Just a woman looking at a man asking him to love her tin foil hat (Photo via Awake Dating)

Are you looking for love and also believe that shape-shifting reptilian aliens control the Earth? Do you like posting cherry blossom petal pictures on Instagram and discussing the 9/11 Truth? Well you're in luck, because there is now a dating site just for you! Launched on the 13th of April, Awake Dating is the brainchild of self-proclaimed Australian "truther" Jarrod Fidden and joins the likes of Dating Freedom Lovers and Paranormal Date.

A month in, the site has notched up over 4,0000 'awake' members—not be confused with "woke" people, apparently—and by the sounds of it, Jarrod has big plans. He's just hired a chief technology officer from the US, a legal representative team and numerous coders. He revealed plans for a social networking site this week too, and is meant to be pushing out an app next.

I've been single for a while now, and am partial to the odd alternative lunar landing theory, so set up a profile. The site's still pretty basic, but its simplicity does make it easy to navigate. It's got all the usual bits: a profile to which you add a photo, choose what genders you're interested in and specify your interests, ranging from political manipulation and deception to chocolate.

From what my algorithms returned, looking for love on Awake Dating mostly consists of wading through a sea of webcam selfies of white middle-aged men with a glint in their eye, but I'm convinced there is a more to it than that. To find out, I spoke to Jarrod and we chatted about the gaping hole he's aiming to fix in the conspiracy theorist dating market. I recorded the call, and so did he.

Here's Jarrod, possibly looking for the truth through his viewfinder

VICE: Can you describe what you mean by the term "awake"?
Jarrod Fidden: The meaning differs from person to person. For me, it's somebody who is more on an in-depth critical thinker, they question the mainstream narrative.

Have you always been "awake' or did that worldview come later on in life?
I guess people throughout history have always questioned life and its meaning, whether it be politics or whatnot. On a personal level, perhaps I've always been a seeker of truths and that's led me to where we are today.

Do you think the term conspiracy theorist has negative connotations?
Certainly. It would be valuable to research how the term conspiracy theorist came into its current meaning, as someone who is on the wrong track or a nut. There was a memo or something that went out to the New York Times; my facts aren't strong on this. Go and Google it yourself you'll find out.

I shall.
Conspiracies happen trillions of times perhaps every day. The definition of a conspiracy is just two or more people coming together and planning something without the knowledge of others and a theory is often based in factional science. Evolution is a theory! When you put conspiracy and theory together, there shouldn't be an immediate reaction that makes you think someone is nuts.

Right. What was it that made you want to create Awake Dating?
My wife and I were very fortunate to get into our research together, we are both well-educated and switched-on. We personally spent thousands of hours doing independent research into alternate topics—and I mean literally thousands.

What did you learn?
Our research put us into a state of belief that was socially inconvenient. It's much easier if you are happy with what goes on in the world. Through that we realized that this state of belief was distancing ourselves from the other people around us. We thought it must be a horrible scenario for single people who have the same "awake" understanding as us, or have done similar research. So based on that Awake Dating was born.

So, you felt your beliefs were pushing others away?
Our understanding developed, and the things that were of interest to us weren't necessarily of interest to the people around us. And often they would prefer not to hear about those things.

That must be a feeling shared with a lot of people who are reading into that sort of thing. What kind of feedback have you got from the site so far?
We've had heaps of feedback! From simple messages of users saying thank you, to long paragraphs of writing saying thank you in one way or another. It's amazing that there are millions of people who are subscribing to the YouTube channels that carry alternative content, like Alex Jones and a number of others, yet there are so many areas that aren't being addressed in the market. The fringe communities are disenfranchised by the current offerings in online communications so we are hoping to step in to offer an alternative.

What conspiracy theory most rings true to you?
The one that holds most heed for us is the illusion of money. Obviously money is just paper and it's made up by the central banks of the world and they are privately owned, so they have the right to make money out of thin air and we don't.

Do you think you will have the same stance on the illusion of money if you turn Awake Dating into a profitable business?
These things unfortunately are not free to do; I have invested near enough 50,000 euros of my own money into this in the last month alone. We do well on our business model and I think to succeed you must.

Have you or anyone you know ever worn a tin foil hat?
Nope, but I may start a 'Tin Foil Hat of the Month' profile photo competition on site!

Conspiracy theories have a tendency to be linked to paranoia and other mental health issues. Do you have plans to put any wellbeing systems in place on the site?
That's very difficult to answer. What we want to do is facilitate the interchange of ideas and information and personal growth. If people are having difficulty with any subject matter it's of course up to the individual to take course and evaluate. If someone were to contact us we would try and provide any help that we could but, again, this isn't our job we are just a social platform.

Could love be a conspiracy?
Good question! Seeing that I am a man who is very much in love with his beautiful wife and two young children, who he absolutely adores, I'd say love is as real as waking in the morning.

Thanks, Jarrod.

@ameliadimz

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A photo of the author and his friends in college while off their tits on mushrooms

No one takes psychedelics and comes away untouched. Which isn't to say that every experience has to be a descent into hell, just as a tab of acid isn't a guaranteed entry ticket to some paradigm-shattering creative awakening. Steve Jobs would probably still have created Apple even if he'd refrained from devouring blotter paper back in his Portland dorm room.

What I am saying is that no matter how positive an experience your trip is, your brain and body will feel odd during the comedown—a little deflated, a little spent, a little wonky, even under the gilded surface of an afterglow. If anyone's told you they've taken hard psychedelics "with zero comedown," they're lying to your melted-ass face. Some type of mental or physical hangover will inevitably plague you, even if it's a manageable one. That's just the toll you must pay if you want to go moseying about the cosmic abyss.

One of the best parts of taking psychedelics is the rag-tag crew you end up with at the end of a long day, embracing the mutual misery of withdrawal by scraping your bowl for resin and turning on some music. But what type of music? It has to be perfect or the vibes may turn sour—all those synapses, messed with for nothing! (As a quick and obvious aside, no one should be allowed within projectile vomiting distance of an acoustic guitar.)

People will have a lot of opinions about the best song to listen to when coming down. Though well-intentioned, many of these selections will also have the not-so-subtle ulterior motive of chilling everyone the fuck out so they stop talking about self-improvement and trippy /r/TodayILearned nonsense that started wearing thin around dusk. The trick to keeping the energy buzzy but not too brainy (or at risk of becoming lethargic) is to select a strange song, one that is enveloping but not overbearing or peripheral. Maybe even something a little challenging, or one that's more interesting to talk about than, say, "shape-shifting lizard people" or Bush being behind 9/11. (We all already agree that, yes, it was him.)

With this in mind, my personal favorite psychedelic hangover song is "There Will Be Other Worlds," from Sun Ra's 1978 album Lanquidity. The simple reason being that this 11-minute jazz-psych epic sounds like how a comedown feels.

Setting out with a haunting dissonant synth chord, it collapses into a handful of pretty piano notes before the voices of Arkestra members June Tyson, James, Jacson, Edde Tahmas, and Sun Ra––collectively billed under "Ethnic Voices" in the liner notes––begin moaning. It's spooky but hypnotizing, as if it belongs to a lost soul or a friendly ghost who's gesturing you to follow him with a "come hither" motion.

A bassline sneaks across the track, followed by a woozy trumpet. Instrumental elements keep getting added, the various components sounding uneasy, anxious, even frightening; each of them fucked up on something. It's a dangerous, albeit triumphant, balance of vibes bad and good that mirrors those pangs of acute anxiety and all-knowing, unforgiving existential dread—muddled with moments of warmth and tranquility—that color a comedown from psychedelics.

I remember the first time I heard the song—unsurprisingly while coming down from nearly an eighth of shrooms. I had previously put on something that was too mellow; I believe it was Stereolab. People in the room began falling asleep as I jabbered on out of bug-eyed listlessness. My friend told me I was trying too hard to change everyone's mood through the music when I should instead celebrate our shared cerebral itchiness. He turned on "There Are Other Worlds" and told me to be patient, to accept my decision to give my brain an old psilocybin-inspired wash-and-hang-dry.

At first, Sun Ra made me feel better––the slow pace, the seductive voices. Once those voices derailed into maniacal rambling half-way through the song, however, my anxiety felt worse. I felt overwhelmed and chaotic, as if I had to choose between embracing my private thoughts or embracing the track, but not both. My friend noticed my discomfort. "You shouldn't feel calm right now," he said. "You ate a shit ton of mushrooms today."

I think part of what makes music amazing is its ability to supersede any emotion you might be in the grips of and actively strongarm you into feeling a different one—a kind of artificial mood enhancement. But there's a different appeal to music that is able to replicate a feeling with such precision that it feels as though there's someone else there, strapped in to the exact same emotional rollercoaster as you are.

As "There Are Other Worlds" enters its final minute, it throws you a few more pretty piano licks, suggesting it will end well, before completely scuppering that with an ominous synth chord that sounds like lots of worlds ending at once. As I thought about this during that first listen, I forgot about all the problems and epiphanies swarming my fungi-filled head. The composition planted its flag in the forefront of my cortex, and I felt myself being transported back to reality, sobriety, without worrying about what that meant or the fact I didn't feel as good as I did a few hours prior.

This is a song that does not leave listeners untouched: after it kisses (or slaps) your eardrums, you will most certainly have an opinion about it, even if not a positive one. Ultimately, eating some spooky spores or a tab of acid is no different. Both change you in some shape or form and leave an impression on your brain like a sonic-cum-psychedelic fingerprint. For me, that mark is like my favorite scar—it's not going away any time soon, and the story behind it is one I share too often.

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Lola Frost, probably feeling good. Photo by David Denofreo

All of us have something about our bodies we don't like.

Callum Swan has looked happier. Head down, eyes fixed on his feet, every inch of his body language screams: get me off this fucking stage, immediately. Tournament anchor Olivier Morin has a microphone thrust beneath the Millenium player's nose. "So, what happened, what went wrong?" he asks, as The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" plays over the PA (nice choice, no, really). I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of his questioning. A mumble, a shrug, a swift exit: Swan, or the freshly Twitter-verified Swanny to millions of viewers who tune into eSports, into competitive Call of Duty competitions on the regular, is caught between feeling livid and fractured. He's all torn up inside, and wearing the crisis, the conflict, all over his face.

Anyone thinking that eSports is just so much hyperbolic but hollow hype, a bunch of silly boys playing around with silly toys, would immediately be set right with a split-second look at Swan, right now. This isn't just a game—this is a sport, with all the passion and fire and broken hopes of any 'traditional' precedents. It doesn't matter that this is played with a controller, that the action takes place in a virtual environment, generated by a games console. The emotions, the highs and the lows, are just as real as those seen and felt in any other competitive discipline.

Swan slinks away to go over what went down wrongly in his mind, before reengaging with Black Ops III in what's effectively both a backstage area and second, smaller competitive zone, where less-glamorous matches have been played this weekend. A third-place playoff match now has to happen. He doesn't give all that much of a shit about it, now that a crack at the top prize, $20,000 and an admirably proportioned trophy, has slipped through his team's fingers and thumbs. But he'll play anyway, alongside his fellow British teammates, ultimately losing a 2-1 lead across a best-of-five set-up against the American team Rise Nation. It's all a bit England at Italia '90: once Chris Waddle's penalty had screamed over the bar, all anyone watching at home wanted to do was bring our boys home. The third-place match is a cruel prank. No tournament needs it.

