with no pharmaceutical company set to take over its manufacturing from France's Sanofi Pasteur. According to Doctors Without Borders, the last stocks will expire in June 2016, putting up to 10,000 people in developing countries at risk—an Ebola-scale epidemic.

Sanofi Pasteur announced it was winding down Fav-Afrique in 2010, giving ample reaction time. According to Professors Leslie Boyer and David Warrell, antivenom experts at the Universities of Arizona and Oxford, respectively, other antivenoms already provide similar coverage, and producers are also developing economically and medically viable Fav-Afrique replacements. Yet experts like Dr. Jean-Philippe Chippaux, a snakebite epidemiologist at the French Institute of Research for Development, think the press release was intended to raise awareness about a wider crisis brewing since the 1990s. Over the past quarter-century, sub-Saharan Africa's antivenom stocks dropped from 200,000 reliable doses to about 20,000 less reliable doses today. Chippaux believes the 500,000 doses per year are needed to treat its snakebite load.

A fifth of the world's 5 million annual bites, and more than a quarter of its at least 100,000 bite-related fatalities (not to mention a similar number of permanent disabilities and amputations), occur in sub-Saharan Africa. And those figures are likely conservative. Few snakebite victims make it to statistic-reporting hospitals. Recent epidemiological studies around the world lead Chippaux to suspect that Africa's burden is three to five times higher than these oft-cited figures.

Sister Jackie Mahlalela and Dr. Koshi, an administrator at Good Shepard Hospital, take inventory of their antivenom.

Snakebites kill more annually than all 17 of the neglected tropical diseases combined—a list that includes dengue fever, leprosy, and rabies, for which the World Health Organization (WHO) has special programs. Some regions have more bites than malaria. "In some of the villages where I've worked in northern Nigeria, there's scarcely a family who hasn't lost someone to a snakebite in living memory," said Warrell.

Snakes are the second-deadliest animals in the world, behind mosquitoes. Yet producers are leaving the antivenom market in Africa, stocks are dwindling, and few authorities seem to care.

Antivenom production is difficult and expensive. It's also surprisingly similar to its 1896 origins. Technicians milk snakes for their venom, inject it into horses, wait about two months for antibodies to develop, draw buckets of blood, and separate out the serum. The biggest advance made in the past 119 years is the removal of substances that used to trigger anaphylactic shock, or another condition called "serum sickness," in many patients. But that refinement increases already high baseline costs, before regulatory cuts and shipping.

Each snake requires its own antivenom. Because most regional doctors only get cursory bite-treatment training, and because it requires great expertise to figure out what type of (usually unseen) snake bit someone based on a wound, clinics need to stock antivenoms for all local species. But the distribution of snakes is erratic, and epidemiological data is anemic, mooting targeted single-snake antivenom dissemination. So the production and procurement of polyvalent antivenoms is vital, but even more expensive than already-pricey single-serum antivenoms.

The result is a treatment that, in Africa, costs between $55 and $640, depending on local subsidies, species, healthcare systems, and the number of doses required for a particular bite.

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Since meeting Zamo, Litschka-Koen has become a snakebite activist. She founded the Antivenom Swazi Trust Foundation, which raises money to buy serum and leads symposiums on treatment for local doctors low on relevant skill sets. "To treat a single Mozambique spitting cobra bite can cost an annual salary for a worker," she told me. "Our country can't afford to treat all the snakebite victims—there are too many."

Even when healthcare providers can afford antivenoms, they can't always store them. Many serums are liquid or freeze-dried, requiring refrigeration. In rural areas, where 95 percent of regional venom poisonings and 97 percent of deaths can occur, that's either unavailable or inaccessible.

And where serums are available and storable, according to Boyer, "the physicians in some places have completely lost faith in antivenom because they've been buying fraudulent products."

Warrell singled out two Indian manufacturers as key culprits in Africa: "Bharat Serums and Vaccines and the Serum Institute of India have produced antivenoms that purported to be for Africa, but were misleading and inappropriate." He said the companies used the Asian rather than the African species of particular snakes, leading to relative impotence and increased side effects. In response to studies about the relative ineffectiveness of the antivenom in question when used on bites from African species of the snake, BSaV said that the inclusion of Asian venom is listed in the product inserts or liner notes. However, this information may not always be readily visible to purchasers. "It has been a really, I think, criminal deception of slightly naïve purchasing authorities," Warrell said.

About a decade ago, when clinicians in Chad and northern Ghana switched from Fav-Afrique to budget antivenoms (sold at up to a tenth of Western product prices), they saw mortality rise from 2 to 15 percent. Litschka-Koen used to drive from clinic to clinic, reporting Indian antivenoms to the minister of health. For fear of similar results, she crusaded to get the clinics to finally stop ordering the inferior products.

Inaccessibility and bad experiences, combined with preexisting mistrust of healthcare systems, mean that only ten to 20 percent of snakebite victims seek and use antivenom treatments. Instead, many lean on suspect traditional healers. These cases largely go unreported, decreasing the perceived gravity of snakebites for outsiders. They also signal to manufacturers that there's no market for serious antivenoms, triggering production declines and pullouts.

Thea Litschka-Koen, left, is a largely self-taught snake expert. Because of minimal antivenom supplies at hospitals like Good Shepard in Siteki, Swaziland, she imports needed serums from South Africa.

"Why does Latin America not have the problem that Africa does?" Boyer asked. It's a fair question. Latin America has its share of venomous snakes, remote and ill-provisioned locales, and traditional healers. Yet the region has done well in terms of antivenom.

"Latin America has a long-standing tradition of providing its own antivenom," said Boyer, adding that its governments subsidize the treatment, evading supply and demand traps. "And lyophilized products for years and years. Even though there are, periodically, small shortages, Latin American countries typically have pretty low prices because their ministries of health make massive purchases from these companies" and distribute the antivenom effectively via relatively adequate, reliable healthcare systems.

Not every African nation can have its own antivenom industry—only South Africa does—but many believe that outreach programs would restore faith in serums (which most will still use if they're cheap and proven effective). The creation of nationwide buying programs and better regulations on antivenom quality, combined with advances in epidemiological knowledge and production techniques, could produce viable, affordable antivenoms, even for remote usage.

A number of companies from Costa Rica to Spain to India are developing new techniques to produce economically and medically promising African polyvalent antivenoms. Spurred on by evolving crises involving counterfeit antimalarial drugs, nations are tackling fraudulent medications in general, which could help to rebuild confidence in antivenoms. There's currently research being conducted on the potential to make E. coli excrete protective proteins that can work as a prophylactic for numerous snake toxins.

Getting institutional support to fund research is the issue. There's so little money available that the aforementioned E. coli research is being crowdfunded. Even major antivenom producers often have to (or embrace the excuse to) forego proper clinical tests before rollout.

"It's very rarely that people will take snakebites seriously unless it's a day-to-day problem" for them, Warrell told me. "A snakebite is regarded as funny, scary, sort of biblical in its connotations, and something that can be laughed off and denied."

"A snakebite is a poor man's disease," said Litschka-Koen. "If snakebites affected the middle and upper class, we would have had a solution a long time ago. These people have no voice."

Plus, you can't eradicate snakes. They're environmental risks, and bites are difficult to mitigate. Perhaps that's why, in 2013, the WHO downgraded snakebites from a neglected tropical disease to a neglected condition with no major program to address them. From one vantage, that's a fair prioritization of scarce resources. From another, it leaves tens of thousands of the world's most vulnerable people at risk.

In 2012, Chippaux and some African colleagues formed the African Society of Toxinology. Over three years, the collective of activists and experts has crafted best practices and raised the visibility of snakebites. Through ambitious guidelines for willing states, they hope to reduce African bite mortality by 90 percent by 2020. It sounds utopic. But today, officials in at least seven nations have started working with the African Society of Toxinology on subsidy, training, and education programs, foreshadowing a possible sea change in countries' reticence to acknowledge or seriously, openly tackle snakebites.

The publicity Doctors Without Borders provided has given antivenom activists a shot in the arm by demonstrating the power and vectors of an effective snakebite PR campaign.

While awaiting breakthroughs, activists look to education as an immediate preventative tool. Getting people to wear shoes, use flashlights, and sleep with mosquito nets can drastically reduce bites. Kids, common victims, might not absorb these messages, and habitat encroachment is making it harder to avoid snakes. But education can help local and national leaders to see snakebites as something you can systematically address rather than an inevitable ailment. Community education could serve as a catalyst for the already promising changes the African Society of Toxinology and its allies are pushing forward across the continent. So there is hope.

This article appeared in the April issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Scarlet Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi in the upcoming remake of 'Ghost in the Shell.' Photo via IMDB

Last week, the first picture from the American live-action remake of the Japanese cult favorite manga and anime Ghost in the Shell was released. It's been a year since Scarlett Johansson was cast as the lead role of Major Motoko Kusanagi (now simply called "Major"), a female Japanese "cyberbody," and the new photo reignited the controversy around whitewashing in Hollywood. Outrage swelled when the film's studios, Paramount and DreamWorks, were accused of conducting CGI testing on Johansson's scenes to "shift her ethnicity"—in other words, to make a white actress look more Asian. (Paramount Pictures acknowledged the tests, but denied they were for Johansson's character.)

As an Asian American, it's upsetting to continuously see white people take the roles of Asians onscreen. But for Asian American actors, it's actually a major career barrier. When you're constantly overlooked for roles because you're not white, how hard is it to pursue an acting career?

