Jesse Friedman is 20 years old. A former resident of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he prefers the moniker Hi-Rez over his Christian name. Like most 20-year-old Floridians, he loves pornography. Unlike most 20-year-old Floridians, he's a Penalty/Sony recording artist, so when he tweeted at Pornhub, the YouTube of smut, asking if they'd give him a lifetime membership in exchange for an original song about the site, the company responded to his request with an emphatic yes. A man of his word, Hi-Rez then went into the studio and, in one magical hour, cranked out a song titled, natch, “Pornhub.”

Which explains why he's here, in a hillside mansion in the otherwise unglamorous enclave of Whittier, California, surrounded by porn stars, camera equipment, cookie jars filled with weed, tired-looking men holding clipboards, and bored-looking members of his entourage. The time has come to shoot a music video for “Pornhub.” Which explains why I’m here.

The interior of the mansion is nondescript in a decidedly new-money way: An enormous flat-screen TV blasts Olympics footage in the living room to an audience of no one. A curio cabinet filled with action figures and memorabilia from the Saw franchise sits in one corner; a cage full of exotic cats sits in the other. I hear the click of heels above me, but the only person within my eyesight is a middle-aged man with a buzz cut and dazed expression. He wanders around slowly, saying nothing. I take a seat on an overstuffed black leather couch and wait for my contact, Hi-Rez’s manager, to find me.

I’m eventually led upstairs, where filming is taking place in one of the bedrooms. Hi-Rez’s manager introduces me to his employer as “Megan from VICE.” “Is that her last name? ‘From VICE?’" Hi-Rez retorts. Along with the already exhausted looking crew, I exchange awkward chuckles at this bon mot. Hi-Rez is, indeed, 20 years old. He wears tube socks and sweat shorts, and his face is lightly dusted with acne—he looks, acts, and exudes his age. He sits on a pile of beanbags that have been placed to give him a height advantage over the two tanned women in pink bikinis that fawn over him whenever the camera rolls. The three of them frolic on a velour Playboy blanket, the kind you'd buy from a kiosk in the mall or the trunk of a van outside a gas station. Hi-Rez’s shirt reads “Big Dreams,” which, given the context, seems very apropos.

Porn legend Eva Angelina, sitting on a couch behind the crew, picks up one of the two copies of Guns & Ammo lying next to her and holds it to her chest. “Looks like she really likes guns!" she remarks, referring to the owner of the mansion. I can already tell Eva will be the sunshine of this set. I take a photo of her giving an electric pink-nailed thumbs-up next to one of the gun mags:

Hi-Rez pantomime-raps along to his song (sample lines: “Jerkin' off till my elbow's / Fuckin' sore as hell, though / I don't really care, though”) as the pink bikinied women writhe around him. His manager nods along, even though he’s surely heard the (admittedly catchy) song at least a dozen times today. The owner of the house, a middle-aged woman who resembles the actress Louise Lasser, nods along as well. "I love the song!" she gushes. She asks the director if he wants to include a shot of two of her exotic cats fucking in the video. According to her, whenever you put 'em together, they just start going at it. She reckons it might “be cute.” He responds positively, but without making a commitment to her.

Scene in the can, I smoke a cigarette outside with a fella by the name of Huggy. Along with being a loving father and husband, he’s also a director of films for Brazzers. (Brazzers, for the uninitiated, is one of the biggest porn producers in the business, specializing in gals with big knockers gettin’ fucked but good.) He’s telling me about a profile of a pornographer he recently read. “It was good,” he says, “but the guy was just the worst." According to Huggy, the man in question came off as incredibly egotistical, to the extent that he feels the profile negatively reflected the entire porn industry. "I wanted to send an Edible Arrangement [to everyone who read it] or something, to say, like, ‘We aren't all like that!'"

Eva comes out and smokes a menthol alongside us. She pokes away at a phone ensconced in a bright-pink case. A guy from Hi-Rez’s entourage wanders outside, saying the word hashtag to no one in particular. Eva takes a selfie. “What you doin' with that?” he asks. “Putting it on Instagram,” she replies. “Can you hashtag me?” he requests. “Sure, what's your name?” she enquires. “Kush Friendly ENT.” “Kush friendly EMT?” she confusedly asks. "No, Kush Friendly E-N-T,” he clarifies. “Like entertainment."

Hi-Rez’s hangers-on all wear hats and are smoking weed. They’re doing very little, other than the aforementioned weed smoking and checking their cell phones. They don’t even gawk at the porn stars; when they actually talk to them, they do so respectfully. They mostly wander in silence, on call to smoke more weed with their employer. (By “their employer,” I mean “their friend, the 20-year-old from Ft. Lauderdale.”)

Morale on the set is high, the environment lighthearted. All the porn stars are jovial and jokey; their jokes usually involving humorous puns about their profession. “I'm a carnivore at heart!” Eva yells. “I can't live without my tube steak!” It’s impressive how quick these gals can turn it on—pun intended. Cheerful and gay before becoming seriously, intensely, mock-gay, they instantly kiss and rub and make bedroom eyes and whatnot as soon as the director says, “Action!” I admire their professionalism. I watch Eva and another broad lick whipped cream off each other's tits.

"I'm not gonna lie,” Hi-Rez's manager says. “This beats being in my office. This beats any video we've ever shot." Huggy and another guy on the crew talk camera lenses as the licking transpires. They’re oblivious.

Time moves slowly, as it does with anything entertainment-industry-related. The dazed middle-aged man I encountered earlier explains film shoots to me: “It's hurry up to wait,” he says. “Tell you what—it doesn't matter if it's a Miley Cyrus video or if it's a porno. It's always hurry up and wait.” He keeps trying to get me to take a picture of an enormous shark statue next to the pool, in the interest of making it look like it’s biting one of the twerking asses currently being filmed. My camera won’t focus. “Come over here,” he slurs. “Just take pictures of the asses."

Many hours have passed, and morale has decreased significantly. We’ve been privy to a lot: hours of twerking, topless pole dancing, energy-drink product placement, the eating out of an Eva Angelina-signature Fleshlight and the mock sucking of the dick of a bear from the motion picture Ted. Even Hi-Rez himself is pooped. "I'm done,” he says. “I'm done. I've seen enough tits and ass for today." Eva jokes that the shoot has gone on so long, she’s “gonna ask for [her] anal rate.” "Do you take PayPal?” Huggy asks. "Actually, I do!" she cheerfully replies.

The smell of weed smoke sits heavy in the air. It’s 7 PM; the crew has been here since 8 AM. Everyone types away on his or her phone. The porn stars perk up when Hi-Rez’s manager suggests a Starbucks run. Before the caffeine can be procured, however, a wrap is called. They nixed the cat scene.

For behind-the-scenes footage of Hi-Rez's "Pornhub," watch Pornhub's making-of video. 

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Katerina Nis briefs

PHOTOS BY: GIBSON FOX AT FEELTHEFUTURE
STYLIST: RENEE WARNE AT FEELTHEFUTURE

Hair: Kyye Reed
Makeup: Miriam Nichterlein
Models: Kathleen McGonigle at IMG, Ebony Gallant at the Wolves, Rowena Xi Kang @Chadwick Models, Eilika Meckbach at EMG, Newsha Syeh

Special thanks to Sun Studios 

Soot dress, POMS earrings

P.A.M. dress, Triangl briefs

Yuliy Gershinsky top; Lonely Hearts pants

FEELTHEFUTURE top and gown, American Apparel tights, vintage shoes, Prada bag

Pelvis top

Verner dress, FEELTHEFUTURE top

Verner dress, FEELTHEFUTURE top

Louis Vuitton top, Rolex watch; Prada bag

M.Y.O.B ear cuff

The 1965 patent for the first e-cigarette

No one really cared when, in 1963, Herbert A. Gilbert filed a patent for the first e-cigarette, which he called a “smokeless non-tobacco cigarette.” What a difference 51 years makes. Today, the $2 billion industry is at the center of one of the biggest public health debates in history. 

There is a contradiction at the heart of what an e-cigarette is, with both sides saying opposite things. On one side, you’ve got nicotine-addicted enthusiasts who believe e-cigarettes are a safer alternative to tobacco cigarettes and represent the biggest revolution in the health-care industry since penicillin. 

On the other hand, naysayers protest that e-cigarettes are dangerously unregulated, untested, and marketed irresponsibly, especially to teenagers, thus encouraging more people to jump on the smoking bandwagon, which is a shitty place to be.   

The shadow of Big Tobacco also looms over the e-cigarette debate. Some of the more hardcore e-cigarette evangelists think the backlash within the health-care community is part of a "conspiracy.” They accuse Big Pharma of throwing money at nonprofit health groups to release studies that have found no relationship between smoking e-cigarettes and quitting traditional cigarettes. 