Millenium in action (Swan is the third player back, leaning forward)

At the Le Zénith venue in the north east of central Paris, usually home to rock concerts, some 5,000 Call of Duty fans have gathered to watch the final day's play of an intense ESWC weekend, just another in the on-going Call of Duty World League series. Yesterday, Saturday, saw a starting total of 16 teams reduced to just four: the French-owned Millenium, featuring all British players; their semi-final conquerors and ultimate competition winners OpTic Gaming, from the US; another British outfit, Splyce, who reach the final despite visibly shitting it in every interview; and Rise Nation, who place third. The crowd is wild for it; the hosts hype them up from time to time, but honestly, it's not needed.

Drinks flow, voices rise as one, and the celebrations that erupt amongst the onlookers when a match-turning play comes off is a marvellous thing to witness, indeed. If you turned your eyes from the stage and focused solely on the attendees, leaping from their seats, doing Mexican waves and waving flags of their chosen crews, you'd automatically assume you were at an indoor tennis match, maybe; or basketball, or anywhere else where a little booze and a lot of excitement combine to turn the air electric. It's completely compelling, and after arriving on the Saturday somewhat naïve as to how this kind of competition will play out, I leave wholly won over. I daren't dive into the technicalities of each match, the various modes and what each one means; this isn't that piece. But the competitive format allows for a variety of modes in each encounter, and the way the scoring can swing from one side to the other is indicative of certain teams having very particular strengths and weaknesses.

Twenty-four hours before Millenium go down to OpTic, Swan and I share lunch on the edge of La Vilette, the park that Le Zénith sits within, just beside the impressively curvaceous Philharmonie de Paris. On our way to a bowl of particularly salty skinny chips, a salad and a couple of drinks—lager for me, something non-alcoholic for the yet-to-play-that-day professional—we pass another competitor, from the FaZe Clan team. The two exchange friendly words, and look forward to seeing each other later. "There's no trash-talking between players, off the stage," Swan tells me. "We all get along, really." I ask about psyching each other out on stage, when the teams are sat facing away from each other. "We can take comfort breaks, like, toilet breaks," he says. "If you're doing well and the other team is all fired up and ready to strike back, you really wind them up by slowing things down, and having a break."

In the heat of the mid-May sun, Swan remains cool: "I don't really get mentally affected by anything. And I'm not superstitious, or anything like that." There's an almost unsettling steeliness to the man, still just 23 years old; a got-his-shit-together calmness that other players I see in action across the weekend don't share. He's fairly private when he's not putting on a show—"I don't share my personal stuff on Twitter. I mean, social media is instrumental in the growth of eSports, and Call of Duty in particular, but I only use it for the playing side. The rise of eSports has coincided with the digital age, and the foundations of our community are built on social media. That is the primary method of communication here, and you'll see Premier League footballers with fewer Twitter followers than people who play this game."

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One such player is the same one we pass on the way to lunch. The fresh-faced "Clayster" is James Eubanks, a veteran player who celebrates his 24th birthday (he still looks about 16) on the Saturday of competition. His Twitter follower count is over 570,000, and he spends what feels like forever signing autographs and having his photo taken with a seemingly endless line of admirers, in the Zénith concourse, while all the time being watched from not-quite afar by his girlfriend. Clayster doesn't look like a celebrity—if you saw him simply milling with the regular punters, if they weren't constantly stopping their stride to do a double-take before politely asking for a selfie, you'd assume he was just another fan, albeit one in a garish, sponsors-plastered team jersey. (Seriously, someone needs to get these guys some properly tailored kits.)

The biggest receptions are reserved for whenever France's own Team Vitality is on stage. Millenium soundly beat them at the quarterfinal stage, but they're far and away the crowd's choice, the peoples' champions if not genuine contenders this weekend. Two of their four, "BroKen" and "Gotaga", get special attention—the former is featured on an advert for customized controllers that runs between matches, and the latter is, says Swan, the star of the team.

"Gotaga, he's kind of the star, and he's got a YouTube channel and a lot of social media followers," Swan says. "He's had a lot of success there, so he's garnered an incredible following. And that's transferred from the casual to the competitive community, to the point where a lot of the people attending this event have come specifically to watch him, and Team Vitality. People actually follow the players more than they do the teams."

Team Vitality

Alan Brice is covering the weekend for English viewers. He's both a commentator—a shoutcaster—and a director, constantly moving the camera to find the best action for the watching-at-home audience. He wears a smart shirt, as befits anyone being broadcast live onto thousands of screens, but mercifully loose shorts, because this venue is quite the cauldron of stink, sweat and oppressive heat. He might not be the one pressing the buttons to pull off the headshots, but he's well aware that his role in all of this, this rapidly growing industry, is just as vital as that of the players themselves.

"One of my colleagues a few years ago, he said to me that eSports is like a pizza," Brice says, in a break from coverage, "and all the 'casting, all the stuff around it, is the toppings. The games will happen regardless, but margarita is margarita. Take us away and you take away the toppings."

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It's an awkward analogy, but one that makes sense all the same: it's the 'casters, the analysts and the experts who bring colour to these occasions, who provide the context necessary to transform what would otherwise be a bundle of polygons and textures jogging aggressively around a screen into a tense drama, a soap opera, a true theatrical experience. Brice both drives the coverage, deciding what player's perspective to snap to in time to see a vital kill or play, and delivers motor-mouthed descriptions of what's going down, and why it's significant.

"You have to remember that these players are all people, and wherever you have people you have stories, and drama. It's every bit as real as traditional sports, but it's a lot more public, because this is a very social media-based form of entertainment. We've had corruption in the past, and that's been taken care of to make sure it doesn't happen again. But that's part of a bigger drama. You have teammates leave to start other teams. Stuff can get really personal in eSports. When a footballer leaves their team, their teammates don't hate them; but here there are some genuine grudges and grievances going on. So we have Splyce and Epsilon here this weekend—right now the new Epsilon is struggling while Splyce, which took on a lot of Epsilon players, is doing really well. And it would be fireworks if they came up against each other."

Splyce

They don't, mainly because Splyce are, as Brice observes, on fire (right up until they meet OpTic, anyway), while Epsilon fail to make it out of the group stage. But Brice has seen teams rise only to fall in the past, and has used that to craft storylines based on who's going where, and why that may or may not cause repercussions elsewhere. "Even when I'm not casting, I'm watching everything, he says. "I'm always making notes when I'm off camera, to get those stories, and feed them into my next cast." He's also been working right through eSports' rise from a niche attraction on the fringes of the games market to its current status as a cultural phenomenon ready to happen—if you don't feel it's exploding already.

"I think it'll be baby steps for eSports, going forward—you can't just flick a switch and turn it on. The money is now flooding in though, so perhaps people expect it that way. But that's a worry for me, honestly—a lot of companies are just throwing money at eSports, because the numbers are great. But the numbers have been great for a long time, but we took ages convincing you that this wasn't stupid. Now a lot of people are land grabbing—I think Shaq's bought a team (he has), and we see a lot of that. And it's great, but we need to make sure the right steps are taken, because this level of boom is almost unprecedented, and it's a very dangerous area."

Brice advises caution in escalating eSports' reach, then—the viewer numbers and prize pools are going up every year, but he feels that "competitive integrity" needs to improve, too, before the industry can really feel it's in a secure place, its future assured. "I'm actually a big advocate of an eSports union, and I think that it will come about. I was a union man for eight and a half years myself, and this whole legitimacy for eSports is coming, but it will be in baby steps. A union is almost untenable at the moment, because we don't have the infrastructure—but we'll get there."

Call of Duty is an eSports mainstay, with Black Ops III developers Treyarch committed to maintaining its high profile in the market alongside both publishers Activision and the makers of the forthcoming Infinite Warfare, Infinity Ward. For Swan, he first realized he had a future in it back in 2011, at the CoD XP event in Los Angeles, the game's first million-dollar tournament. "A few 18-year-old lads from the UK decided to get a team together. We were massive underdogs, but we qualified to play in LA, and took it all in our stride. There was no pressure on us, we ended up placing fourth, and we took away $100,000 between four of us. My parents got it, then. Their scepticism fell away, and they saw how it could be a legitimate occupation. Before that, I had no intention of pursuing this professionally. But now, I don't think I'll ever lose interest, and I'm not about to give this up for anything else, anytime soon. It's a privilege to be able to do this, and actually pretty humbling when you see how far people have come to support you."

Yet while CoD isn't going anywhere, it's going to come up against some fierce competition in 2016, from other shooters like LawBreakers and Overwatch. But if this is making Treyarch sweat a little, the company's director of brand development, Jay Puryear, isn't showing the signs of it. Backstage at Le Zénith, I talk to him about how easy it isn't to launch a new title aimed squarely at the eSports market.

"It's very difficult to start a game by saying: this is going to be an eSports title. How do you even do that?" Jay's face scrunches into one of comedically perplexed exaggeration. "You can't just create a new sport without having a critical mass. Now, Call of Duty has such a history of players, maps and memories, and that gives us a great advantage. Obviously we have critical mass, but more pertinently, this is important to us. The Call of Duty World League is a franchise play, something we want to support across multiple titles. This isn't about capitalizing on a fad, or one particular title; it's about looking at pillars, at CoD titles from multiple studios. Call of Duty changes every year, but when it comes to eSports there needs to be these same things you see every time, albeit always improved."

Treyarch listened closely to feedback from pro players when designing the multiplayer maps and competitive modes for Black Ops III. "Professionals look at the maps different to most players. They will find lines of sight that we never saw coming. So they're constantly pushing us to design better maps. But the other challenge is finding the balance between public matches and how professionals play the game. So, it's a constant balancing act between the two, and neither side should be stronger than the other, but both need to be considered, equally."

And Black Ops III offers a portal into eSports, into the CoD World League, for casual players who'd never considered the game as a spectator attraction before. "If you turn the game on, and there's a tournament happenings somewhere, you can see a widget in the upper left-hand corner, inviting you to watch it now. And that's introducing a lot of our players to eSports.

"It's our belief that eSports players are becoming stars in their own rights, and that's very aspirational. You watch them at home and you might think: 'Hey, I'm as good as these guys.' Or you see a new strategy, and then you give it a go yourself, then and there, inside the game. That's a very interesting connection that we have. That aspirational part is huge for us."

OpTic Gaming celebrate their win at Le Zénith

In a moment of quiet, before Millenium play their final Saturday match, Swan slouches beside me on a sofa that's only half as comfortable as it thinks it is. "This is its own medium of entertainment, on its own platform of competition," he says. "And when you're getting six figures and more in terms of concurrent viewers, for an event like this, and you have thousands of people always tuning in, it does legitimise it. It proves that eSports has transcended its niche. It's not mainstream yet, obviously, in as much as it's not a 'conventional' sport, but it is a flourishing industry."

Brice, sat nearby, is in agreement: "I remember doing ESWC four years ago, and I set up my own PC, we didn't have a mixing desk, I had two headsets, and we had a standard-def webcam. It was just me and one other guy, for 13 hours a day. Now, we have a production crew, additional talent, and there's a 5,000-person crowd out there. And this is just going to get bigger as the years go by."