"My agent told me that I should get plastic surgery to make my eyes look smaller and mono-lid."

Sarah, a Chinese American actress with a decade of experience in film and TV, told me she wasn't at all surprised by the recent news. (Sarah asked that we not use her real name, for fear that it would negatively impact her career.) "This keeps happening because the majority of decision makers at the top aren't Asian. Or if they are, they're making decisions that are 'white-friendly' since they have to please their white bosses with numbers about profit estimates."

Sarah is now transitioning to do more behind-the-scenes work, but when she was working as a full-time actress in the early 2000s, she was told she didn't look "Asian enough" to get cast in the "Asian" roles. "My agent told me that I should get plastic surgery to make my eyes look smaller and mono-lid," she said. She looked too "ethnic" for the white roles, but not stereotypically "Asian enough" for the Asian roles.

Ming-Na Wen in 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.' Photo via ABC Studios

In some ways, the tide is starting to change. In 2015, there were more minority leads on television, and Asian Americans starred in popular shows like Fresh Off the Boat and Dr. Ken. But all told, only 4 percent of characters on television were Asian last year, according to the Hollywood Diversity Report, and white actors still took the roles of Asian characters in film—like Emma Stone playing a mixed-Chinese woman in Aloha, or Tilda Swinton made to look Asian in the forthcoming release of Doctor Strange.

Several Asian American actresses—like Ming-Na Wen from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Constance Wu from Fresh off the Boat—recently spoke out against the cultural insensitivity surrounding the Ghost in the Shell casting. I asked Sarah why it seems like the conversation about racism in Hollywood is only happening recently.

"Oh, we talk about it privately or with other Asian entertainers, but definitely not in public or in print," she told me matter-of-factly. "If it can be traced back to you, it's really bad—you don't want to offend all the old-school people in the industry who are the decision makers. Some people do get away with it, but they don't land major roles like Constance and Ming-Na. Those people are now at the top of ladder, so they're protected by that. It's the actors still climbing the ladder who keep quiet."

Sometimes Asian Americans looking to make it in Hollywood face hindrance even earlier in their career from well-meaning people. Ken Jeong, the creator and star of Dr. Ken and of the Hangover series fame, recently said in an interview with the New York Times that his UCLA acting professor once told him, "You're a good actor, which is why I'm telling you: Stay the hell out of LA. There's not much of a future for you. Go to Asia."

Ken Jeong in 'The Hangover.' Photo via Warner Bros.

For 30-year-old Justin Wang, his acting dream was squashed by his own parents. "I've always wanted to be an actor ever since I was a kid. In fourth grade, a casting director came to my school looking for a Chinese kid to play a scene in a movie, and she specifically asked for me since I had been in a few plays and musicals by then," he remembers. "But my mom ignored her calls on purpose since it'd cut into my studies and be a waste of time, according to my parents' mindset."

Wang continued to take drama classes until freshman year of high school, when he says his parents flat-out told him, "You're not white. You're not going to make any money as an actor." Wang says he cried himself to sleep that night.

As an adult, Wang understands that his parents were unsupportive of his passion out of legitimate fear, which is based on the scarce representation of minority groups in the media. The current statistics are sobering: Less than 1 percent of the Academy are Asian, 52 percent of movies and TV shows feature no Asian characters at all, and only 5 percent of movie roles go to Asians.

That's not bad for a minority group that only accounts for 5.8 percent of the population in the United States. But whitewashing Asian characters is about more than just representation—it's about cultural ownership. In the case of Ghost in the Shell, there's no dispute that the beloved series is a Japanese story, set in a futuristic Japan, dreamed up by a Japanese writer. That doesn't change when an American studio buys the rights. Choosing a predominately white cast feels like an insult to the culture that created the original version, and one less opportunity for Asian American actors to catch a break.

Follow Chin on Twitter.

From the brutal dismantling of multigenerational communities in government housing, to people renting out sheds for £500 a month, London is a terrifying place to live at the moment. And it's only going to get worse.

So when they turn up at the door demanding £650 -a-week for your shared floor, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go then? It turns out you could literally build a mud hut in some woods and the cold reach of the capital's callous housing climate would eventually track you down.

In 2012, after suffering a nervous breakdown and being made homeless, Daniel Pike arrived in the lap of Merry Hill forest, near Watford. Carving into a riverbank, he began shaping a home with his own two hands. Over the next four years he transformed it into a sustainable, solar-powered paradise—all buzz words that would have London's rental market drooling.

The house—in the "perfect discreet spot"—built from "large, clay bricks" Daniel made from the riverbank.

So surprise, surprise, the 28-year-old is now being threatened with forced eviction. Usually this is the part of the story where I start describing the notice he's been served by WankerCorp so they can go ahead and build their Pret a Manger Plaza, but isn't a normal London-person-evicted-from-their-home narrative. The organization that finds itself in the unlikely role of cutthroat bastard here is The Woodland Trust.

The trust argues that it has to look at the possible impact Daniel could have on the site, and the other 1,000-plus sites across the UK. They say that allowing Daniel to remain living in the woods could set a "precedent for this type of occupation to occur across all of our sites." Fair point—but it doesn't matter how you rationalize it; you're still smashing down somebody's place and leaving them homeless. So it's complicated.

One thing that's indisputable, however, is the house. This is a thing of beauty; an accomplishment, a home. His first for a long time, in fact, which is why Daniel's friends have set up a fundraising page to try to protect it.

We drove up the M1 to see the hut and have a chat with Daniel.

Some of Daniel's supplies on the shelves he made out of clay from the riverbank.

VICE: How long have you been here?
Daniel Pike: Altogether, about four years. I've been building and living in this particular house for two years.

Was there a moment you thought you needed to leave London for good?
Years ago. I've been through this for much of my teenage life. Being homeless, meditating, and tents out in the woods. The longest time I did it consecutively when I was in my teens was around two years. It did get stressful sometimes, especially when it was cold, raining, and you needed a wash. My camp was attacked and vandalized, and that made me want to go back into society—and I did, many times. Then I was made homeless again. It's been a cycle that's been happening for a long time.

Daniel heats the water in the basin on the far left, locks the stream outlet, and adds it to the isolated area for warm bathing.

How did you develop the skills to construct this?
I bunked school and used to work at Tesco. Most of my learning came after from trial and error. I'd been building before with shacks and stuff, but everything failed, so I had to learn. It's within everyone. have got it within them to learn. Nature teaches you, and you teach yourself.

So what inspired you? Did you grow up watching The Swiss Family Robinson or Rambo or something?
I took a lot of inspiration from being younger and watching Bruce Lee films and Dragon Ball Z.

Bruce Lee?
It was his ethos of calmness and peace. I'm a martial artist, too, and that meditation means a lot to me. I remember something he said: "You must be shapeless, formless, like water." The first time I heard that sticks out in my head. Then Dragon Ball Z also teaches about humans and all of the things they do to each other, the emotions. How energy works. It inspired me.

Daniel's bed, with a mattress made from leaves, is raised off the ground to avoid the damp and pests. A trick he learned "watching Ray Mears."

Have you had any moments, living here, where you've decided you want to leave?
No, no, no. This place has been quite an enjoyment for me. Even though there have been days of stress and depression, I've always wanted to stick here. This is home for me.

What's the latest interaction you've had with the Woodland Trust?
It's weird. They came here the other day and said something completely different to what I'd heard them say on the radio. It was two different people. On the radio they said, "We don't want to evict him; if we wanted to we'd have done that already. We want to sit with Daniel and discuss a solution with him." But the lady who came here, she directly told me straight away: "We will be moving you on."

Okay.
I kind of laughed and said, "Look, this is going to be dealt with in the courts if anything." But it was just two completely different voices from them.

A continuous rodent trap. Rats were "causing chaos," biting through walls in the foundations of Daniel's building, eating his food, making nests in his clothes, shitting everywhere. He's caught "30-plus rodents" in this trap.

Do you have the money to go to court?
Well, my friend set up a donation page without me knowing. The last time I checked it had £600 . But if that target isn't met I don't get anything, or that option. The legal costs and the legal fees—I don't know about that stuff, because basically I'm going to be there on special visitation defending myself. They're the ones spending all the money and doing all the paperwork. I just need to go there and defend myself.

Have you had any support from the local community? What do they feel about you being here?
They don't want me to go. I've had a lot of people come here, especially people who come to this park and donate to the Woodland Trust, talking to me about the Woodland Trust's policy. And they're telling me that they don't want me to go, the policy can be changed, and that they've sent emails to them about that as well. They're very supportive. I've also had local people get a petition going. There are a lot of people on the nearby estate who support me. There's a local guy who comes here near enough every day with his dog and I've connected with him a lot. We've been through very similar things.

What is your message, then? Why are you doing this?
Freedom. You don't have to be living in a mud hut like I am here. It's just total freedom from the system. This is just me putting my foot in the door to the government and saying, "Enough." My freedom's not going to be chucked down the toilet.

What do you see happening if you are moved? What's the next step then?
It will just be a cycle. I don't even see that as a possibility, but assuming that I do and I go back into society, in less than a year I'll come back and do this again somewhere else.

Follow Oobah on Twitter.

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Just one of the many sporting events we would like to bet on if we were allowed. Photo via Facebook

If there's one thing you must know about me, it's that I love sports.