Suddenly, it seems like everyone cares about the future of vaping: Big Tobacco execs, public health experts, e-cigarette entrepreneurs, evangelistic vape nerds, local politicians, curious teens, and anxious moms all have something to say about whether these cylindrical puff pieces will be the death knell or saving grace of humankind.

A custom e-cigarette “mod” from Sin City Mods

As e-cigarette culture seeps into the mainstream, the fight for our right to fill our lungs with chocolate-chip-cookie-flavored smoke (it’s a fundamental American freedom, goddamnit) has gone from schoolyard skirmish to full-blown war. 

This battle is being fought in courtrooms all over the country as both the Senate and individual states decide how to regulate e-cigarettes. Tobacco companies recently supported two bipartisan Senate bills prohibiting the sale of ecigs to people under 18. Major cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have all bowed one after the other, domino-style, to tighter restrictions on where you’re allowed to puff on your e-stick. 

Yet in spite of all these clamp-downs, signs of vaping’s rising cultural cachet are everywhere--from Courtney Love’s infamous “It’s a fucking NJOY” commercial to this (actually quite good) electronic music mixtape by a collective of artists and musicians called Vapecru. 

But nowhere is the growing swell of vaping enthusiasts more evident than in e-cigarette forums. Forum users are intrinsically early adopters, mostly because they’re the ones who give the most amount of shits. Dig through these brutal, time-sucking sinkholes, and you’ll find the seeds of what will blow up in a few months. Some of the topics they’re yakking about today will be tomorrow’s headlines; the new gear they’re embracing will be next month’s top sellers. (E-cigarette carpetbaggers, take note.)

Of course, internet forums have always been sites of cultural formation. But what separates e-cigarette forums from, say, forums for Bronies or Scooby Doo fanfic is that the culture growing out of the former is actually important. It has the power to change the discourse—and the governmental policies—around what might be the biggest health issue of our generation.

Right now, the internet’s biggest and most influential e-cigarette forum is the straightforwardly titled E-Cigarette Forum, which has racked up 190,000 registered users. One of those users is Mathew Dryhurst, a San Francisco–based artist who represents the new breed of vapers: Young, technology-obsessed, and just as likely to customize their own e-cigs as they are to build their own synthesizers. E-Cigarette Forum “was the original source of info for me,” Matt said. The site was “where I first learned about modding—transactions for that stuff were mostly happening through forums.”

A British man named Oliver Kershaw created E-Cigarette Forum in 2007, the same year modern e-cigarettes were introduced to US markets via Europe and China. Like many other vape nerds, Oliver has a passion for building and tinkering with things. The 34-year-old dabbled with carpentry and selling furniture online before dedicating himself full-time to building the forum.

At the time, there were scant resources for finding up-to-date information on the infant industry. “I wasn’t sure if people would think e-cigarettes were a stupid gimmick or if they would see that this was the future,” Kershaw told me over the phone.

But Kershaw did know that the forum’s first wave of visitors were going to be looking for a specific type of information: how to smoke weed with the newfangled contraptions. He worried that if e-cigarettes were co-opted by stoners, regulators would try to stamp them out before they got a fair chance to take off. So he decided to set some ground rules: no talking about any other drug besides nicotine, and the focus had to be about “health improvement,” not quitting smoking.

This semantic nuance has become even more important today, as the question of whether e-cigarettes will help people quit smoking or cause more people to start smoking has become hotly contested.

Critics have pointed out that some e-cigarette ads borrow the same glamorizing tactics used by tobacco companies. “It’s a fucking NJOY” is a contemporary echo of Virginia Slim’s “You’ve come a long way, baby.” As Molly Osberg noted on the Verge, other brands position their e-cigs “less like smokes and more like iPads, with TV spots obliquely announcing ‘dreams, opportunities, the promise of new things to come.’” Since e-cigarette marketing is still largely unregulated, these ads can get away with pretty much anything.

But pro-vapers like Kershaw think the anti-e-cigarette backlash (especially surveys that claim teenagers who smoke e-cigs are six times more likely to smoke tobacco too) are part of a larger conspiracy designed to force smokers into making an unfair choice: quit smoking or die.

For vaping evangelists like John Castle, author of Smokeless: An Introductory Guide to the Pleasures of Vaping, e-cigs represent an “escape hatch” from that “gigantic, rotten guilt trip” of a cigarette addiction. As any smoker who has been berated in public by a complete stranger knows ,puffing on smokes has become increasingly taboo. “So online and offline,” John said over email, e-cigarettes are only going to keep getting bigger, “as more and more people discover this technology that finally allows them to achieve freedom from a trap set for them by [tobacco] corporations.”

Herein lies the rub: There just isn’t enough evidence to come down conclusively on whether e-cigarettes are truly a healthier alternative to their analog counterparts. Tellingly, E-Cigarette Forum’s approach to advertising reflects this ambivalence. The entire forum is financially supported by advertisements bought by e-cigarette businesses peddling their wares. Revenue is good enough that Kershaw has been able to hire six full-time staffers to help him run the site. But he’s firm that these ads are “not allowed to make crazy testimonials [about quitting smoking], 'cause they’re all bullshit.”

For now, E-Cigarette Forum is booming. The New Users thread is currently the most popular on the website, and the average age of users has slid from 30 to 20, a sure sign of its trendiness. But Kershaw also knows that his current business model is untenable. “It’s quite possible that in two years time, online sales will be banned,” he said matter-of-factly, “and we won’t be able to put the resources into running the site that we have now without that revenue.” That means no more moderators to verify accounts, kick out spammers, and generally keep an eye on the amount of bullshit that tends to flood internet forums. That means vapers might have to find a new place to congregate. But Kershaw’s got it covered—he’s already bought Vaping.com.

Follow Michelle Lhooq on Twitter.

A local news report on the killing of James Boyd

On March 16, two members of the Albuquerque Police Department fatally shot James Boyd, a homeless man reportedly suffering from schizophrenia. The 38-year-old wasn’t a terribly sympathetic figure—he had also been arrested a dozen times, usually for violent assaults, including attacks on law enforcement officers—but the details of his death are still troubling. On the day of the shooting, he was confronted by cops for camping illegally and wouldn’t put down a pair of knives, which resulted in a three-hour “standoff.” Eventually, Boyd began threatening to kill the officers and ranting in an unhinged manner about the Department of Defense. Cops first used a flash-bang grenade and beanbags against Boyd, but they didn't incapacitate him, so the police shot an unknown number of live rounds at him, at least one of which struck him. (Officers Dominique Perez and Keith Sandy, who fired their guns, are now on leave. Sandy was previously fired from a police job for fraud.)

Much of this sounds like a the behavior of a man police might reasonably fear, except the (graphic) video shows that Boyd was turning away from police when he was shot. In addition, it's not clear why the cops couldn’t just back off from a man who was clearly mentally ill but not currently wanted for any violent crime. The footage has outraged New Mexicans who are getting tired of the Albuquerque Police Department’s sordid history—hundreds protested the shooting over the weekend, and hackivist collective Anonymous even put down the APD website for a few hours by using denial-of-service attacks.

The reason for the rage is bigger than Boyd: Since 2010 the APD has fatally shot 22 suspects, and in 2012 the Department of Justice began investigating the department because of its unusually high number of police shootings and use-of-force incidents. The APD has also cost taxpayers a reported $24 million on lawsuit payouts in the last few years. Clearly, something is rotten in the state of New Mexico.

In a March 25 post on his Photography Is Not a Crime blog, Carlos Miller noted that the much-touted Rialto, California, police department’s institution of body cameras on all of its officers and the subsequent reduction of complaints against police is well and good, but cameras don’t stop police misconduct by themselves. In 2010, the APD became one of the first departments to put cameras on officers, but obviously that hasn’t helped solve its problems. As Miller points out (using a rather unfortunate choice of metaphor), cameras will not be “a magic bullet to curb police violence.”

Obviously it’s good that we have footage of the confrontation with Boyd—otherwise, accounts of the incident would depend solely on the word of the cops present. But despite the video showing a mentally ill man being shot as he turns away from the cops, the APD is calling this a justified use of force. Filming the police is important, but it’s more important to keep an eye on them and note when they unjustly gun down a marginal member of society.

Onto the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–On Tuesday, a member of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, police department fatally shot 27-year-old DeAndre Lloyd Starks during a narcotics raid. The undercover officer who fired the single, fatal shot at the unarmed Starks for making “a threatening movement” was identified as 32-year-old Mark Wollmershauser Jr., who has been on the force since 2005. Police had a warrant for the raid, and it took place at the relatively “reasonable” hour of 5:22 PM (narcotics raids frequently take place at night or in the very early morning), but they also fatally shot an unarmed man because he didn’t show officers his hands fast enough. Wollmershauser is on paid leave while an investigation into the shooting takes place, as is traditional. Meanwhile, members of the community have planned a candlelight vigil for Starks. One local news report seems keen to stress that Starks had gun and drug charges in his past, as if to say, Don’t worry—he was one of the bad ones.