Current predictions set the global eSports revenue for 2017 at $465 million, up from $195 million in 2015. The trend is clear: the thin line on the not-so-little graph of income and exposure over time passed is on a strictly upwards tangent, and shows no sign of dipping. 2016 will see some new games hoping for a slice of the eSports action fall short of achieving anywhere close to the necessary critical mass—Evolve being one such title from 2015. That's inevitable—might be Paragon, might be Overwatch, might be Battleborn. You suspect, though, that Call of Duty will be around forever. And 20 years from now, when it'll still be around, will anyone be viewing eSports, the games and the competitors alike, with scepticism? I don't think so. The corner of acceptance is being turned, and before long only the utterly naïve will look upon events like this with any scorn, offering in a cackling, mocking tone: "It's not a real sport." I've been there, in the middle of it, between the cacophony of a packed-tight crowd and the ecstasy and anguish of the on-stage winners and losers. It felt pretty real to me.

@MikeDiver

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This again. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Here in Vancouver, you can't throw a brick without hitting someone who's participated in an ayahuasca ceremony. Like when yoga swept the city about a decade ago, I think it's fair to assume this is a good thing—because how could more people being into mindfulness, meditation, and self-transformation be bad? (Terrible fashion, notwithstanding.)

Photo by William Martin via

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It all changed a year ago today. People danced in Dublin's streets when Ireland became the first country in the world to vote through marriage equality by referendum. For a country that had only decriminalized homosexuality in 1993, the vote symbolized a resolute step towards shaking off its traditionally Catholic conservatism.

Irish journalist and Yes campaigner Charlie Bird has published book A Day In May, looking back at the experiences of LGBT people and their families affected by the move towards marriage equality. His aim was to put a human face to a potentially dry and politicized conversation. I rang Charlie up to hear about the stories he gathered for the book, those that lingered with him, and what he's learned in the year since the vote.

VICE: Hi Charlie, can you tell me about your initial involvement in the Yes Equality campaign?
Charlie Bird: I'd been working for Ireland's national broadcaster for almost 40 years, and as a journalist you keep away from activist politics and don't get involved. All I did was chair the launch of the Yes campaign's first meeting, but as I oversaw more meetings, the same theme recurred again: brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, people telling their own stories. And that's what last year was all about.

Charlie Bird

The book's a pretty powerful compilation of interviews and photography. What made you choose that particular concept?
I interviewed 80 people, sat in a room with each individual who, in a way, was telling me the most personal and intimate details of their life. They were doing it because they felt they wanted to raise a voice. At many points I laughed and cried. Doing this book was emotionally draining, but it was this human intensity that I wanted the book to carry.

What particular stories from the book stood out to you?
One that really blew me away was the story of Enda Morgan and his daughter Rachel—it features in the book. Enda's talking about how Rachel had covered up her sexuality, not telling her parents or her friends. She was lying to everybody, hiding from the whole world.

It was creating this huge anxiety for her. When she was driving back from Galway one time an incredible anxiety attack took hold of her and she called her mother, convinced that she was dying. What are we doing to our loved ones and the people around us when we allow this to happen?

Thankfully Rachel had loving parents. Enda's own brother was gay so they were open and receptive. Rachel describes how that when she told her parents, all her anxiety went away. She and her partner are now planning to get married, and I was just blown back by the story.

What have you learned in the year since the vote?
At a recent book event in Cork, a father approached me asked me to sign his copy of the book. I asked him who to and he replied, "I don't want you to sign it to anybody. I have an 11-year-old son. I'd love you to sign your name but simply write the words, 'Be Yourself.'" This is the nature of the change that we're witnessing across this country. Another person who had voted No told me that if he were to vote again he'd vote Yes. The intervening year has opened up hearts further.

But surveys and reports on the mental health of young LGBT people in Ireland are frightening. Self-harm and even suicide is still a massive problem. The figures are going up, not down. There are still huge challenges to be overcome. In fact, we decided that all royalties from the sale of the book will go to suicide awareness. In the past year I've become much more that there's much work still to be done.

The coming-out stories of June Hamill, Arthur Leahy and Kathryn O'Riordan (left to right), all feature in the book. Photos by John Minihan

That being said, what did the campaign teach you?
Well, 1.2 million people voted Yes but what astonished me was the realization that Irish people were voting for someone they knew and loved. It was the right thing to do for their loved ones.

The emotion and common unity was powerful in this country last year. I open my introduction with a quote from Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney: "the dazzle of the impossible suddenly blazed across the threshold." I think it beautifully captures that feeling.

What do you think about the way LGBT rights have developed in Ireland, in all the time you've been reporting?
You sometimes have to pinch yourself. Many of the young people have no memory of what might be called "the dark period"—when the Catholic Church ruled everything. It wasn't just one generation, though, it was overwhelmingly passed with 62 percent of people voting Yes. I know many people did vote 'No,' and that's what democracy was about, but there was some energy.

The emotion was amazing, that Ireland should make history in becoming the first country in the world to vote, by popular mandate, to bring in marriage equality. Absolutely mind-blowing. In the UK the Tories had to introduce it, in the US the Supreme Court ruled it through, but we did it in a sense the hard way. The people took to the polling booth and willed it into being.

You sound both happy about what's been accomplished so far and aware of challenges that may come up next.
There are many places that marriage equality has still not yet been achieved, for example, in Northern Ireland. At the book launch in Belfast last week, we jokingly said how we want to get a copy of this book into the hands of every Northern Irish politician. If you simply read the stories and boil them down to basics—take politics out of the equation—and learn about your neighbor, a young person, a couple, any person in the book, you'll think, how can we deny them?

Thanks, Charlie.

Follow David on Twitter

A couple of guys fighting in the street in London. Screen shot via

Street fighting is one of society's great levelers. No matter who you are, where you're from, how much money you spend on shampoo, which deity you do or don't believe in, picking a fight with a stranger for no real reason always makes you a huge dickhead.

However, that doesn't mean street fights don't happen. They happen a lot, on the street, in parks and nightclubs the world over. Go out in literally any major city on a Friday night and chances are you'll see people scrapping, sometimes in that sloppy drunk way that ends with both parties bleeding a little bit and shouting a lot; sometimes in that genuinely worrying way that sees one person hospitalized and the other in a cell.

Alcohol is undoubtedly the most common reason that humans attack other humans for little to no reason at all. But what else is at play? Why do some people seemingly go out looking for a fight? And how does a particularly vicious attack affect you afterwards? I spoke to a few people about their last street fights to find out.

Billie

VICE: Talk me through the last time you got in a fight.
Billie: I was 14 or 15, and the hardest girl in town, a 19-year-old mom, started on me for looking at her. Classic Great Yarmouth.

Were you scared?
A bit; she was properly hard and had a rep.

What kind of rep?
For just doing in people randomly and that.

So how did it go down?
I was with my mate, and this girl, and a few of her equally scary mates are walking towards us, and I haven't got my glasses on, so I guess I'm squinting a bit. She comes bounding over, shouting at me, "What you looking at? Why the fuck you staring at me?" I try to leave, and she's like, "Nah, you're not leaving," then she swings at me, and I think one of her punches lands. I swing back a couple of times, but I'm this little 14-year-old and she's a big girl, so I doubt it did much damage.

How did it affect you after?
I was a bit shook, but after a day or two it was calm. It was my first fight so felt a bit weird, but it also gassed me up in a weird way. Like, I had a fight with this hard girl, and although I by no means came out on top, I didn't get myself kicked in either, so mixed emotions. I don't enjoy violence or confrontation much, though, so not too gassed.

What do you feel about fighting in general?
I guess sometimes it's necessary.

How?
Like if some creep won't leave you alone and he's getting really touchy, he's not gonna listen to your voice—you're gonna have to push him around. Some people only respond to violence, unfortunately.

Why do you think that girl wanted to fight you?
I think for her it was a status thing. If some girl's looking at her funny and she's known as this hard nut, she can't show herself up. Asserting her dominance, proving herself—almost animalistic.

Pasquale

What happened the last time you got in a fight?
Pasquale: I'm from Archway, that roundabout in north London, and at a bar on this roundabout there was a drum 'n' bass night every Friday. I was there with a load of people, and our mate Shawn had wandered off and come back. Shawn was pure trouble. He once survived a huge shock getting struck by a wire while he was train surfing. As it happens, when he wandered off, he'd wound up a group of very large eastern European men—about eight to ten of them. We didn't know this at the time, so it came as a surprise when they came running across the road and hopped the fence and just started punching us at random.

What then?
Shawn started knocking people out. I saw him get bottled, but I don't even think he noticed. My other friend Will, who was also a bit of a warlord, was on crutches from a recent moped accident and started swinging his crutches. Everyone was swinging fists.

What about you?
I remember punching a guy and knocking him down, and, before I could even lift my championship belt, getting immediately punched to the floor, and before that guy could kick me when I was down, getting knocked by someone else.

How did you feel being in that mix?
It wasn't fear. Anger and adrenaline, but also weirdly fun.

What was the conclusion?
We fought them out of the roundabout and it became a shouting match across the road. They flung a big Smirnoff bottle and hit my mate Mike in the eye and knocked him out. This restarted everything, but this time it spread all around Archway. Will, on crutches, chased a few of them up Highgate Hill with his brothers. Me and a few others chased some up the parallel Archway road, where police pulled up, jumped out and took my mate and one of them to the floor. Mike came out of his daze concussed, with an eye closed up with glass fragments in it, and very angry. He got arrested while going for this dude. Ended up having to have surgery on his eye and went to jail for ABH .

How did it make you feel after?
I was proud that we held our own in our area, I guess; you've got that stupid local pride as a kid. But ultimately, pretty empty and worried about my mate.

Did it make you more or less inclined to fight in future?
There was definitely a gap in altercations, but there were a couple more, and more custodial sentences before we became adults and slowly separated from dudes like Shawn. I'll always defend myself if there's no other option, but as you grow out of certain scenes and people, these situations don't arise at all.

How would you deal with things these days?
I wonder how I would. No such incident has happened since that era, and London's a different place now mostly. Pride isn't such a thing as you become an adult. If anything, you take pride in walking away.

Jan

Talk me through the last time you had a scrap.
Jan: It was about two years ago. It was in the early hours of the morning, after a Friday or Saturday night out, purely fed by alcohol and the horrendous music of Café de Paris. After the club closed, me and about five friends headed out, merry and not looking for trouble. A random person came up and asked my friend if he'd had a good night, to which my friend said, "Yes, mate, thanks." He asked again: "Are you sure?" Then he kind of lightly slapped my friend's face and said, "Good, good—have a good one, bro," and then turned to walk away.

Did it seem like something was about to kick off?
I had a feeling something was gonna happen, yeah. He then turned around and told my friend to go fuck himself and called him a refugee, maybe due to his skin color being similar to mine—he was English born but Spanish blood. He then went to throw a punch after no provocation, and before I knew it we were two versus about five guys that I didn't even know were there with this guy. We fought in a bit of a scrap for a few seconds until my other mates caught up and it turned into a big brawl.

Where there any police or bouncers about?
The bouncers at the door didn't get involved for a while—I could just vaguely hear them shouting that the police were on the way. I didn't take any severe damage, but one of my friends got kicked in the head while he was on the floor. Then the bouncers got involved relatively calmly, and just held us until the police arrived. My mate called the police racist cunts and ended up in Charing Cross police station while we all went home.

How has it affected you since?
I think I'm more scared of street fights now, to be honest. I've been involved in similar situations where someone seems to be looking for a fight, but I try to walk away and have managed to just apologize, even if I don't think I'm wrong.

Do you think people fight because they don't have a proper release for their negative energy?
Potentially, but I think some people gain a lot of courage when they're drunk and maybe want to show off to friends or girls. In this case, I don't know, because none of us said anything to provoke the fight—but maybe he had a point to prove. Maybe he'd had a bad day, or maybe alcohol does that to him every time he goes out.