Some targets for sale at the Crossroads of the West gun show. All photos by the author

Say you live in San Francisco, and you want to carry a gun around. First you have to have a gun, which isn't the easiest thing in the world, since the city's only firearm store closed last November; one way to go about it, if you don't want to travel far, is to wait for the next gun show to roll around at the Cow Palace, an old livestock pavilion and sports arena just over the San Mateo County line.

It's here that the Crossroads of the West events periodically appear; one draw is the carrying a concealed weapon (CCW) class taught by W. Clark Aposhian, a concealed firearms instructor certified by Utah's Bureau of Criminal Identification. Aposhian's company, FairWarning Training, specializes in teaching firearms safety and tactical skills. Earlier this month, I attended one of these courses, which cost $149 for a two-hour session that certifies you for CCW permits in both Utah and Arizona. (The permits themselves cost $51 and $60, respectively.)

Utah's permit is recognized in 34 states, and Arizona's gives you two more, meaning that with the exception of Wisconsin, Illinois, and a few states on either coast, your two new permits will let you carry a loaded gun concealed on your person nearly everywhere you go—but not in California.

Despite an ongoing federal lawsuit claiming that the CCW rules imposed by many urban areas in California are too restrictive, San Francisco has remained resolutely anti-concealed carry—in 2014, fewer than ten people had permits, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

California doesn't recognize CCW permits from other states, including Utah. So, wait, what's the point of this class for Californians again? Well, if you live in San Francisco, and you want to carry a gun, you might have to leave the state.

Aposhian told me that a fair number of his students are "collectors, by which I mean collectors of permits. They feel a little safer having it in their wallet in case they get that call to go to a wedding or a funeral or something out of state, and these permits—Arizona and Utah—offer them the greatest likelihood they'll be OK to carry," because so many states honor those permits.

My fellow student Jonathan*, a 61-year-old engineer with the air of a college professor, told me that "a friend of mine inspired me to pursue learning how to use a gun" and that he'd "put in a huge effort over the last ninety days, going to the gun range twice a week," practicing until he felt safe and proficient handling firearms.

"If you're going to own a gun, you need to know how to use it; it gives you a feeling of safety to have it around, but that's an illusion unless you know what you're doing," he said. "I've spent sixty-one years not having to use a gun, and I assume that's not going to change now that I have one in the house." Jonathan was taking the class because each credential he picked up made him feel more prepared, albeit "for some imagined scenario I'll probably never encounter."

W. Clark Aposhian instructing his students on how to avoid pointing your gun at yourself

The first hour of the class—which is all one needed for Arizona's permit, the one that unlocked access to concealed carry in Nevada—covered basic gun safety. ALl the people in the room had been tested on this material for their Firearms Safety Certificate, which California requires for purchasing most guns. No one took notes, since this was routine stuff; at one point, Aposhian emphasized that you shouldn't "ever, ever point a gun at something you don't want to put a hole in, and that includes your toes or your own hand."

Richard*, a tall, bulky, former law enforcement officer in his 50s, said he was taking the course because his work in executive protection services required him to cross into neighboring states, and he wouldn't be able to take more lucrative jobs until he could carry concealed weapons, particularly in Nevada. "Movie stars, production people, directors: When they're scouting locations or just walking around between shoots, they want a little protection, especially in colorful areas."

Richard was also planning on getting a California CCW permit, "which might cost upward of $400 and requires range qualification for each weapon you want to carry, up to four." Requirements vary by county and are determined by either the sheriff or the chief of police. "Luckily, I'm in Woodside, under the direct purview of the sheriff's office." Most police chiefs, he said, weren't in the business of issuing permits at all.

Michele Lockwood, 68, of San Mateo, was straightforward about her reasons to obtain the permit. "I'm doing it mostly for street cred," she said. "My husband and I are on a shooting team out in Dublin at an indoor range," across the Bay in Alameda County, at a rod and gun club called Guns, Fishing, and Other Stuff. They also have business in Nevada: The Lockwoods own a gun safe company.

A T-shirt for sale at the gun show

During the second hour, which qualified you for the mother of all CCW permits, the Utah one, and covered self-defense laws and use of force, the class livened up with questions about scenarios when it was safe or legal to pull or point your gun. Aposhian told me that six people in a class was a low number. He expects attendance to pick up with election season. "The more they see it looming that there might be a change in gun , people buy guns," he said. They buy ammunition, and concealed carry classes start to heat up again."

I took home my fingerprint cards and Arizona application in case I want to send away for that, but I paid the $49 up front for Utah's permit along with the fee for the class. In a week or so, a concealed carry permit good for the next five years in 34 states will arrive in my PO box, bearing my name and photo. I can keep it in my wallet as a fairly menacing form of photo ID. I can rent a car and buy a holster and drive across country wearing my gun under my clothes, as long as I lock it in my trunk before I cross back into California. I probably won't be doing that. My own "imagined scenarios" involve me trying to get the gun out of its holster and being clocked by a crowbar in the meantime, and until I'm willing to put in the time to be a gunslinger, you and I are safer if I leave my gun locked up.

*Most of my classmates agreed to talk to me only on the condition that I not share their full names.

Follow Tarin Towers on Twitter.

Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Anna Vasquez, and Cassandra Rivera. All photos courtesy Deborah S Esquenazi Productions, LLC

In the file of worst possible things that could happen to you, being falsely accused of sexually abusing young children, and then convicted and imprisoned for over a decade, is probably close to the top of the pile.

This is the hell that was dealt out to a few dozen Americans in the great Satanic sexual abuse panic that burned its way across the nation in the 1980s and 90s. Rumors and media panic, followed by wild and often impossible accusations from little children, methodically coaxed out by bogus experts, sent childcare employees and others to prison all over the United States. From the McMartin family's preschool in Los Angeles—the longest criminal trial in US history at the time, which ended with nearly all charges dropped—to the saga of the Amirault family's day-care center in Malden, Massachusetts, where prosecutors said about 40 kids were "tied to trees, sexually penetrated with knives, and tortured by a 'bad clown' in a "secret room,'" it was a dark time.

Often these sex panics were spiked with homophobia. Take the persecution of Bernard Baran, a young daycare worker who had just come out to his western Massachusetts community when he was accused by a homophobic family of raping their child. (He spent 21 years in prison before being released and eventually exonerated.) Or Kelly Michaels, sentenced to 47 years on 115 counts against 20 children at a day-care center in Maplewood, New Jersey. According to Michaels, when police entered the apartment she shared with another woman and saw just one bed, she knew she was in trouble.

Anti-gay bigotry also fueled the preposterous case against Elizabeth Ramirez, Kristie Mayhugh, Cassandra Rivera, and Anna Vasquez, four women barely out of their teens—lesbians and Latinas, two of them mothers of young children. They were arrested in 1994 on what became satanic child sex abuse charges in San Antonio, Texas, a town that was homophobic even by south Texas in the 1990s standards. And as in previous instances of lesbians and gay men accused of satanic child abuse, critics say established LGBT advocacy groups left them hanging. As the San Antonio Four's current lawyer, Mike Ware, told me, "Truthfully back then, most of the groups were so marginalized themselves, at least in San Antonio and that area, they were reluctant to get involved in any kind of alleged sex crime."

The accusers were Liz Ramirez's two nieces, age seven and nine. Their stories, like those of many children in these cases, were inconsistent and all over the place. The girls had reportedly made similar accusations against another person while staying with their mother two years earlier while their father was suing for custody. On top of that, Liz Ramirez claims she had spurned the advances of the children's father years before. (He denies this.) None of the backstory was admitted as evidence in the trial, and one of the two accusers has since recanted her story.

Attorney Mike Ware of the Texas Innocence Project appearing in court on behalf of the San Antonio Four

What gave the four defendants the final shove into prison was junk science. An expert medical witness, Dr. Nancy Kellogg, testified that photographs of the two little girls' hymens showed clear signs of trauma—a claim that more recent medical research has since demolished (leading Dr. Kellogg to recant her testimony). When a new "junk science" law came into effect in Texas in September 2013, allowing prisoners to challenge dodgy expert testimony, the release of three of the women—Anna Vasquez had already been paroled out—followed a few weeks later.

Last Wednesday, I met the San Antonio Four while they were in New York for the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of a new documentary, Southwest of Salem, about their long struggle. At an event sponsored by the National Center for Reason and Justice, an advocacy group for people accused of sex panic charges, and held at the Lower East Side bookstore Bluestockings, the four strong women spoke to a standing-room-only audience that sobbed and laughed with them.

They told stories of lives not destroyed but seriously derailed. Ramirez and Rivera were separated from their young children. Kristie Mayhugh had been enrolled in the prestigious veterinary program at Texas A&M but is currently earning a living in an automotive plant—"a different line of work,"as she dryly puts it.

Throughout the ordeal, the four have never turned on one another. "I felt so bad to be responsible for what happened—I'm very grateful to have friends who didn't hold anything against me," Ramirez told the audience between sobs. The prosecution tried her separately from the other three, trying to cast her as the ring leader in a courtroom proceeding soaked through with homophobia and medieval weirdness. "The prosecutor tried to picture me like I was sacrificing this girl," she said. "He tried to paint me as this person who got in trouble all the time, was a satanist who was abusing these kids, who were my own flesh and blood!"