–Across the pond, a group of eight UK women who formed long-term relationships with undercover police officers are trying to make sure such things don’t happen to anyone else. These women, mostly political or animal-rights activists, are suing Scotland Yard in an effort to make them clarify their policies. They have reason to be upset, as their relationships with undercover police officers went on for as long as six years—one woman even had a child with her officer, who left after his assignment ended, which is completely insane. Law enforcement officials claim that sexual relationships while undercover are forbidden, but so far no charges against any officer have been filed (though prosecutors are reportedly considering bringing them against three of them). The women say this is not enough, and that policies need to be made clear so that nobody suffers the emotional trauma that they have.

–A Holyoke, Massachusetts, woman with cancer was arrested on Friday and held for more than four hours for failing to pay her $5 dog license fee. Technically, the outstanding warrant was over a failure to appear in court, but 41-year-old Ann Musser did go to court in September to settle her non-payment of the fee, but she left after three hours of waiting because she has advanced ovarian cancer and didn’t feel comfortable in an environment that might hurt her immune system. Musser’s cancer makes this overreaction by police even more horrible, but armed government agents coming to arrest someone for a failure to pay for a dog they already possess is fundamentally absurd. (A similar situation happened to a Massachusetts woman on March 8 over another rogue dog license. Maybe the cops in that state should adjust their policies?)

–A Sandusky, Ohio, man says sheriff’s deputies searched his home without a warrant on Tuesday, March 25. John Collins, 26, claims Huron County deputies pushed into his apartment when he opened the door, handcuffed him, and placed him on the floor for 20 minutes, then searched the place, breaking several of his belongings, including his tablet and a memento from his dead son. Johnson says two of the deputies knew him from going to school together, but they didn’t acknowledge that they were obviously in the wrong apartment. He says one deputy began to read his rights and arrest him before the rest of them realized they weren't in the right place and that Collins was not the suspected drug trafficker they were looking for. The deputies apologized and left the apartment, but strangely, both the search warrant and the gag order on the search warrant are under gag order. The Sandusky Register also notes that the Huron County sheriff’s department has a habit of not complying with requests for public information in spite of Ohio’s public record laws. For his part, Sheriff Dane Howard disputes Collins’s account of the event—though he won’t release the search warrant, which would clear a lot of this up.

–On Tuesday, Rahinah Ibrahim became the first person to get off the federal government’s no-fly list after a seven-year battle. One of the artifacts of the post-9/11 war on terror, this list probably has hundreds of thousands of names on it, though you can’t be sure you’re on the list until you’re prevented from boarding a plane. And even if you are barred from a flight, the government’s response is usually a coy “maybe you’re on the list, maybe you’re not.” Ibrahim’s inclusion on the list was a clear mistake, but getting her off of it was still a nightmare. Yet another reason to abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

–Good luck and a quick response helped a sheriff’s deputy save the life of a toddler on Wednesday in Indiana. The mother of 21-month-old Olivia Turnick called 911 because her daughter had turned blue, and Porter County Sheriff's Sergeant Jeremy Chavez was close enough to respond to the call in under a minute. He performed first aid on Olivia, and she soon began crying and breathing. Chavez is our Good Cop of the Week for being close enough to help and reacting fast enough to save a child.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

In 1998, the antiretroviral drug efavirenz was approved for treatment of HIV infection. Though the drug was highly effective, patients soon began to report bizarre dreams, hallucinations, and feelings of unreality. When South African tabloids started to run stories of efavirenz-motivated rapes and robberies, scientists began to seriously study how efavirenz might produce these unexpected hallucinogenic effects. 

Hamilton Morris travels to South Africa to interview efavirenz users and dealers and study how the life-saving medicine became part of a dangerous cocktail called "nyaope."

A plate full of muskrat (left) and possum (right). All photos by the author, unless otherwise noted

Last Saturday night in New York City’s northernmost borough was cold, rainy, and desolate. I was wandering around the Bronx with my friend Anna searching for the Andrew Freedman Home, a historic mansion turned hotel where Baron Ambrosia (a culinary video series host and filmmaker whose real name is Justin Fornal) had invited us to dine at his fourth annual Bronx Pipe Smoking Society Small Game Dinner. Siri was doing us a huge fucking disservice, though, bleating out the wrong directions on Anna's smartphone while we walked in endless circles in the driving rain and men disgustingly leered at us. We finally made it to the giant, decrepit mansion that was hosting the game dinner; it's owned by a friend of Baron’s and is a dead ringer for Wayne Manor in its twilight years. 

The night’s dress code was described as formal—specifically “black tie, traditional, or warrior,” where you should proudly wear your taxidermy, bones, mojo bags, machetes, and other large blades—so I wore high heels for the first time in years, along with the only garment I owned that could qualify as black tie, my old high school prom dress. As I desperately tried not to fall on my face on the slippery tiled front porch, I couldn’t help wondering if this was a prelude to a ridiculous shitshow of a night. I wasn’t far off. 

The night's host, Baron Ambrosia. Photo by Rose Callahan.

Baron’s concept for the night was not just an eccentric shindig but also a way to encourage people to not waste the food resources we have—specifically, small game. “It has a small carbon footprint, it’s in your backyard, and it’s yours to enjoy,” he told the crowd later in the night. As someone who grew up (and loved) the wild venison my father used to bring home, I was already behind his vision. In fact, Baron is taking a break from his award-winning video series, like Bronx Flavor and The Culinary Adventures of Baron Ambrosia, to write a game-centric cookbook based off these annual dinners, set to be released at the end of the year. “You may not like squirrel, you may not like porcupine,” Baron said, “but we’re just opening up the discussion that there are protein sources other than beef, pork, or chicken.” It was a valid argument—and a good reason to party. 

A typical outfit that night

The mansion’s interior looked retro chic in a very “this place is haunted and will make you murder your family” kind of way. The attendees—mostly Bronx restaurant owners or beloved borough personalities, all of whom were friends or family of Baron—were dressed elaborately: The men wore giant pieces of fur, elaborate velvet togas, capes, and tuxedos, while the women were dressed in little hats and short party dresses. When we walked up to the check-in, we signed a legal waiver in case the meat poisoned us or whatever—We’re off to a fine start, I thought—and wandered down the hallway to a room booming with loud noises. Inside, there was a bar serving Bronx Pop, beer (both in Red Dog cans and from a keg), and a bottle of tequila. I chose the tequila. “Can we mix it with the lemon-lime soda?” Anna asked.

“I haven’t made a mixed drink yet tonight,” said the man behind the bar. He filled the cup halfway with tequila and topped it off with the lurid green soda. It tasted like a melted frozen margarita. The owner of the soda company, Nicky d'Aragona, immediately deemed it "the Lime Ricky" and plugged it on social media. “This is great!” he said. “We’ve been trying to market it with vodka, but this is much better.” 

Bill Guiles, a badass trapper

On a table by the bar, I spotted several plates of untouched sushi. I read the labels: crickets with brie, raccoon, and mink. The meat looked a bit suspicious—a little gray and sad—though there thankfully wasn’t any odor. No one was touching it, which I interpreted as a bad sign. I quickly turned away to prevent the possibility of someone trying to offer me some and almost ran straight into a man wearing the craziest fur hat I had ever seen, complete with multiple tails and two little pointy ears on top. I asked if I could steal it. He agreed, but warned me that it might be a bit sweaty. I then learned that this guy—Bill Guiles—had the right to wear such furry headgear because he supplied 99 percent of the night’s game. The 68-year-old and has been hunting for as long as he can remember. He traps for sport, conservation, and fur, and his weapon of choice is a .22 caliber rifle. Four years ago, he met Baron at a Native American powwow when Baron approached Bill’s partner and asked what happens to the meat of the animals they trapped; after offering to buy the meat—which they refused—Baron received an invitation to head upstate to hunt with them, which he does every year. Bill’s contributions of the night included raccoon, fox, coyote, beaver, otter, muskrat, fisher cat, marten, and porcupine. 

Jason Engdahl serving beaver tacos

Still wearing Bill’s sweat-laden chapeau, I wandered into the library, which, thanks to its dark wood paneling and ominous-looking portraits on the walls, resembled a room from some cliché made-for-TV murder mystery. Standing beside me was a man wearing a fez who claimed to have popularized the pickleback shot. Another guy was serving up… uh… beaver tacos, which were served on rock-hard crispy tortillas. Baron was flitting from room to room getting everything ready. He looked like his usual over-the-top self, flaunting shotgun shells rolled up in his hair like curlers—he said that he was inspired by distinguished men of yore like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—and sported a pencil-thin goatee. 