Do you think the UK has a problem with fighting in general?
One hundred percent. I'm abroad at the moment and some of the behavior is shocking—drunken English people causing trouble. But that also goes for the Aussies and Kiwis. The locals drink too, but seem to have a lot more fun at the end of the night and go home merry. I feel like, in our culture, if the night doesn't end with taking a girl home or finding drugs, fights seem to be the last resort for some people.

Becky

What happened in your last street fight?
Becky: I was about 17, I think—the first year of college. It was summer, so a group of us were in the park, drinking and getting stoned. There was another group, from a different local college, so it was instant bad vibes.

How did it all go down?
There was this one chick being bare loud and drunk and rowdy—I think we were slyly creasing at her from where we were sitting. Fast forward a few hours and the two groups start to mingle, so it's almost like one big circle, but this girl is in the middle, wasted, and attention-seeking. She starts to try it with a few of us, then she starts swiping at the boys. I think I said something like, "Fucking sort yourself out," and she just shot up, ran over to me, spat in my face, and pushed me. So I shoved her back, then she punched me in the mouth—my lip split open and was bleeding like crazy.

What did you do?
I guess I saw red, because I don't really remember what happened from then until my friend Jack was pulling me off her. I vaguely recall punching her, but no real details. I think I broke her nose, because I remember they called the ambulance and we had to leave. Everyone seemed impressed, like, "Wahey, go Becky, you broke some chick's nose!" But I was just embarrassed.

Did you ever see her again?
I think I only saw her once, which was lucky, seeing as we went to that same park every day after college. I was really scared to see her, though.

Why?
She wasn't scary, but maybe I felt like her mates were scary, or she had some scary crew. Girls are terrifying sometimes.

Tell me about it. Did you change in any way afterwards?
Emotionally, I was pretty shaken up immediately after. The fact this weird thing had got hold of me and made me fuck up some girl's face, and I didn't really remember it happening, was kind of internally terrifying. Plus I fancied one of the guys in my group, so it was super humiliating to have done that in front of him. I was scary enough to boys at the time as it was.

What about long-term?
I think, when I was younger, I used to get a kick out of being around fights, getting a bit rowdy, and trying to prove myself. But after that, I knew I could maybe hold my own, but I didn't want to go mental again and lose my head.

Do you think girls and guys get in fights for different reasons, or is it all the same?
I think a lot of men have experienced a lot more fighting growing up, either intentionally or not. The ability to hold their own and defend themselves is maybe more entwined with their identity as masculine men, whereas I felt completely unfeminine and embarrassed about getting into a fight. I'm not a girly girl, and definitely can be mouthy, but it did feel at odds with the sexual female thing I was trying to give off in front of the guy I liked.

Did you end up getting with the guy?
No.

Rupert

Tell me about the last fight you had.
Rupert: I was in Aldeburgh, in Suffolk. My friend got in a little altercation with quite a small guy and I stepped in and asked the guy to leave it out. He hit me, so I retaliated. Little did I know, he had six friends waiting around the corner. They circled me and started kicking me in the face and ribs. One was in Timberlands and caught me square in mouth, knocking a tooth clean out, root and all.

Ouch.
Not ideal, is it?

Did the police get involved?
The police were called, and they knew of the gang that did it. They often used this small guy, Mikey, to start fights, and they'd hide and come in and beat the shit out of whoever they chose. They were local. The police couldn't press charges as he said I hit him first. I got no compensation and ended up with a removable tooth.

How much did the new tooth cost?
My denture was £800 .

How did you feel during the fight?
I remember he nutted me first and I sort of leapt at that opportunity to retaliate. I was winning at first, so it was great, I guess. But I vividly remember being really scared when all his friends were around me kicking me, and when the tooth came out it was quite traumatic. It's really bad when you lose something you know you can never get back.

Did it dent your confidence at all?
I wouldn't say so, but it definitely changed my outlook on fighting. I am now of the view that there is always a way of talking yourself out of a situation, even if that's just by saying sorry, even if it's not your fault, or just walking away. Obviously situations happen that you can't control—friends get into fights and you have to get involved. But in that situation I just try to defuse it, like try talking sense to my friend so the fight doesn't kick off.

If you had any advice for yourself back then, what would it be?
This situation really upset my mom and dad, so it would be to think about how your actions can affect the people you love and who love you.

Follow Tom Usher on Twitter.

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.

Kevin Rowland is beloved by wedding DJs across the land. As lead singer in Dexys Midnight Runners, he was responsible for the perennial floor-filler "Come On Eileen." Outside the British Isles, the band are thought of as one-hit wonders, but at home they were household names, most famous for their classic trio of 80s albums and Rowland's flawless collection of wide-brimmed fedoras and vintage tailored suits.

After they disbanded, Kevin Rowland had an unsuccessful solo career and eventually decided, after a 27-year break, that he'd bring back the old band. In 2012, Dexys—shortened from the original name—started work again. They're about to released their second album, Let The Record Show: Dexys Do Irish Country And Soul, under this truncated guise.

VICE: What would your parents prefer you to have chosen for a career?
Kevin Rowland: I think my mom was happy as long as I was happy. I was a dreamer, really. I wasn't doing well at school. I had the feeling of being a failure and was finding it hard to keep up, so I thought a fresh start might be the thing. I think my dad was happy how it turned out. He's a different guy to me; he's into security and he found it hard to get his head round me going into a business without security.

What was your worst phase?
Style-wise, definitely when I was about 17. I had left school, I had some money in my pocket, I was feeling good. The style of the time in the late 60s was short hair. The media called it skinhead, but no one else did. But as soon as the media got a hold of it, everyone started to grow their hair, but because my hair was curly it grew outwards. I hadn't figured out a way to deal with it as no one blow-dried their hair at that point, and straighteners weren't around. I just felt horrible and really self conscious about it. I 'd been very up front in terms of style with my gang in Harrow—the Harrow Crew—and I was known to be at the forefront, style-wise. People would ask me about clothes, and all of a sudden I didn't feel like I belonged. I'd go to a club and just feel awkward. I went into myself a bit, and when you go into yourself you never look good.

How many books have you actually read and finished this year?
Not one. I'm on the internet way too much. It's a distraction.

How many people have been in love with you?
I would say about seven. I'm not in relationship now and I've never been married, so seven is probably about the right amount.

When in your life have you been truly overcome with fear?
Every time I go onstage or go into the recording studio to do a vocal. It's the days leading up to it that are the worst. It just feels horrible. I feel a relief when I wake up the morning it's actually happening. I think, 'Today I can do it. Thank god I can get it over with.'

Complete this sentence: the problem with young people today...
...is that it's very hard for them. They get demonized in the media about knives and crime, in the rags. But there was always violence when I was young. Kids carried knives; I saw someone get hit with a hatchet. All this stuff has been going on a long time and they just make out that it's new. I'd much rather be around younger people than people my age. I live in east London and I know it's becoming a bit like Camden Market in parts, but there are still a lot of creative people around.

What would be your last meal?
Fried egg and chips, probably at E Pellicci.

Would you have sex with a robot?
Definitely. It's humans I have problems with.

What's the grossest injury or illness you've ever had?
After a difference of opinions with a nightclub bouncer at my brother's bachelor party, I got a broken jaw. I ended up in the hospital for two weeks, which wasn't terrible, but I had to have my teeth wired together for six weeks and had to eat through a straw. I was talking like a bad ventriloquist. So my teeth were pretty gross 'cause I couldn't clean them other than with salt water. So yeah: that was pretty gross.

What TV show or film makes you cry?
Born On the Fourth of July. Because it's got this guy, Tom Cruise, full of hopes and belief in what he's been told about the Vietnam War. He then gets paralyzed from the waist down in Vietnam, comes home, and the prevailing mood in the country is anti-war. So not only is he paralyzed for what he thought he believes in, he now has to come to terms with the fact that he was wrong; he got it all fucking wrong. He eventually finds himself by fighting against the war. It's beautiful. It makes me a bit tearful now talking about it.

Without Googling, explain how global warming basically works.
I think it's something to do with all the chemicals, the gases that we're producing, that are piercing a hole in the ozone layer, and now we're not getting enough protection from the sun. Blimey, I didn't even know I knew that.

What have you done in your career that you're most proud of?
It's possibly my restless spirit, but I'm not that proud of what I've done. I never listen to the 80s music, unless I'm out and hear it, or maybe if someone posts something on Facebook. I'd have to say this album, and that's the absolute truth from my heart, because I feel finally that I'm a singer. I've placed myself center stage, you know, with my voice as an instrument. I can get better, but I'm more confident as a singer and do feel I nailed these songs.

What memory from school stands out to you stronger than others?
I got in trouble a lot at primary school, and I remember the head nun getting my mom up to the school and telling her I was misbehaving and that I was never gonna be any good. I remember my mom crying and getting punishment from my dad. It seemed like the end of the world, and the nuns were crying over me, for me, because I'd done this thing. It was a hell of a guilt trip. It might sound like a small thing to anyone else, but to me it was massive. It was so big. I thought I was going to hell.

If you had to give up sex or kissing, which would it be?
I'm presuming by sex you mean full sex? Yeah, I'd give up sex, because kissing can be really sexy. Might be a tad frustrating, but sex complicates things. I've had some great relationships that have been ruined by sex. But kissing? You know, you can kinda go there without fucking things up to much, committing too much, getting into expectation too much.

Do you think drugs can make you happy?
They definitely helped me initially. Ecstasy was amazing when I first took it. It showed me what was wrong with my life. I found I could talk to people and they would talk back to me. Before that I'd been really uptight. My first pill was around 1987, after the first three Dexys albums. I didn't really knew where I was or what I was doing. I was going out to clubs but I was just tense. Then, one night, I went out and took ecstasy, and it just completely relaxed me. I felt at ease and at peace with everybody. I went up to this girl, a friend, not a sexual thing, and said, "Hey, how are ya?" She went, "I'm alright, why are you being so friendly?" I told her I was always friendly. She said, "You're fucking not."

But I got addicted to cocaine, and my life became much darker than it had ever been. I had lots of demons and pain in me, but they really came out in the last three years of my cocaine addiction. And it just became my life; it took over. I was a maniac. I could not stop taking it, no matter what the reason. But I got into a program of recovery in '93 and that was like my protection. I'm still in it, and been clean ever since. I'm lucky. I'm blessed.

If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you carry on doing what you 're doing, or stop working?
I'd definitely carry on. One-hundred percent. For a short period of time in the 80s, I had the feeling of having a lot of money. It didn't satisfy me. It just created a whole lot of other issues. I like what Jim Carrey said: "I wish everybody could be rich and famous and have their dreams come true, so they could find out that it's not the answer." That's very true.

Follow David Hillier on Twitter.

Guests at a Falsa Boda party

Nico's having a shitty Saturday night in Buenos Aires. He's just been jilted at the altar by his stunning bride, and the registrar is about to call off the nuptials. Me and 699 other guests look on, mortified, some bellowing insults at the would-be wife. But one minute: best man Juan Simón is down on one knee, proposing to the bridesmaid. Julieta instantly accepts. A live telenovela is unravelling before our eyes.

A wedding—though not the planned wedding—is back on. The new happy couple swiftly exchanges vows, but more importantly, our eagerly anticipated fiesta is about to shimmy into action. Of course it is. This is all part of the script penned by Trineo Creativo, the production company whose Falsa Boda (fake weddings) are captivating young Argentines with their soap opera-style plot twists and all-night parties.