Despite the hideous injustice the four have survived, they are somehow able to look back at some moments with a piquant sense of humor. They shared a big laugh with the Bluestockings audience at how their defense attorney tried, unsuccessfully, to neutralize the courtroom homophobia by insisting they—and especially Vasquez and Mayhugh, who do not fall firmly on the femme side of the dial—wear flouncy dresses and lots of makeup to their trial. "And you can see in the movie how ridiculous we look," Mayhugh noted with a deadpan smile. "Remember how I did your hair?" chimed in Rivera.

Now their convictions have been vacated, but they have not been formally exonerated. Ware, who is also the executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, voiced optimism qualified by the fact that the state of Texas has a financial incentive to not exonerate, given that it must pay out to each exoneree a sum of $80,000 per year spent in prison. And the legal standard to be met for proving innocence—because on this side of the looking glass it is innocence and not guilt that must be proved—is a high one. As Ware told the audience at Bluestockings, "It's very difficult to prove that something never happened."

Anna Vasquez in prison

Before the panel, I was able to squeeze in a few questions to get a sense of their personal experiences behind the court documents and headlines. Convicted child predators are, in pop culture anyway, targets for constant abuse inside prisons. Did their fellow prisoners believe their claims of innocence? "Yes, actually they did," Vasquez told me. "According to them, I did not fit the profile." Kristie Mayhugh likewise spoke of her former prison mates without bitterness. "You build a relationship with the people you're in with, almost like family," she said.

I also asked Vasquez about any reprisals she faced for refusing enrollment in a sex-offender treatment program while in prison, a defiant assertion of her innocence."I did face heavy repercussions. They took away my privileges—commissary privileges. They took away my contact visits with my family, and I was only able to see my mom, through a glass," she said. "And when I was on parole, I was put on a sex-offender registry, and they wanted me take sex-offender therapy, but I was able to prove through a series of tests that I didn't fit the category. And I got off the registry about a year and a half after my release."

If you're wondering whether the prosecutor, Philip Kazen, saw any consequences for stoking a homophobic sex panic to get his scalps, the answer is no. In fact, Kazen was elected judge after racking up his convictions, is now retired, and will never face any kind of sanction for railroading these four women. And as Mike Ware reminded me, "The DA's office in Bexar County hasn't even agreed yet that my clients are innocent." (Criminal DA Nico LaHood did say in February, "I have some serious reservations about this case, and I don't believe pursuing these cases would be in the interest of justice.")

But Ramirez is rightfully amazed they haven't already been completely exonerated.

"It's the same thing as at the beginning—how can you convict me of a crime that never happened?" she said. "How can you not exonerate us? It's been twenty years since 1994, and our story has remained, and we still remain, the same."

Readers can contact Bexar County Criminal District Attorney Nico LaHood at 210 335 2311 to politely but firmly request a full exoneration.

Follow Chase Madar on Twitter.

All photos by Carl Wilson

This week, at the Crescent Theatre in Birmingham, England, Stinson Hunter, better known as the Pedophile Hunter after a Channel 4 documentary about him, held a ticketed meet and greet. For the princely sum of about $18, his fans could meet the UK's answer to Chris Hansen.

This was the sort of event that should only be held in the freezing, pouring rain. Walking to the Crescent Theatre, batting the warm sun out of my eyes, didn't quite seem fitting for the dark occasion. Stinson Hunter is responsible for over 50 convictions of men caught grooming young girls. He acts, or rather used to act, as the child, inviting these men to a decoy child's home. Then they would be filmed, asked why they were there, and footage of them would be uploaded to Hunter's Facebook group.

Hunter has a ghoulish agony in his eyes. They're eyes that have seen an incredible amount of pain. They're almost discolored from it. He has emerged from years of drug addiction and crime to answer his true calling, the only thing he's ever truly felt good at: trapping men who want to have sex with underage girls. He wanted to be a train driver, but he is colorblind, so he "turned into a scumbag instead," as he told the assembled audience.

Most people in the Crescent Theatre, a mass of old dears and dressed-up middle-aged couples, were there to see a musical performance of Jekyll and Hyde. Stinson's Q&A session seemed to be a source of great embarrassment for the staff of the venue. It was being held in the studio area of the theatre, in the basement, as if to hide it away from everything. After the last call was made for the musical, a silent group of sparsely arranged people were the only people left in the bar. These were the Hunter fans. I asked one of them for a chat about why she was there, but she told me that she doesn't speak to press, and that she herself was a "hunter." She spent the rest of the evening taking notes on Stinson's talk.

I called Hunter the next morning. "I think she came as a bit of a fan and came away really disappointed with me to be honest," he said, of the woman I had met. "We were keeping an eye on her because she was being really evasive. I'm against this wave of copycats who are kind of doing it for fun. The message gets lost."

Another fan was a short-haired woman called Belinda, who had a notebook spilling with questions. Belinda was on the edge of life, contemplating suicide, but she says she watched a video of Stinson's, in which he discussed his mental health, and it saved her life. "It blows my mind, and it's difficult to take in," Stinson told me. "I'm used to people not liking me. There are people out there who don't like me, who run their little hate campaigns. tried to get the theater to cancel."

One of Stinson's enemies is a man called Nigel Oldfield, a kind of pedophile rights advocate, who demanded that an irate throng encircling his Rotherham home "bring your children to ".

For a man who has dedicated his life to impersonating pubescent girls in order to entrap perverts, Hunter is quite the charmer. He thanks every person after they ask him a question, and he gesticulates when speaking, as if he's about to unveil a new iPhone. He told the theater about shedding his birth name, Kieran Parsons, in favor of the How-I-Met-Your-Mother-referencing Hunter. He spoke of his disdain for an attitude of violence toward the people he captures, stating that talking to them calmly "gets to them more." But he also spoke about the incident in which he was run over by someone he caught, who later killed themselves, something he appears to be, essentially, remorseless about.

It's important to ask how much of Hunter's work is a PR-led endeavor. I don't mean to suggest that he does what he does for fame, but the way in which he carries himself, the smooth behavior he exhibits, shows that he knows how to play a crowd. Perhaps it's his skills in talking to people that make him ideal for the job of manipulation. Everything he does is to promote his message—that the police need more resources to tackle online pedophilia. The point isn't necessarily to promote himself, but it does come with the territory. He says he feels forced to use controversial tactics to get people talking about a phenomenally dark and still largely taboo subject. It is hard to argue with him.

Hunter admits that he's done many bad things in his life. He was in prison for burning down an empty school. But there is a quiet story of redemption in him. You might expect people who move away from drugs and crime to help people in those situations. Hunter has emerged, as if reborn, with the primary goal of raising global awareness about online grooming.

It presents a deep moral quandary. Naturally, I cannot abide abusers, and I think that often more complexity and pathos is awarded to abusers than is warranted. But is a person taking his or her own life out of embarrassment and shame the price that must be paid for this type of prevention? Most people in the room with me in Birmingham that night would have said yes.

Hunter's fans adore and respect him, but Stinson seems uneasy with being the object of their admiration. He strikes me as the sort of person who likes to be almost constantly alone, charm or not, and to see him standing in front of not just moderates, but fans—I imagine that must have been galling for him.

That it was a predominantly female crowd surprised me. I asked Stinson why he thought that was. "I don't know, to be honest. I never really thought of it like that until you just said it," he said. "I didn't really see the crowd as men or women—I just saw them as people."

Hunter says he's now out of the pedophile-hunting game, though clearly he doesn't want anyone else to take up his mantel. I get the impression that he believes he's the only person who can do this job, this task that's been given to him, almost as if it's a secret mission. He is the one who has to do it, on his own terms. While he may not be tricking wronguns into houses anymore, he is constantly working on ways to raise and re-raise awareness of the issues. You get the feeling that he will never stop until he gets the results he wants, and fickle things like complex moral discussions won't thwart him. It's almost as if he's trying to redeem himself from a life of darkness by entrenching himself further in it, like pushing your arm into the murky waters of a blocked sink to pull out the plug. "I've got to go and make noise, again, so they start listening. I don't know what they can do mate, I'm not the expert, you know? But when they have that conversation, I think then I might be satisfied. Might."

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.

An entry coin for Lineage. My precious.

The first time I was explicitly denied access to a party, I was 14 years old. The suburban birthday spectacular of a classmate named Kayleigh was scheduled for the following weekend, and after she'd distributed a glossy invite to almost everyone else in my science class, and after I'd had Matthew Dawson loudly draw attention to my lack thereof, she took a moment to warn me that her "step-dad was going to be there and would flip out if anyone else turned up." The last time I was denied access to a party was outside a club on a drizzly, gray Sunday morning in Berlin. Despite possessing 15 years' additional perspective and a slightly better haircut, being told, "Sorry, you will not party here today" carried the same sting a few months back as it did when Kayleigh shut me down that day in science class.

I'm sure I'm not alone in being able to vividly remember the times that I've been turned away from places. It's a form of social rejection that tends to cut deep. But when you realize that you've had maybe 20 good nights out in public—nights out that have been relatively free from harassment, boorishness, and overly sloppy people—for every one you've had to walk home from prematurely, you can understand the logic. When a good club works, you hardly notice the seams holding it together. As well as solid sound and lighting and less than squalid toilets, the attitude of those at the center of the rave remains the most vital element, as well as often being the hardest science to perfect.