The "Stabbing of the Beast" ceremony. Photo by Amanda Fornal

Besides the hors d'oeuvres—which also included shredded fox served with corn bread, raw oysters, rare elk, and a Thai porcupine nam tok salad—there was a sit-down dinner, complete with a “Stabbing of the Beast” ceremony officiated by Trapper Bill and Grammy award-winning hip-hop musician Grandmaster Melle Mel. More game dishes came out to the tables: possum cooked in coconut milk and served with sweet plantains, coyote hinds in chipotle sauce served with cactus leaves, sous-vide otter, fisher cat sliders, Malian-style muskrat fakoye, and jerk-style raccoon. Meat like this “has the ability to take a lot of spice,” said one of the night’s chefs, Jason Engdahl. This is true, because while there were a huge range of aggressively flavored dishes—all from a myriad of cuisines—the game ended up soaking up all the flavors and resulted in a surprisingly tame meal. The desserts, by Whoopies Miniature Dessert Co., were made with Georgian white clay to further drive home the "utilize your resources" theme of the night. “Geophagia is always portrayed in the media as a squalorous form of survival, never as a cultural tradition,” said Baron. “That’s why I saw it as a misunderstood food source, much like small game.” 

Baron with chefs Tata Magia and Assetou Sy. Photo via Rose Callahan.

The end of the night was, admittedly, a blur. As the night went on, I was struck not only by the sense of community that was created at these dinners (many of the chefs and partygoers had excitedly participated for multiple years) but also by the fact that the two tenets on which Baron’s shows were built on—serious culinary discussions amid a crazy, surreal aesthetic—could be translated into a party where we were contemplating serious food issues in a totally ludicrous setting. At one point, I stole someone’s fez and was tending bar for a while. Anna eventually succeeded in dragging me out of the mansion, but the night continued with two party favors of sorts: two feet that felt legitimately broken after being shoved into those torturous shoes and the lingering, complex, feral taste of wild game seeping out of my pores.

Kirsten Stamn doesn’t mess with salads. Follow her on Twitter. 

Meet your future vote-counter. Image via Reddit user humenbean

Bitcoin’s been in some trouble lately. Every week, it seems like there’s a new exchange, social engineering heist, or pronouncement from the IRS to bring the collective spirits of cryptocurrency enthusiasts down. People are understandably worried about Bitcoin’s future as money, including Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, who praised the technology but called out the Bitcoin community for being overly ideological in a recent post. The way it’s talked about in some quarters, Bitcoin's replacement of money will strangle big government, eliminate the Federal Reserve, and radically change our democracy. So what happens if Bitcoin doesn’t become the new money?

As it turns out, it may not need to completely replace money to shake things up. A number of groups have already begun working on evolving cryptocurrency technology and adapting it for other uses. So far we’ve seen SolarCoin trying to incentivize renewable energy, Namecoin allowing people to circumvent pesky internet censorship and site takedowns, and the nationalistic Auroracoin getting handed out to all Icelandic citizens.

One of the most promising applications of new crypto tech lies in creating transparent, efficient systems for making political decisions. For those who are counting on cryptocurrencies to radically shift political power back into the people’s hands, it’s worth considering that decisions about how we organize society and allocate resources are just as important as the currency we use for trading. Enter Bitcoin-based voting.

I spoke with Oliver Hinck from the European Pirate Party about Liquid Feedback, the group's system for internal party democracy. He’s been using the Liquid Feedback system since 2011. Basically, the Pirate Party uses this system to determine its position on issues. For Oliver, this was an important way of crystallizing its platform.

“I was fed up with constantly repeating discussions about copyright—so, I saw that it's absolutely crucial to find new ways for the process of forming the political will of a group,” he said.

Liquid Feedback works by allowing every member a vote on every issue. If they don’t want to vote or don’t feel qualified to weigh in, members can delegate their vote to a trustee. There’s no need for an annual convention, and the party could change its platform by quickly polling members in response to new developments.  

The current way citizens vote at different levels of our democracies is by electing delegates every four years or so and generally staying out of the process in between. Apart from special occasions or various US states' ballot proposition systems, we rarely get to decide on an issue-by-issue basis. Instead, we trust our representative to cast a vote for us or otherwise represent our interests. This arrangement isn’t necessarily a bad thing—many of us are too busy, lazy, uninformed, apathetic, or all of the above to decide on a wide range of political questions that leaders grapple with. It’s a relatively efficient division of labor. Up until the widespread adoption of the internet, having a true direct democracy wouldn’t even have been remotely practical. But as connectivity grows, it’s now within reach, and getting closer.

Liquid Feedback isn’t based on the blockchain—the central technology underpinning Bitcoin. But it’s part of a number of pieces of democratic software like Helios or Ethelo that promise to make in-group democracy much more efficient and achievable. These kinds of processes are well-suited to co-ops, community organizations, social enterprises, credit unions—anywhere you want members to have a direct vote on any issue. The technology uses algorithms based on social research to determine the most amount of satisfaction for a group based on the expressed preferences of its members.

Merging this with the blockchain for security and verifiability is where it could get interesting for big-time, official democracy. This is nicely pictured below in this image from Denmark’s Internet Party.

Image via Internet Partiet

One of the most useful parts of Bitcoin is its blockchain, which is essentially a public ledger of all transactions. It’s transparent, irreversible, decentralized, and very difficult (but not impossible) for one party to gain control over. This means that if you base a direct voting system on a blockchain, anyone with a computer and a little know-how could verify the results. It would be possible to see how many votes were cast, voters could verify that their own votes were counted, and the decentralized network would be the best answer so far to hacking attempts. Combined with the political thought that’s gone into systems like Liquid Feedback, there’s a starting point here for putting political questions to the public much more frequently and ambitiously.

A public voting system could be built within and on top of existing or proposed cryptocurrencies. BitCongress, one idealistic idea, builds itself mainly on Ethereum, a blockchain-based programming platform for trustless contracts, transactions, and decentralized autonomous organizations. Even after going to an Ethereum meetup, I’m not entirely sure how Ethereum works, but its developers describe it as “cryptocurrency 2.0” and say it will enable a wide array of applications of blockchain technology that aren’t possible with Bitcoin alone. If they’re right, then we can compare cryptocurrency today to the internet in 1994—things are just getting started.

A few problems immediately jump out when we picture widespread electronic voting. We’re still human, for one. No matter how optimized our systems get for counting people’s votes and balancing their interests, there will still be people who want to break the rules for their own benefit.

Vote buying, intimidation, and hacking are three big human wrenches thrown into the gears of online decentralized voting. What if someone offers to buy my vote on an issue and threatens to send goons to my house if I don’t agree? What if my device has a virus on it that will change my vote without my knowledge? What if voters just don’t give a shit or get tricked into voting against their interests? What if we get results like California, with its massive proposition battles and referendum-riddled budget?

I asked Emil Kirkegaard from the Danish Internet Party to address some of these concerns. In a blog post, he outlined some responses to these fears. Emil addresses the impracticality and high cost of intimidating enough voters to make a difference, the fact that you could already sell mail-in absentee ballots if you wanted to, and the notion that a voting system must be perfect in order to justify trying it out. Our current paper-voting system isn’t perfect: Turnout is crap, politicians can already indirectly buy votes by promising development or massive advertising expenditures, and people are for the most part disengaged from politics between elections. But we accept it, problems and all, because it’s the best we’ve currently come up with.

The largest problem with e-voting, even with a blockchain network, is client-side hacks (i.e., some sort of exploit compromising a voter’s computer, rather than the network itself). There’s no solution yet, but Alex Petherick-Brian, a programmer working on a friend-to-friend, networked mesh democracy outlined a solution to this that could involve looking for irregularities after the vote, promoting static media like live CDs (which would virtually ensure each voter’s computer was uncompromised by booting into an unadulterated operating system that’s programmed onto a CD), and open voting, where users could verify their vote went where they wanted.

Would e-voting solve all these problems or be perfect? No. Would it be better than our current system? Quite possibly. It’s that chance that makes experimentation worth trying.

It’s probably too soon to embark on a giant national experiment in electronic voting, even when built on a solid cryptographic foundation. But it’s undoubtedly worth starting small, and starting open-source. Canadian cities are already contracting large projects to improve public consultation and make people feel heard, so it’s clear that there’s a demand. What cryptocurrency technology brings to the table is security and openness, two things that are essential for scaling the process up.