After ten years of living in Buenos Aires I've attended my fair share of bodas. Besides numerous registry office services, I was witness for a gay couple and travelled 500 miles for a full-on marquee bash in The Pampas. And while the similarities to getting hitched elsewhere are numerous—meringue frocks and tossing the bouquet—what Argentines really crave is the fiesta.

The problem is that there just aren't enough bodas to go around (my last invite was in 2013). The number of couples in Argentina saying I do dropped a huge 61 percent between 1990 and 2011, according to the Vatican Annual Report. Argentine millennials—who, thanks to predominantly Italian and Spanish heritage, are very family-oriented—feel they're missing out on participating in this life experience. It's a sentiment shared by the organizers themselves.

A fake bride and groom at a Falsa Boda party

Gastón Gennai from Trineo Creativo says: "Three years ago, we were five bachelors talking about the fact we'd only get to go to a wedding together if we had girlfriends in common. That's when we had the idea of organizing a mock event, complete with a script. We rented a space—imagine the owner's face when he found out no one was actually tying the knot—and around 300 people came to that first falsa boda."

The groom and immediate entourage are actors, tonight's bride clearly isn't a natural blonde and even the cake's a fake. Everyone is under 25—except me and plus one Daniel—so there isn't even a generational cross section toddling or staggering around the dance floor. The only glimmer of reality? Legit booze and a massive party. That, however, doesn't perturb the Argentines who are hoofing up canapés, getting trashed at the open bar, taking selfies, and already starting to pair up (after all, where better to get lucky than at someone else's wedding night?).

They certainly don't mind paying the price tag, which is pretty real at 650 pesos annual wage—for something of that magnitude in a country where inflation hits around 30 percent each year.

Shelling out isn't an issue, says Florencia, 22, who's on her second fake wedding at the same venue in the Palermo neighborhood with two friends; she just wants a fiesta. "My mom and dad got together when she was 16, and they've been married for 30 years. There's no way in hell I can see that happening to me," she says. "Honestly, I love it, it's utopia, but marriages that last that long are strange nowadays. If I love someone, I don't need a piece of paper to prove it. But I do want to go to the party."

Gisela, 25, adds: "I was four the only time I went to a real wedding, so this is my chance to go to one with my friends. I didn't even see the couple get married last time—we just came for the fiesta!"

A fake husband getting chucked around at a Falsa Boda party

Since the first event was staged in La Plata in 2013, Falsa Boda has rolled out to other cities including Córdoba and Rosario, staging weddings every few weeks that sell out within a few days. From intimate sit-down dinners for 100 guests to vast celebrations catering for 1,000, Falsa Boda's success is based on life imitating life in the shape of an Argentine wedding experience: video messages recorded by "friends," the nuptials themselves, a live band, classic cumbia tracks everyone sings along to, cotillón wigs and comedy spectacles, dancing until dawn and endless Fernet and cola. And, as neighboring Uruguay and even Russia have latched on, it proves the pseudo wedding isn't just an Argentine fad, according to Buenos Aires-based psychoanalyst Dr. Megdy Zawady.

"It's a cultural movement that obeys the fact that the lines for important ideals such as marriage and family have blurred," he says. "The majority of people no longer believe in eternal love or a commitment forever, and relationships don't last as long as our parents' or grandparents' have done. This type of event does, however, trivialize a mundane link between two people, making a fun parody out of something that used to be solemn, that of accepting a commitment for life. And I don't think it just applies to Argentina."

But blurring the lines is part of the attraction, says 23-year-old Quillén: "Marriage is pretty formal nowadays, and I've come here because I've never been to a 'real' wedding. The couple isn't the main event, though. I'm here to have a great time, plus it's fun to play my role as a guest: it's very theatrical and I like that."

Aspirational and inspirational images on social media are obviously key to Falsa Boda's raging success: the proof is 47,000-plus Facebook fans who tag and hashtag like crazy before, during, and after the ceremony. And make believe is more popular than real life, given that just 12,500 couples wed in the city of Buenos Aires in 2014. Instagrammer @natalitiaaa wistfully commented on a recent photo depicting the fictitious nuptials of one glowing "happy" couple: "It's my dream to have a wedding like this." Additional personal touches by Trineo Creativo reel in the first 60 guests who pay to play the bride and groom's "friends"; added to a WhatsApp group, they're assigned tasks such as filming those messages of support.

Gastón adds: "People get to live an experience they don't usually have—we give them a protagonist's role they'd never get at a nightclub. Everyone who comes to falsa boda has a part: besides being a party, it's also theater."

Wandering around the falsa boda, I'm taken back to the 1990s, when 14-year-old me and my friends would go to balls—parties in a safe environment for middle-class teenagers wearing posh frocks. Here, I feel like an aging extra in this matrimonial farce, and after a few vodka and Sprites to make the cumbia more tolerable, the lines quickly blur: I can't quite tell whether the guy passed out on the sofa, firmly clutching a glass, is pseudo wasted or really wasted, or whether Bride One is happier with or without Nico, or just loves having her photo taken.

Everyone else is having a ball, though. That is, until the fiesta is closed down by local authorities at 3:30 in the morning for failing to stock condoms in the men's bathroom. Just another, albeit unexpected, plot twist on fake wedding night.

Still from the VICE documentary 'Cash for Kim'

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

After getting their hands on a report on the death of a North Korean labor worker at a Polish shipyard, VICE Germany recently mounted an investigation into European companies that employ North Korean laborers.

For their documentary, VICE Germany spoke to Dr. Remco Breuker, professor of Korean studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Breuker heads an international task force consisting of lawyers, scientists, and human rights experts who do research on forced North Korean laborers working in the EU. Breuker had many more interesting things to say than would fit in the documentary, so here's an extended, slightly edited version of the conversation VICE host Sebastian Weis had with him.

VICE: Why did you feel you needed to start this task force?
Professor Breuker: We heard the news that the DPRK had forced laborers working in the European Union—which was strange, to say the least. North Korea is particularly notorious for its disdain for human rights, and it's very difficult to do anything about that. You can try to pressure Kim Jong-un but that changes nothing substantial.

What kind of people are in this task force?
We're a group made up of people from different backgrounds. I have an expertise in Korean studies and there's another member with the same background. But there are also experts on labor laws, international labor laws, human rights, North Korean studies, and people with expertise in government.

Related: Watch 'Cash for Kim'

How long have you known that there are laborers from North Korea working in the EU?
We've known for quite some time, actually. There have been laborers in the Czech Republic for example—that ended in 2006 or 2007. Eastern European countries have traditionally always had a better relationship with North Korea than most western European countries, and many of them still maintain that relationship. So you'll find the most North Korean laborers in those countries.

Why does North Korea send laborers abroad?
Because of money. For the last two or three years, North Korea hasn't been able to export as much, so any way to make hard currency for the country is welcome. That's why they send people all over the world. They get some from China and countries in Africa, but there's just more money to be made in Europe—especially when you don't pay taxes and you don't pay for any kind of insurance. You can earn as much as £24,000 per individual North Korean laborer a year. That's a lot of money.

Are the North Korean laborers working in Poland getting paid?
It seems that all the money they make goes to the state, directly or through the company they work for—which is owned by the state. There has been some research on this, and the estimation is that a North Korean laborer in Europe earns about £55 a year of extra income.

Is it fair to say the North Korean laborers are a kind of slaves?
That's a very complicated question. People in North Korea sign up for the job voluntarily. They are proud to be able to go abroad. But the horrible part of the story is that many of them get hurt on the job, and that their working conditions are really, really bad. The work is dirty, dangerous, and underpaid—that's why North Korean laborers are being hired to do it. They work hard, they obey, they're cheap, and they do all the work no one else wants to do. But everybody wants to get out of North Korea—they try to survive and sign up to go abroad. So I don't think you can speak of voluntary labor, really.

If I see North Korean workers in Poland or anywhere else in the EU—can I go talk to them?
You can, but the consequences for a worker, his colleagues, and his family at home could be bad. One of the criteria for a North Korean laborer is actually that he has a family with at least two children, so that his family can be used as leverage. So I'd advise against talking to anyone who's an employee of the North Korean state in Europe.

How can something like this still happen in the EU?
Because we like money as much as anyone else. There is a lot of money to be made here.

Doesn't it violate the European Convention on Human Rights?
The fact that North Korean laborers are working under these conditions is against many EU regulation laws and international treaties. You're obliged to take care of the basic conditions under which they work. The fact that they don't own their salary, for example, is a complete violation.

What would you call what North Korea does? What would you compare it with?
I think North Korea is the world's largest job agency. They send people where they're needed, to whoever is willing to pay. North Korea doesn't behave like a state, it behaves like a company. It thinks only of the interest of its shareholders and does everything to make sure the CEO and the board of directors stay in power and make as much money as they can.

In the midst of the celebrity frenzy that is Cannes, the city's luxe hotels attract almost as many paparazzi as the red carpet. Today, as I write this, photographers and fans are swarming around the entrance of the Grand Hyatt Hotel Martinez, all cloying to get a shot of Kim Kardashian.

The celebrity-stalking press first got their name back in 1960. This was when Federico Fellini's 1960 classic La Dolce Vita featured a photographer named Paparazzo, whose name roughly describes the annoying buzz of a mosquito. Today paparazzi are still seen as morally-depraved pests, who will do anything for the money shot.

It seems few jobs could be as soul-destroying as hanging outside celebrity haunts, hoping to photograph stars doing something vulnerable in order to make a few bucks. So this year at Cannes, I hung out with paparazzi as they waited for Kim to make her exit, trying to understand why they do what they do, and how they view their industry.

Maxine Raffled, Paris

This is my 11th Cannes film festival. Do I like it? It's like the Olympic games. A lot of people from different countries all competing for the same subjects. "Subjects," that's what we call the actors.

I don't know if there's any ultimate person nowadays, but maybe Kim Kardashian. She's meant to be coming, she's being followed right now. How much you get paid is less about how famous the person is and more about what's happening with that person. You can have a minor famous person who's crazy.

There's actually nothing going on at Cannes by the moment; the actors are totally run by the industry. The freedom they have is very limited... Cannes isn't about the movies, it's about branding, about banks, fashion, jewelry, drinks, all that stuff. It's one big brothel. A lot of whores and pimps. Actors, they're all whores.

It's not about disrespecting or respecting celebrities, that's what paparazzi are here for. If I were them, I'd have a lot of fun. They don't know how to enjoy the fun. If you can use the press, do it. Kim's the best. She's absolutely manipulating us.

Casey Kennelly, London

It gets a bit long and tiring, especially festivals like this because you're working 19-hour days. You'll get up seven in the morning and you'll get here about eight, you won't get home some days until early morning. It's rough. This is my fifth year in Cannes, I've been doing this job for six years.

Sometimes I feel bad, depending on who the celebrity is. If it's a UK celebrity that I speak to and I get on with, and I take a picture that doesn't paint them in a good light, yeah I feel bad. Sometimes, if I know the person well enough, I won't do the picture. But that's what paparazzi are all about, getting pictures that someone doesn't want taken.

It's all about the information—you have to know where to go, who's coming, and where. I don't think there are many people I haven't seen now. Once Victoria Beckham came out of a big party and she wet herself. I suppose that was one of the worst. But I didn't feel sorry for her. She's horrible to us.

Laurene Favier, Paris

I've been doing this for eight years. In Paris, there are like two other women paparazzi. Sometimes it's hard being in a male environment all the time but sometimes it's cool. They take care of me and treat me better than the other guys and it's easier for me to get inside because nobody thinks I'm paparazzi and I can put my camera in my bag. I can get into places, I use my charm, I'm always smiling.