Amsterdam has a strong take on dance floor culture, reinforced by genre-spanning institutions such as Rush Hour, festivals such as DGTL and Dekmantel, and the huge success of Trouw, closed last year and already arguably equalled by a new venue from the same team named De School. Like Trouw before it, De School has a publicly available policy on why it turns people away. (No phones on the dance floor, no stag dos, no drugs or guns, no sexual harassment, and no transphobia are among its wholly reasonable edicts.) Its "house rules" exist partially as a result of its huge popularity, but also to retain its spirit and credibility. You're probably not going to get in if you show up in a gang of 12, covered in spilt beer, chanting the riff from "Chelsea Dagger."

Despite the adventurous selections of celebrated DJs such such as Ben UFO and Lena Willikens, both regulars at Trouw and De School, the club atmosphere in Amsterdam is still at its best when rooted in house and techno. It's a situation that local promoter Axm3d feels inadvertently undermines the city's equally strong attitude toward hip-hop and rap. So, together with associates Daniel Maciejewski and Jack Nolan, the trio have begun to experiment, setting up a new night called Lineage with its own way of determining who does and doesn't get in.

Musically, Lineage twins a classic 4/4-orientated dance floor with a second sound system specializing in classic rap cuts reclaimed from straight, commercial clubs. The really pioneering thing about it, though, is its ambitious invite system. Before the first edition took place at Amsterdam's Radion club earlier this month, it distributed 1,500 coins between 300 people—some friends and some merely strangers seen dancing particularly enthusiastically backstage at festivals. There is no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram. Inside, there are strictly no photos. The only way you can get through the door is if one of the coins granting you membership of Lineage's extended family comes into your possession.

Inside a club that looks to have a rather lax door policy. Photo by Jake Lewis

Maciejewski, who has emerged on the club scene from a business background, is adamant that the entrance policy isn't just a way to ruin as many people's nights as possible: "The coins work as a really good way of tailoring the crowd, but they also work on a family level," explains Maciejewski. "It's a very diverse crowd, and it's not so much about being exclusive, but about reaching out to more of the cream of the crop; the people on the party and music scenes who represent the best of it. We wanted people from all different subcultures, so there would be people from the gay scene, the DJ scenes, expats, local legends, people from all different corners who we trust, and who we call friends. And we know that when you invite this person, then a party starts."

Club membership by invitation is far from a pioneering concept. Throughout the heyday of New York's Paradise Garage, one of the hottest hook ups in New York was a pal in the know with Larry Levan and his crew, whose membership cards bestowed each recipient the responsibility of selecting four guests for each weekend's party. But Lineage might be the first dance club in history where the crowd also operates as a small democracy. It must also be among the first to operate a gay friendly "dark room" in earshot of classic West Coast gangsta rap.

Elsewhere in Europe, it's a different story. In the UK, where clubs are dying out at an alarming rate, you won't find many places that have developed their door policies in response to "safe space" ideals. While some—most often the type that offer "VIP guest list" and bottle service to separate the men from the boys—will remain exclusive in order to maintain a long running illusion of prestige, most nighttime venues presumably can't afford to turn anyone but the most obvious troublemakers away. This is especially true in British town and city centers, once nocturnal party hotspots, now increasingly just large-scale franchise opportunities for David Lloyd Gym and Leisure Centers.

As someone who grew up in the UK and gravitated toward indie and then dance clubs, not being dressed right for certain high street clubs was a point of pride. Funny, then, that I now find myself one of thousands of spirited if not slightly jaded temporary expats in Berlin, pessimistic as to whether we'll be granted entry to temporary temples of self-expression, some of which have a truly transgressive attitude that'd curl the toes of anyone who's ever filled out a health and safety risk assessment form. The city's ongoing appeal to "easyJet ravers" has meant clubs are now able and wholly advised to pick and choose. Most famously, the mysterious, occasionally brutal door policy at the city's popular and willfully hedonistic Berghain has pumped more than its fair share of rejection stories into the world, quizzically documented at length in the wider media, only strengthening the club's appeal over the past decade. The tough stance enacted by the club's door staff might not always seem "fair," but it acts as a barrier to what might otherwise be chaos.

Berghain is the spiritual successor to Ostgut, a large scale and once radical gay club that operated just across the train tracks from where thousands of clubbers now line up hopefully, and often nervously, each weekend morning. While the door policy doesn't exist in print—at least not publicly—it can be said that Berghain's is a successful attempt to continue the open-minded spirit and sexual freedom of its heritage. "You always want friction, though," warned head doorman Sven Mardquart in a rare interview with GQ last year. "That's the theme in any good club: diversity, friction."

When fortunate enough to bear witness to and partake in the euphoria that Mardquart is able to subtly engineer, only a fool would question his formula. But from disco's heyday, to the thriving creativity of Berlin techno throughout the 90s, and even the inadvertently politically charged golden era of acid house, dance music's common message has been one of unity. Is it really possible to achieve that without leaving some outside in the cold?

"We don't want to be exclusive, but inclusive," clarifies Lineage promoter Maciejewski. "We want to be selective, and we want to get people to talk to one another offline again... That's something we sell to people as a value, the idea to connect with people." As many clubs in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe and the United States continue to demonstrate a truly cold shoulder, defining themselves largely by the lines of hopefuls standing outside, it will be interesting to see how Lineage's radical "third way" of literally putting a club night into the hands of its patrons unfolds in 2016.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Liberal MP Bill Blair have made no mention of pardons or stopping prosecutions for weed crimes. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

When David Chun woke up from the grand mal seizure that almost killed him, he found himself shackled to his hospital bed.

The 54-year-old Toronto resident was diagnosed with a golf ball-sized brain tumour in 2012, causing him to have memory loss, headaches, and nausea. He was at his Etobicoke home with his two sons in January of this year when the seizure—the first one he'd ever experienced—struck, lasting 20 minutes.

Chun's sons called the ambulance.

"They had to give me a double dose of tranq just to put me out, It took seven firefighters—seven grown men—to hold me down while I was seizing. It was so bad," Chun told VICE.

According to Chun's version of events, paramedics tending to the scene noticed he had six small cannabis plants in the home and alerted police, who additionally found 300 grams of bud, and 15 dogs and a cat (Chun said the pets belonged to him and his sons). When Chun woke up in hospital six hours later, he said they arrested him for production for the purpose of selling. News reports described his house as an "illegal grow-op." His two sons, aged 22 and 23, had been thrown in jail, he learned, under the same charge, despite having showed officers Chun's medical license, which allows him to legally possess and grow pot.

Two days after he regained consciousness, while being guarded by cops and cuffed by his hands and legs to a hospital bed, Chun said he was taken to Toronto police's 22 Division station; hospital staffers, who told him he "would have died" if he had another seizure, asked that he be returned for treatment, he said. He was, briefly, but then got thrown into jail for a night, an experience he described as "terrifying."

Up until last week, when the charges against Chun and his sons were dropped, he was forbidden from entering his home. The $6,000 in cash cops found there was seized.

"They destroyed my life. They destroyed my house," said Chun, adding he didn't consume cannabis before he got ill and was growing his own strains so he could tailor them to manage his symptoms (he prefers less of a psychoactive effect).

"The police apply the laws however they decide to apply them," he told VICE, his voice rising at times. "They've eroded any sense of safety and security in my belief in democracy in Canada."

On 4/20, the Canadian government announced it would be unrolling its marijuana legalization plan in spring 2017, with the goal of having a system in place by year's end.

"We know it is impossible to arrest our way out of this problem," Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott said at United Nations General Assembly Special Session on drugs.

That's a nice soundbite, but on the ground, arrests, raids, prosecutions and jail sentences for crimes like possession and small scale production have been ongoing since Justin Trudeau was elected to office last November, prompting a growing body of criminal lawyers, patients, industry folks, to call for a moratorium on the prosecution of weed crimes. Just yesterday, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair asked the prime minister if he would decriminalize marijuana and "promise that there will be legislation to remove the criminal record" for thousands of Canadians who've been convicted of weed crimes. Trudeau deflected in his response that "decriminalization... actually gives a legal stream of income to criminal organizations."

According to Statistics Canada, police recorded roughly 68,000 cannabis-related drug offences, including possession, trafficking, importation, and exportation, in 2014. That's down from 2013, which saw 75,000 such charges, but still shows that a Canadian is arrested every nine minutes because of pot—primarily for being in possession of it.

For people who end up with a criminal record due to charges like these—and over 90 years of prohibition there have been many—the fallout can last a lifetime, damaging a person's ability to travel and be gainfully employed.

Despite acknowledging that the 22,000 possession charges laid in 2014 were "shocking," and that Indigenous people and visible minorities are disproportionately targeted, Bill Blair, parliamentary secretary to the justice minister and Liberals' legalization point man, said in a policy meeting earlier this year the current laws should be upheld.

"Until Parliament has enacted legislation, and new rules are in place to ensure that marijuana is carefully regulated, the current laws remain in force and should be obeyed," the former Toronto police chief said, rejecting the notion of a moratorium on charging or prosecuting for possession. Granting pardons to those with criminal records, "is not being contemplated at this time," he added.

The Ministry of Justice told VICE neither Blair nor Justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould was available for interviews about marijuana while the Public Prosecution Service of Canada only said it will continue to proceed with offences that fall within its jurisdiction, which includes the Controlled Substances and Drug Act.

