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Photos of the Most Kawaii Costumes at a Brooklyn Cherry Blossom Festival

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Things got real cute last weekend at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's annual Sakura Matsuri Cherry Blossom Festival—a pastel-and-rainbow explosion celebrating the arrival of spring in NYC. Cosplayers and other kawaii enthusiasts flaunted their elaborate, candy-colored outfits against the dramatic backdrop of pink cherry trees in full bloom.

The two-day Sakura Matsuri program featured over 60 events and performances to celebrate ancient and modern Japanese culture, including a cosplay fashion show, where people dressed as Sailor Moon characters, Pikachu, or in seven-foot-tall robot suits cat-walked to high-pitched J-pop and J-rock. No matter how obscure the character, everyone seemed to know exactly which persona each festival-goer was representing.

Despite the abundance of lace, ribbons, kimonos, bloomers, platform heels, furs, ruffled petticoats, pinafores, glitter, parasols and kitsch manga regalia, the assembled fans weren't just exhibiting a fashion sensibility. For many, kawaii is a complex embodiment and pursuit of all things happy and positive; it's a way of life. Photographer Aaron Purkey attended the 2016 festival and documented the flowers, fans, and unrivaled cuteness.

For more of Aaron's work, visit his Instagram page here


Parenting Advice from Real-Life Porn Star MILFs

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Teagan Presley with her two daughters. All photos courtesy of the subjects

Porn stars are just like us. Really. They might make more money, have more sex, and enjoy their jobs far more than most people, but nearly every woman in the adult business I've interviewed over the past 20 years has had the same basic desires: be loved, be happy, and make it to the end of the life's road in one piece and hopefully not hurt anyone in the process. I've also come to realize since having my first child nearly seven years ago that I can relate more to the parenting beliefs and techniques of people who are ostracized for doing porn than I can with almost any parent in the suburbs of New Jersey.

Porn stars are scrutinized daily by society (and even their own fans) for their looks, actions, life choices, personal beliefs. When it comes to parenting, people question not only how they raise their children, but if they should even be allowed to have kids at all. It takes a very confident person to endure that level of bullshit. I applaud all the mothers out there, today and every day, especially the real-life porn MILFs.

Just as I interviewed some of the world's greatest skateboarders last Father's Day about their outsider approach to fatherhood, this Mother's Day I caught up with several of the best porn moms in the business to get some parenting advice, plus to let them know I wish there was anyone as cool at them at the PTA meetings I have to attend these days.

Holly Halston
Three Daughters, Ages 17, 18, and 23
@xxxHollyHalston

I'm the original porn MILF; I had my three girls before I started doing porn in 2000. I can say being a parent will take you to the brink of insanity and offer you the single most rewarding and frustrating experience of your entire life.

When I was first asked what advice I would give other parents, the first thing that came to mind is cover everything in plastic and double up on rubber mattress sheets. In seriousness, I believe I'm able to get through being a mom by having a great sense of humor, lots of love, and always talking to my girls about everything. Being honest with them has helped them to see my human side, and see that I too make mistakes, but every choice I made had pure intentions.

I can confidently say that you will make mistakes and probably screw parenting up, but having the grit to be proud of your mistakes is the goal. I learned alongside each of my three daughters how to be the best me. I was never afraid to say thank you to each daughter for teaching me something.

Kayden Kross
Daughter, Age 2
@Kayden_Kross

My experience has not been one of raising kids in the sex industry because the two worlds are separate; I work in the sex industry and I raise my daughter outside of that. I can tell you that the pros of having a job in the sex industry are that I get to set my hours to maximize the time I can spend with her, and that I can afford things like good preschools, healthy food choices, and so forth. The cons are that people automatically stigmatize my abilities as a parent or question my right to be a parent at all.

The most important lesson I've learned is never to ask her a yes or no question if I can't live with one of the answers. And the best advice I can offer is: Don't ask her if she needs to use the potty. Ask her which one of the potties she wants to use.

Sparky Sin Clair
Daughter, age 2
@Sparky_Fett

My advice would be to not let strangers, friends, family, society, even your own parents make you feel that you need to be conventional in order to be a good parent. To suddenly view sexuality as something to be ashamed of is an unfortunate side effect of the Madonna-whore complex. As if the moment I became pregnant, I was supposed to stop being me and become Mother Theresa? I don't have to take on "Mom" as my entire identity, as opposed to simply adding it to the inventory of roles that make up my identity. Sometimes it feels like once you become a mom, people want you to denounce the very thing that made it possible for your child to exist. No more pleasure, no more you, now you are here only as a means to an end for your child.

I recently got a tattoo I had been wanting for a while. It's a big pink butt plug wearing a bandana with a banner dead and center reading, "Plug Life." It's located on the front of my leg underneath my hip bone, and it's fairly visible if I'm wearing shorts.

My mom told me that I've "ruined my daughter's life forever. What will her teachers think? What will other parents think?" Any adversity my daughter faces due to the choices I have made, such as a profession in porn (or even a tattoo of a butt plug), will only present opportunities for her and I to learn about ourselves and grow in the process.

I'd rather show my daughter how to live from a place of love than a place of fear. And that starts with living my life how I decide is best for me (and subsequently her as well), rather than let the beliefs of others decide my path for me.

Brooke
Daughter, Age 4
@NewBrookeBrand

I am constantly being asked, "What are you going to tell your daughter about your work?" That is an extremely complex question and there is not a one-liner I can offer that will satisfy those who are intrigued.

Besides the fact that I'm able to spend more time with my daughter, my child is not treated any differently at home than the average working mom with a nine-to-five job. Who am I kidding? There are probably loads of differences! For one, we love being naked in our home. There is no shame when it comes to our bodies, and I want our daughter to feel comfortable in her own skin. There are no wrong questions our daughter could ask about our bodies, body parts, and how miraculously our bodies function.

For example, when our daughter asked me where babies come from, I responded with, "Out of women's vaginas." If you can believe this, our daughter has sat with me a few times to watch birthing videos on YouTube. I am not sure if that is normal, but I knew the very confused look on her face would be solved with a video explanation. Thank God for YouTube!

My theory is desensitization. The hope is for my daughter to understand the world and how it works, rather than to shelter her from it. My feelings are that, in return, her curiosity won't lead her to be a follower when it comes to peer pressure, losing her virginity, or to try drugs (to name a few of my concerns). She will understand the consequences of her own actions, be secure in herself and her body without having to seek validation from outside sources.

Anna Bell Peaks
One Daughter, Age 14
@AnnaBellPeaksxx

I've only been in the adult industry for a year and half. I worked my entire life as a certified public accountant and now some of the same the same people in my Midwest community that used to look at me as a professional businesswoman now look at me like, "What the hell are you doing?" But it doesn't change the way that I parent. I just really love sex. There's a fun factor to what I do now; the stress is lower and it's really good money.

As for advice, it's totally different to have a high-schooler than to have a four-year-old. She already knows what I do. I knew I had to tell her because every high school boy goes on the internet and sure enough within her first month in high school everyone in the city knew her mom was a porn star. We told her before other people found out. It's always good to be proactive and let your children know from you before someone else tells them—that is a bad way for them to find out. We just explained to her that it's legal, that mommy is good at it, and I make a good living from it. We told her when she turns 18 she can do whatever she wants. She can be a CPA, a doctor, a stripper. It doesn't really matter as long as you're happy in what you do. I honestly believe that.

Lily Lane
Daughter, age 5
@LilyxLane

Being a mom in the porn industry is pretty much like any other job: My daughter goes to school and I go to work. There are a few pros and cons though. One con would be that I don't want other parents to judge my child because of what I do. Going to school meet-ups and birthday parties is kind of hard and awkward I guess. When you meet a new parent they always ask what kind of work you do, so I always seem to have to lie. It's more of a way to protect my child than anything. Also, not being able to participate in her school's "occupations day" was kind of a bummer because she wanted me there.

I will say being a mom has turned me into a giant pussy! I used to be this tough, hardcore, no-fucks-given chick, and now I'm a total crybaby! Damn hormones! I think she's taught me that there's more to life than just working every day and making money. You have to enjoy every minute of your life. She's growing so fast and I don't want to miss any of it! But if I could pass on one piece of parenting advice on to other mothers it would be that you can't be super mom! You're going to sometimes miss school events, birthday parties, etc. It's OK to break down and cry sometimes. Parenting is hard! I've learned that you can't always give in! You have to say no sometimes! At the end of the day, as long as you provide a loving, safe environment for your child that's all that matters.

Teagan Presley
Two Daughters, ages Eight and Ten
@MsTeagan

My experience has been blissful up until the present. My daughters are officially old enough to be cognitive of what mommy actually does for work. Luckily for me I have many tattoos and have been lucky enough to grace mainstream magazines such as Inked, so it makes it easier to explain that I'm a model and I get paid like the celebrities in our local town of Las Vegas to host parties around the United States. One downside is that they're rapidly approaching entrance into the tween age group, and they will soon be on the internet with more chances for them or their friends to stumble upon what mommy actually does, or previously did, for a living.

Another crucial downside is that due to my distinguishing tattoos, all of the parents who've ever watched porn in the last 13 years has probably recognized me. For me, it doesn't matter, but it matters when it comes to my children. My kids will be the only ones not invited to the birthday parties in their class. My children end up being collateral damage because I must subconsciously portray an evil sexual deviant in the minds of the fellow parents. (Yet in their own personal time, they'll let me help them get across their own sexual finish lines with no qualms.)

The most important lesson as a mom I've learned is to have the utmost compassion and nonjudgmental attitude towards people's lives, their childrearing techniques, and the choices that shape their children. We all think we know what's the correct way to raise children and try to push our beliefs and opinions onto each other, which can tend to alienate and ostracize fellow mothers. We may all have a difference of opinion, but there shouldn't be any less of a hidden sisterhood of mothers to support one another and hand each other that proverbial glass of wine at the end of a tough day, especially in regards to what they do to support their children and give them such a wonderful life.

Bonnie Rotten
Daughter, age Four months
@TheBonnieRotten

I actually don't perform in scenes anymore. I stopped when me and my husband met back in February 2015. We got really serious and decided we wanted to have a baby together, and that's when I decided not to perform in the industry anymore. I understand that a lot of girls can do it and it's a great way to make a lot of money quickly for your family, but for me it just wasn't something I could be comfortable doing and then coming back home with a child.

It is going to be difficult for when kids find out about my past career, but society is becoming more sex-conscious and I don't think there will be as much of a stigma attached to it as there used to be. But I definitely plan on having that talk with her before somebody else lets her know.

In terms of advice, I would say the most important lesson I've learned so far is patience. I had zero patience before, but when when I got pregnant a switch went off in my head. I can't get mad at her and I can't really blame her; she's a little baby and she doesn't know any better. I'd say that's the most important trait for any mom.

Brandy Aniston
Son, Age 11
@BrandyAniston

For me mom-life and work-life are two separate things. I don't perform much anymore, and I focus more on my Vivid Radio show. Plus, I don't bring him to industry parties or anything like that. I suppose that would be a big tip for moms: don't bring your kids to adult industry parties.

I am not as free as some people about bringing my son into an environment where there's nakedness. That might sound funny coming from a porn star mom, but I'm pretty protective. I'm not walking around the house nude. Mom has tattoos and pierced nipples and he's 11 years old; I don't think it's super appropriate. I understand it with moms and daughters, but a mom with a son is different.

He does know I have a second name and that I'm a nude model. He's not fully aware of all that has gone on because I don't think he's ready for that yet. He's a bookworm and I'm trying to keep him as far away from as possible right now, but I've has some feelings that he kind of knows something. One day we got in my car, he put his arm around me and said, "Mom, no matter what it is you've ever done I'm still going to love you just the same."

If I could share any advice with other moms, it's to be affectionate. I see so many parents that aren't affectionate to their kids and that drives me crazy. I hug and kiss my son, and even try to pick him up. I'll do that until he's 20 if I could. And to girls in the industry with young kids, just remember the scenes are on the internet forever. But if you can get your child to accept sexuality, like we have, I think the world would be a better place.

Follow Chris Nieratko on Instagram

Why Won't the UK Legalize Ketamine as an Antidepressant?

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Ketamine, in all of its potential anti-depressant glory. Photo via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

"It saved my life," says Tiffany Snow. "I would recommend it to anyone who has treatment-resistant depression or who is suicidal." She's talking about ketamine, a drug obviously best-known for the hallucinogenic and dissociative effects of its K-holes—but one that's been creeping into mental health treatment. "I started suffering depression around age 14 and started ketamine treatment after my mom saw a TV show about it and recommended it to me," says 43-year-old Snow, a natural therapy practitioner from Arizona. "After my first infusion the depression was gone, although only for 24 hours."

In 2014, the UK government reclassified ketamine from a class C to a class B drug, in the face of mounting evidence that the drug can cause irreversible health damage, especially to the bladder, liver, and cognitive functions. But ket, approved in the UK as an anesthetic and for pain relief, has also been explored by the medical community as a radical new way to treat severe, refractory depression. "The evidence all points in one direction," says the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's spokesperson on mental health, David Taylor. "People who have depression seem to have their condition substantially improved within an hour or two within receiving intravenous ketamine, and there are no other drugs that are comparable in having that effect."

In 2014, spurred on by research taking place in the US (where ketamine is now used to treat depression) NHS consultant psychiatrist Rupert McShane headed up the first UK study on the drug as a treatment for depression with researchers at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Oxford. But two years on, ketamine still hasn't been approved as an antidepressant in the UK, and an NHS webpage on the drug reads that it is "highly unlikely that ketamine will ever be prescribed in the same way as antidepressants." What's going on?

Taylor says the main reason ketamine hasn't been approved to treat depression is because it's a "very long process"; you've got to convince regulatory authorities that it's safe and fit for purpose. While George Freeman, UK life sciences minister, told a London conference in late April that "we can't continue as we have in the past" with how we approve new medication, at present the UK is one of the countries with the slowest uptake of new drugs in western Europe.