We have to know all the stars. Every day we check the websites and magazines, so when we see the same girl every day, we might not know who she is but we recognize her. We get information from the guys who work at the hotel, or their drivers, it's a lot of work. That's the route of the paparazzi, we have to get information and that's the most difficult part. Taking pictures is the easy part, and the actors who are not so famous are usually nice.

I love the work. I started ten years ago as a fan. I like to see celebrities. After two years, people started to say to me, "You know you can make money with that." I work but it's a pleasure, every day is different.

The best picture I ever took was of Madonna when she came back from a show and broke her ankle. I was the only woman there, it was like 2 AM and I took the picture... it was the most expensive picture I ever sold, around €10,000 .

Jon Beretta, London

I've been doing this for 12 years. Yeah, I still like it. It's different every day. To be honest, it's a bit of adrenaline when you get pictures.

I think people strive to have money and do interesting things with their lives and see the world. If you're a celebrity you get to do that. I know they don't get privacy but they get to go all over the world, stay in the nicest hotels, get to do things away from people. I think that's what the obsession is; the glitz and glamour.

If someone is with their kids and stuff or they want a bit of privacy, yeah, I feel bad. But sometimes they phone you, they tell you what they're doing—"Come take my picture!"—and then they want to switch it off, they don't want to know you any more.

The craziest thing I've done recently was when Kim got married. I went to Paris to work her pre-marriage thing. She was going to the Versace castle for dinner and there were like five or six Range Rovers with Kim and Kanye. We were following them through the streets of Paris; they just blocked all the traffic and went through red lights straight through the Arc de Triomphe... It was crazy.

I've done celebrity funerals in the past and I don't do them anymore, I don't like doing them. I think they're a private event, even if press get invited. If that was me and my family were grieving... Other people would do it though, they see it as a job. This is what we do. You get people that make loads of money, but they've got no life.

I hate having photos taken of myself. Hate it.

Follow Livia Albeck-Ripka on Twitter.

This piece was published in partnership with the the Influence.

Last December, in Northfield, Vermont, three people poured gasoline over a young couple and lit them on fire in an attempt to obtain crack cocaine.

Twenty-two-year-old Brittany Burt died, and her boyfriend, Efren Serrano, 26, was treated for severe burns at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He survived, but his face was burned beyond recognition.

Serrano told medical personnel that the people broke into his apartment before pouring the gasoline on him and Burt, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). A neighbor told state police investigators that he heard screaming from Serrano's apartment. That neighbor opened the door to see Serrano on fire and called 911.

The state police arrested three Vermonters: 45-year-old Tammy Wilder, 33-year-old Jonathan Zampieri, and 32-year-old Howard Hoisington. A confidential source, according to the ATF affidavit, told investigators that the three "went to that house last night to rob them," and that they were planning to steal drugs. Court documents stated that Wilder, Zampieri, and Hoisington were looking for crack cocaine.

Just after Christmas, 28-year-old Brooklyn resident Obafemi Adedapo was shot several times on a crowded street in Burlington, Vermont. He was carrying crack cocaine. Police say Adedapo is known by the New York Police Department as a member of the Cashford Crips, a gang based in Brooklyn, and that he most likely was a crack dealer.

Crack cocaine wasn't even on the average Vermonter's radar until these incidents. But they illustrate how law enforcement approaches can backfire: When authorities crack down on one drug (in this case, heroin), the illegal drug market tends to shift toward a different drug, leading to violent struggle for control of new revenue streams. It's another of the drug war's unintended consequences.

Vermont police have reported a surge in crack use. "I think there's so much attention on heroin, but let's not lose sight of other addictions and other problems," Montpelier Police Chief Anthony Facos told me in a Barre-Montpelier Times Argus interview in early December, just a few weeks before the two deadly incidents. "Crack cocaine is very much here, as well. It is significant in the region."

He and other law enforcement were puzzled that media weren't paying much attention to crack cocaine. But since January 2014, Governor Peter Shumlin has been focusing heavily on opioid problems. He famously designated his entire 2014 state-of-the-state address to the issue, which he said was gripping Vermont.

Since then, treatment, law enforcement, and media have been concentrating on heroin. At the time, Vermont had the highest rate of heroin use per capita. According to Vermont State Police, heroin-related problems have only increased since Shumlin's speech.

John Merrigan of Vermont State Police's Narcotics Investigation Unit says that he began to notice crack making a huge comeback in the summer of 2015. (This is difficult to confirm objectively because crack doesn't often lead to overdose, so measures such as calls to poison control aren't reliable.)

But here's how crackdowns on any given drug can actually make drug-related problems worse.

"There's a well described and common phenomenon called the 'balloon effect,' where enforcement in one area doesn't get rid of a problem, it simply simply moves it elsewhere," says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform, a drug-policy foundation. "It's a characteristic of drug enforcement across the world. The displacement can be geographical, or it can be between drugs. What history shows is that demand for drugs, and the incentives for criminal profiteers it creates can't be eradicated with enforcement. The market just mutates and finds a new equilibrium. At best enforcement is futile, but more often it actually makes things worse."

"We had a lull in crack," says Merrigan. "It wasn't gone, but we definitely saw a decreased amount in Vermont for maybe the last eighteen months or two years." During this time, heroin use reportedly skyrocketed.

"But for the last six months there's been a resurgence ," Merrigan says. "We've been seeing it a lot more."

Jim Johnson, a Vermont crack user and dealer interviewed for this story, was unsurprised by the deadly gasoline incident.* "I didn't have no reaction," he says. "I'm not saying things like that happen, but you see some things when you're buying crack, on crack and selling crack."

Check out our documentary about how one mother is coping with New York's restrictive medical pot law:

Rolles explains the context of such violence.

"The war on drugs has completely failed to eradicate drug markets, which continue to grow nationally and globally," he says. "What it has achieved is to dramatically inflate the price of drugs, and give control of the market to gangsters and street dealers. In the absence of formal legal regulation, violence becomes the default regulatory tool. Violence is used to enforce contracts, intimidate rivals, expand markets, and settle differences. It's the same story from Vermont to Bogotá or Kabul."

According to Merrigan, drug-related violence in Vermont has been a lot more prevalent in the last year than ever before.

He says of the distribution routes: "More often than not, distributed by the same people that distribute heroin. You can buy heroin and crack together." Traffickers come up from cities like New York City, Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts. They will typically double the price of their product.

But it's not just out-of-staters: Vermonters, often people looking to fund their own drug use, will also drive down to the cities to pick up crack for themselves and make a profit. Vermonters also work in distribution networks for out-of-state dealers, according to Vermont State Police. All the dealers need to do is bring up product. Everything else is already set up for them.

Although the sources of the drugs are similar, Merrigan thinks heroin and crack are used by different parts of Vermont's population. "There is a difference between the two regarding socioeconomic backgrounds," he says. "Crack is usually associated with people with a little less money and a little more low income."

Rolles believes the only solution to Vermont's drug problems and the associated violence is legalization, which would mean that government authorities, rather than criminal profiteers, manage the markets.

"The socially corrosive impacts of the illicit market would be dramatically reduced and the balloon effects of localized or drug-specific enforcement ended," he says.

*Name has been changed to protect his identity.

Gina Tron is a freelance journalist and author who lives in Vermont. Follow her on Twitter.

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

Photo by Fred Clifton

Not having babies costs money. But until a few months ago, I'd never considered asking my boyfriend to go halves on contraception. Then I decided to shell out a bit more for a new pill because my old friend Levlen, while amazingly cheap, was wreaking havoc on my skin.

I was relieved when he offered to split the cost because the new pill was pricey. Yet I felt torn: Should my boyfriend really have to pay just because I was sick of having the types of breakouts that are usually reserved for teenagers?

I decided to ask around, to get answers from a bunch of girls and guys on this seemingly simple question: Who should pay for the pill?

Chloe, 19

Sadly, no one has ever offered to pay for the pill, nor do I know of any close friend whose partner splits it with them. Generally girls are expected to pay the entire fee for their chosen contraception (Implanon, IUD, the pill) while boys are expected to pay for condoms.

But splitting contraception is often more complex than simply splitting a bill.
When I started dating my current partner of two years I was already on the pill, so we never had a conversation about who would pay because it was a decision I made for reasons other than just safe sex.

But I decided to go off the pill about four months ago and since then we've taken it in turns to buy condoms.

Adam, 27

I have offered and my partner initially refused, but when she was going to a more expensive pharmacist, she accepted and now we share the cost. I think I owe an extra round or two though.

Since the woman typically has to shoulder most of the admin, mental load, and stress of a potential pregnancy or termination, it seems fair that the man should cop at least half of the financial burden.

Having said that, if I thought my partner was making a poor decision about the method or brand of contraception, I probably wouldn't feel comfortable paying for it.

Zoe, 24

Yes, a partner should definitely pay half of our contraception, whether that's literally half or even covering something else in lieu. When you share so many expenses in a relationship the pill may seem affordable for women, but it potentially dissolves the responsibility of the man. I feel this should be an issue shared by both partners.

However, when I was taking the pill I generally paid just for the convenience—my partner would contribute occasionally but because guys aren't the ones booking the doctors appointments and picking up the prescriptions it's a case of out of sight, out of mind.

Phil, 26

Why doesn't everyone just use the cheaper option like the IUD or the Implanon? That way it's a one off payment and see you later. I've never been asked and I've never thought to offer. My last girlfriend was in Germany and everything is free there. Back at home in England it's only a few quid every three months.

I don't know if guys should have to pay for a girl who's using a really expensive pill for reasons other than contraception. I mean, if I had some bowel condition would they be paying for my treatment? And when do you start paying? The third date? There are a lot of questions.

Tom, 29

I think splitting is definitely optional. I mean contraception is as arbitrary an area as any to mandate equal spending. That said, I've definitely offered to pay before. The response has usually been a mixture of pleasantries that I've interpreted to mean, "How nice of you to think of the cost of contraception, but I don't think that you paying is going to happen." If I had substantially more money than my partner, or just any money, I'd probably feel more responsible.

Rachel, 28

In theory I like the idea but I've never asked a boyfriend to pay for contraception.I think contraception is almost always up to the woman, so often they get shouldered with it. I've got the Implanon at the moment and I'm not about to ask my boyfriend to give me $25 for it. Unless it's a really expensive pill, it's an awkward conversation to have for only a small amount of money.

Xabe, 29

My partner's never offered, but then again I've never been on the pill or anything similar since we've been together. We did share the cost of condoms when we used those. I actually just asked him and he said he'd never even think of offering in the first place. I think it's very much a mysterious woman thing in a lot of guys' eyes.

I'd definitely want my partner to pay half my contraception if I was using any—it's something we both benefit from, so it's probably something we should both pay for. Maybe if I was using something that benefited my health in a lot of different ways separately to being a contraceptive, I might feel uncomfortable letting him pay for a large fraction of it. But otherwise, sex is an equally shared part of your relationship and the costs associated with it should be too.

Robert*, 27

I would definitely be happy to pay half the cost of a girlfriend's contraception. I'd also pay a premium for one that didn't affect her moods (either directly due to hormone imbalances, or indirectly by way of the side effects, skin, weight gain, etc). If there was an income disparity, I'd be happy to pay more than half; it all comes out in the wash, and a baby i far more expensive anyway. I did offer to help pay for the pill for my ex-girlfriend a few times but she refused. I'm not sure why.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Zxc

The benefits of buying cocaine are obvious: It makes you feel interesting and tingly for a few minutes, plus people will be nice to you if you give them some. The drawbacks are a bitter taste on the back of your tongue, the possibility of an overdose, or debilitating addiction, and prison if you're unlucky or careless.