Alan Young has been fighting the government on pot prohibition since the early 90s. The Toronto-based lawyer and York University prof has lobbied legal challenges over banned drug literature (which was successful) and drug paraphernalia e.g. bongs, rollies, vaporizers (which was unsuccessful, but everyone leaves head shops alone anyway).

"It wasn't just a professional interest," Young said from his York office, which is outfitted with framed newspaper articles headlined "The great marijuana debate" and "High time to stop the war on marijuana," highlighting his life's work.

"I had been a person who's used cannabis since high school... It's one of the most benign psychoactive substances on the planet."

From 1997-2001, Young worked on a number of cases relating to medical cannabis, resulting in the Marihuana Medical Access Regulations being enacted in 2001. The program expanded, and with it, public hysteria over reefer madness died down; there was even a brief moment in 2003 when weed was almost decriminalized. However, the gains that were made took a hit when Stephen "marijuana is infinitely worse than tobacco" Harper and his "tough-on-crime" agenda came into power (police incidents relating to pot increased 30 percent from 2006 to 2014.)

Enter Trudeau, who admitted he's smoked pot and campaigned partially on the premise of regulating weed to keep it out of the hands of children and the black market.

"He probably believes it's the right thing, partly cause he wants the revenue source and partly cause he wants to be cool," said Young.

While Young said he understands that it'll take a while for the feds to figure out legalization (read: manage optics), he feels the government should at the very least put a stop to jail time for nonviolent weed crimes.

"There should be a memo sent to Department of Justice indicating that unless there are serious aggravating factors, they should not be seeking terms of imprisonment for an activity that may be legalized." The US Department of Justice made a similar directive when Colorado and Washington State went legal.

In fact, prosecutors drop the "vast majority" of possession charges, (more evidence, critics argue, that enforcement is a waste of time and more than $1 billion in resources), but Ottawa Supt. Paul Johnston, a member of the drug abuse committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, told VICE the decision of whether or not to write someone up comes down to an officer's discretion. If it's a person quietly smoking a joint, "I may choose to use my discretion," he said. If it's someone blazing in front of a family having a picnic, "you're likely getting charged."

Read more: 'It Is Impossible to Arrest Our Way Out of This Problem,' Canada Tells UN Drug Conference

Thanks to Harper, there are also mandatory minimum sentences of six months to two years from crimes like trafficking, importing, and production (e.g. growing).

Montreal resident John Vergados, 48, who is also editor of Skunk, a cannabis-focused magazine, told VICE he's lived a "respectable life." He raised two kids, coached their hockey teams and has helped out fundraising causes like that of Mykayla Comstock, a little girl who had leukemia and used cannabis as a treatment.

"I've never been in trouble with the law," he said. But if he's convicted of the offences he's currently charged with—importing; conspiracy to import; possession for the purpose of trafficking; and possession—he'll be facing at least a year in jail.

The allegations against Vergados, which he couldn't discuss in detail because it's an open case, are that he purchased pot seeds online with the intent of selling them here.

"The system, they were providing one strain for every condition, it wasn't even a good strain," he said. "I think genetic diversity is the one thing that trumps everything, you need it." Due to the charges, which were laid in 2014, briefly dropped and then revived at the end of last year, Vergados has been unable to cross the Canada-US border. He'd been planning on moving to California, where he wanted to document legalization.

His lawyer, Paul Lewin, pointed out seeds are available everywhere—to the point where people don't even realize they're illegal.

"Go on the internet for three seconds and you can find seed sellers who are left alone," said Lewin. "The things John's accused of doing people are doing legally above board all over Canada."

Vergados and Lewin both sit on the board for NORML, an organization that's pushing for a moratorium on pressing charges for weed-based offences.

"This is a human rights catastrophe," said Vergados. "You're saying it's a bad law, you're gonna change it, but the law is the law."

Supt. Johnston, who seemed much more concerned about people driving high than possession, said in some parts of the country (cough, Saskatoon) cops tend to be more vigilant about enforcement because community tolerance for cannabis is low. He advised being careful about using it openly to avoid trouble.

"The government of Canada is considering legalization. Don't screw it up," he said.

Longtime pot lobbyist Dana Larsen has the opposite prescription.

After his recent arrest in Calgary, the first he's ever encountered in 30 years of activism, Larsen told VICE he was grateful to the cops.

"I really gotta thank the police in Calgary because it gave my tour a huge boost, it drew a lot of media attention, I have way more seed requests than before," he said.

He'd been handing out pot seeds for free as part of his Overgrow Canada tour and was charged with trafficking. After making him spend the night in jail and sign a document explaining he'd qualify for a six-month prison term, the cops gave Larsen back his pot seeds in a little evidence bag. He's excited about his May 18 court date.

"We're gonna plant seeds outside the courthouse. I'm gonna get people to go down to the police station and plant seeds there. We're gonna have fun with it. I would be very surprised if I get any kind of jail sentence at all."

The night he spoke to VICE, Larsen was giving a speech about prohibition at Kensington Market's Hot Box Cafe vapour lounge. He talked about how there'd been several false starts toward legalization and so the opportunity Canadians have now shouldn't be wasted. He then, while advising audience members to plant their seeds in public parks and traffic circles, said the one thing that's proven to be effective is civil disobedience.

Head shops, vapour lounges, and dispensaries, though ubiquitous in places like Vancouver and Toronto, are all still technically illegal, Larsen pointed out, but that hasn't stopped anyone.

"Simply through sheer force of numbers and force of will, we've made the police stand down, we've made prosecutors stand down again and again, and the final phase of that campaign is overgrowing Canada with cannabis plants everywhere so they can't keep up anymore," he said.

"The cannabis leaf is really more important to Canada and its history than the maple leaf has ever been."

History is what the Trudeau's party will make when it legalizes weed. If we're to believe the hype, it's coming very soon. But curing the hangover from decades of failed drug policies may take a lot longer.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

For years now, a humanitarian disaster has been playing out in Yarmouk, a neighborhood of Damascus, Syria, that historically served as a home to Palestinian refugees. The area was first besieged by Assad regime forces in 2013, and has experienced food and water shortages ever since. Two years ago, an image of thousands of locals lining up to receive rations became one of the most iconic photos in the five years of civil war in Syria.

But the strategic location of the neighborhood, close as it is to the regime-controlled heart of Damascus, means it's likely to be hotly contested so long as the war is on. The camp was first overrun by ISIS about a year ago, with the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front maintaining control of some sections and a small anti-ISIS Palestinianian group called The Sons of Yarmouk also enjoying a limited presence. In the last few weeks, fighting broke out between fractured elements of Nusra, and ISIS took advantage of the fissure with a new offensive. Nearly 10,000 civilians remain trapped there, and since April 7, many have perished, human rights observers say. (On Saturday, a UN official said residents hadn't received food or water for over a week.)

"While diplomatic talks are vital to a peaceful end to the violence in Syria, the international community must do more to save lives now," says Natasha Hall, Middle East and North Africa program officer for the humanitarian group Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and author of a recent report on protecting Syrian civilians. "In Yarmouk, an area of just a couple square kilometers, civilians are simultaneously suffering from a siege and further trapped by clashes between armed groups including ISIS and the regime shelling just blocks away."

Early Wednesday local time, Hall—who speaks Arabic and has been in contact with residents—got in touch with a 54-year-old resident of the camp named Issam via social media, and was able to transmit some questions of mine, as well.

Here's what he had to say.

VICE: We're hearing reports of snipers shooting at civilians. Who are the snipers?
Issam: People won't leave their houses because they are afraid of snipers. Most of the snipers are from Daesh -Basel hospital has been destroyed.

For more information on work done by the Center for Civilians in Conflict, click here.

Follow Patrick Hilsman on Twitter.

"Part of it might be to do with me being raised in America, and being surrounded by Hollywood gun culture," Cliff Bleszinski tells me, when we sit down to discuss his new game, LawBreakers. "I don't want to get into the big gun debate, though, because I do have a lot of respect for guns. That's a conversation for another time."

Bleszinski's respect for firearms might go some way to explaining why they've featured so prominently in his previous games. He was co-designer on Gears of War, and lead on its two sequels proper (to date). "Being raised in America, particularly in the north east (he's from Massachusetts), which is all 'manly,' you watch all of these movies like Commando, Rambo, and even something like Demolition Man. And you learn that the psychology of the gun is very powerful, that in itself it represents power."

We're talking inside a massive warehouse space that also houses the offices of Bleszinski's new studio, Boss Key Productions, which he founded in 2014. Raleigh, North Carolina is where he now calls home, where he's set up his current venture. It's a university town of a sleepy disposition during weekdays and a population that is amongst the friendliest and most welcoming of any urban landscape I've experienced in the US. Walk down any street here and you'll receive your share of "good morning"s.

It's hardly the kind of setting in which you'd expect to find a video game company specializing in shooters. But with Bleszinski's former employers Epic Games (Gears of War, Unreal) and Red Storm Entertainment (Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon) also in the area, the region is used to unloading virtual bullets.

The Gears of War and Unreal series, and 1994's PC platformer Jazz Jackrabbit, might be how Bleszinski made his name in the games industry, but LawBreakers represents a completely new start for him. A multiplayer-only, first-person shooter coming to PC later this year, it'll be his first game since ceasing work on Gears of War amid rumors that he'd completely retired from the games industry.