"There are some safety concerns over ketamine," says McShane, reflecting back on his study, "but I think the drug is safe, provided it's used in a medical context. There's no doubt there's something about ketamine—and presumably similar compounds—that could really be useful."

The three-week study gave people with refractory depression 40-minute intravenous ketamine infusions—where the drug is administered directly into the vein through a tube—twice a week. He treated 24 patients and none suffered memory or bladder problems as a result of the infusions, with some experiencing "highly beneficial responses." Some were sick and had anxiety. Suicidal tendencies among patients dissipated overall, and 20 percent of his patients thought it would be worthwhile to have more intermittent ketamine treatments.

"The results of the study were the sort of thing that makes it all worthwhile—it reminded me a bit of the film Awakenings, which showed the discovery of the compound L-DOPA as a treatment for the 'sleepy sickness.' We had one patient who was very sick, had ketamine, and got sufficiently well that they were able to write a really complicated, competitive grant application. They then won that grant."

Although McShane admits that ketamine doesn't work for everyone, he's adamant about developing the drug for use in the UK. Kevin Nicolson, CEO of Ketamine Wellness Centers in Phoenix, Arizona, agrees. Like McShane, he also compares ketamine depression treatment to an "awakening," and he has successfully medicated over 500 people in the past five years. Patients go to his center as much as three times a week, or for less regular "maintenance sessions."

"I've been lucky enough to be bedside during more than 1,500 infusions," says Nicolson. "Some of our patients suffered for years with ineffective medicine, or medicine where the side effects were too devastating. I've seen people really get their lives back.

"These are patients who have been struggling in this fog of depression, this heaviness, this grayness for years, and sometimes they walk out of the first treatment—although it's usually the second where they really start to believe it, truly understanding what it feels like to not have that burden on them. It's unshackling. They start to have hope."

Watch: How Mental Illness Derailed a Promising Young Skateboarder

On the practical side, Nicolson says at the centre they give all of their ketamine infusions intravenously, but that there's a debate raging in the US over the best way for ketamine to be medically administered. Psychiatrists who aren't trained in IV infusion therapy often give the drug as an intramuscular injection or snorted in powder form, but Nicolson believes the intravenous method would better help to prevent misuse if it was legalized in the UK.

"In the ideal situation there would be the availability of treatment centers," he says, "so that patients could get the appropriate dose at the appropriate time, reducing any kind of real kind of public concern in regards to abuse and overuse. Of course, ketamine can be found on the street, but comparatively the doses we use are dramatically low."

McShane and Taylor both believe that the difficulties with administering ketamine will play a part in its approval. While Nicolson doesn't seem too enthusiastic about the whole snorting thing, it seems likely that it is in this form that it will first reach UK shores. This involves a web of generic versions, because ketamine is long out of patent.

"There is one way round this," Taylor says, "through patenting the form. Johnson & Johnson has made a ketamine nasal spray. The patent is attached to it, and can't be easily copied." The spray uses an isomer of ketamine, also known as a "mirror image" drug, called esketamine, and is currently being fast-tracked by US regulators the Food and Drug Administration. You could see it available as soon as 2019.

"Given the evidence that I've seen you would think with the backing of Johnson & Johnson it would be approved in the UK, just as it's being fast-tracked in America," adds Taylor. "But with a drug like ketamine you just never know."

Follow Charlie on Twitter.

What You Should Know About Puerto Rico's Debt Crisis

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A security guard outside a closed business in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. (AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo)

Puerto Rico has a problem maybe you're familiar with: The government owes more money than it can afford to pay. The island is about $70 billion in the hole, and things have gotten to the point where it is beginning to refuse to pay its creditors.

On Monday, those creditors went away mostly empty handed, as Puerto Rico defaulted on a whopping $400 million debt payment. This move—paying $22 million of general-obligation debt it owed, while letting the other $400 million default—was not at all unexpected. It had been telegraphed for the last 18 months or more, and PR's intention to not pay up became crystal clear during Sunday's televised address from Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla, who called the current financial woes "a humanitarian crisis."

He's not wrong. In the recession (due largely to US tax policy that led to companies first flocking to the island, then abandoning it) that's hovered over the island for close to a decade, housing prices have taken a nose dive and nearly half a million people have left Puerto Rico, as CNN has reported. That has shrunk the island's tax base, and PR now finds itself locked in "a death spiral," as Padilla calls it. Basic services have begun suffering—trash is being picked up infrequently, hospitals are closing, tax returns are being delayed, and there isn't enough money to pay for gas in police cars. What's more, given its diminishing resources, there are new fears that a new outbreak of Zika on the island will be hard to control.

But shit won't really hit the fan until July 1, when Puerto Rico's next debt payment is due, and the US territory's government will almost certainly default on another $2 billion.

So how did Puerto Rico get here? The answer is long and complicated, but at least some of the blame can be laid on the US, say experts.

"Puerto Rico has been a political pawn historically since its inception," says Craig Centrie, a University at Buffalo lecturer of Latino Studies. "Most significantly during the Cold War, PR was used as a tool of propaganda between the US and Soviet Union to demonstrate the overall superiority of capitalism over communism."

To achieve this, says Centrie, people and corporations were enticed to the island by considerable tax cuts and other financial incentives, but these investments did not necessarily benefit the island. When those tax incentives and cuts were eliminated for good in 2006, there was no way to replace the income. "Puerto Rico has been forcibly moved from small self-sustaining agriculture to a large scale mono-machine crop economy pushing the rural population to San Juan without employment," says Centrie. "The flow of tax monies more recently supported the overall infrastructure, but with these funds eliminated the economy has been ruined."

For a while, most Americans pretty much ignored PR's problems, but in the past few months, the situation has gotten so dire the mainland media has begun to pay attention, up to and including John Oliver:

Many high-ranking politicians and officials—both Democratic and Republican—have urged that something be done.

"The human costs for the 3.5 million Americans in Puerto Rico are real. And they are escalating daily," Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew wrote in a letter to Congress Monday, urging them to act and avoid a bailout by taxpayers.

"Congress has a constitutional and financial responsibility to bring order to the chaos that is unfolding in the US territory," House Speaker Paul Ryan said last month. The way to bring order, many think, would be to allow PR to declare bankruptcy, or at least give the government a way to restructure its debt. If nothing is done, Lew warns, Puerto Rico will descend into "cascading defaults" of ever-bigger payments, worsening the crisis.

Though some Republican leaders like Ryan have supported a bill that would attempt to tackle the debt crisis, Democrats say that the right-wing party is dragging its heels; New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez said that Republicans were "content to watch the island burn."

Assault, Consent and the Rebirth of Katimavik

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Photo by Joseph Young

I volunteered for Katimavik in 2010 at age 19, mostly out of a fear of academic failure and long-term commitment. I wanted to travel, but I wasn't edgy enough to pick fruit or plant trees, which made the all-expenses-paid six month volunteer program seem perfect. I got a letter of acceptance and found out my placements were going to be in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec and BC's Okanagan Valley. So I left on a bus for my first three month rotation to live with ten other volunteers and a project leader.

Six years later, a new federal budget suggests Katimavik's Canadian Heritage funding could soon be restored. The program is likely to see at least a portion of funds set aside for "youth service" amounting to "$105 million over five years, starting in 2016–17, and $25 million per year thereafter." Supporters have been urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, once Katimavik's chair of the board of directors, and Canadian Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly to make it happen. Alumni have been using the hashtag #BringBackKatimavik to share passionate testimonials, almost all of them include some variation of "Katimavik changed my life."

Missing from this outpouring of enthusiasm is a real discussion of the youth program's weaknesses and blind spots. During my time in rural Quebec, I was placed in a position that, I felt, put me at risk.

Despite strict policies on drinking and recreational drug use, I was able to play by the rules enough to only end up with a warning. About half of my group wasn't quite able to pull this off and wound up on a bus or a plane home, which made group life even more overwhelming. Around the halfway point in every community you get a two week break where you billet with a local family. Taking in a stranger between the ages of 17-21 isn't for everyone, so there was a shortage of families in our host community.

My project leader informed me I would be staying with two older men. One, a supervisor at a local work placement, Ethan, and the other his 27-year-old roommate, Mathieu.* They had a band and it was a small town, so I knew them. I was not pleased about the arrangement. I was homesick and all I wanted was my own bedroom and the full family dinner table experience. My project leader was in a pinch and the regional project coordinator told her to place the most mature and responsible volunteer she could with the pair.

The apartment was a typical bachelor pad complete with a futon, beer in the fridge and a lot of weed. I think I broke the no drugs rule about 45 minutes after arriving. I was anxious, because the situation was uncomfortable, and seeking validation. Mathieu spoke French like me, so I felt some attraction and sought his approval, but only really considered the possibility of making out. I didn't have a full grasp of the guardian-like obligations that ought to bind adults hosting youth, but that wasn't really my responsibility.

Near the middle of the second week, around 2 AM, I figured out that Mathieu really didn't grasp those obligations either. Stumbling into the house and then my room, he seated himself at the foot of the bed. He drunkenly pouted and whined for me to rub his back. I complied, aware of his capacity to potentially harm me, despite his pathetic state. He brought me, by the hand, to his room and I felt I was in no position to say no. I obsessed over what would happen if I resisted. It would be so awkward, I thought. He could hit me. My anxiety only blurred things further. There were no other billeting families. I could get sent home because I smoked pot. I wanted to finish the program. I would feel like such a failure if I got sent home. I didn't want this, but my instinct was to submit and avoid a struggle.

I spent an eternity in the shower the next day. I went to work, because work is mandatory. I called another volunteer, who shared an office with Ethan, and told her what happened. I tried to normalize things as much as possible and act cool. Mathieu got word and called me. I wanted this. I sat near him on the couch all week, so he knew I wanted this. I was immature for telling people. And he was going to his parents house for the remaining few days, because I was too childish for him to be around. I stole his T-shirt, because he took something he shouldn't have, too.

It became clearer to me that I did not just feel like I couldn't say no. I couldn't. Mathieu was eight years older than me and placed in a position of power. Comparing Mathieu to a guardian might sound like a stretch, but he and Ethan agreed to host a volunteer, which placed me in their care. I was told by my project leader to make the billeting arrangement work when I said I didn't want to live with them. I didn't have any agency. As a guest in their home and a Katimavik participant I was in no position to provide consent. I should not have been placed in that position at all.

Billeting ended. I knew my options. All I wanted was to move on, get out of that town and finish Katimavik. Complainants of any kind are encouraged to contact an ombudsperson. I made a brief call, knowing it was an unbiased third party with powers to investigate, but feared revealing details of the incident could get me sent home. I was unsure if the organization would stand behind me as they had no policies stating they would, so I gave up.

I decided the best I could do was to make sure that Ethan and Mathieu were blacklisted from the program. I had a brief, but firm discussion with my project leader. I told her it was a bad decision to have placed me there and she replied with something to the effect of "but, you were supposed to be responsible" and reluctantly agreed never again. Later, someone else in administration disregarded my efforts and placed a male participant with the bachelors. I accessed the counselling services Katimavik offered and I moved on.

READ MORE: A Manitoba University Made Sexual Assault Survivors Sign a Gag Order or Be Expelled

I completed the program and became the resource person to the new group in my hometown in 2011. I was saddened, but strangely comforted in 2012 when then Heritage Minister James Moore said it was "one of the easiest decisions ever made" to cut Katimavik's funding. With mixed feelings and some guilt, I bought Christmas cards for optimistic alumni this year.

I am on board with restoring the program, but I think it must do more to address preventable experiences like my own. I have reviewed the organization's current policies on behaviour standards and billeting, and found no meaningful mention of sexual consent or abuse, let alone a stand-alone policy. The agreements state simply that intimidation, threats, aggression and harassment will not be tolerated. Also: no hitchhiking, drinking or porn. Katimavik administration declined to comment for this story.

For many participants like me, Katimavik is a first experience living away from home. Those young people should be confident in their right to safety, which must be reflected in transparent policies. These changes are only going to happen if we start talking about it now.

*Names have been changed.

How the Russian Mafia Salvaged My Brutal Year in Dubai Prison

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Not the actual prison from this story. Photo by Raul A via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Some may see Dubai as the perfect holiday destination. Its idyllic beaches, luxury shopping malls, and lively nightlife make it easy for tourists to forget that there's a much darker side to this Gulf Coast paradise. Despite the UAE's reputation as one of the more relaxed and moderate Islamic countries, it's a place where police brutality is reportedly rife and racism is propped up by a two-tier system that sees some Emiratis enjoy comfy lives while low wage workers from the country's 88 percent migrant population slave away for little pay.

British tourist Karl Williams was blissfully unaware of all of this when he traveled to Dubai in 2012. He was more concerned with enjoying the sun, sea, and sand—that is, until six pistol-packing policemen dragged him and his friends Grant Cameron and Suneet Jeerh out of their hire car. The police then proceeded to brutally beat Karl while repeatedly calling him a "black shit," he has said.

The police found packets of the synthetic cannabis 'Spice' in the car, and Karl and his two friends allege they were then tortured for more information about their supposed supplier. Karl was later sentenced to four years in a hellish prison system in which he says rape was commonplace, the inmates were routinely drugged, and the wings were unofficially run by the Russian mafia. I caught up with him to find out more about the year he spent in custody before he and his friends were pardoned and released in April 2013.

VICE: Hi Karl, thanks for talking to us. Let's rewind: what were the circumstances surrounding your arrest?
Karl Williams: We rented a car, and we'd just finished shopping, so we started putting our bags in, and noticed that a bag was already in there. We looked inside, and saw loads of little parcels. We didn't think much of them at the time, but later, whilst we were parked up at my friend's apartment waiting for him to come out, we were swarmed on by the police. We were pulled out of the car, put onto the ground, slapped around, and led out into the desert, where they started tasering us.