Oh, and there's also the vague feeling that somebody, somewhere, got beheaded or tortured so you could feel interesting and tingly for a few minutes.

That vague feeling has been around for a while. In 1982, Harper's published an opinion piece by David Owen called "Boycott Cocaine," designed to guilt trip the Reagan-era literati about its collective cocaine habit. "Murder is as much a part of cocaine culture as tiny silver spoons and rolled-up hundred-dollar bills," Owen wrote. He cited dozens of murders in Miami in 1981, and noted that "in the first four months of 1979, 240 people died in drug feuding in the Colombian resort town of Santa Maria."

If any readers were won over by Owen's boycott idea based on a three-digit death toll, they would only be more apt to shun cocaine based on more recent reported body counts. According to a PBS report last year based on numbers released by the Mexican government, between the years 2007 and 2014, 164,000 people were murdered in the country—27,000 in 2011 alone. PBS noted that one report linked 55 percent of Mexico's murders to the cartels, but those estimates were criticized elsewhere, so it remains unclear how many deaths were tied to cocaine.

Other relevant numbers are useful in linking that violence to cocaine in particular. In 2011, the peak year for murder in Mexico, an estimated 546 metric tons of cocaine were smuggled into the US—mostly through Mexico—according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In its most recent Drug Threat Assessment report, the US Justice Department noted that "current cocaine users outnumbered heroin users by approximately 5 times in 2013," the most recent year with such data.

And cartels do more than just increase murder rates. Shockwaves from drug-related crimes reverberate throughout an entire affected country, such as the terrifying mass kidnapping of 43 Mexican college students in 2014. The slow response to that crime, which appears to have been masterminded by the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, sparked a period of civil unrest that lasted for months. Mexican citizens have so little faith in local law enforcement, a recent government survey suggests that only 10 percent of violent crime in Mexico is ever even reported.

"As a consumer, you're part of the chain," Professor David Schwartz, Randolph College ethicist, and author of the book Consuming Choices: Ethics in a Global Consumer Age, told VICE. Along with the manufacturers and distributors of a product, Schwartz explained, "consumers share in the moral culpability for such unethical practices, because in the end, they receive a tangible benefit from these practices—they receive the consumer product itself, whether that be clothing or cocaine."

According to a Los Angeles cocaine dealer in his 20s who calls himself "Ra," distributors of cocaine are only vaguely aware of the troubling fallout from the drug trade. "Random people being offed, and stuff like that? I don't know anything about that," he told VICE. He did say he knew dealers who had relatives in Mexico who had been in danger, but he'd certainly never heard of a cocaine buyer expressing any concerns. "On the consumer side right now, nobody gives a shit. They can be vegan and still blow lines. Human bloodshed is fine for you, but animal bloodshed, no. It's kinda ugly in that sense for sure."

While reports of drug-related violence more often come from Mexico these days, cocaine has had an enduring impact on the 1980s cocaine stronghold of Colombia, as well as its neighbors Peru and Bolivia, where almost all coca plants—from which cocaine is derived—are grown. Paradoxically, according to Sanho Tree, director of the drug-policy project at the Institute for Policy Studies, the farmers themselves long for the seemingly endless cycle to finally break. "It's not just a livelihood for . It's one that many of them no longer want, because there's just too much blood and violence associated with it," Tree, who observes Columbian coca farming and cocaine production firsthand, told VICE.

But the Columbian and US governments have already tried to raise consumer awareness about the ecological impact of nose candy for years. Former Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderón launched an environmentalist campaign in the UK in 2008 and in the US in 2009, attempting to spread the word about "shared responsibility," and guilt trip middle- and upper-class cocaine users to give up their precious yeyo. But given the US and Columbian culpability in the enormously destructive spraying of herbicide in the Amazon rainforest in order to choke cocaine farms to death, such past campaigns reek of Roundup and hypocrisy. "It's disingenuous to say the least," Tree said.

Related: Check out our report on Greece's problem with the drug sisa

But Schwartz remains optimistic about a cocaine boycott's chances of improving the drug's ecological and humanitarian footprint. "I think sometimes consumers sell themselves short as to what effects they might have," he offered. As an example, he pointed to the way in which outrage about the torturous deaths of the cows that became McDonald's hamburgers gave way to extensive reforms in slaughterhouses. "Obviously, nobody can change a system as one person," he said, but he added that with social media, "it's a hell of a lot easier to get something on people's radar."

But short of a laughable scenario in which some of the world's deadliest gangs adopt nonviolence and sustainable agriculture, it's tough to imagine what positive change in the cocaine world would look like. But even Ra the coke dealer would love to see improvements. He suggested that narcos could arrange with farmers to have a "grow-op that's humane." Either that, he said, or "somebody has to start doing it in America, but it's crazy. Where the fuck would you do that?"

Tree said the climate looks right in Florida, and noted that, "Hawaii had plantations back in the day," but he pointed out that those are small islands, and therefore easier to police than relatively lawless equatorial Latin America. Unlike weed, which you can grow in a small space like a closet and get a nice side business going, cocaine doesn't work that way. You need "an acre minimum" if you want to see a usable amount of white stuff according to Tree, so "the economies of scale just aren't there."

In short, don't expect to see labels on your cocaine advertising that it's made in America, or that it's "cruelty free" anytime soon (or if you see them, don't believe them).

But if you must insist on putting powder in your nose, according to Schwartz, you can do what people with guilty consciences about their carbon footprints do to sleep better at night: offset your economic sins with charitable donations. "With something like cocaine, one way to lessen one's culpability for buying a product intimately tied to such troubling practices is to financially support social welfare organizations or other groups seeking to help those who may have been harmed," he said.

For Ra, a crusade for change sounds great, but "that's not for now," he said. Ra's main worry in the meantime: "not getting my ass kicked."

If you really do want to give to an organization that helps out in Latin America—whether or not its because you feel guilty about buying cocaine—you could check out the work done in that region by ACCION International, OXFAM or Save the Children.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Officers work the scene where a 27-year-old woman was shot and killed by police in the Bayview District of San Francisco, Thursday, May 19, 2016.(Jessica Christian/The San Francisco Examiner/AP)

The police killing of a 27-year-old black woman in San Francisco on Thursday may have been something of a tipping point when it comes to local policing. Generating national headlines, the woman's death while fleeing cops—she was suspected of driving a stolen car, which crashed shortly after police began pursuit—was promptly followed by Mayor Edwin Lee asking for for Police Chief Greg Suhr's resignation.

The chief called it quits that same day.

The roughly 2,000-strong SFPD has killed three people since December, including one homeless man. So it only figures that, like some other big-city police departments in America, it's facing intense scrutiny from the media and the Justice Department. Not that San Francisco cops haven't found ways to stick out from the pack: racist and homophobic text messages from 14 officers surfaced amid a federal criminal trial last year, and they've continued to plague police-community relations after four more officers were recently implicated in the exchanges.

So if Suhr's resignation was a bloodstained victory for activists and protesters who have been calling for his ouster for months, it's unclear what effect removing the top cop will have on the department and its officers. For an inside view, VICE got on the horn with an SFPD officer who has 20 years of experience, including undercover narcotics work and posts in some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. He spoke with us on the condition of anonymity because, like most American cops, he is not an authorized spokesman for his department.

VICE: Chief Greg Suhr resigned after the mayor asked him to. What's going on there, and what are regular cops saying about it?

Rave culture is one of the UK's great cultural exports, but after its first wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was forced into the underground by stringent new laws and the rise of licensed super clubs.

Fast-forward 25 years into the midst of a nationwide purge on the UK's nightlife, where nearly half of all British clubs have shut down in the last decade, and a new kind of scene has emerged: a 21st century version of rave, where young people break into abandoned spaces with the help of bolt cutters and complicated squatting laws, to suck on balloons and go hard into the early morning.

But with the police using increasingly extreme tactics to clamp down on these parties and more than one fatality causing a nationwide media panic, can the scene survive?

Follow Rhys James on Twitter.

Barack Obama in 2012. Photo by Marc Nozell via Flickr.

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

US News

Taliban Boss Killed Because He Posed Threat to US Troops
President Obama approved the "defensive" drone strike in Pakistan that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour to stop "specific" threats against US troops in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. The White House did not inform Pakistan in advance of the strike, according to reports. —ABC News

Virginia Governor Investigated by Feds Over 'Suspicious' Income
Federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe's campaign contributions, as part of a probe that has been active for more than a year. The investigators are thought to be interested in McAuliffe's "suspicious" personal finances and foreign sources of income. —The Washington Post

Dozens of Schools Targeted by Hoax Bomb Threats
A series of bomb threats directed at dozens of schools across America forced authorities to lock down buildings or evacuate students. A school security expert said Monday's hoax calls, reported in 18 different states, bore all the hallmarks of "swatting," including computer-generated voices that are difficult to trace. —USA Today

Facebook Changes Trending Topics Policy
Facebook has changed some of the procedures for its "Trending Topics" section, eliminating a top-ten list of approved websites and giving clearer guidelines to help editors stay clear of political bias. The company still insisted that an internal investigation showed no evidence of political bias. —Reuters

International News

Syria Blames Foreign States for Bombings
The Syrian government has blamed Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia for the bombings in the cities of Tartous and Jableh that left at least 145 people dead. The foreign ministry sent a letter to the UN blaming the "malicious regimes of Riyadh, Ankara, and Doha." Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks. —BBC News

Thousands Removed from Greek Refugee Camp
The Greek authorities have begun ten-day operation to evacuate thousands of migrants from the informal refugee camp of Idomeni on the Macedonian border, sending in 400 riot police. The camp has been home to at least 8,400 people. The authorities say people will be moved to official camps. —Al Jazeera

Brazil Rocked by Scandal as Minister Steps Down
Brazil's planning minister Romero Juca has stepped down after he was caught on tape allegedly conspiring to obstruct a major corruption investigation. On the tape, Juca talks about trying to "stop everything and limit things" while feferring to the investigation into state oil giant Petrobras. —CNN

Workers Strike at French Oil Refineries
Strikes have spread to all eight of France's oil refineries, according to the CGT union leading protests to labor law reforms. French police used water cannons and tear gas on striking workers who were blocking access to an oil refinery in Marseille early Tuesday morning. —The Guardian

Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Shia LaBeouf Launches Latest Art Project
The actor and his collaborators have explained the latest Shia LaBeouf venture #TAKEMEANYWHERE. LaBeouf will tweet a GPS coordinate, then wait for someone to pick him up, a digitial hitchhiking project that the actor says is about "making friends." —VICE

California Teamsters Oppose Weed Legalization
The union representing truck drivers and warehouse workers is funding the opposition to a proposed ballot to legalize marijuana use in California. The Teamsters might support legalization in future, given "the right regulatory structure." —Buzzfeed News

Kayne Beat Tape Surfaces Online
A rare Kayne West beat tape, entitled "Unreleased KanYe West Demo Beat Tape (c. Sept. 97')", has been uploaded onto Soundcloud. It features an instrumental that made it into one of Kayne's earliest productions. —Noisey

Green Party Tries to Win Over Bernie's Base
Green Party leader and third party presidential candidate Jill Stein is hoping to tap into the energy of Bernie Sanders's supporters. "We are right now in the polls where Bernie Sanders was about six months ago," she said.—VICE

Done with reading? Watch our new video 'Cash for Kim: North Korean Forced Laborers Are Working to Their Death in Poland'

Jim Jarmusch wouldn't shake our hands, but the veteran filmmaker immediately apologized for it. He had a cold and didn't want any of the assembled journalists to get sick. It was the second and final Friday of the 12-day Cannes Film Festival, where Jarmusch first made a name for himself as a prematurely gray but still quite young auteur in the mid-80s, and outside a private inn near the French Riviera, the northern Ohio native appeared right at home.