Anyone expecting decentralized electronic voting to solve all our democratic problems shouldn’t hold his breath. History suggests that political theory doesn’t match reality. Implemented thoughtfully, decentralized direct democracy offers some fantastic possibilities for improving our political life by letting people have a greater voice if they choose to. In a time when people are already trendily “hacking” their diet, their business model, their workspace, and their sleep schedule, why shouldn’t we be tempted to hack democracy? We might just like the results. 

Follow Christopher Malmo on Twitter.

We love Gangsta Boo here at VICE. She paved the way for lady MCs as the only female member of the legendary Southern rap group Three 6 Mafia. Her hard-hitting bars have always enshrined her as a sexy, independent woman you wouldn't want to fuck with. We're super proud to have the opportunity to premiere Boo's latest music video, for the song "Bitchy," which hails from Witch, her collaborative album with fellow Memphian La Chat. The track has a banging beat produced by Three 6's DJ Paul and features a great guest verse by rapper Mia X. Watch the video below and look out for Witch on iTunes in May. 

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003–2013), will be published this spring.

Photo by Timothy Briner

Follow Mossless magazine on Twitter

Image via

For weeks, we’ve clutched whatever the modern equivalent of a handkerchief is to our collective bosom, waiting for news on missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. The sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the commercial airliner seemed shocking in a world where everything is meticulously tracked. Things no longer simply disappear. Wild theories, idle speculation and conspiratorial whisperings on the fate of the flight soon gave way to the most important question of all:

Hey, how’d we make out?

Someone will eventually figure out what happened, and the fact that nobody has clear sovereignty in this situation – the plane likely went down in international waters – means that it’s all up for grabs.

There’s probably not going to be a happy ending to this, and so the closest thing any country can hope for is to be the first to find the wreckage. Do not underestimate the power that will come with this. Implicit in finding the wreckage is technological and deductive superiority. This is what the arms race now looks like.

Naturally, each country wanted to focus on how much they’d been doing. China Daily was quick to report on the important work of the Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 aircraft. NBC News told us of the USA-provided black box detector vital the search. The Sydney Morning Herald reported Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s comments that the families of the passengers would most likely want to await news in Australia.

Abbott commented, in not terribly diplomatic terms, that the families “will be in the arms of a decent country” in response to reports that they were clamouring to get to Perth to be physically nearer the search. This could well be the basis for Perth’s most convincing tourism campaign since that statistical anomaly proving that not everyone who visits necessarily gets eaten by a shark.

Due to the increasing likelihood that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Perth, all eyes have turned to Australia, and Australia has not disappointed. This past weekend (nearly a month after the plane disappeared), Prime Minister Abbott announced former defence force chief Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston as the coordinator of the operation. Houston’s responsibilities will include keeping the national and international media up to date in all facets of the search effort. This must be one of those times where providing a shipping news service is politically advantageous.

Meanwhile, China has breathlessly reported that its afore-mentioned military plane, the Ilyushin IL-76, had spotted floating objects the colours of white, red and orange. This information was relayed immediately, inevitably giving way to the news that the objects were, in fact, nothing to do with the missing plane.

(Conspiracy theory fans will note the only country whose flag is white, red and orange is Bhutan. As China has an historical border dispute with Bhutan, maybe this “find” is simply a bit of clumsy foreshadowing.)

The story of the Chinese-found objects was not the first or the last false alarm, and was hardly productive even if the intention is to cross debris off the list. If we’re going to sit and list everything that isn’t a piece of MH370, then we’re going to be here an awfully long time. On the other hand, if this exercise in red herrings does nothing else, it will at least demonstrate to everybody just how much man-made junk is clogging up our oceans instead of, say, actual red herrings.

The growing insanity from 24-hour news organisations desperate to fill air time has been well-documented. Pundits have speculated about the possibilities of a black hole opening up in the fabric of space-time; others have spoken directly to psychics for a supernatural scoop; newsreaders have wondered if God Herself raptured it into a different plane of existence (emphasis and laboured pun both mine); reporters have, for reasons known only to themselves, asked if there’s a connection to the TV series Lost. (Actually, that last one might not be as crazy as it sounds. Lost, about a missing commercial aircraft, was executive produced by JJ Abrams, whose reluctance to let any information about his projects leak to the press is now the stuff of legend. If Abrams is executive producing MH370, then the lack of information suddenly makes sense.) Oh, and news.com.au decided to talk about how handsome searcher and Flight Lieutenant Russell Adams is, which will be of great comfort to the grieving families.

But in amongst this free association-posing-as-news is a small nugget of insight. For every Courtney Love—who thought she’d found the plane by examining GoogleMaps, a plan only marginally less stupid than searching for the thing with a magnifying glass and an atlas printed in 1987—there is a Rupert Murdoch.

The local angle, a favourite topic of ours, reveals the unconscious bias in more ways than one. Murdoch, who consistently fails to employ anyone with backbone enough to tell him to for-the-love-of-all-that-is-holy stop tweeting, posited the following on March 15:

“World seems transfixed by 777 disappearance. Maybe no crash but stolen, effectively hidden, perhaps in Northern Pakistan, like Bin Laden.”

With any luck, flight MH370 is hiding out in an Abbottabad compound, watching satellite television and biding its time. What form of mammalian seal team finds it first will determine whether Rupert is a savvy media operator, or a man whose fear of terrorist threats colours everything he sees.

Speaking of Abbottabad, as our Prime Minister takes a somewhat erratic approach to the plight of foreigners off the Australian coast, he dutifully announced to a world desperate for closure that recent satellite images could be showing wreckage of the crashed flight. Some may criticise him for the fact that this statement was made a week-and-a-half ago, but others will recognise that it is of utmost national importance that Australia be at the forefront of this announcement. Surely somebody must have George W Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner lying around.

Follow Lee on Twitter: @leezachariah

Illustrations by Nick Gazin

Tom Burke was driving through a sleepy part of Grand Rapids, Michigan—an empty neighborhood full of abandoned warehouses—when he first noticed the vehicle tailing him. “I was like, Why is this car turning left whenever I turn left?” he recalled. “I figured out I was being followed.”

Tom, a 49-year-old who has been active in antiwar and labor circles for decades, had been monitored for months by the FBI, and that morning, September 24, 2010, the Bureau was moving against him and his fellow activists. Agents had raided the homes of some of Tom’s friends, seizing computers and tearing apart rooms as part of an investigation into whether they were planning an armed revolution and providing aid to terrorist organizations. In response, Tom was on his way to an internet café to issue a press release telling the world what was happening, which was about all he could do given the circumstances.

That same morning, he and his wife were served with subpoenas demanding they testify before a grand jury. By December, 23 activists across the Midwest were subpoenaed and asked to answer for their activism. Among other things, they were accused of providing “material support” for terrorism, a charge that can mean anything from providing guns to a terrorist group to providing any sort of “advice or assistance” to members of such a group, even if that advice is “lay down your arms.” (Former president Jimmy Carter warned a few months before the raids that the threat of a “material support” charge “inhibits the work of human-rights and conflict-resolution groups.”)

Nearly four years later no one has been charged with a crime, and an unsealed affidavit, which the FBI used to get a federal judge to sign off on the 2010 raids, even notes that this group of mostly middle-aged peace activists explicitly rejected the idea of providing arms to anyone. The document, released by court order last month in response to requests from the activists, shows that an undercover special agent was intent on luring people into saying ominous things about “revolution” and, sometimes, some of these people indulged her, which provided the pretext for legally harassing a group known to oppose US policy at home and abroad.

The FBI first became interested in Tom and his fellow travelers on the eve of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when the bureau that purports to keep America safe sent an undercover agent who went by the name “Karen Sullivan” to infiltrate the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, one of the most prominent groups organizing protests outside the convention. The agent couldn’t uncover any wrongdoing whatsoever, but soon she made her way to another left-wing organization in the Midwest, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a group that includes Tom and a number of other activists who received subpoenas.

Her cover was fashioned to appeal to the bleeding-heart leftists she sought to entrap and imprison—“Karen’s” identity was practically a caricature of a socialist activist.

“She presented herself as a lesbian with a teenage daughter,” Jess Sundin, a founding member of the Anti-War Committee who also belongs to the FRSO, said in a 2011 interview with Nick Pinto of the Minneapolis City Pages. The agent told activists she had a rough childhood and spent years on the streets after first her parents and then the military kicked her out for being gay. She laid it on thick, in other words.

“I remember a woman who was really eager,” Tom told me. “She kept bringing up how eager she was about revolution. And you know, on the one hand, people think it's good because we really need to change society, so it's a fine thing to talk about. On the other hand, she was trying to find people she could manipulate into [committing] a crime.”

Her excesses, her going on about revolution a bit too much, were shrugged off as the zeal of a recent convert, but they didn’t go without notice. These were experienced activists who knew that government surveillance of dissident groups had a long, ongoing history—but they were also aware that paranoia can also scare off the genuinely eager and slowly kill an organization. Being a little too green and a little too willing to help out doesn’t always mean someone’s a cop. And why worry if you have nothing to hide?