What were they after?
One of them said, "Call your dealer and get him to bring us some spice." I said, "What the hell's spice?" I hadn't even heard of it. He said, "Tell us who you got it from." I told him, "Mate, I don't know what you're talking about." They also used a lot of racial slurs, which is typical of the authorities there. We heard racial slurs constantly from both the police and the staff in the prisons. Anybody who isn't a pure-blooded Emirati is treated worse and looked down upon there. After that, they took us back to our hotel room and kicked my hand until it broke. I was blindfolded, and had an electronic cosh rubbed up the side of my thigh into my testicles.

That sounds awful. How long did you end up spending in prison?
I was pardoned and released after doing just over a year. I was in two different prisons: Port Rashid and Dubai Central Prison.

What were the conditions like?
In Port Rashid, they were disgusting. It was overcrowded, with around 300 people in a jail that's supposed to hold about 100. The food was awful, and the prisoners ran the place. The second prison was very clean, and the food was good. It was a prisoner-run jail as well though, with no guards walking around, and the other people in there were absolute nutcases. The Russian mafia were the most respected people in there. They were the nicest people I met; they were just like normal people. They were extremely respectful, clean, and had an amazing sense of morality.

Besides the Russians, what other nationalities were represented?
Around 20 percent or 30 percent of the prisoners were Indian, Pakistani, or Bengali, another 20 percent or 30 percent African, and around 15 percent were Filipino. There were also a lot of Emirati gangsters.

What was the deal with contraband?
Mobile phones were smuggled in by the officers. There weren't a lot of illegal drugs, but most people seemed to have been allocated prescription drugs. I can't remember exactly which drugs they were, but some people were given uppers and others were given downers. I wasn't allocated anything myself.

Was that to keep them calm and under control?
Yeah, but lots of people ended up trading them. A prison guard and one of the other inmates both told me that the staff routinely put drugs in our tea as well. They put bromide in there.

The cover of Karl's book on the whole thing

Grim stuff. I've also heard that rape is common in Emirati prisons, and that people use HIV as a weapon. How much of that sort of thing did you see?
If a gangster had a serious issue with someone, for example if another prisoner had stabbed one of his friends, he would get someone with HIV to infect that person to get revenge. There was also a guy who used to rape a lot of the newcomers. I'm not a big gangster or anything, but when I saw the guy, I looked at him and laughed. I said, 'What, you're the guy who's been raping everyone?' He said, "Yes, I put drugs in their tea and then do it."

What about violence?
Yeah, we were given metal dinner trays, which people snapped bits off and sharpened. At night, you could hear people sharpening them up. The last thing you want to hear whilst you're trying to get to sleep is someone sharpening a razor blade against the floor.

How did you end up getting pardoned?
If you're convicted of a drugs offense in Dubai that's also your first offense, you're sentenced to four years. You're also eligible to be considered for a pardon. We were eligible, but I think we were actually released early because our case got a lot of publicity.

What impact has all this had on your life?
At first, it had a very negative impact on me because I had to see a therapist for quite a while. I bottled a lot of stuff up and obviously had a lot of bad experiences to deal with. At first, it had a very negative impact. Once I got over that negative phase, it really increased my creative drive. I've written a book about my experiences, called 'Killing Time,' and my time in prison has also propelled me in my music career because I found it hard to talk about what happened, but easier to make songs about it. I've got an album coming out later this year.

Thanks, Karl.

You can follow Karl and Nick on Twitter.

What ‘Game of Thrones’ Taught Me About Parenting

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Perennial queen/queen mum/Übermatriarch Cersei. Photo by Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO

It's May, and Mother's Day was just yesterday. As a mother-to-be myself, expecting a baby boy in weeks, I've been on the lookout for parenting wisdom. I haven't had to look far—everyone seems to have something to say about parenting, no matter their qualifications. So why not look to the cast of characters on Game of Thrones for some guidance, too?

Even Varys has kind words for kids. As he explained in last night's episode, "Oathbreaker," "Children are blameless; I have never hurt them." Certainly not—Varys only uses a threat to a child's wellbeing as a tool to achieve a greater good, like convincing a loving mother to spill the beans about who is funding the Sons of the Harpy. Game of Thrones teaches us that children can be loved and useful.

Some say the show is all about violence and nudity, but I'd argue that these aspects of the television show are just an exciting veneer on the heart of the Game of Thrones saga: the importance of family, especially when that family contains a potential inheritor of the Iron Throne in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Here are a few of the more useful pieces of parenting advice the series has provided so far.

"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword." —Ned Stark

One of the first scenes we get is of Eddard (Ned) Stark passing along these words of wisdom to a young Bran before personally beheading a deserter of the Night's Watch. Ironically, Ned later loses his own head in this way, but the lesson remains true: Your words and your actions should coincide, and this sometimes means following through with difficult or unpleasant tasks, like lopping off heads when the rules call for it or slitting the throat of your daughter's direwolf.

An upstanding guy, that Ned Stark. A shame he had to go so soon, but there is another lesson here for children everywhere: Be prepared for anything. Someday, you'll have to fend for yourself, and that day may come sooner than you think, especially if your last name is Stark. One day you could be engaged to marry a sadistic, blond-haired boy-king; the next day you could be marrying a sadistic, brown-haired young Hitler. Life, like the gnarled roots of the weirwood tree, is full of twists.

"It's the family name that lives on. It's all that lives on." —Tywin Lannister

Patriarch Tywin shares this timeless advice with his son Jaime to urge him to step up to the plate and retrieve his other son Tyrion from the Starks. Sure, Tywin's statement is more about honor than love, but this truth remains: A parent will do anything for his or her child, including but not limited to fleeing in sub-zero temps with your newborn, thwarting would-be assassins, and going to war.

Of course, as with many utterances on the show, Tywin's words contain unfortunate foreshadowing—it's Tyrion who lives on by ending his father's life, not on an Iron Throne but a porcelain one (or whatever Lannister toilets are made of).

Lesson: We may not always be valued by our own children, though we seek to protect them ourselves. Such are the sacrifices of parenthood.

"A dragon is not a slave." —Daenerys Targaryen

No one recognizes the power of her own children like the Mother of Dragons. When a slave master agrees to trade 8,000 of his soldiers for one of Daenerys's dragons, the Khaleesi knows she's got the better deal—her dragon child is loyal because she treats him well, as a good parent should. When she subsequently commands her dragon to burn the slave master, the well-treated dragon child doesn't hesitate to obey his momma and disregard the slave master's pleas, much like a child might not listen to the random stranger trying to tell him what to do.

But alas, even wise parents sometimes forget their own wisdom. Dragons grow up and their power cannot be contained even by those who raised them, as Daenerys learns when the charred bodies of small livestock, and eventually children, start turning up, courtesy of her well-treated, fire-breathed babes. Her response? Lock them up in a windowless basement. The plan doesn't go over so well, it turns out, because a dragon is not a slave.

Parents, if you love your children (or if you are Tyrion serving as an adoptive daddy after Daenerys flees), you have to set them free, even if it means a few villagers gotta burn.

"The night is dark and full of terrors." —Melisandre

This is especially good advice to heed if you are friends with someone like Melisandre, who thinks she knows better than you and isn't shy about telling you. Remember: People from all over will offer suggestions as to how to live your life and how to raise your child, but the choices you make in parenting are ultimately your own. Don't let persuasive voices get inside your brain and drown out your instincts, or you may end up like Stannis Baratheon, burning your only daughter during that dark, terrible night, and losing your chance to take Winterfell when half your army consequently abandons you in disgust.

"Bastards are born of passion, aren't they? We don't despise them in Dorne." —Oberyn Martell

Children aren't in control of their beginnings. Westeros has many societal rules in place, such as naming a bastard child "Snow," convincing them they deserve a monastic life on the Wall (at least until they're reborn), or lording their illegitimacy over them, leading someone like Ramsay Bolton to get his due through more devious schemes. But imagine how much more peaceful that world could be if all children were treated equally? Let's all move our babies to Dorne.

"I thought if I could make something so good, so pure, maybe I'm not a monster." —Cersei Lannister

Having children is a powerful experience, a time when we see our own selves reflected back to us, and maybe see parts of the world in new ways we never dreamed imaginable. Some say our children are extensions of ourselves, and in Cersei's case, this became a hope to cling to: If Cersei could produce something so good as Myrcella Baratheon, maybe that was proof she had some good in herself in order to do so.

And maybe poor Cersei deserved a little good in her life, as all dedicated parents do. After all, she's had to live through the poisoning of one son and the abandonment of another, who couldn't even do the Westerosi version of calling back his mom when she was imprisoned and shamed through the streets.

Hopefully, in time, Tommen will learn how to step up more for his poor beleaguered mother—at least he's starting to try. The High Sparrow summed it up nicely in his fatherly chat with the young king in last night's episode: "Her love for you is more real than anything else in this world, because it doesn't come from this world." I'd argue that the mothers really are the unsung heroes of Westeros. Perhaps it's time for the Seven Kingdoms to stop all the fighting for a minute and institute a Mother's Day of its own.

Follow Catherine LaSota on Twitter.

How the ‘Acid King’ Won a Lawsuit Against the US Government

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An example of blotter art allegedly used as a medium for Pickard's LSD. Photo via DEA/Wikimedia Commons

William Leonard Pickard was sentenced to life without parole in 2003 for manufacturing massive amounts of acid at a decommissioned nuclear missile silo. But last week, Pickard—one of the biggest LSD manufacturers in American history—won a decade-long lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for records on the confidential informant that helped put him behind bars.

Pickard, now 70, filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in 2006. The suit plodded along for ten years in an epic case of government foot-dragging and stonewalling, according to his current lawyer, Mark Rumold, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Rumold is representing Pickard pro bono—and not as part of his day job—and the way he sees it, Pickard's case represents "absolute government and DEA obstinance."

"I've done a lot of FOIA litigation, and I've never encountered something like this," Rumold tells me.

Last Monday, Pickard finally caught a break when a federal magistrate ruled the government must produce at least some of the documents he requested. The decision doesn't mean the convict will somehow overcome his life sentence, but it does offer promise for transparency advocates concerned about the obstruction of FOIA requests in the Obama era.

Pickard was originally busted in 2000 after a DEA raid on his LSD superlab inside the old Atlas E nuclear missile silo site near Wamego, Kansas. According to court records, the spot was owned by Gordon Todd Skinner, who later received immunity in exchange for his testimony against Pickard (and a second defendant in the case).

The DEA claimed the raid recovered nearly 91 pounds of LSD, which might have been the largest acid bust ever. Of course, the actual figure was probably closer to half a pound, but it was still a historic haul, considering there have only been a handful of seizures of complete LSD labs in the history of the DEA, according to the agency.

After Pickard and another man were busted, the DEA also claimed—much more dubiously—that the US acid supply dropped by 95 percent.

In prison, Pickard became an ardent FOIA activist, suing the DEA to get information on Skinner, and initially represented himself in court. Justice Department attorneys originally tried to argue that the DEA could neither confirm or deny Skinner's status as a government informant, a strong-arm move typically employed by the CIA. (The DOJ declined to comment for this story.)

A district court ruled against Pickard, but in 2011, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government's arguments, declaring that, since Skinner had testified in an open and public trial, the government had officially confirmed his status as an informant for the purposes of FOIA.

Rumold says there's a public interest in finding out more about the DEA's use of Skinner as a confidential informant, especially given its problematic use of informants in general.

"The DOJ told the court in trial that Skinner had only been an informant once before in his life," Rumold says. "That turned out not to be true. I think we've found five or six different times Skinner had been an informant."

Skinner was also charged with manslaughter after a man visiting the silo overdosed on drugs, but those charges were dismissed between the time of Pickard's arrest and Skinner's testimony in court.

"Here's the government's star witness in an LSD manufacturing trial in the middle of Kansas, and those charges just disappear," Rumold adds. "That raises some pretty serious red flags."

Check out our documentary about Gordon Skinner's subterranean LSD palace.

Skinner was later convicted of kidnapping, as well as assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (a hypodermic needle), for abducting an 18-year-old teenager for six days and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Prior to his life sentence, Pickard was a gifted chemist, an ordained Buddhist priest and a UCLA researcher who received a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He also had a string of prior arrests for drug possession and manufacturing. According to lengthy profiles in the San Francisco Chronicle and Rolling Stone (the publication that dubbed Pickard the "Acid King"), the DEA suspected he was connected to the "Brotherhood of Eternal Love," a clandestine group of acid cooks who operated out of the California starting in the late 60s. They also suspected that Pickard laundered LSD profits—with the help of three exotic dancers in San Francisco—to a well-heeled research institute that studied psychedelic drugs. Pickard, the exotic dancers and the research institute all denied those claims. And the Brotherhood of Eternal Love has never been available for comment.

For now, Pickard and Rumold will have to wait and see which records the DEA actually turns over.

The lawyer suspects there's plenty of waiting left.

"It's been a wild ride, and I hope this is the beginning of the end, but something in me says it's not," Rumold says.

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.


The Vice Interview: Talking to Filmmaker Philomena Cunk About Drugs and Global Warming

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This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into their psyche.

Broadcaster and filmmaker Philomena Cunk first came to prominence on Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe, where she provided incisive insight into current affairs. She summed up the US election better than any other pundit when she said of Donald Trump's campaign, "It's exciting watching the footage of his rallies thinking, 'This will be in a documentary in about 20 years time with ominous music underneath it, and here's me watching it live.'"

She then branched into filmmaking with her Moments of Wonder series exploring important issues such as feminism—"The suffragettes threw themselves under the king's racehorse to highlight how unfair it was that women didn't have a vote but horses did"—and architecture—"The National Theatre is designed to look so horrible that people are glad to be inside watching boring plays."

Now she's back in her first full-length TV show, Cunk on Shakespeare, an exploration of the Bard's greatest moments. Cunk will visit his birthplace, exploring the Globe, studying priceless artifacts, and interviewing "literally six different experts."

But before that she has to pass the intellectual rigor of The VICE Interview.

Shakespeare's flat

VICE: If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you carry on doing what you're doing, or change jobs, or stop working?
Philomena Cunk: There's no lottery on a Tuesday, so what you're suggesting is basically illegal.