Today, Bleszinski is firmly focused on making sure that LawBreakers doesn't follow the tried and tested patterns that so many of its predecessors have subscribed to. First-person multiplayer games, in particular, are notorious for their staunch adherence to genre stereotypes and clichés.

"A lot of people think that you have to a sniper, you have to have a medic, you have to have a capture the flag mode," laments Bleszinski. "Do you? If you do have that stuff, then you're just making the same shit that everyone else does. Why not have a vision for what you actually want to make, and come up with something different and unique instead of just iterating off other people's stuff?"

Bleszinski is aiming for individuality in an already crowded marketplace—before LawBreakers comes Overwatch and Battleborn, multiplayer FPS titles from Blizzard and Gearbox respectively—through a process he describes as "consuming everything and then regurgitating it back into something that is your own." It's a method born from his belief that as you get older you start to learn "that everything is a fucking remix." Making that remix different from the others is what's important.

But on paper, LawBreakers comes across as a fairly typical game of its kind. Two teams of five—one known as "Law," the other as "Breakers"—face-off across a series of game modes. Different characters have different traits, and those traits must be used wisely in order to fulfill your team's potential at any given moment. Yet dig deeper and deviations from the norm do begin to emerge.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on competitive gaming, 'eSports'

Character classes have yet to be finalized, but those I play at Boss Key fall into a range of categories that are unusual for a game of this type. There is a sword-wielding, grapple hook-swinging individual who is low on health but high on speed, capable of traversing the map by swinging through the air, so long as you've the input dexterity to achieve it. Then there's the assault rifle carrying, grenade-throwing hipster with a jetpack, briefly propelling him forwards in an inhuman sprint. Other characters have rocket launchers, and the ability to slam into the ground from great heights.

A realistic shooter, then, this is not, an impression reinforced when you see certain areas of the maps affected by gravity distortions, which will suspend your character in mid-air. Quickly reacting to these fields is essential when it comes to keeping your head in the heat of a match.

The "Law" and the "Breakers" feature aesthetic differences, but their abilities are identical. Bleszinski explains that the original idea was to make each side unique in terms of which tools and weapons are available to them, but he and the team quickly realized that they simply didn't have the manpower to tackle this approach.

However, the symmetry that exists between the two sides has helped Bleszinski align LawBreakers more directly with one of his other loves: sport. Growing up in Boston, home to the New England Patriots, Boston Bruins, Red Sox, and Celtics, the young Cliff was not short on sporting options to draw inspiration from.

"Most video game creators—not all, but most—aren't big sports people," he says. "But there's a lot to be learned from the rule sets of sports, and the last minute action they create. There are complex things going on in sports when you first start to learn the rules, such as offsides in (ice) hockey or what icing means; but it's important to remember that people will take the time to learn those complex rule sets. When you look at these sports that have existed for many years, they have made their rules so airtight that they very often end with a lot of drama. That's the thing that grabs me about them."

LawBreakers promises to feature many game modes, but I've sampled only one, dubbed "Battery." The concept, as per Bleszinski's theory of consumption and regurgitation, is something of a mix between the capture the flag modes seen in any number of shooters since the dawn of time, and Call of Duty's ever-present "Domination."

A battery is positioned in the center of a map, with each side having to grab it, take it to their base, and protect it until a meter reaches 100 percent. Once the meter is filled, a 20-second cool-down timer is triggered, upon which time a point is earned. The first team to score two points is declared the winner.

In a nod towards the sports that Bleszinski loves, the entire concept is built around facilitating those moments of drama in the dying seconds of a match. Reaching 100 percent charge, only to have the battery stolen during the cool-down period, is legitimately both painful and exciting; as are those 20 seconds that lead to eventual victory, during which you never quite know whether you're going to successfully protect your prize.

"There's a big final 'push' ," Bleszinski explains, grinning. "But I hate to use that term, because it's so associated with the MOBA genre. I feel we have something in common with MOBAs in terms of the character classes, but we don't have the towers and the minions, and that sort of thing."

Say "MOBA" and immediately the brain conjures images of DOTA 2, League of Legends and, more generally, eSports. Does Bleszinski want LawBreakers to earn a place amongst the eSport elite?

"Yeah, I'd love it to be an eSport, eventually. That's the goal. Everyone wants to be an eSport, everyone wants to be shown on television networks and everyone wants to see kids playing their game and they want to make millions of dollars. Yeah, we want that. Who doesn't want that?

"At the end of the day, though, you have to start with certain core pillars that will allow you to eventually get to that situation, way down the line."

And all anyone outside of Boss Key has really seen of LawBreakers, at this point, are those core pillars. Prior to its release, more game modes, maps, and character classes will be revealed, which should help diversify the offering and attract the attentions of a bigger audience. Right now it feels like something aimed very much at the "core" shooter player.

To start with, though, that might be enough. Setting out to secure the most dedicated players first, before spreading to encompass a more casual audience, has worked wonders for the MOBA genre, as well as the likes of Hearthstone and Counter-Strike: GO. So there's no reason why it can't work here, as that first pillar that ultimately holds up a larger offering later on in the game's lifespan.

Plus, it has guns in it. Bleszinski might assign his interest in them to growing up in an America that informs itself through Hollywood's output, but the fact is that almost everyone enjoys shooting guns in a safe, digital space. That, combined with the Bleszinski name, the Bleszinski brand, might just be enough to guarantee LawBreakers that all-important initial impact, from which it could prove a powerful contender.

Follow John Robertson on Twitter.

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/Press Association Images

Fuck.

Read: Dear 2016, Fuck You

Indelible pop genius Prince passed away Thursday at Paisley Park, his Minnesota home and recording studio, the Associated Press reports.

Last week, a plane the 57-year-old artist was traveling in had to make an emergency landing in to rush him to the hospital for what his representatives said was the flu. The illness led to the cancellation of several tour dates, and he'd made his way back to Paisley Park to rest. Prince played his final show in Atlanta just a week before his death.

As news of his passing spread Thursday afternoon, celebrities took to Twitter to pay their respects and mourn the loss of the musical icon. We've collected some of their reactions below.

My Mother and Father at the Bar, London,1990 © Doug DuBois

"Was it really that bad?" That's what Roger DuBois asked after seeing his son Doug's photograph of their family's 1987 New Year's Eve celebration. In it, the DuBois clan sits silently and glumly around a corked champagne bottle. Roger looks at his feet. His wife Ruth and his daughter Lise stare blankly at opposite walls. And his younger son Luke looks emotionlessly at the camera. Given that the photograph was taken soon after Ruth's attempted suicide, and a few years before the couple's divorce, was the photograph predicting the events that were to come?

Well yes and no, and that's what makes things interesting: Doug DuBois had taken more than 19 shots from the same vantage over the course of that New Year's Eve, many in which his family were talking and drinking, some in which they looked happy. He only chose to keep one. Which is to say that DuBois's photograph presents one version of the past. He's weaving a story.

What are the themes of this story? What are its characters' fates? And what does its narrative tell us about its creator? These are the questions posed by DuBois's photos, which are currently on display at the Aperture gallery in New York as part of a powerful mid-career retrospective titled In Good Time.

The exhibition collects work from the three long-term projects that DuBois completed over 32 years. The first is All the Days and Nights, DuBois's intimate chronicle of his family life that was begun in 1984, just as he was heading out for grad school and completed 24 years later.

Structured around major events—his father's near-fatal accident on a commuter train, his mother's subsequent depression and suicide attempts, their marriage's dissolution—All the Days is DuBois's attempt to give a shape and meaning to the countless days that his family spent together. As he does for the New Year's Eve photo, he carefully frames his every shot to ascribe it a particular narrative, to place it in a context of his choosing.

After Roger's accident, for example, there are a number of photograph's that chart his increasing alienation from Ruth. In After Dinner, the two of them sit at a table after Christmas. Their physical proximity is deeply ironic, however, because Roger and Ruth are emotionally and mentally far away from one another. He sits on a wheelchair and looks despairingly at a wall, while she stares morosely at the food. In My Mother in the Backyard, DuBois uses perspective to highlight his parents' estrangement: In the foreground his mother is caught in a moment of worried contemplation, while in the back, out of focus, his father walks by the pool in swimming trunks. Soon, we start to see them alone: in My Mother in the Bedroom, we see Ruth smoking by the telephone, her head in her hand, her despair palpable. My Father, Christmas Eve depicts Roger looking anything but celebratory before a Christmas tree. There are occasional spots of brightness, of course, but, by and large, DuBois's calls our attention to their increasing alienation.

'My Father in the Backyard,' Far Hills, New Jersey,1985 © Doug DuBois

Given that Roger and Ruth eventually divorced, one can easily defend the accuracy of DuBois's retelling of their relationship. But things get complicated, though no less compelling, when his artistic narratives threaten to overtake a subject's life. This threat is neatly represented by a pair of photographs of his sister, Lise.

The first, taken in 1984, shows a 21-year old Lise looking at herself in a vanity. It's a touching photograph, one that captures the self-consciousness and yearning of a certain type of scatterbrained college graduate. In the second, taken in 1999, Lise is once again looking at her shoulder. Only this time she is outdoors and carries her baby son in her hand. In the background, behind her yard's wooden fence, four townhouses punctuate the landscape, towering reminders of her impending domesticity. The symmetry between these photographs is startling, and at first I was reduced to despair at the thought of how quickly Lise's youth has past by—how easily a baby made its way into her hands! But then, at the exhibition's opening event, DuBois spoke about asking Lise to pose for him, baby in hand, so he could replicate the photograph he had taken 15 years ago. In other words, he hadn't captured a symmetry—he had created one.