“We had discussions about her,” Tom said. “The mistake we made is that we believed, well, we're not breaking any laws, so what is she going to report? The raids shook us.”

"Karen Sullivan" along with another undercover FBI agent, who went by the name of "Daniela Cardenas"

Most of the activists targeted by the FBI wouldn't deny they are revolutionaries, but they aren’t naïve either. They are radical enough to not rule out that some future revolutionary period could entail a gun going off somewhere, but they aren’t about to stockpile weapons—they know America is not revolutionary Russia. As a result, the day-to-day activities of the self-described “Marxist-Leninists who believe that capitalism... is inherently a system of inequality, injustice, and war” are pretty mundane. After the 2008 Republican convention, they engaged in routine organizing efforts, attempting to mobilize support for health-care reform and opposition to police brutality. When George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, they put together rallies protesting the verdict.

The FBI affidavit paints a far more sinister picture, with testimony from “Karen” alleging that members of the FRSO—teachers and trade unionists with long-standing ties to their communities; people whose homes she visited and whose newborn children she cradled in her arms—were actively plotting to take over government buildings in an armed revolution, all while aiding terrorist organizations in Colombia and Palestine. But after two years of undercover work, there was never any hard evidence for any of this; the affidavit is based almost entirely on the undercover agent’s testimony—testimony that, at worst, makes her former comrades sound like a couple of leftists after a few beers.

“Commies fighting for national liberation in other countries? We love those guys,” Jess Sundin, who was later subpoenaed, allegedly told the agent in 2009. Another activist allegedly talked about being a “big fan” of terrorist groups, though the affidavit concedes that statement came amid laughter and joking. Those off-the-cuff remarks, however, were presented as damning evidence that these community organizers—eight of whom are women with young children at home—were serious threats to “national security.”

To bolster its claim of “material support” for terrorism, the FBI affidavit makes much of the “solidarity trips” activists would sometimes take to Colombia and Palestine. The FRSO was said to have met with people who have ties to the FARC, a nominally Marxist guerrilla group now fueled by the drug trade that has been fighting the Colombian government for decades. In lieu of direct evidence, the affidavit quotes “Karen” as testifying that, based on her two years of undercover work, “I know… that there are multiple members of the FARC who do not publicly acknowledge their FARC membership and who are members of various unions.” At one point, the affidavit alleges that members of FRSO have provided aid to a pregnant woman who was a member of one such union and was touring the US. The agent also testified that her “experience and training as an FBI Special Agent” taught her that “criminals engaging in illicit activities often attempt to conceal their activities from others in order to avoid being caught.”

In the case of Palestine, the agent actually went on a solidarity trip herself, though she appears to have tipped off Israeli security before the FRSO members arrived, leading her group to be sent back home as they soon as the landed. The affidavit claims that activists provided aid to terrorists because they were on their way to deliver $2,000 to a group aiding the poor, embargoed people of Gaza—which would apparently indirectly help potential terrorists by helping to feed them. A list of questions an FBI agent left behind at a home that was raided suggests the source that money: a “Revolutionary Lemonade Stand.”

To say that all of this combined makes the activists terrorist sympathizers is a pretty drastic reach—in fact, the affidavit mentions that one of them told “Karen” that the “FRSO is not going to send anyone ‘military aid.’”

Unable to uncover hard evidence of any crime, in March 2010 the FBI agent tried to get the others to help her commit a crime. She told them she had been left $1,000 from her deceased father—who, she had claimed earlier, kicked her out of her home for being gay—and instructed that she send it to militants in Palestine. According to the affidavit, an unnamed activist promised to put her in touch with a man who could help her with a “monetary donation to people in his country,” offering to help because it's “such a cool story.” The affidavit doesn’t say if the money was ever sent.

Protests at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota, which is what the FBI was originally investigating. Photo via Flickr user Eric Hanson

So why haul all these people before a grand jury? If the case was so weak, it should have been dropped—and if there were anything to these allegations of terrorism and planning for armed revolution, activists wouldn’t be out on the streets giving interviews to me.

“Grand juries are a great vehicle for investigating political dissidents,” said Kade Crockford, a privacy expert with the ACLU of Massachusetts who has been following the case. “They are run by the government in a non-adversarial process which is secret from the public and immune from many of the constitutional protections afforded to criminal suspects in open courtrooms.”

People who testify before a grand jury aren’t allowed to bring a lawyer into the courtroom and don’t have the right to remain silent—simply refusing to talk can land someone in jail for a year and a half, which serves as a convenient way to jail people with radical politics without having to go through the hassle of convincing a jury to convict them of a crime. Anything you do say can and will be used against you, resulting in a perjury charge if nothing else. And the testimony of witnesses is kept secret, which can sow distrust among activists already prone to infighting.

“All these circumstances make grand juries the ideal vehicle for FBI fishing expeditions into lawful political activity that the government doesn’t like but, due to pesky constitutional issues, cannot outright criminalize,” Kade told me.

From the affidavit, it's evident the activists’ greatest crime was their anti-government rhetoric. Time and again, “Karen” kept asking her newfound friends when they would get around to the revolution here at home. Or were they all just talk? She goaded them and led them down conversational paths designed to produce incriminating quotes. She once asked Jess Sundin if she would be willing to throw down when the time came for “street fighting,” as if these peaceful activists desired nothing more than to make the streets run red with the blood of local small business owners and other patriots. To that, Jess allegedly replied, “If that was my assignment, yeah,” though the FBI admits she then “stated that she did not think a revolution would happen in the next ten years.”

Jess is also quoted as having “welcomed new FRSO members by stating 'we need new fighters,'” as if it were the first time anyone in American politics had used militant rhetoric (“We need fighters,” said President Barack Obama on the 2010 campaign trail).

“Do we support the overthrow of the US government?” another member of FSRO is said to have asked herself. “Oh, yeah.”

Pushed to discuss what she herself “would do during the revolution,” the activist allegedly responded, “Fucking fight and [kill] people.” But, she added, “We are not there yet.” The affidavit also notes that she didn’t even know how to use a firearm, though the fact that she knew someone who could “take her shooting” if she wanted—in Middle America, no less—is presented as if it were a shocking revelation.

Yet another activist supposedly told the informant that “she wanted to build a revolutionary movement in the United States,” a perfectly legal thing to do, “but did not think now was the time to pick up arms,” a perfectly legal thing to say.

Far from planning revolution by way of terrorism, the FBI affidavit itself suggests that, at worst, the FRSO was engaged in some fiery rhetoric—speech, in other words, which is something people are ostensibly allowed to engage in freely. No, you probably shouldn’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theater, but you can go ahead and yell all you want about hating the government and putting that theater under collective ownership after the revolution. At least, you’re supposed to be able to do that.

Another example of constitutionally protected free speech

Suppose the allegations are true, though. Suppose that when the FBI asked an activist, “What do you think of terrorist groups? Do you support them?” the activist had deep down inside wanted to respond with an “I love them” and a “Hell, yes.” If that were the case and the 23 activists targeted by the government were as nefarious as they were alleged to be four years ago, they managed to trick a lot of people, including some elected politicians, who stood by them when all 23 risked prison time by flatly refusing to participate in the grand jury process.

The Chicago Teamsters condemned the raids and demanded an immediate stop to the grand jury proceedings. So did the chapter of the SEIU representing workers in Illinois and Indiana. So did the New York Metro Area Postal Union. So did the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America. So did a Bay Area chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. And so on and so on. In all, more than three dozen labor groups spoke out against the harassment of their fellow trade unionists. Instead of sowing division among the left, the FBI had, for once, created solidarity.

Even the politicians joined in. Twelve of the 13 members of the Minneapolis City Council signed a letter in October 2011 stating that they were “deeply concerned about the chilling effects [the FBI’s] activities might have on completely nonviolent and legal activism.” They said they were worried about what it all meant for the “health of our democracy,” adding that the council had recognized the Anti-War Committee as “an important voice of nonviolence and political dissent.”

US Congressman Keith Ellison, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also expressed concern about the raids in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, though he fell short of outright condemning the federal law enforcement harassment of his constituents, a step too far for a liberal Democrat in Congress.

That so many public figures were willing to stand up for a group of self-described socialists shows just how obvious it was to anyone familiar with the case that the raids and subpoenas didn't represent a good-faith effort to arrest terrorists, but rather a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from an investigation that had gone on for more than two years without digging up a damn bit of dirt.

The affidavit itself contains admissions that the quotes within are not based “on a final, verbatim transcript.” Indeed, “certain conversations were partially recorded to save on the battery life of the recording device,” leaving the FBI to patch together quotes. In at least one case, quotes were drawn entirely from memory because the undercover agent “was holding something in his/her hands and was unable to activate the recording device.”