How many people have been in love with you?
How would I know? That's a daft question. I'd have to go up to them all and ask. You try asking a bus full of people if they're in love with you. You'd get thrown off. I got thrown off once just for asking the driver if that was his real voice.

How many books have you read and finished in the past year? Don't lie.
I like short stories. I've read every one of Closer, which is this book you can get from WH Smiths with loads of little stories in it, like about Katie Price's daughter playing in horseshit or Jodie Marsh getting a new mouth. There's a new Closer every week, so I've probably read 100 in the last year. I'm a really big reader.

Who is the worst person on Twitter?
Nando's. Make me starving every time.

What conspiracy theory do you believe?
There isn't one specifically, but there are loads of things the government won't explain to us, like why are there no capital numbers? Why aren't there more songs about doctors? And, the big one: Are rainbows real? My MP hasn't replied to any of my letters about that, so I reckon there must be something they're covering up.

When in your life have you been truly overcome with fear?
I had a dream where Brian Cox was attacking me with celery. Now I'm scared of celery. I have to cross the road when I go past Subway because I know it's in there.

Complete this sentence: The problem with young people today is...
... scooters.

What would be your last meal?
I had a banana about half an hour ago, so that was my last meal. But can you call a banana a meal? Or is it a snack? Is it "snacks are savory and treats are sweet"? What's the rule? A banana doesn't feel much like a fucking treat. It's more like a job.

Would you have sex with a robot?
God, no. Imagine the noise. All that beeping. What if it started buffering in the middle? It'd put you off your stroke.

Do you think drugs can make you happy?
They can now, but they didn't used to. When I was young, medicines tasted awful. Now they're delicious. They've had to put these new lids on that you can't get off unless you get a man in.

Without Googling, explain how global warming basically works.
The more humans there are, the hotter the planet gets, like when there are too many people in your front room and you have to open a window. But the only way to open a window on planet Earth is to make a hole in the ozone layer. And that just makes it hotter, like when you're on holiday. And all the flies come in. It's very complicated. Which is why it's good that 3 percent of scientists are keeping an open mind that it might not be happening, because that would be a lot easier, to be honest.

One of Shakespeare's characters, Queen Elizabeth.

You are having a conversation with a family friend, and they say something unequivocally racist. What do you do?
Report them to the police. Or the coastguard, if we're at the seaside.

What have you done in your career that you are most proud of?
When we were filming in Stratford-and-Avon, where William Shakespeare's ghost lives, I helped an old lady out of a tree.

What's the latest you've stayed up?
I once stayed up 'til tomorrow as an experiment because I read somewhere that you can see the date change in the sky. But either it isn't true or it happened behind me in the sky, and not where I was looking.

Is university worth it?
The questions are too hard, and Jeremy Paxman is a bit shouty, and it's on at the same time as EastEnders, so no.

What have you done in your life that you most regret?
I got off the Megabus at the motorway services and went into the shop and they had limited edition cookies and cream Frijj, and I chose the chocolate one instead. And I haven't seen it since. I've literally never forgiven myself for that.

Cunk on Shakespeare airs Wednesday 11th May, 10pm, BBC Two

More on VICE:

The VICE Interview: Louis Theroux

The VICE Interview: Melissa Joan Hart

Meeting the New Dapper Laughs, a Man Reinvented

​How One Inuit Woman Is Fighting Back Against the Animal Rights War on the Seal Hunt

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Inuit people are fighting back against misconceptions of the seal hunt. All photos courtesy of Qajaaq Ellsworth

For decades, images of bloodied and battered seals have flooded pop culture as animal rights activists have furiously fought a PR war against the seal hunt and the Canadian government's condonement of it. While critics call it a brutal practice and a contributor to accelerating environmental damage, Inuit activists like Tanya Tagaq have fought back against that perception and pushed for a new conversation around the seal hunt. Now, one film is tackling that very issue.

Angry Inuk—a documentary from Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril—premiered at Hot Docs last week with the goal of reinvigorating the debate around the seal hunt. It tells the story of Inuit communities across Canada that are actively involved in the sealing industry, and it does so from the ground level. Viewers see how Inuit children in schools learn about the value of a life, how hunters track their prey, and how entire communities rely on what amount of useable meat is brought back. It's honest, raw, and shot from the perspective of actual Inuit people living off the sale and consumption of seal products.

Arnaque-Baril, who has spent the last eight years filming in the Arctic and in Newfoundland and Labrador, has desperately tried to chase down animal rights groups for a response to the film and the Inuit people's belief that the seal hunt is necessary to their survival. Through it, she has experienced constant harassment, threats, and serious depression. Now that the film—what she calls an "homage to her life and community"—is out for the world to see, VICE spoke to her about what eight years of studying and shooting the seal has revealed to her.

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VICE: This film's been in the works for a long time now. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came about making it?
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril: I'm Inuit, so I grew up in the Arctic. I grew up hunting and eating seal meat with my family, and as an Inuk, you just grow up hearing people complain and criticize seal hunters. It's just kind of always been an issue for me, and I knew that when I became a filmmaker that I was eventually going to have to cover this issue.

This film is clearly a personal journey and a documentary—did having that personal involvement shape the direction of the film in any way?
It was a hard line to walk—knowing when to be personal and when to be informational—and when you're telling a story of your own community and culture, and you're coming from a remote place that people don't know a lot about, it's hard to tell what people are .

Was it tough for you to make the film compared to other projects, being that it was so personal?
It was. I became part of the story too. I'm just a filmmaker, I'm also one of the activists in the film, and when you put yourself out there and challenge animal rights activists, you kind of get attacked. That was kind of a tough thing to handle.

The film looks at a lot of the misconceptions outsiders have of the seal hunt. What are some of the main things that you think people get wrong about it?
I think when people see posters and ad campaigns that say, "Save the seals," and they see things that make comparisons of seal skin to elephant ivory and rhino horns—these are really deliberate tactics that animal rights groups use to imply that seals are endangered, and they're nowhere near endangered. There's between eight and ten million harp seals in the Atlantic Ocean, and are on their way to extinction. They'll talk about climate change and the ice receding and how they could possibly endanger seals, but that's just not true.

Critics often counter anti-seal hunt rhetoric by pointing out that Inuit communities can't simply go to the grocery store and buy food. It's a hunting-based diet by necessity. How do you feel about that?
Sometimes I've heard people say, "Why don't you just buy groceries at the store?" Which is absurd, because if you're trying to protect animals and the environment in the Arctic, it's better to source locally than to fly avocados in from 6,000 kilometers. It just makes no sense. We have local, wild, ethically-sourced food—why wouldn't we eat that? People tend to think of seals as exotic, majestic beautiful things—different from what we eat as "Canadians"—but Inuit are Canadians too, and seal, narwhal, walrus—all those foods are normal, everyday food for us.

There seems to be a lot of intersection between animal rights groups and progressiveness for Indigenous rights. Do you feel people are blind to how they're hurting Inuit communities with anti-seal hunt dialogue?
It's kind of ironic that we've been marginalized and silenced on the issue of seal hunting because it's actually Inuit seal hunters in the Arctic. A while ago, one of the very few voices on the voices on the planet speaking up about the issue was Sheila Watt-Cloutier—an Inuit woman. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize beside Al Gore. When nobody was talking about climate change, Inuit was talking about climate change. It just makes sense for these types of groups to be working with us, but instead, for the last 50, 60 years, they've been working against us. I think it's just a matter of being heard, I think we've never had the chance to do that before.

What are some of the issues that you ran into making the film? Was there anything you didn't expect?
My family worried about me. We saw animal rights protests for a long time on TV, and a lot of the time they were very aggressive and loud and outwardly angry. Inuit tend to express anger a little more softly and quietly, even when you're really pissed off about something. It's a principle to stay calm under fire—I think it's a survival tactic we have—and it's just a matter of being respectful. I think we see losing your temper as a sign of a guilty conscience, and we are misunderstood a lot when we say, "This isn't right." We know this place. We figure if we say, "This is wrong," people will listen. My family was very worried about the backlash I'd receive from animal rights activists, and it has been very hard on me. It's part of the reason the film took so long to finish.

Do you think animal rights activists have been any more receptive to the concerns you've raised in this film?
accountable. What I'm really looking forward to is their jobs being taken over by a generation that actually gives a crap about people like me.


Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Narcomania: How Amazonian Tree Frog Poison Became the Latest Treatment for Addiction

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An Amazon basin giant leaf frog, splayed in an X shape while kambo practitioners extract its poison for use in a ceremony

In March of this year, Beth Marsh, a 29-year-old photographer from London, paid £60 to have small circles of her skin burnt and anointed with kambo, the poison of an Amazonian giant leaf frog, before being induced to vomit into a bucket to a soundtrack of shamanic chanting.

Beth had decided to undertake the ceremony—part of a growing fashion for "life-changing" Amazonian medicine drugs such as the hallucinogenic plant infusion ayahuasca—because she had heard that kambo could help her stop getting drunk all the time. Over the last five years, a serious addiction to GBL had turned into a destructive relationship with alcohol; she had passed out on dance floors after drinking ten Jagermeisters too many times.

"The ceremony was quite nice at the beginning. We were in someone's living room, it was dimly lit and I was kneeling in front of a small shrine with a glass frog, next to two young guys I'd never met before," says Marsh. "The practitioner was singing shamanic songs and wafting sage incense around our bodies. In the background there was a stereo playing rainforest sounds. made three small circular surface burns on the skin of my arm with a lighted stick, and dabbed them with a translucent drop of the frog poison, using a piece of bark. I was thinking, What the fuck is going to happen now?"

As the poison entered her lymphatic system, Marsh felt her head rushing. She said it felt like she'd taken "loads of poppers." After about a minute came the purging: she started projectile vomiting into a bucket. The man to her left had become emotional and was crying, and the other guy was also getting sick. She felt a togetherness with her fellow kambo users. The practitioner looked after them and muttered encouragement. Then they relaxed, ate some fruit, and talked through what had just happened.


Beth Marsh on a night out

What surprised Marsh was that, after the ceremony, she kept on finding herself sober after a night out. After a few weeks, however, she "started slipping back to wanting to get drunk," so took another dose of kambo. Now, just before her third kambo session, she says she feels like a different person: "It's a massive change. I don't want to go back to the drunkenness and hangovers."

From its origins among Amazonian tribes who use kambo to go hunting and ward off illness, the frog poison has hitched a ride on the coattails of the hallucinogenic plant drink ayahuasca to become increasingly popular as a spiritual medicine. On Instagram there are 5,600 #kambo tagged posts—usually proud pictures of the burn marks with comments like, "Check out my sweet warrior girl burns!" or, "Kind of love these little scars."

In the UK, there are a growing number of people conducting kambo ceremonies, either trained in the Amazon or by the International Association of Kambo Practitioners (IAKP), which administers, teaches, and regulates the use of kambo there and in several countries around the world. The IAKP already has 13 registered practitioners in the UK and over 50 worldwide. Training courses for those wanting to become practitioners are fully booked.

Laura Horn in the Amazon

Laura Horn from Exeter, also 29, was trained as a kambo practitioner in the north Peruvian Amazon during an intensive £2,000 two-week course, where she took 13 kambo doses in 14 days—which is a lot of burned skin and vomit.

During her training she went into the jungle each night with tribe members to "harvest" the bright green Amazon basin giant leaf frog. Back at camp, as is customary, the frog was positioned in an undignified "X" shape, with its limbs tied to sticks with string, and tapped on the head, releasing the poison on its back, which is then scraped off before the frog is returned to the jungle, completely unharmed. In fact, the welfare of the frog is paramount to the kambo community.

Since completing the training in January, Laura has conducted around two ceremonies a week, for which she charges £55 . They are usually held at one of the participants' homes in groups of up to five. She says her clients "are not the predictable middle-aged hippies, but people from the council estates where I grew up." She uses lit sage "to clear negative energies" and plays recordings she made in the jungle of the frog's call, a weird noise that sounds like the laugh of a cartoon villain. Laura says the main reasons people give for trying kambo treatment are "depression, mental clarity, pain relief, and cleansing."

Emma's kambo ceremony burn scars

Another new kambo user is Emma, a biologist in her thirties who was encouraged to try it when a bad break-up left her suffering borderline clinical depression. "I'd been diagnosed with depression before, so I knew what was going on," she says. "I was up for trying anything that wasn't anti-depressants."

After researching kambo online and talking to her friend's practitioner, she decided she would take part in a ceremony at her friend's house. "When the practitioner gave me the kambo, burning eight small holes in my ankle, I felt my face swelling up like a puffer fish—and it stayed like that for two days," she says. "You have to be sick, but I couldn't, so blew some special smoke up my nose and it was hideous, like my brain was being punched from the inside. I lay down under a duvet and shut my eyes, and I felt an overwhelming sense of absolute peace. I felt completely numb, in a good way, like my head wasn't full of crap. For the first time in a while I felt positive—that I was going to be alright. It made me feel stronger."

Emma repeated the treatment in March, but says she will only use more kambo if she starts to feel depressed again. "It made me feel great—it was a kick up the backside," she says. "But ultimately, we don't know the long-term effects of kambo, so that's a concern for me."

So what's the science behind kambo? Why, with a $300 billion global pharmaceutical industry pumping out a plethora of medicines for everything from hemorrhoids to schizophrenia, are people turning to the slimy poison of an Amazonian frog to try to cure their ills?

Professor Chris Shaw, an emeritus professor at the school of pharmacy at Queen's University, Belfast, is a global expert on the study of frog skin secretions. He explains that kambo is used by the giant leaf frog to produce a "molecular electric shock" in a predator's mouth so it is quickly ejected. The poison works by overloading the predator's internal system with chemicals, prompting regurgitation, muscle spasms, vomiting, and intestinal convulsion—hence the sick buckets at kambo ceremonies.

I ask Professor Shaw, on a scale of one to ten, how strong the evidence base is for kambo in treating physical or emotional sickness in humans.