I don't mean to suggest that this admission made DuBois's photographs any less powerful (it didn't). Rather, I want to highlight the astonishing pitilessness that lies at the heart of his vision.

As a teenager DuBois discovered that the camera offered him a "ticket outside" himself. It allowed him to closely study the people around him and also to transcend his attachment to those people. When DuBois follows his family members into their most private spaces, and when he captures them in moments of utter vulnerability, we are never entirely sure if he's driven by compassion or a desire to document a story.

It's this exhilarating uncertainty that gives All the Days its particular, chilling power. We know that DuBois eliminated 18 photographs of happiness and ambivalence, and retained the one that shows a broken family. We know that he's artificially reduced 15 years of sister's life to one frightful symmetry. And yet, when Roger DuBois asks if things were "really that bad," we are compelled to gravely nod our heads. Such is the power of his artistic vision, and so deep are the emotions it touches within us.

The two other projects represented in the present exhibition are Avella, DuBois's study of a life in the titular coal mining where his grandmother grew up, and My Last Days at Seventeen, a photographic record of the five years he spent with teenagers at Russell Heights, an insular housing project in Ireland.

While the general mood of All the Days was at best melancholic, there is a pervading despair that runs through the lives depicted in Avella. DuBois is overwhelmed by the lack of opportunities, the consumer culture, and the general insularity he finds in the Pennsylvania town. And what's worse, at least according to him, is that Avella's denizens aren't awe of their own despair. In a representative and bitingly ironic photograph, a family visits a coal mine—this is what passes for recreation in Avella—wearing tourist caps that scream "Joy."

'Larry Fixes His Motorcycle,' Avella, Pennsylvania,1994 © Doug DuBois

My Last Days, though also shot in an economically disadvantage neighborhood, is far more hopeful. DuBois attends to the vulnerability and fear of disenfranchised Irish teenagers coming of age at a time of an economic crash. Yet, alongside these fears, he also finds manic hope, romantic longing, and a punk-rock fuck-you attitude that allows the teens to subvert their circumstances. When we see skinny boys climbing lampposts and jumping off piers, we know they aren't going down without a fight.

The exhibitions title, In Good Time, refers to many things: DuBois's famous propensity to embark on decade-long projects, aging—one of his favorite themes—and the manner in which, as curator Cory Jacobs puts it, "something becomes revealed" if you spend long enough with his photographs. I prefer to think of it as a comment of DuBois's construction of stories. In 1984, a girl and her mirror represent the vanity of youth; 15 years later, the same moment has taken on the quality of a paradise.

Doug DuBois is a serious and excellent photographer. Anyone who has had a family—or a youth—will be moved by In Good Time.

See more photos below.

Ratik Asokan is a writer based in New York. You can follow his work here.

In Good Time is open through May 19 at Aperture Gallery in NYC. More information can be found here.

Mike Duffy toasts the justice system. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Devaan Ingraham

Years of political scandal, investigations, and sensational Maclean's covers ended on a somewhat flat note Thursday when Senator Mike Duffy was fully acquitted of the 31 spending scandal-related charges against him.

Duffy, 69, you'll barely recall, came under fire in 2012, when he was accused of abusing his privileges as a senator by claiming housing and travel expenses based on the premise that he worked in Ottawa, away from his home in PEI. However, an audit revealed that he had in fact been living in Ottawa for decades while claiming his PEI summer cottage was his primary residence. There were also a clusterfuck of other allegations that sounded pretty shady (dude was charging taxpayers for funerals he attended), compounded by the fact that former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's chief of staff Nigel Wright issued a $90,000 cheque to cover some of Duffy's seemingly improper expenses. Duffy claimed he was innocent of wrongdoing but eventually the RCMP charged him with 31 offences including fraud and breach of trust.

It was all very salacious by boring Canadian standards, throwing Harper's crew under scrutiny and igniting a debate about why the fuck we still have a senate. (Lol to the Liberals for booting all their senators from caucus.)

But basically, none of it matters, because Thursday, Ontario Court Justice Charles Vaillancourt said Duffy is "an overall credible witness" and that his expenses weren't suspect at all, given the vague rules senators were given at the time.

For what it's worth (read: nothing because the reigning Conservative government was swept out of power by the internet's boyfriend, Justin Trudeau), the judge was highly critical of the Prime Minister's Office during the Harper regime, asking, "Could Hollywood match their deviousness?"

Duffy is currently on a leave of absence and seeing as how he's innocent, could be back in the senate spending our tax dollars again ASAP.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

All the accoutrements necessary for a dab. Photo by the author

Even if you're a daily stoner, the first time you do a dab can be a terrifying, coughing-fit filled experience if you're not properly prepared. Though shatter is not the "toxic and highly addictive drug" that some mainstream media have warned it is by parroting uninformed police paranoia, trust us when we say it can really fuck you up. (You're still not going to overdose from doing dabs no matter how hard you try though, sorry, CTV.)

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

There was a time in Raeford Davis's life when the idea of putting on a police uniform and a badge brought him joy.

Law enforcement seemed a natural fit for the South Carolina native, growing up, as he did, around people who dedicated themselves to helping others. His mother was a school teacher, and his father worked in nursing.

So Davis took the plunge in 2002, joining the police department in the small, violence-plagued city of North Charleston. The city's police force came under national scrutiny last year when Officer Michael T. Slager was caught on camera shooting Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, eight times in the back after a traffic stop. (Slager is scheduled to go to trial for first-degree murder in October after being released on $500,000 bail in January.)

Almost from the start of his career, Davis was troubledby the department's approach to combatting drug-fueled violence in minority communities. Policies aimed at disrupting the drug trade seemed ineffective—at best. At worst, kicking down doors in SWAT gear and locking up juveniles who had few options outside of the local drug world seemed legitimately harmful.

The moral conflict ate away at him. Davis retired as a patrolman in 2006, after being hit by a car while on duty and suffering a broken leg. The 43-year-old now works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a nonprofit comprised of former cops and government agents who oppose the war on drugs.

I remember very early on in my career, I was on patrol in an area where we were basically pulling people over for not using their turn signals, and then turning into a drug search.

I was with some officers who pulled over a black kid on a moped for not using a signal. There were four or five of us, big guys in uniforms with guns on our hips, all standing around him. We asked, "You don't mind if we search your vehicle do you, to see if you have any drugs?" What's this kid going to do? He's not going to say no. We stripped the moped. He didn't have anything. We sent him on his way. But I felt like we earned that kid's enmity that day.

I was a little scared to speak up about this at first, but then I thought, Why should I chicken out? I don't want cops getting killed over this stuff.

Another time, we were doing traffic stops and I had a K-9 officer with me. We stopped a guy basically just because he was in a drug neighborhood. He was a middle-aged black guy driving a nice car. We brought the dog over. It jumped up on the side of the car and scratched the door. Then, of course, the dog jumps in the car all over his leather seats and scratches them. I can see the dog doing this, and I'm thinking, Holy shit! We didn't find anything in the car, which was now all scratched up. It was like, "Here's your ticket for failure to use a turn signal, and have a nice day."

Brutal. All because he aroused our merest suspicion.

I wasn't on a SWAT team, but I did perimeter security when the SWAT teams did drug warrant raids. They would hit the crappiest houses in the crappiest part of town. You know, kick the door open, fly in with rifles, pull all these people out, and find a couple of grams of drugs and $700 in cash. That amount of effort and violence in a neighborhood that's had a drug problem since before I was born seemed horribly dangerous and counterproductive.

Later on, I realized how this became self-perpetuating. You arrest people for selling drugs, they become criminalized, and it destroys any opportunity they had to be productive members of society.

We all wrestled with it. You had some guys who really enjoyed working and bought into it. Others tried to avoid it and got into other parts of law enforcement. But you can't really tell your supervisor, "I'm good with law enforcement except for drugs." Your options are limited. Nobody's going to agree with you if you say it's morally wrong.

Then, one day, I got hit by a truck while I was out directing traffic. My leg broke and didn't heal right, so I got out for a physical disability.

Getting away from the job really freed up my mind. There's a great quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I can understand how police officers who are still working can't bring themselves to admit that some of the policies they enforce are counterproductive. But I feel like the tide is turning. I look at the original guys from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition—they started coming out in the early 2000s, saying the drug war wasn't working. They could kind of mention legalizing marijuana, but they couldn't even get into the moral aspect. Now we can do that. Marijuana will be the gateway to larger legalization efforts.

I was a little scared to speak up about this at first, but then I thought, Why should I chicken out? I don't want cops getting killed over this stuff. They're in dangerous situations, fighting a war that's going nowhere.

For most cop-supporters I meet, 90 percent of the time their response to dissenters is something along the lines of, "You haven't served," or "You don't know what it's like to walk a mile in a cop's shoes." Well, not only was I a cop, but I was crippled in the line of duty—with the boot they cut off me at the hospital to prove it. So I'm, like, double sacrosanct. It confuses them.

As far as people who have been harmed by police and still hate or hold a grudge, I have this apology: It was wrong for me to use violence against you for merely possessing or trading in drugs. My actions, though harmful, were without malice. I believed at the time that they were in the best interest of our community.

I can only ask for more forgiveness than you've been shown.