The first questions from a document accidentally left behind by an FBI agent during a raid on an activist's house.

One thing I realized from reading the affidavit is that the activists being spied on by the government knew their radical politics could draw the government’s attention—and the government, bizarrely, tried to use that knowledge against them. Under the subhead “FRSO's Goals and Methods Used to Conceal Activities,” the affidavit makes note of a “UNITY DOCUMENT” that was presented to the Bureau’s infiltrator upon joining the group. It’s meant to illustrate that activists had something to hide, that you couldn’t believe their peaceful veener, but if you give it a more charitable reading it merely suggests that the activists were onto something:

No progressive struggle ever got anywhere in the United States without facing violent repression… Therefore… not only is repression inevitable; we are facing repression every day… If repression is a constant of ruling class policy, then defense against it must be a constant of revolutionary policy…

There is ample evidence that we have been and are either intermittently or constantly under one or another form of surveillance. In general, the smartest policy is simply to assume that we are under some kind of surveillance… Our main line of defense against repression will be secrecy; there is no realistic alternative.

They were right about the surveillance, of course. If anything, they weren’t paranoid enough—and certainly not as paranoid as those powerful people within the FBI who sought to imprison a group of mostly middle-aged peace activists because of some revolutionary rhetoric. The purpose of the investigation, of course, may just have been to discourage activism, but in this case it had the opposite effect: People were inspired by the activists’ refusal to testify against one another in the face of what even four years ago looked to be a clear instance of a law enforcement agency overreaching. But despite the city council's voicing dismay at the subpoenas, the 23 people targeted by the FBI could still be indicted and thrown into jail at any time, as the case against them technically remains open to this day.

As if to remind them of that, last year the Department of Homeland Security arrested Rasmea Odeh, a 66-year-old community organizer who served as associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. The alleged offense that got her arrested, in October 2013, was not stating on her immigration application that she had been incarcerated by the Israeli military in 1969—an oversight that, activists say, would have been forgiven were it a country other than Israel and Rasmea something other than an outspoken Palestinian American activist. The message: If people in power do not like what you are doing, they can find a reason to put you behind bars.

“How long do we have to be presumed guilty until proven innocent?” Tom asked when I last spoke to him. It’s a pretty good question, so I called up the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois, which is handling the case, to see if I could get an answer. Assistant US Attorney Randall Samborn got back to me the next day. “There have never been any charges filed and as a result of that we simply have no comment,” he said.

Charles Davis is a writer and producer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by outlets including Al Jazeera, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

Mark McCloud has about 30,000 tabs of acid. He collects them; framing and cataloguing them in his San Francisco home, which is why Mark gets periodically arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Most of the tabs are now too old to do anything, but they sure look cool filling up his Victorian rowhouse. I visited him there and we talked about hobbies, hallucinogen history and psychedelic rebirths, and I did lots of nodding as Mark smoked a joint and became increasingly mysterious. By the end I wasn’t sure what we were talking about, but it seemed very, very important.

VICE: So Mark, you collect tabs of acid as artwork. Why?
Mark McCloud: This happened because I have an interest from my childhood in small, well made things. When I was growing up in Argentina they put out these little books and the one I remember most clearly one called “Weaponry of the Second World War”. You would buy a stick of gum and inside would be all these little images to collect. We tried filling the books with them to entertain ourselves.

So how old were you when you arrived in California?
Well, I was raised in Buenos Aires until I was 12 and then sent to a boarding school in Claremont. Two weeks after I got here, Frank Zappa’s Freak Out came out, just to place the time. So I became an American eighth grader, reading The Doors of Perception and doing pot, then mescaline when that came on.

Okay, so tell me about tripping. How old were you when you discovered acid?
I was thirteen. It was in Santa Barbara at a very nice hotel on the beach. Me and a friend had our own cabin and we ordered some cubes from the Brother Hood of Eternal Love which was Owsley’s outlet. The experience was very full bodied, even though I was nervous and I just liked acid for its humility and educational effects. I was blind but then I could see.

So when did you start collecting it?
Oh, that was when the first imagery came out. See, when acid first came out it was just drops on paper. This was in 1968 and it was the first commercially available acid. It came out of New York City and it was done by this great underground chemist called Ghost – may he rest in peace – and they were called Five by Twenties. They were five drops by twenty on a little card that was the same size as autochrome film and it came out wrapped in Kodak packaging. Five by Twenty - for brilliant colours!

_{Yeah, it’s basically blank card masquerading as a film negative.}

And when did the first illustrated tabs appear?
In the 70s. There’s a whole vignette of imagery that appears throughout that era and it’s usually on sheets of paper the same size as an LP so they could ship it dressed as a record. The first sheets would have a single image that would be divided up into the tabs, usually in a single colour. They quickly became individual pictures though, with great detail.

_{One of the very first illustrated sheets.}

And how did you come to start framing them?
Well that’s another question about my rebirth. See, I was a very difficult seventeen year-old. Hendrix had just died so I took three hundred mikes of Orange Sunshine and basically the fabric I existed on changed. I vibrated myself out of this world and into a different thing and that’s when I really started collecting. At first I was keeping them in the freezer, which was a problem because I kept eating them but then the Albert Hoffman acid came out and then I thought fuck, I’m framing this. That’s when I realised hey, if I try to swallow this I’ll choke on the frame.

So how did a guy with a freezer full of acid become an acid historian?
Well I was on the board of the San Francisco Art Institute and to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Summer of Love I proposed that we do a show on the San Francisco acid guys. So we set up a big art show and I exhibited the whole collection. And 1987 was still loose enough to have a huge acid party with everyone afterwards.

How do you avoid being arrested, given the size of your stash?
I don’t. I’ve been done a few times and it’s always for the same thing - conspiracy to manufacture and distribute narcotics. I’ve never done that, but then I always have because I’ve been a huge advocate for acid. Back in 2000the DEA busted a group of kids at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri and that led to a group of distributers in New Orleans and somehow the snitch factory led to me. They wanted to put me away for life but they couldn’t because the tabs were old and inactive. In the end I got off and they had to hand over all their evidence which was a couple of folders of the photocopied collection. Fuck them. Someone has to say “enough already, you fucking arseholes.”

_{The DEA catalogued Mark's collection.}

But I’m guessing you know who the chemists are right?
That’s a very difficult question because to admit it is to take a big chance. So let’s just say that I can sometimes tell by the flavour who makes it. Some of my favourite guys are Dutch. They do great acid in the Netherlands.

How many trips have you taken in your life?
Half of one. The full trip is when you’re happy playing harp in heaven and your job is done. That’s the full trip.

Should everyone take acid?
No because you have to ask the right question to take it. Do you want a one-on-one with your maker?

And what if the answer is yes, even if you’ve got a mental illness?
Well there’s a correlation between acid and curing mental illness. I realised after my beautiful accidental rebirth that what we usually call psychology is actually just art.

You use a lot of complicated metaphors.
No, I just use the truth.

Ok, well, what would you say to someone who is reluctant to take acid?
I would say go with it and don’t take it until you’re willing. The will is very important. If you are willing be sure to take it sensibly, surrounded by your favourite things and, if people are involved, make sure they’re your favourite people. And just expect a miracle.

Follow Julian on Twitter: @MorgansJulian

The vast majority of today’s ads are not good. In fact, advertising sucks more now than it has ever sucked before, which is saying something when you think back to those floating-head abominations of the 1950s. While horrifying and maybe an offense to God, at least they were earnest. Part of the problem is that creativity is a dying concern in the industry. Viral marketing stunts and a click-bait mentality has led companies to prioritize cheap, mindless ads aimed at tricking people into looking at their product over standout campaigns that assume a given brand’s target audience is not brain-dead zombies clicking on anything with tits or a cat in it.

Nobody in the world lives deeper in this dark advertising hole of the internet than I do, but occasionally a spark of brilliance lights up this terrible place and, at least for a moment, makes this ad-critiquing gig worthwhile. Here are some examples of things that did not make me want to poke out my eyes with a Dixie knife.

Bell’s Whisky

Released around the same as the Super Bowl, this South African spot was better than all of the game ads combined. The music is a bit over-the-top, but the ad feels real, as does the warmth it evokes. And isn’t that what a stiff drink is about?

Ad agency: King James, Cape Town

Combantrin Worming Products

Absolutely fucking hilarious. No overproduced digital bullshit, not even a voice-over. Great product lock-up, too. Hard to believe a stodgy company like Johnson & Johnson approved this, but this is Australia. It is one of my favorite commercials of the last few years. Goddamn perfect.