"It's a two," he says. "Kambo is not scientifically proven for treatment, but I would not be at all surprised if kambo worked well in cases of depression, because there are so many substances in it that affect the brain. Taking kambo leads to a massive rearrangement and overload of the nervous system; it changes our neurochemistry."

Laura Horn during a kambo ceremony

There may be a low level addictive quality to kambo, according to Professor Shaw. He points out that if the body is regularly overloaded with molecules—for example, a heroin user taking morphine—the body switches off its own production, which leads to the need for external sources and a risk of dependency. Research into the Indian tribes that have used kambo has, according to Professor Shaw, found that they need to take more and more over time, perhaps because of this overloading. This chimes with the experience of kambo users in the UK, who describe their desire to repeat use. Practitioners are keen to stress that the use of kambo should be restricted to 12 times a year.

What's for certain is that kambo hides a rich cocktail of more than 100 chemical compounds. So far, 70 patents on the uses of compounds isolated and synthesized from the secretion have been taken out. The IAKP denies it, but kambo does, technically, have psychoactive properties, even though its psychoactive effects, chiefly of sensory enhancement, are minimal compared to drugs such as ayahuasca. So under the new Psychoactive Substances Act—which comes into force on the May 26 and bans all psychoactive substances apart from tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, and licensed medicines—kambo will technically become illegal.

Harry Sumnall, a Professor in Substance Use at the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, and member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, explains: "This secretion contains opioid peptides such as dermorphin, dermenkephalin, and the deltorphins, which are are ingested via the burn points. These are potent opioid receptor agonists in the central nervous system, which by definition will affect the mental state of the individual. It is therefore not correct to state that these drugs aren't psychoactive."

Related: Watch our documentary on 'Dying for Treatment'

With synthetic weed and bath salts as the main target of the UK's new drug law, it would be an incredible waste of resources for police to start chasing down Britain's growing kambo community, especially when there is little evidence linking the substance to ill health or death.

Increasingly, people are turning away from a pharmaceutical industry that is more interested in customers and profit than cures, and looking to nature for answers. The rise of kambo is proof of this—and regardless of whether or not it is scientifically proven to work, the anecdotal evidence of it helping certain people work through depression or alcohol abuse issues, even if for just a few months, can't be ignored.

But, as has become so painfully obvious with the historical trade in illegal drugs, the expanding market in kambo—a useful alternative treatment for some—is better off properly regulated than outlawed altogether and left open to charlatans.

Follow Max Daly on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Donald Trump. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

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

US News

Trump Calls for End to Federal Minimum Wage
Donald Trump has called for the elimination of the federal minimum wage, saying individual states should decide on any rises—a backtrack on his primary promise to support a higher minimum wage. He also flip-flopped on his plan to cut taxes for the wealthy, saying he expects taxes on the rich to "go up a little bit" if he becomes president.—The Guardian

Twitter Stops Spy Agencies Using Data
Twitter has reportedly banned US intelligence agencies from accessing analytics service Dataminr, which is used to identify and make sense of events like terror attacks and political unrest by sifting through social media postings. Twitter owns about 5 percent of Dataminr, and is concerned about the "optics" of looking too close to government agencies. —The Wall Street Journal

Uber and Lyft Quit Austin After Losing Vote
Both Uber and Lyft plan to suspend services in Austin indefinitely from today after voters in the Texan city opted against a ballot measure that would have protected the ridesharing companies from regulation. The companies say rules requiring them to fingerprint drivers make it impossible to operate. —USA Today

Panama Papers Data to be Made Public
Thousands of companies found in the Panama Papers will be made public later today when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) releases a database with details on 200,000 offshore entities, including many US companies. The ICIJ said it would not be a "data dump," but a careful release of information. —The Hill

International News

Filipinos Vote for New President
Polls have opened in the Philippines, where up to 55 million eligible voters are casting their ballots today for a new president. Candidate Rodrigo Duterte, who has sparked controversy with rape jokes and threats to murder criminals, is favorite to win. At least five people have been killed in election-related violence between rival factions since Saturday night. —CNN

Greek Protests Austerity Measures
Greece's parliament has approved a controversial tax and pension reform, despite angry protests. Police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds in Athens on Sunday, where almost 18,000 rallied against tax rises and cuts to the highest pension payouts. —Al Jazeera

Canadian Wildfire Could Take Months to Put Out
Canadian officials are optimistic that they are finally getting on top of the huge wildfire in Alberta. Light rains and cooler temperatures helped firefighters hold it back Sunday, and flames moved southeast away from the town of Fort McMurray. But it could be months before the fire is fully extinguished. —Reuters

BBC Journalists Expelled from North Korea
A team of three BBC journalists were detained in North Korea for their reporting over the weekend, and then ordered to be expelled from the country. Reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was questioned for eight hours and was forced to sign a statement before being taken with his producer and cameraman to the airport. —BBC News


Radiohead's new album sleeve.

Everything Else

Critics Hail New Radiohead Album
The first reviews of the band's new album A Moon Shaped Pool, released Sunday, have been overwhelming positive. Rolling Stone called it a "haunting triumph," while The Independent called it "a work of total self-assurance." —Faster Louder

Hijab-Wearing Teen Named as Isis in Yearbook
A California student wearing a hijab was misidentified as "Isis" Phillips in her high school yearbook. The school's principal apologized to Bayan Zehlif and said the school is now investigating the misprint. —Buzzfeed News'

Powerball Winner Yet to Claim Prize
The sole winner of the $429.6 million Powerball jackpot has yet to come forward to claim the prize. The winning ticket was sold at a 7-Eleven in Trenton, New Jersey, and is the largest jackpot in the state's history. —ABC News

Black Female Cadets Investigated for Raised Fists
A group of 16 black female cadets at West Point are being investigated for a photo in which they all raised their fists. Concerns were raised that the women had violated the school's honor code by participating in a political activity. —VICE News



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Why I’m Glad My Bipolar Dad Was Institutionalized

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All photos courtesy of Kelly Burch

"You father is all set to be released tomorrow," the social worker said, her voice cheery, as if this were good news.

My stomach dropped.

My father was about to be released from his third hospitalization in five months. A decade earlier, he'd had an episode from which he never fully recovered. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his early 20s, but managed to maintain stability for years. In 2008, at 44 years old, he became manic. Then he crashed into a deep depression that never loosened its icy grip. That episode, which happened when I was 18, rendered my dad unable to work or live alone. When my parents' marriage ended three years later, he moved in with his mother, spending the days sleeping in the sun in a bay window and the nights shuffling about, locked in his own internal hell.

My father's bipolar cycles, with hospitalizations at least once a year, somehow became normal for our family. However, the winter before the social worker's call—the eighth year in this cycle—was particularly brutal. In January, I brought him to the hospital for manic symptoms. We spent 12 long hours in the emergency room before he secured a bed in a psychiatric hospital. As he was restrained on a stretcher for transport, I prayed for the best. But when he got to the psychiatric hospital, the staff immediately recognized that his symptoms were not related to his being bipolar—he was showing signs of a stroke. Unbeknownst to me, he was transferred to the neurological department at a third hospital. I awakened to a call from the doctor in the middle of the night, seeking information about this confusing patient.

My family spent the three months that followed trying to understand what was causing my father's health crisis. The neurologists treated the effects of his stroke with physical therapy and meds, but didn't coordinate with his psychiatrist. He was temporarily sent to a nursing home, where his mental state declined further. After two weeks there he was finally sent home, only to wind up back in the ER a few weeks later after he was found delirious and barely responsive, the cause of which—a suicide attempt, psychosis, neurological damage—we were never able to determine. He was brought back to the emergency room and stayed for three days while I fought to get the doctors to admit him to a psych ward, where I believed he needed to be.

Ultimately, the three-week psych stay we won for him had done wonders for his health. Which was why the social worker was calling to arrange his discharge.

"He just can't come home," my grandmother told me over the phone, her voice both resigned and heartbroken.

She was right. She had her own health and age-related issues, and it was no longer practical or safe for my father to live with her.

And yet, as I heard those words, I was overcome with nausea. I sat in the May sunshine outside my New Hampshire home, pulling on new blades of grass, focusing on the small physical details of the lawn as I tried to maintain my composure. I lived out of state with an infant, and was unable to take my father in for both practical reasons (he would lose his Massachusetts state-sponsored medical insurance) and personal ones (I couldn't care for an ill father and an infant at once). My three siblings, all in their teens and early twenties, were just starting their lives—living abroad, launching a business, and going to college. None of us were equipped to handle our father's needs.

In that moment, my biggest worry—that my father was going to die—was replaced with a new, more pressing concern: Where would he live if he survived?

A half-century ago, my father would have likely ended up a longterm resident of a state hospital for the insane. Although many of those institutions were regal on the outside, with their gothic architecture and rolling green lawns, inside was another story. Patients were often restrained and experimented on without consent, and the hospitals were woefully overcrowded and under-funded.

By the 1960s, steps were being taken to move away from the state hospital system and to deinstitutionalize care for the mentally ill. This was driven largely by two events: the 1955 introduction of Thorazine, the first successful antipsychotic drug, which stabilized many patients enough that life outside the walls of a hospital could be considered, and a 1965 federal law that prohibited thenewly-established Medicaid from paying for patients in state psychiatric hospitals. Policymakers hoped patients would reintegrate into society, but offered no real solution for how this would happen. In response, hospitals closed in droves, with 70 percent shuttering by 1990.

By the 1990s, most states had a deinstitutionalization rate of over 95 percent: for every 100 state residents who were in public psychiatric hospitals in 1955, fewer than five were still in care. Today there are about 14 state psychiatric beds per 100,000 Americans, the same rate as in the 1850s.

Although at first glance this seemed like a victory, deinstitutionalization left a massive gap in the care for the mentally ill. In the absence of other options, treatment for patients fell to prison systems and nursing homes, which are ill-equipped to handle the medical complexities of mental illness. Today, the number of seriously ill patients in prisons is three times that of those in hospitals, and more than 40 percent of people with mental illness will be caught up in the criminal justice system at some point.

Although nursing homes are a better option than prisons, they often compound depression and anxiety in mentally ill patients. Nonetheless, they're regularly used for care. A 2010 study found that people with severe mental illness are likely to come into nursing homes younger (more than half of nursing home admissions with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are under the age of 64), and stay longer than patients without mental illness.

My father was just 52 when he entered a nursing home, in the aftermath of his stroke. He was physically stable, but still psychologically fragile, and although no one would say it, the doctors were afraid of what would happen if he was left alone. It was only a two-week stay, but the resulting sharp decline in his mental state was horrific to see. He wouldn't get out of bed for his children, or even his grandchild. I knew, without exaggeration, that if he remained in that nursing home longer than the bare minimum, he would slip into oblivion.

The author's father and grandmother

Several months later, at the end of my father's psych-ward stay, the social worker called about my father's release. It wasn't unexpected; he had been improving during the weeks spent in the ward. But despite my research efforts, I couldn't find an acceptable place to house him. He was not newly sober, so he didn't qualify for halfway-house programs. Wait-lists for low-income housing are absurdly long, and would not provide the level of medical oversight that he needed. We had already seen that the nursing home would not help his mental state.

"He's homeless," I told the social worker. The words were bitter, and I felt that I had failed my father. He was now among the one-third of homeless Americans with a serious mental illness. Yet I hoped that the designation might flag him for additional services.

"We don't like to release people to the shelter, but we have before," she replied. In Massachusetts, where my father lives, a 2006 study found that 27 percent of discharges from state mental hospitals were homeless within six months. In other states with lower access to mental health care, the rate is even higher.

But, the social worker let slip, there was one option: a so-called rest home, one of only two group homesin all of Massachusetts, she said, for people with stable but chronic mental illness.

"It's nearly impossible to get in, but I can see," she told me.

Twenty-seven percent of discharges from state mental hospitals are homeless within six months.

My father has now been living at the rest home for nearly a year. This has been his longest stretch without a hospitalization in nearly a decade. It's not a coincidence.

"I feel like it's home here now," he recently told me.

The best way to describe the rest home is as a dorm for adults with mental illness. Being in Massachusetts, most of the residents pay for care through state health insurance, as well as through disability payments. There are two floors, with common rooms for watching television and shared bathrooms where the staff can assist with shaving and other needs. In the small dining room, meals are offered three times a day, and staff members distribute psychiatric medications and coordinate doctor's appointments. Residents can come and go as they please, giving them a much-needed sense of independence.

The home is by no means glamorous. My father calls me often to complain that they're having sandwiches for dinner, or that another resident is dominating the television remote. However, for my father and our family, it has been transformational.

"I feel great," he now says when I ask how he is. The fact that he calls me after years of being too depressed to pick up the phone, even on holidays, is amazing. He goes for walks, and writes, and even has a girlfriend, another resident at the home. I no longer need to worry about whether he is going off his meds, and when I lie awake at night my mind doesn't wander to what he might do if left alone. My grandmother did not, and could not, supervise him constantly, nor could she take responsibility for his medications. However, in the group home he has an extensive network built to do just that. If I am worried about his health, I can call and speak to the staff.

Now he goes for walks, and writes, and even has a girlfriend, another resident at the home.

It's no secret that stable, accessible housing improves outcomes for the mentally ill. In 1990, New York City initiated the New York/New York Agreement to House the Homeless Mentally Ill, a program that offered permanent supported housing and communal living options to formerly homeless people with mental illness. Studies of the program found that participants were less likely to be hospitalized, had shorter stays if they were hospitalized, and were less likely to be incarcerated. A UPenn study found that the program cost an additional $995 in public funding per person annually, compared to providing no housing. But in the long term, the program saved thousands in emergency care and incarceration costs.

Other programs have shown similar benefits, but they are woefully scarce. In fact, the nonprofit National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) says that lack of access to safe and affordable housing is one of the most powerful barriers to recovery from mental illness. NAMI calls for a range of housing options, from supervised group housing like my father's, where staff is on site 24/7, to partially supervised group housing and supported housing, where people live mostly on their own but are visited by support staff when needed.