Although he was aware of the middling reviews for his Iggy Pop and the Stooges documentary Gimme Danger—the only nonfiction film in Cannes' official selection—his mood seemed as bright and even as the clear skies above. Perhaps in part that was because Jarmusch was in Cannes with not one, but two films. His latest fictional effort, Paterson, had premiered the previous weekend to the best reviews Jarmusch has landed in a decade.

"These characters might seem on the surface to be clichés,"noted the gently self-deprecating director at the press conference for Paterson, an often very funny drama about the daily comings and goings of a bus driver, played by Adam Driver, who is also a very serious poet, a quietly committed husband, and a technological philistine. He writes all of his poems longhand, in a small notebook, in the context that so many of the great poets have forged their art: While working at a day job. The movie is well steeped in the culture of hybrid poet/laborers, reminding its audience that Wallace Stevens sold insurance and that William Carlos Williams was a doctor.

Still of Iggy Pop and the Stooges from 'Gimme Danger.' Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios

So full of style as a narrative filmmaker, Jarmusch is still finding his way with nonfiction. "I don't know if we can even call it a documentary," said Jarmusch outside the inn as sunlight beat down on him and the gathering of journalists, iPhones, and baby mics in front of him. He compared his own film negatively to 20,000 Days on Earth, Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth's stunning Sundance prize-winner about Nick Cave that weaves archival footage and staged scenes with moments of verité documentary."I watched that and was just ready to give up, man," he said with a smile, adding that the use of fictionalized scenes got to the truth about Cave with more authority than a traditional documentary would have. Jarmusch knows that his film isn't trying to "push documentary form" and seems to have no problem with that, even if he is well aware of how exciting things were becoming in that hybrid space between fiction and nonfiction.

One leaves Gimme Danger wondering why Jarmusch didn't give such a strategy a try. Perhaps overfamiliarity set in. The director and his subject have been friends for over 20 years now, and Gimme Danger was a collaboration from the start—Iggy Pop had approached Jarmusch to make the film. When I asked Jarmusch what he learned about Pop in the process of making the film that he hadn't already gleaned in 20 years of friendship, Jarmusch struggled to come up with an answer.

Initially planning to interview a lot more individuals who had worked with Pop over the years, Jarmusch narrowed the focus of the piece, which opens with one of the Stooges' notorious early 70s break-ups. It ultimately relies heavily on a few interviews and the scant archival footage that exists of early Stooges performances. The movie unearths some bravura archival moments (Jarmusch's archivist on the project, Sierra Pettengill, is one of the best) and his sit-downs are relatively revealing, but the movie is fundamentally lacking a formal character.

Adam Driver in 'Paterson.' Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios

One can't say the same thing about Paterson, which feels both like a culmination and a rebirth for the director. Repetition and temp morts, as ever in Jarmusch, have their place, as do the laconic humor slow fades to black, and the droll protagonist. But there's a sweetness to the film, and a sense of longing too, that feels new to his work. He remains in thrall to flat narrative and to the mundanity of everyday life, but not at the expense of feeling. Although not much fuss is ever made about it, Driver is the only white adult character in the film—our working-class artist inhabits a world entirely populated by people of color, from his Iranian wife to his black drinking buddies.

Both films, soon be released by Amazon Studios, are in their own ways portraits of working-class artists from off the beaten track, whose need for self-expression trumps the quotidian facts of their existences. Iggy Pop is, like Jarmusch, a child of the post-industrial Midwest; Jarmusch described his upbringing as middle-class; Iggy Pop famously grew up in a trailer park. In a country that provides little support for young artists that they, or more likely, their families, can provide on their own, the arts are often an iconoclastic pursuit.

When asked who he was when he discovered his kinship with the Stooges, Jarmusch answered quickly: " was probably a 14- or 15-year-old kid in a post-industrial city—Akron, Ohio—looking for some kind of cultural release, for some kind of hope of freedom," he said, and it's a similar release Driver's driver receives from writing poetry. " Gimme Danger is about choosing your own path and both of these films on some level are about that," he said. Fortunately for cinephiles, one could say the same thing about Jarmusch's singular career.

Follow Brandon Harris on Twitter. Read more of his coverage of Cannes 2016 here.

Amazon Studios will release Jim Jarmusch 's Paterson and Gimme Danger later this year.

Members of the Special Antinarcotics Force (FELCN) burn cocaine, which was allegedly going to be sent to Mexico, in Oruro, Bolivia, on January 5, 2015. JORGE BERNAL/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this month, the Colombian national police uncovered almost nine tons of cocaine, some of it hidden in a chamber below a banana plantation. The series of seizures produced more than 17,500 pounds of blow, and Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos boasted it was the biggest ever, tweeting that the operation represented "a hit against criminals."

It's the same kind of chest-thumping rhetoric American politicians seem to deploy whenever a massive shipment of drugs gets nabbed at the border. Take, for instance, that time almost exactly a year ago when New York made its biggest-ever heroin bust and the top cop in the state said the "case have a significant impact on the drug trade in New York State and throughout the Northeast."

The problem is that it's awfully hard to fact-check cops and politicians on the significance of these seizures. Questions tend to linger, like whether splashy busts actually put a dent in the global market, and whether they might actually just trigger violence because they mean a cartel boss suddenly can't pay his cronies. For some perspective, I asked Dr. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who studies drug trafficking and security issues, exactly what a big drug seizure means for all the key players in 2016.

VICE: It seems like massive busts remain the most hallowed of achievements for drug warriors in the United States.
Dr. Bruce Bagley: Yeah, they take great pride in major busts. They calculate very often the total tonnage or poundage and then they project how much it would be worth if you were to sell it by the gram in the streets of New York. So there is a natural tendency for them to be inflated by ambitious bureaucrats who want to overestimate the real impact of major busts.

But what's the impact like for the traffickers?
If you take out a ton or eight or ten, that's a major blow to whoever was the owner of that tonnage. OK? And certainly it can effect the bottom line of certain organizations, but all that it does in the end is to withdraw from the market and create a vacuum, which then drives up the prices for those other smugglers that want to get stuff into the United States. In the final analysis, not only does it not have a longterm productive effect, it causes a rise in the price, which incentivizes additional smugglers to get in on the act.

Earlier this month, Colombia seized 17,500 pounds of cocaine from a drug gang. Will that even make a dent in the local or global market?
That's a big one, and they will make a big deal out of it. It's their job, and it's how they kind of count coup and get merit points, so it makes sense. Look, Colombia increased its total number of hectares cultivation between 2013 and 2014 by 44 percent. So this upsurge means there's just more being produced and more being shipped. There's much more floating around. And Colombia recently recaptured position number one, after Peru had held the position for several years.

Is there a a seizure big enough that it would actually disrupt the infrastructure of the drug trade?
They have captured storage facilities in California and some other places and there has still never been a longterm dent, the kind of thing you're talking about. There are temporary blips, because it creates a rise in price through continuing demand. And that rise in price motivates or incentivizes other producers. The only way to sort of stop this procedure is not by periodically cranking up the price through extra economic protectionist barriers, which is what this is—the only way to do it is by legalizing the stuff. Otherwise you have a clandestine market, that clandestine market continues to feed demand in the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe, and there is no end to the demand so there will be no end to the supply. No matter what they do.

"They better duck, first of all, because the bullets are gonna fly."

They simply shift it around. They shifted it northwards, right, from Bolivia and Peru. In 1985, Peru produced 65 percent of the world's coca supply and Bolivia produced 25 percent. Colombia was a largely irrelevant factor. In 2005, Colombia produced above 90 percent of the world's coca supply. In 2010, Peru outstripped Colombia because of an interdiction effort and Peru became number one. Through 2013. Between 2013 and 2014, Colombia recovered position number one. And now Colombia and Peru probably produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent plus between the two of them, with Colombia five percent ahead of Peru in terms of overall production. But from my perspective, which is based on my research and writings, that's not success. What you've done is just contaminate more and more countries.

In retail, there's the concept of shrink, or the assumption that product is gonna be stolen as a part of doing business. Do the Cartels work interdiction into their business projections?
Yes, they do. They cooperate among themselves. To give you an example. The Medellin cartel came up with a technique: Rather than any single owner holding 100 percent of a shipment, the Medellin had five principle members, each of which took 20 percent. So if they lost one shipment, the likelihood of them getting another through and minimizing their losses was very high. The same kinds of things happen within the Sinaloa Cartel, within Los Zetas. There are, in effect, shareholders. So they've developed mechanisms to absorb potential losses of 10 to 15 percent, which they calculate in their own models as standard operating procedure, as standard business practice.

So what happens within a cartel when there's a big publicized seizure?
There can be significant impact if there's a single group that owned it. That's going to have a devastating impact. They won't be able to pay their organization very well. There's unrest and discontent. There may actually be in-fighting by various groups jockeying for position, especially if this is accompanied by the arrest of a major leader. They're gonna make somebody responsible for it.

What about among civilians in the area? Are those regions heavily destabilized after a bust?
They better duck, first of all, because the bullets are gonna fly. And they may not get paid if they're transporters, or they watch warehouses, or drive cars. If you lose a lot of money, the organization can become cash-strapped. People like El Chapo and Mayo Zambada from the Sinaloa Cartel basically keep people employed. One shipment will not end their efforts to maintain their organization. In more precarious groups, or rising groups, you can find a lot more difficulties. So the younger and less consolidated the group, the less cash they have to spread around and maintain people in place when the profits are not flowing as they hoped. So it's like other businesses––the bigger and badder you are, the more you can weather the storm.

There's a lot of noise made when these big seizures happen––a lot of showing off. Is there any accurate way to assess how the War on Drugs is going other than through press releases about busts? Or at least a better one?
The very best way is to look at the price per gram per eight bar per ounce per metric ton in places like Miami or across the country for cocaine or for heroin. And the tendency in the last 20 years, or the last 40 years, is for price to decline. The very best indicator is street prices, and the DEA actually publishes a series of street prices. And the tendency has been on the decline. They've actually plotted out these prices over about 20 years and demonstrated that very clearly, despite momentary spikes in prices when there are serious disruptions. When we closed down the borders after 2001, there was a major spike in prices for a short period of time. So all of those things are possible.

Ultimately, interdiction, Peter Reuter wrote in "Sealing the Borders," normally captures between 10 and 15 percent of the total being shipped into the United States. This is only temporary delays. Others have done projections over time of the price, and even with all the major busts, the overall tendency has been a decline in the price in cocaine and heroin in the United States market—precisely because of the reasons I mentioned. And we spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on interdiction. If you were to plot out how much it costs us––nobody has ever done this––to capture each of these tons in terms of Air Force AWACs and Navy patrols and inspectors and the DEA and everyone else, the cost would be astronomical. If there's an increase in shipments captured, it probably indicates an increased level of shipping into the United States.

We have no benchmark against which to really judge how effective these operations are. I am never impressed with high rates of interdiction.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.