There has been some progress. Section 811, a Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program, aims to provide supportive housing for people with disabilities, including mental illness. The program was expanded in 2012, but is still far from meeting demand. In 2011, HUD joined forces with the Department of Health and Human Services to launch a three-year program, the Housing Capacity Building Initiative for Community Living, which targets people with chronic illnesses who are at risk for being institutionalized. However, the impact of the program on housing for the mental illness remains to be seen.

The author's toddler and father

As a journalist, my job is to get to the bottom of convoluted and confusing situations. But during my family's crisis I was unable to find any housing solutions on my own. That speaks to the fact that while there are individual solutions scattered throughout the country there is no well-organized security net to meet the massive gaps left by deinstitutionalization.

For now, that means too many people with mental illness will find themselves in jail, in a nursing facility, or on the streets; anywhere but home. And too few families will have access to the second chance that mine has found.

Institutionalization remains a dirty word; something everyone with mentally ill loved ones strives to help them avoid. Yet each time we pull up to my father's residence, a large brick building in a residential neighborhood, my toddler yells "Papa's house!" And when my father walks out with a smile on his face and his granddaughter leaps into his arms, I know I am experiencing something that would not have been possible without it.

Protesters in Kayaks Shut Down the World's Largest Coal Port This Weekend

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Newcastle, on Australia's east coast, is home to the world's largest coal port. Despite a steady decline in prices over the last five years, record quantities of thermal and coking coal are still dug out of the Hunter Valley and exported to India, Korea, and China, via Newcastle.

While the Australian government claims to be making bold moves in the fight against climate change, this mass exportation of carbon dwarfs the country's domestic emissions output, making Newcastle a fairly obvious target for climate activism. Anti-coal protests happen here every year, but on Sunday May 8—Mother's Day—350.org arranged what turned out to be the port's largest protest ever.

While protesters in kayaks filled the port, the beach filled with families and BBQs. All photos by the author

Dubbed Break Free from Fossil Fuels, Sunday's anti-coal protesters planned to block the port with a flotilla of 100 kayaks, but the turnout was much larger.

I arrived Sunday morning to find some bored-looking port employees in high-vis milling around, waiting for the cops to arrive. I stood on a railway overpass, from where I could see three activists who had locked themselves to a coal loader. I waved to the closest one, a girl named Mandy, who smiled back. From below, she explained why she was protesting.

"It's Mother's Day, and I'm terrified to have kids, because in twenty-six years time—when they are my age—I don't know what the world is going to be like. If we keep going the way we're going now, spewing fossil fuels into the atmosphere, I don't think I will be able to protect my kid from that."

Mandy had been sitting there for a few hours and seemed grateful to see someone who would talk. We chatted about what she had for breakfast (fruit salad and toast) and how she'd taken Gastro-Stop, so she wouldn't need a toilet break.

Not long after, some police officers arrived, removing Mandy's lock-on equipment with angle grinders before arresting her. Since she and another girl had also turned off the coal loaders, they were each charged with malicious damage as well trespassing.

Afterward, I headed to Newcastle harbor, where around 2,000 people were bobbing around in kayaks on the shipping lane. There were around 200 kayaks in the water, and the beach was packed. The vibe was much lighter, with a huge barbecue, live music, and a range of chants all themed around the evils of coal. The port authorities had already decided to ban ships from the port during the protest, so the blockade had become more a symbol of dispute rather than an act.

Around lunchtime, Greens leader Richard Di Natale appeared and held a press conference on the beach. He was in the middle of talking about the election, which had just been announced for July 2, when Ash Grunwald and Rob Hirst started jamming on a yacht just off the beach.

It was awkward to watch his speech be drowned by the music, but Di Natale kept talking unperturbed. Local Greens supporters smiled politely as the reporters turned from the speech to Grunwald.

While all this was happening, I got a message from someone at another protest happening nearby on the Hunter River railway bridge, which usually brings block coal loaders into the port. Around 60 people had occupied the bridge, jamming up the railway network.

Kate Gunningham, a protester who'd been lying on the tracks, told me she was a bit nervous about heights and needed to pee, so she got down. Among the protesters were mothers and children, a 94-year-old war veteran who was later arrested, and some women dressed as climate angels.

"We're the average citizens, not some rat-bag group of people," Gunningham said. "We represent society at large."

Over the course of the day, 66 people were arrested, most of them from the railway bridge. At Mayfield, a woman was arrested for climbing the mooring lines to a bulk carrier coal ship, while another guy was arrested for attaching himself to a ship loader. At Kooragang Island another man was arrested for operating a drone. The Newcastle Herald dutifully circulated this info online.

Toward the end of the day, I went back to the harbor to catch the final speeches. One of the organizers deemed the day a success, acknowledging that the protesters had successfully blocked coal ships from leaving the port. On the theme of Mother's Day, she told the crowd how her mom had been arrested at the railway bridge. She said she was really proud of her and everyone cheered.

Follow Nat Kassel on Twitter.

Talking to Artist Sean Scully About Addiction, Death, and Ai Wei Wei

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Sean Scully in his studio. Photo by Liliane Tomasko


After his grandfather killed himself, Sean Scully and his family left Ireland for north London. "He was going to be shot for desertion," says Scully. "So he hung himself so they couldn't shoot him." Later, his father would go to prison on the same charge. "We lived in extreme, extreme, poverty," the abstract painter says. "I don't know why anyone said I came from a working class background—I didn't. I had a tremendously difficult and stressful relationship with my parents. I wet the bed until I was 20. I only stopped when I got married, I needed a wife to straighten me out."

Sean Scully is tall and broad and loud, and so uncensored that at times it's quite disarming. I meet him in China, on the 45th floor of the tallest hotel in Nanjing—the former Ming dynasty capital—where he's just opened an exhibition that will tour throughout the year. He's a big deal in China. In 2015, he was the first western artist to have a major retrospective in Shanghai. Gallerists, super-rich collectors, and journalists from around the world have come here for this latest opening. The day before our interview, I see him looking up at a picture of himself in paint splattered overalls, blown up onto a giant billboard. "In England, we don't like artists to be big personalities," he says. "But in America, in Germany, and in China, I'm a rock star." He's not joking.

In person, Sean is as bold as his paintings—big blocks of color that never seem to quite fit. Born in Dublin in 1945, he funded himself through "second chance school for dunces" Croydon College of Art, where he worked with "such intensity it scared the other students. "I was famous before I'd even left," he says. He quit the UK for New York in 1975. It was there, in the 1980s, he would teach the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei.

His work is abstract, but only in the academic sense. The subject matters are all too real—the death of his first son in 1983 led to a dark, desolate series of paintings that "only a maniac could have painted"; his Wall of Light series is a "political metaphor. It's about dissolving walls, which of course is impossible." Another series came out of drug addiction. Most recently, he's been painting landscapes "I'm painting nice pictures at the moment. But it won't be long before I tear it all up again."


I spent the morning talking to Sean about his life, work, and censorship in China.


"Diagonal Light" by Sean Scully. All photos courtesy of the artist

VICE: How did you start painting?
Sean Scully: I started at school. When I painted, all the girls would come and sit around me. I realized that this was a really good way to get girlfriends. I was only ten. When I was a teenager, I was very political. I used to make posters for demonstrations—anti-apartheid, CND. Then gradually, I worked my way into the idea of being an artist.

How did your family feel about you going to art school?
Not good. I was born in Ireland. We were travelers. My dad was a barber. The other side of my family were coal miners in Durham. I was the only one to go to university, and the last thing my dad wanted was for me to be an artist. But later on, when I bought him a house in the south of Spain, he thought it was alright then.

I guess the art world was pretty alien to them.
What usually happens in generations is that people either evolve or they don't. And if they evolve, it's usually one step at a time. I went from the bottom of the staircase to the top in one generation. And that was really too much for them. They couldn't get their head around it.

You left school at 15, got a job in printing, and worked your way into art school. How did it feel once you finally got there?
I was so happy. Croydon was a good school, but it was a second chance school for dunces. I was a dunce. But art school saved my life.

Was there anyone else like you there?
There was nobody like me. Because nobody came from the wreckage that I came out of. I'm not trying to glamourize poverty, but they had parents who were doctors or plumbers or secretaries—almost middle class. And then there was me. I worked with an intensity that was scary. I've really calmed down a lot.


"Pale Fire," 1988

You moved to New York in the 70s and you've been there ever since. I noticed in the exhibition one painting from 1988 called "Pale Fire," after the book by Vladimir Nabokov. The book's an interesting comparison to your life—the main character is an outsider, a foreign body...
Yeah he's the foreign guy in America—and I was too when I painted that. He looked at all the weirdness and the strangeness of it all. The fitting and the not fitting—that's the subject of my work. "Pale Fire" is this American-style painting, but it's got a hole in it with a very hesitant painting stuck in the middle that's very sure of itself. I felt like I was an insert.

There's a quote from you next to that painting that says reading books helped you reconnect with people after the death of your son in the early 1980s. How had that affected your work?
Well, it darkened my palette. And it made paintings like Durango, which isn't in this show. These are maniac paintings. Only a maniac could have painted them. Durango is almost scary—it's a huge, grey painting that's just about a kind of desolation. And again, it doesn't quite fit together. But I've never been interested in making nice pictures.

So why do you do it, then? Is it cathartic making your work? Do you see it as therapy?
After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved—or I proved—that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis. After three months of therapy, I was looking after him—straightening the pictures in his office. In the end, he told me to go away. He said, "There's nothing about yourself that you'd want to change. So you should just go away."

"Human Nature," 1996.

You've found a lot of success in China. Do you like it here?
I'm a big supporter of China—this goes back to my political days. And I don't believe in this idea that China should just get in a fast car called democracy and start the engine. When a country has been smashed—which this country was—you've got to have communism. You couldn't start any other way.

Abstract art is becoming increasingly popular here. Why do you think that is?
Once people start looking at art and the audience is gathered—which usually starts with figurative art, then abstract art will follow. A Chinese guy told me last night that since my exhibition, there's been a huge emphasis on abstract art in this country with all the young artists. And that's just the influence of one person.

Still, the government has clear ideas about what contemporary art should be. Here's a statement from the general secretary of the Communist party Xi Jinping at a 2014 art conference: "Contemporary arts must... take patriotism as a theme, leading the people to establish and maintain correct views of history, nationality, statehood, and culture." Have you felt any pressure being a foreigner showing here?
No. But it's also probably important that I'm a very sympathetic advocate of China. You know abstract art was illegal in China 20 years ago. Illegal.

Because it was seen as too decadent and bourgeois?
Because it's independent. It's independent thinking. And this is a problem. But I don't see why you can't have a slow evolution in a culture. And with a 1.3 billion population, it has to be slow.

Do you think it's harder to censor abstract art?
Not if you say it's illegal. But you're right, it's very difficult to censor it, because you can't really ever say what it is. This is where abstraction is very powerful—it's free. What's really interesting to me is that in England, there's democracy, but they can't really understand abstract art. I've always had a problem in England.

"Falling Wrong" by Sean Scully. Image courtesy the artist


What do you mean a problem? That you've always been more successful away from home?
With people embracing my work. Because my work is really embraced in America and Germany, and now China. You talk about censorship here, but there's censorship in America. I was going to make a big sculpture for the American Embassy. And the people at Fox News—which I like to call Fucks News—attacked it, viciously. They called my sculpture a pile of rocks and said it was a waste of public money. And in the end, it didn't happen. That's another form of censorship.

You taught Ai Wei Wei in New York. What do you think about his work? He's obviously very critical of China.
It's an entirely different idea about how to improve the world. I'm not saying he's not trying to make the world better. His work deals with the symptoms—it's reactive to specific situations. My work deals with the the cause. Because abstraction—well, the best abstraction, not those nice big dopey paintings hanging in hotel lobbies—is about inner structures.

His work deals with government censorship, cover-ups, and the lack of freedom in China. Did that not freak you out when you first came here?
In China, there are more artists than there are in Germany and America. Have you ever been to the art gallery district in Beijing? It's massive and completely free. I say exactly what I think about everything. When I was on national news on China, I was watched—can you imagine such a thing—by 300 million people. Nobody said anything to me about what I could say. There's a lot of misunderstandings about what it means to live in a socialist society.

But writers are still being arrested here.
Much more radical people than Ai Wei Wei—you know, people trying to bring down the government. I don't know what the truth of it is. But Ai Wei Wei's original issue was tax evasion.

If everyone can still access Google and Facebook, for example, why does the firewall still exist?
The thing you've got to understand about the Chinese is that they don't give a shit what you think. They really don't. This is the 21st century and they do what they want, and the west are somewhat befuddled by it... Ai Wei Wei has found some solace in the west. But what do you think about Ai Wei Wei—and I ask this as a father—lying in the shadow of a refugee boy that drowned and having his discomfort written about it as he lay on the pebbles? Poor Ai Wei Wei, lying on the pebbles, making all those dents in his body.

"Four Days," 2015

But he got put in prison.
I went to see Ai Wei Wei when he was locked up. I go all the way out there to see him and he's not locked up at all. He's got this huge place. We go outside and get in this limo, go to this nice Japanese restaurant, and drink sake all afternoon. That poor, suffering boy.

Hang on, that was when he was incarcerated for 81 days?
Yes... We went out. Look—I can't speak about it with authority, because it's not my life. I don't know how it was with his father, I don't know what all these old grievances are. I don't have a lot of pity for it—the Irish were basically a slave colony for hundreds of years. I can't weep for somebody making a lot out of their past. But if you go to New York, to Parsons where I taught him, you've got to be able to pay for it.

There's difficulties in all the world. I remember the police in Britain used to hunt down homosexuals—and it's not that long ago. Everybody's evolving in their own way. And one has to be tolerant of this. Otherwise we don't get anywhere. It's a question of communication, and understanding, and tolerance. If you're invited into a country to put on exhibitions in a way that I have, multiple times, you're going to influence the culture.

You said at the opening of the exhibition that "art is the enemy of purity." There's a caption next to the piece 'Four Days' in your exhibition where you say you started painting horizontal lines because you'd got too many straight lines when you painted vertically. Was this an antidote to perfection?
Well actually I got very ill, that's how I stated doing the horizontal ones. I broke my back and the doctors put me on OxyContin. I got addicted to heroin for a few weeks. Being on that stuff stripped away my architecture. I had to get off. It was fucking murder getting off that stuff. But I did. And then when I got back to the studio, I just found myself painting horizontal lines. I made this huge painting with six panels called 'Horizontal Soul.' I was strung out, and that was my soul. Art's got something to do with just being free—about giving yourself permission. About making art I've never been conflicted. I've been conflicted about a lot of other things, but I always knew art as right and just.

Follow Jenny Stevens on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: North Carolina Is Suing the Feds to Protect Its Anti-Trans Bathroom Law

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North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory. Photo via Flickr user NCDOTcommunications



Read: The Feds Just Told North Carolina to Stop Discriminating Against LGBT People

North Carolina is firing back against the feds over the state's so-called bathroom law, which requires people to use the restroom of the gender on their birth certificate, as Reuters reports.

Last week, the US Justice Department's top civil rights attorney, Vanita Gupta, sent letters to North Carolina state officials saying the law is a civil rights violation and warning that the state could face a costly federal lawsuit—and the loss of funds—if it doesn't change direction. Gupta set a deadline of close-of-business Monday to respond, and it seems state Governor Pat McCrory's preferred tactic is going after Gupta and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch for a "baseless and blatant overreach" of power.

As McCrory tweeted Monday, "We're taking the Obama admin to court. They're bypassing Congress, attempting to rewrite law & policies for the whole country, not just NC." In another tweet, he added, "Our lawsuit seeks to ensure that NC continues to receive federal funding until the courts clarify federal law & resolve this national issue."

In what the New York Times is calling a marker of just how serious the feds are, Gupta and Lynch scheduled a press conference to respond to McCrory's counter-suit later Monday.

Last Night's 'Game of Thrones' Was Like a College Kegger, but with More Death

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Jon Snow on the resurrecting table. All photos courtesy of HBO

Warning: Spoilers through season six, episode three.

You Saw Nothing, Jon Snow

"Oathbreaker," last night's episode of Game of Thrones, begins, as all episodic television must: with a recap. But here it's never felt more unnecessary. Not just because all the world watched Jon Snow rise from the dead at the conclusion of last week's episode, but because Jonny boy sums it up better than any Previously On ever could: "I did what I thought was right and I got murdered for it." That just about sums up the run of Game of Thrones—and realpolitik, and literature, and life in general. Melisandre can't keep from wishing for a peek behind the mortal curtain and when Jon answers that he saw nothing, Davos shoos her out of the room to talk of more earthly matters.

My my, Davos is looking especially Beckettian this episode. His punchy "You'll go on" is an echo of The Unnameable's final line, and his "Good. Now go fail again" response recalls Worstward Ho. I don't think it's a coincidence, either: Showrunner David Benioff wrote his thesis on Samuel Beckett at Trinity, and season four's "dying merchant scene" with Waiting for Godot actor Barry McGovern remains a killer piece of Irish Modernist fan fiction.

Outside, in the Castle Black courtyard, the risen Jon Snow encounters more upraised bushy eyebrows than I have seen outside of an Arvo Pärt concert. Tormund Giantsbane takes the wind out of the new messiah's sails with a dick joke: "What kind of god would have a pecker that small?" As there are no dick jokes in the Bible—please argue with me in the comments—we at least have an atypical GoT. moment, not because it was about dongs, but because it ends with a smile. Jon Snow smiles!

You Won't Be an Old Man in a Tree

Samwell Tarly and Gilly are on a ship headed for Oldtown, with a pit stop for the women and children in Horn Hill, and all through the conversation, intercut with barfing, all I could think was how awkward it's going to be for Sam to learn that his best friend lived, died, and lived again all in the time it took for Sam to empty his guttiwuts into a bucket like a freshman. Who says this show isn't full of relatable experiences?

Perhaps the strangest cutaway in Game of Thrones history takes us to... history, where Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven (not sure what else I should be calling Max Von Sydow's tree-dwelling Yoda) watch a storied battle. A young, squinty-eyed Ned Stark and five good men siege the Tower of Joy, defended by Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, who looks and fights like a character from Soulcalibur, and who goes out like a sucker after being stabbed in the throat by Ned's second banana Howland Reed. Bran is aghast at his father's dishonor on the field of battle but, like, come now little muffin, your parents were people once too, know what I mean? Bran cries out and, in what I'm pretty sure is a steal straight from Neverending Story, the young Ned hears him. At least, that's what I heard when Sydow lectures Bran on men in trees and the spoilers yet to come, "Turnaround / Look at what you see-ee-ee-ee."

Great Conversations in Elegant Rooms

Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys meets the Dosh Khaleen, a widow's club that has great potential as a matriarchy if the Khaleesi can impart the need for liberation and the need for collective control of their destiny beyond the will of the Khalisars. (That is, if the show can resist its damsel-in-distress impulses by sending Captain Friendzone save her next episode.) In Mereen, we have a painful thud of an interrogation scene from Lord Varys, who struts about like Colonel Klink while justifying the motives of a regime of white western invaders to a prostitute-as-collaborator stereotype, and we forget, again, why on earth we're supposed to be on the side of the former. Tyrion's culture shock upstairs with teetotaling wallflowers Gray Worm and Missandei is equally dead air, at least until Varys returns with news of who's been Kickstarting of the Sons of the Harpy and Missandei replies with the only properly revolutionary sentiment we've had in ages: "The Masters speak only one language. They spoke it to me for years. I know it better than my mother tongue. If we want them to hear us, we must speak it back to them." I'd like to be able to strain for note of James Baldwin or Malcolm X here—but I suspect I am only spitballing and when the wind blows it back, it sounds much more like Oliver Stone.

Back in the non-Raceistan side of the story, necromancer Qyburn sets up shop as the new Fagin to a crop of orphans and Cersei and Jaime present a united front to the small council, but acting Hand Kevan Lannister and his cronies aren't having any of this meddling in Dornish politics. (On a side note: Are the chair cushions in the council room really well-lacquered or did I hear a fart of horror when Franken-Clegane/Mountain-stein marches in on Grand Maester Pycelle mid-sentence?) The whole scene's a little like a high-school lunchroom, which spells bad news for the realm: An alliance of cool kids and nerds might be the only credible defense against those snooty prep school White Walkers, with their airs.

King "Butters" Tommen finally confronts the High Sparrow and, like a gentleman, Jonathan Pryce does enough acting for them both, saying, "The Mother's love outshines it all," and reassuring the perilously-receptive Tommen that the gods work through him. It's hard to disagree with anything he says, because it's impossible to argue with zealots, just one more reason why the Faith Militant are the ideal villains for a show that's coasted on grinning evildoers stroking their swords in front of walk-in furnaces. True believers are much more threatening because they are at once a more recognizable enemy and one whose power rests outside reason, and outside the world.

A Girl Is a Grasshopper Now

Arya continues her kung fu training inside the House of Black and White, smelling poisons (is that iocane powder? Is she building up a resistance?), mastering the lost art of blind bo staff, regaining her sight, and for once it is a compelling montage both because Arya seems to be actually drinking the Kool-Aid, er, magical plot-water. Suddenly she is Arya no more. A girl is an antecedent pronoun now.

In Winterfell, Ramsey Bolton receives a LARPer who has betrayed the Starks—something of a bandwagon at this point—and is furnished with two captives: Osha and little Rickon, who has aged so much since in the two seasons since he's been benched that I almost didn't recognize him. Things are clearly heating up for Bastard Bowl 2016: Back at Castle Black, Jon delivers the most long-awaited scene outside of coming back from the dead, namely the execution of sniveling turncoat Olly. It's rough seeing Thorne swing from the gallows too of course, but it's chilling how the camera lingers on pre-adolescent Olly's dead, bloated face, as if to say, "Is this what you wanted? Is it?" But it is, may the mother have mercy on our souls, it really is.

It's also bad news for Rickon and Tommen: Having killed off most of its adult characters, as well as offing Walda Frey and her babe last week, it appears that child-murder is trending in Westeros. As for Jon, he is released from his vows (on a technicality that clearly didn't see fit to include a resurrection clause). Leaving of all people Dolorous Edd in charge of the Watch, Jon is off to bigger and better things. I guess you can't come back from the dead just to hang around the house.

Recent work by J. W. McCormack appears in Conjunctions, BOMB, and the New Republic. Read his other writing on VICE here.

Hollywood Highs: How They Make Drugs Look Real in Movies

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Photo via YouTube

Johnny Depp smoking a cigarette in a clear holder behind orange-tinted aviators while chatting about the collection of uppers and downers he has in the car. Al Pacino slumped back on a leather throne facing a cocaine mountain. A cold turkey Christiane F. writhing on a bed, fighting her boyfriend for heroin. Whether they signal the tragic downfall of a character or are the impetus for a feature-length joke, drugs in movies—when done well—invariably make for interesting cinema, even if drugs don't interest you in your own life.

Obviously illegal drugs wouldn't be allowed on set, so it's a prop master's job to figure something out. He or she coordinates with the production designer, actors, and directors to provide every single item handled directly by the characters—food, books, money, and even drugs.

Sean Mannion is a prop master in LA and has been in the industry for years, working on everything from The Craft to Bridesmaids. Much of his work, however, has been on drug-centered comedies such as Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Get Him To The Greek, so he's built his career making fake spliffs and sourcing baggies. If anyone knows how to make fake drugs look real, it's Mannion.

"Back in the old days, I'd be using basil, oregano, any herbs that looked real and were smokeable. In a joint, that stuff was really heavy," he says. "Twenty-plus years ago I did a movie with Madonna, and she was like, 'Oh my God, this is terrible.' To make the big clumps of pot, I'd take spray glue and the herbs and just throw them on the table. You would leave the stems from oregano in there for authenticity." Today, it's a lot easier and less DIY. The movie industry has rapidly expanded, and hundreds more movies are released every year. If Mannion needs a lot of weed, he'll go to the Independent Studio Services (ISS), and they'll make it for him.

"I asked them to provide whole wheelbarrows of pot for Neighbors. Sometimes you need a lot of weed. In a film I did last year, day after day, we had a guy who'd do nothing but roll joints. I needed to have a Tupperware filled with easily four hundred joints. People would take a joint from the Tupperware as you walked through the crowds with it."

A lot of the time now, Mannion will buy his "weed" from a brand of herbal cigarettes called Ecstacy, as it's such an effective substitute for a number of reasons. "It's fully herbal, and it's much more palpable to use. It actually smells like pot, with this strong potent smell, to the untrained nose. Obviously if you're a pot smoker, you'd know the difference. A producer on this thing I'm working on actually walked up to me, and said, 'What are they smoking?' and I said to him 'Well the actors actually wanted to smoke pot, so we're really smoking pot.' And his eyes bugged out of his head. He goes, 'Are you kidding me?' And I go, 'Of course I'm kidding you—it's a herbal.' There was another time when a pretty famous actress—I won't tell you her name—was involved in an all-night party scene where they were passing around a joint. She asked me for a real one. So I give her a herbal one, and after a while, she and her friends, who were extras in the movie, were completely convinced they were stoned. It was funny—there's a great satisfaction in that."


Photo via YouTube

Presumably cocaine can't just be any old white powder? "We used to use the filler stuff they used in medicine. It became tough to find that over the years, and it was a prescription sort of thing to get it." Now he uses sorbitol, a sugar alcohol, often used in diet foods. "It's so good you have to do very little to it to make it look real, maybe add a little refined sugar in there and just pile it or wrap it up like a kilo. It can be snorted and has a weird sort of sugary taste to it. It would take an expert to come in and see it on the table and not go, 'Wow, that's coke.'"

Marrion is no expert on drugs, but he does laugh about some experience in his past ("And I will stress past"). When it comes to crack or heroin, it's mostly a case of googling images and researching to make it as real to life as possible. Luckily, not many drug scenes actually require showing the drugs being taken. "A lot of times it's just in evidence, so it's only hinted at. You have a crack pipe or syringes lying around. You go to a medical supplier and get the equipment to make meth, that sort of thing."

Paradoxically, you might say, while studios have no problem with showing illegal drugs and drug use on film, there's been a huge turnaround in actors smoking cigarettes. "Pretty much all studios are anti-tobacco and have eliminated their use entirely," explained Marrion. "It's rare to see anyone smoking a cigarette in a movie. I'm doing a bar scene at the moment, and it's screaming for the bouncer to be smoking a cigar, and the room filled with everyone smoking cigarettes, but it can't be. And in the back room, people are smoking pot and doing coke." This is in line with a public health move to stop glamorizing their use and in any case, Marrion says, hardly any actors smoke because they're so health conscious. If they're smoking a cigarette in a movie, it'd be a herbal one.

In a similar vein, when you see a character getting drunk at a bar or one whose whole reality revolves around alcohol and stimulants—Miles from Sideways, everyone in The Wolf of Wall Street—you might assume they're genuinely drinking. When Josh Hartnett and Kirsten Dunst share a sip of peach schnapps in The Virgin Suicides, you can taste its sickly sweet liqueur on your lips as they press the bottle to their own. Some method actors have been open about using booze to bring reality to their performance. Shia LeBeouf said that when he played a Prohibition-era bootlegger in Lawless, he was pissed all the time so he could turn up on set with red eyes and a drunk bloat. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were wasted when they were drunkenly firing golf balls at nearby buildings in Fight Club.

These are exceptions, however. "I've never had someone take more than a couple of shots," Marrion says. "I've had a few actors ask me if they can drink real alcohol, but I'd never do that without getting permission from a director. People are having to do twenty or so takes, so long-term, it would probably just restrict them from performing." Instead, they're chugging either tea or a caramel-colored water for liquor. If an actor's drinking from a brown beer bottle, it's water.

Whether it's alcohol, smoking, or hard drugs, it's easy to look fake or try-hard, that that's where the satisfaction arises as a good property master. "It's always more work because there is no faking it," says Marrion. "There are keen eyes that will spot it if you're doing it wrong. Your job is to uphold the integrity and make that environment so real, and that is truly rewarding when you get it."

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Photos of Refugees Celebrating European Unity at the Acropolis

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This article originally appeared on VICE Greece.

This year on Europe Day—a holiday celebrating peace and unity across Europe—dozens of refugee families, who have recently found themselves stranded in Athens, climbed the Acropolis hill Monday morning as part of an attempt to raise awareness about the refugee crisis. The visit was organized by the Greek Ministry of Culture, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Flux Laboratory Cultural Foundation.

Check out photos of the visit below.

What My Dad's Kidnapping by Muslim Terrorists Taught Me About Islamophobia

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Former hostage Terry Anderson grins with the author as they leave the US Ambassador's residence in Damascus, Syria, early Thursday, December 4, 1991 to board a plane to Germany. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)

Three months before I was born, my father was on his way home from a tennis game in Beirut when Muslim militants abducted him at gunpoint. As he was thrown in the back of a car and ripped from his life, one of the terrorists leaned down to comfort him.

"Don't worry," he said. "It's political."

After seven years of torture and humiliation in captivity, my dad was released in 1991, which is when I met him for the first time. What followed was a different kind of suffering for my family, as we struggled to recover from the trauma of our experience.

Like my parents, I will wear those emotional scars for the rest of my life.

These facts, taken out of context, fit neatly into America's most popular understanding of Islam. It's almost indisputable that global terrorism is on the rise, even if terrorists kill more Muslims than anyone else. And media coverage of the world's second-largest religion very often focuses on terrorism, drawing attention to the apparently violent nature of the ideology and its enmity toward Western culture. Which begs the question: Is the media portrayal of Islam as a backward, violent religion accurate?

And for that matter, why do Muslim terrorists despise America so much? Did fanatics like ISIS materialize out of nowhere, snarling with hatred at the West, as much of American commentary and news coverage seems to indicate? Did the people who kidnapped my father one day just wake up and decide to take away a man's freedom and dignity for seven years?

Does terrorism exist in a vacuum?

"All of a sudden, this guy came and started shouting at us, 'Are you Muslim? Are you Muslim?'"— Rabie Ayoub

I don't think it does, and believe it's important to provide some historical context for this kind of violence. Indeed, it's increasingly crucial that we find answers to these questions, not only so we can try to politically address the problem of "radical Islam" in a way that makes sense, but because American Muslims are paying a very tangible price. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who will soon begin receiving national security briefings, has outrageously suggested Muslim Americans be put in a database and forced to carry special IDs. More famously, he has promised a complete ban on Muslim immigration to the US. (Not to be outdone, erstwhile rival Ted Cruz recently maintained that Muslim neighborhoods should be regularly patrolled.)

Meanwhile, a college student was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight last month because a woman was terrified after hearing him speak Arabic. From mosque attacks to harassment of women in hijab, it's safe to say the laundry list of Islamophobic incidents reported since last year's terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino keeps growing.

Corey Saylor, director of the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says there is a direct correlation between Islamophobic political rhetoric, increased media coverage of Islamic terrorism, and violence against Muslims across America.

"In the latter part of last year, you had the second Paris attacks, then you had the San Bernardino attacks," Saylor tells me. "All of that gets endless media coverage... then when you add into that particular endless media cycle statements by very high-profile candidates, you get this poisonous mix... For instance, in November and December of last year, we tracked more mosque incidents [of attacks and vandalism] in a two-month period than we usually do in an entire year.

"To what degree I can't statistically say, but that sort of steady diet of negative information does contribute to the increased violence toward the Muslim community," Saylor continues. "I think that one of the great losses we've had in recent years is that there is not as much depth to media coverage as there used to be. You just sort of get the quick hit on the surface of any story without a lot of understanding of the context and the background to it. That's the information that's really needed to solve problems."

I just spent two and a half years investigating my father's kidnapping for a book due out this fall. While reporting on the act of violence that shaped my life, I learned some valuable things about how terrorists evolve.

A women walks past a convoy of Israeli troops as they pass through a village in the Bekaa Valley following their invasion of Lebanon, in June, 1982. (Photo by Bryn Colton/Getty Images)

For example, I've come to understand that the men who kidnapped my father developed their hatred for America in a very specific environment. In June 1982, Israel began the second and most destructive of its various invasions of Lebanon in an attempt to eradicate the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which had been using the country as a base from which to launch attacks against the Jewish state. It wasn't long before the Israelis wore out their welcome in the country. Besides running roughshod over the Shiite south—for the most part, invading armies aren't generally known for their consideration of the land they're occupying—Israeli troops angered the Lebanese by committing acts of destruction and violence, including indirectly participating in the massacre of hundreds of civilians at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps that September.

Negative attention soon turned to the United States, which was (and still is) perceived as Israel's sponsor and patron. In addition to providing billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, America also dedicated itself to supporting a Christian-led minority government in Lebanon by leading a multinational coalition of armed forces into Beirut. Terrorism against US assets in Lebanon soon commenced. Following a 1984 incident in which an American battleship fired upon some militias in a heavily populated area of south Beirut, Lebanese Shiites became thoroughly convinced that the United States was their implacable enemy.

That's when the kidnappings began in earnest.

"There is a very high correlation between being occupied and terrorism," an ex-State Department official who was high up in the counterterrorism apparatus at the time of my father's captivity told me while I was writing the book. "Probably that's the highest correlation. It's higher than a poverty correlation, certainly higher than a religious correlation. In the case of Lebanon, there was Israeli occupation. That tends to make people far more militant and desperate... the occupation aspect is very interesting and says a lot about Lebanon, which has been occupied by someone almost continuously... and what you will sometimes do if you can't actually get at your immediate occupier is to go for their outside supporter."

All of this is not to excuse the men who treated my father like an animal for the better part of a decade. No amount of political oppression justifies terrorism. Kidnapping and brutalizing someone for years is just evil, as is beheading innocent people to make a political statement, the way ISIS does. But it is valuable to understand how American policies helped shape an environment in which evil men found opportunities to exploit anti-American sentiment, so that we can try to make it harder for them to do so in the future.

In other words, unpacking the sociopolitical context for terrorism helps political actors make better decisions by learning from the mistakes of the past. Here's another important, and timely, example: There is a significant likelihood that key ISIS leaders met in a US prison camp during the disastrous, ill-fated war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein—a man who once enjoyed a favored position as an American ally. The Islamic Revolution in Iran was sparked by outrage at the Shah's ruthless repression of his people—which the US indirectly participated in by politically supporting his regime, even engineering a coup against the country's only democratically elected leader when he wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. American support of the Shah's brutal dictatorship led many Iranians to turn against the West and toward the repressive Islamic government its leaders spend so much rhetoric condemning. A faction of that regime created the terrorist group in Lebanon that kidnapped my father and sent him home to me seven years later, psychologically devastated in ways my little mind couldn't possibly make sense of.

Context is essential when it comes to making sense of anti-American sentiment in the region, and clarifying representations of Islam in the media. There are plenty more examples, but we draw none of the attendant complexity from media outlets showing us little more than frightening scenes of beheadings, black flags, and burning buildings.

This leads many people to believe Islam is the problem.

71-year-old Leonard Debello, who allegedly threatened to kill Rabie Ayoub and his family earlier this year

One of those people is Leonard Debello of St. Louis County, Missouri. In February, the 71-year-old allegedly brandished a gun and threatened to shoot Rabie Ayoub, a Palestinian-American who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 16. (Coincidentally, Ayoub happens to have been raised in the desperately impoverished and dangerous Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, where I have spent considerable time. It's a heartbreaking place, full of wide-eyed children in rags and thuggish youths brandishing machine guns—needless to say, not an easy environment in which to grow up.)

According to Ayoub, he, his wife, and their four children were not far from their home when Debello approached the car.

"All of a sudden, this guy came and started shouting at us, 'Are you Muslim? Are you Muslim?'" Ayoub recalls over the phone. "My wife had her hair covered. I told him, 'Yes, what's going on?" I didn't think twice about it. He came toward the car and said, 'You know, all of you Muslims should die.' I said, 'Why would you say that? I haven't done anything to you. I don't even know you.' He said, 'I'm going right now to get my gun, and I'm going to shoot you, your wife, and your kids.' He went back inside his house—and I just froze, you know, in some situations you don't know what to do, you don't know what to say, because it was just insane. He came back with a gun. I asked him, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'The state issues guns to people like me so that we can kill people like you. We have to clear this country from people like you.'"

... it's not always easy to publicly point out the inaccuracy of media depictions of Islam, especially in the modern American environment.

Ayoub adds that he pulled out his phone and took a photo of Debello holding a gun. He then drove a short distance away, called 911, and waited for the police to arrive.

"When the police came, this guy was sitting outside on his porch like nothing had happened. They didn't even force him to stand up. He stayed sitting in his rocking chair, and they were talking. So I called the police over and told them I had a picture of him holding a gun. They went inside, and he had three guns—a machine gun and two handguns by the door. They talked to him and took the guns and handcuffed him, but they sat him in the front seat of the police car. I asked them, 'What is this, a five-star police car?'

"They released him the next day," Ayoub continues. "No bail, no nothing. He lives down the street from me. I saw him the next day. When my kids were getting on the bus, he passed by on the street. When I saw that, I told myself, 'No, I'm not going to let this go.' He scarred my kids for life... So I went to the news and called the FBI."

Following media coverage and, according to Ayoub, FBI involvement, Debello was eventually charged with unlawful use of a weapon motivated by discrimination. The case is still pending, and a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police Department wrote in response to an email asking for comment on the incident, "The officers responded to the scene, conducted an investigation of the incident, and placed the suspect under arrest. The case was then taken to the prosecuting attorney's office for review for charges."

Check out our documentary about an indigenous Muslim community in Mexico.

In addition to helping Americans avoid making the same political mistakes, a grasp of the bigger picture behind global terrorism can also serve as a vaccine against ignorance and bigotry. Religious scholar and author Reza Aslan has spent much of his career trying to dispel commonly held misconceptions about Islam. He explains that the question of context seems to be completely ignored in media coverage of terrorism committed by Muslims, as opposed to acts of violence carried out by people from other backgrounds.

"When the faith at hand is not Islam, people are much more willing to actually think about all the other factors that go into a person's actions," says Aslan. "For instance, when Robert Dear shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic because he saw himself as a devoted, faithful follower of Christ who was saving, in his words, 'unborn babies,' people talked at length about his background, his childhood, his mental condition, his relationship with his parents. They talked about all those factors, which are important, but they rarely or if at all talked about his faith. On the flip side, when you have a Muslim acting violently in the name of Islam, every other factor that could possibly be involved in those actions is just completely subsumed by a single factor: their religion.

"Sventy-four percent of law enforcement agencies in the United States as well as the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security say that the number one threat to Americans is right-wing terrorism," Aslan continues. "The San Bernardino shooting, as horrific as it was, was the three hundred fifty-fifth mass shooting in 2015. The threat is absolutely dwarfed by the reality of the terror that is being rained upon us by white right-wing extremists. Yet I'd say ninety-eight percent of the media focus is about Muslim terrorism. This is an absurdly exaggerated threat. It's not that there is no threat from Islamic extremism. It's just that right-wing terrorism has killed far, far more Americans."

But it's not always easy to publicly point out the inaccuracy of media depictions of Islam, especially in the modern American environment. Aslan has been attacked for his efforts by everyone from Pamela Geller to YouTuber David Pakman, who has dedicated several episodes of his show to questioning Aslan's credentials and trying to poke holes in his arguments. For instance, Aslan maintained on CNN that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a central African problem, not a Muslim problem as is commonly believed—an explanation that has been rated "mostly true" by Politifact. Pakman, who didn't respond to my requests for comment, presents his own stats on his show, which would seem to contradict Aslan's. But how would a viewer distinguish between the two perspectives? And since 80 percent of Muslims do not practice FGM, isn't it important to clarify that the brutal mutilation of a woman's genitals is not a mainstream Muslim custom, so as not to add to the general environment of ignorance and bigotry?

"Anyone can just get on YouTube and say whatever the hell they want to, ignoring the fact that there is documented evidence, statistics, facts, and independent analyses supporting these statements," Aslan says. "That's the magic of the internet. It turns everybody into an authority... and the echo chamber of this fear of Muslims provides an enormous amount of revenue to cable news channels, which feeds into the rhetoric of politicians who then use this kind of fear mongering to get votes. It's incredibly profitable, both politically and economically."

Donald Trump waves to the crowd during a campaign rally at the Northwest Washington Fair and Event Center in Lynden, Washington, on May 7, 2016. (JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images)

Islamophobia may be profitable, but it's having increasingly dangerous consequences for American Muslims. Ayoub, for one, says the incident traumatized his family and that although they are American citizens, they now feel unsafe in their own country.

"What I saw in Lebanon, I don't want my kids to see that," he says. "I saw two people killed in Ain el-Hilweh. One of them was sixteen; the other one was twenty-one. They had nothing to do with anything. They were just students, and they were killed... The news went to interview , and he said he was a veteran and had PTSD and all this stuff. I told them, 'Let him go to my country and be there for two days. Lets see how much PTSD he has.' We're born with those conditions. They come with us when we leave."

So imagine it's the year 2050. A schoolchild in another country picks up a history book and reads about the United States circa 2016—during the era when presidential candidates said Muslims should be forced to carry special IDs and their neighborhoods singled out for surveillance. This child learns that in America, Muslims were once removed from airplanes simply for speaking their native language and threatened with death at gunpoint for no reason other than their faith.

How do you think he or she will view America?

"They're giving the wrong picture of Muslims in the news," Ayoub tells me with bitterness in his voice. "They're not showing what real Muslims are like, and they're not showing how many of us are being killed.

"If it was me pulling a gun on someone, or if I even just threatened someone, maybe they would shoot me first and ask questions later," he says. "If a white family called 911 and said, 'There's an Arab with a gun threatening us,' it would be completely different."

Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.

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