Ad agency: JWT Sydney

Kit Kat

Kit Kat, at least in the UK, has been killing it for years with its long-time agency, JWT London. Of course, when you have a mantra as clear as “Have a break,” the great ads should come fast and easy.

Virgin Active

Gym ads have a well-earned reputation as some of the worst things on the planet, thanks to their tendency to fat-shame or spout bullshit like “non-judgment zone.” But this spot from January, shot in Calvinia, South Africa, is quite unique.

“We had very little time or money, which is always difficult, but sometimes it makes you more resourceful and single-minded," says Karmarama creative director Sam Walker (who also directed). "But when we landed in South Africa there happened to be the biggest biker rally of the year on at the same time. So we went straight from the airport down to the bike festival and started street-casting. The guy we chose in the end was just a guy running a T-shirt company. He had a really cinematic face and a confident, self-assured aura. We just asked him, 'How would you feel about riding a bike at high speed through the desert in your pants?' 'I'd love to,' he said.”

Read more about the shoot, and see some behind-the-scenes shots, at Creative Review.

Apotek Hjärtat (the Heart Pharmacy)

And here’s the best ambient ad of the year so far.

From the ad agency press note:

"To introduce a new line of hair products, the pharmacy Apotek Hjärtat decided to give the subway commuters in Stockholm a bit of a surprise: We equipped the digital screens on the platform with ultra sonic sensors—smart little devices that abled us to monitor the train’s arrival. Upon arrival, the short film clip on the screen changed from beauty pic to hair blowing in the wind. A shampoo truly bringing hair to life."

Ad agency: Åkestam Holst, Stockholm

N-TV News Channel Mobile App

Unmistakable message: Get closer to the news.

You’re in, you’re out, you’re sold. Production budget: about $100.

Ad agency: Havas Worldwide, Düsseldorf

HILTL Vegetarian Restaurant

Images via HILTL

Simply brilliant ads for a vegetarian restaurant in Zurich. For you cultureless people, the campaign references René Magritte’s 1948 painting The Treachery of Images, which features an image of a pipe above the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," or "This is not a pipe."

Colorado Department of Transportation

Government ads, especially in the United States, are always terrible, largely because too many people have to sign off on them. So while on its own this PSA isn’t a great ad, the fact that it got through all the political red tape unscathed is remarkable. It really is a nice low-key (and truthful, if you’ve ever played sports high) way to get the message out without preaching. The other two spots in the campaign are a couple notches lower than this one.

Ad agency: Amélie Company of Denver

Sortere.no

Another government ad, but this one is via Norway, a country with a sense of whimsy. It is the best recycling commercial ever made. Period. Produced by Bacon Production, which also helped create these wonderfully bizarre Dutch fashion commercials featuring Christopher Walken.

Guinness

How do you make an Olympics spot when you’re not an official Olympics sponsor? BBDO of New York and Guinness posted this inspiring ad two weeks before the start of the Games, with the understanding that it would have to be pulled as soon as the festivities started. But of course, rogue postings of the video persisted throughout the Games, going up faster than they could be taken down. Brilliant move. Agency and client also produced one of the best ads of 2013, “Basketball.”

Fit’s LINK Gum

Japan, forever the home of the best cat videos, has been sitting back for a couple years now, watching other countries try their hands at trendy “CatVertising.” Last week, they emerged from the shadows to deliver the coup de grâce to everybody else’s lame-ass cat ads.

It’s the second-best gum ad I’ve ever seen. Here’s the best, from 2012, by JWT New York (warning: It’s quite disgusting).

Burger King

Lastly, there are these 15 seconds of dark brilliance via New Zealand, home of the best ads and PSAs in the world. This particular spot inspired whiny cries of “ageism” and “sexism” on BK’s NZ Facebook. I have no problem with the ad because the comic tone is perfect, but you can go ahead and throw it on the pile of great ads that will never ever air in the “Land of the Free.”

Ad agency: Colenso BBDO, Auckland

See you in three months with more of the best of 2014.

Image via

According to the World Health Organisation, 121 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with depression. The latest ground-breaking treatment for those 121 million is Special K, or if you’re outside of a loud dark room, ketamine. Medical grade ketamine operates on glutamate receptors—the same ones effected by alcohol, hence the feel-good effect—it’s use has been referred to as “the biggest breakthrough in depression research in half a century” by Professor Ronald Duman, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at Yale University.

Closer to home, Australia’s forerunner of ketamine research Professor Colleen Loo refers to it as a, “quiet revolution”. Despite the hype, the psychiatric breakthrough of a generation is almost impossible to get past the medical committee at any major Australian or New Zealand hospital. Australia trialled the treatment in the early 2000s when traditional treatments have failed to work but has yet to be adopted as a common practice. This isn’t some backwater idea, the American Psychiatric Association has been vocal about their excitement about ketamine’s potential.

New Zealand has dipped into the ketamine pool more recently, it was first used to treat depression in New Zealand at the Southern District Health Board in 2010. The psychiatrist in charge was referred to as “Dr. A”, a Pseudonym was invoked in the aftermath, because the drug was technically an off-label or unapproved drug. The doctor was reprimanded and the work was buried from public view. Although it wasn’t exactly an international incident, it left the Health and Disability Commission very much against the use of ketamine and psychiatrists wary of experimenting with it.

Only one person in the Auckland District Health Board region has received ketamine as a treatment for severe suicidality: me. I was severely depressed and had made numerous attempts to take my life in the ward. I was placed in the Intensive Care Unit where they checked on me every fifteen minutes and, for several weeks, had me under constant watch.

I was trialled on all the available SSRIs and had 18 treatments of Electroconvulsive Terapy—nothing worked. Then my psychiatrist and a senior consultant suggested ketamine infusions. They had to go through a hellish amount of paperwork to get this approved, the most difficult party involved was separate government agency Pharmac. Pharmac determines what drugs and can and cannot be prescribed, and aren’t huge fans of pumping patients full of party drugs.

Researchers know why ketamine works, but still have no idea why ECT, the traditional treatment for severe depression does. They only have vague theories about it. Additionally, ketamine is actually a much cheaper treatment than ECT. A ketamine infusion in New Zealand costs two hundred dollars, ECT costs closer to a grand.

I had four infusions and within a couple hours my mood lifted considerably. During treatment I was euphoric. It was great. Never had the K-Hole experience, although I did have some entertaining conversations with the clinical director, ECT doctor, nurse, and registrar. After the treatment I no longer had thoughts of suicide. I felt good for the first time in so long the feeling was alien.

After two weeks my mood dropped again. This time my psychiatrist was unable to get approval from the medical committee for further infusions—a confusing decision considering our evidence that it had clearly worked. My doctor explained it was a concern of, “what people would think, and (their being) averse to risks”, following Dr. A's debacle no one was too keen to go rogue without the committee's approval. Despite their concerns, I had experienced none of the adverse effects.

It was then suggested I try treatments of ECT and ketamine at the same time. They were approved simply because ECT is the old reliable treatment with an established protocol. After eighteen more rounds I was well again. It was incredible. I no longer felt this devastating, debilitating, dead-eyed blankness, drowning in a cavernous black pit. I felt whole again. My personality returned. According to friends I was “normal” once more. I didn't want to die, I wanted to live.

Anxious that my mood would drop again, I asked for oral ketamine after discharge. My psychiatrist said, “we just can't do it here. We can't get it approved”' Despite my experience and the international evidence-based research that demonstrates that both ketamine infusions and oral ketamine are highly effective, Pharmac hasn't licensed it as a treatment for depression. The stigma of the drug meant it wasn’t allowed for my condition.

Arguments against the use of ketamine include its side effects of hallucinations, psychosis, and irrational behavior. There's also the fear that a patient will become dependent on the drug. It's the reputation of ketamine as a party drug, a horse tranquiliser, and the fact it's still technically an experimental off-label treatment. There is also the worry that if oral ketamine is prescribed it will create a new channel of access for those using it recreationally.

The refusal of Pharmac and the Health and Disability Commission to approve ketamine as a treatment is an example of an intransigence, and a hesitation to establish new protocols allowing psychiatrists to try out new things and accomplish significant new research. The use of and research into ketamine could lead to the development of new drugs that also operate on glutamate receptors—drugs that have less stigma than Ketamine. To me it seems unfair to impede research into an incapacitating illness over a negative social connotation. Some people abuse drugs, but a lot more people need them to feel well, and they shouldn’t be suffering because of the choices of other.

Image via SwedishCrutch.com

Hey, would you like to look at healthy Swedish girls posing with crutches? Maybe because that's the kind of thing you like to masturbate to or whatever? Don't worry, Swedish Crutch has totally got you covered. The girls are fully clothed, but that doesn't matter if the attraction lies in the idea of these girls being either partly immobile or totally incapacitated.

The site is run by a mysterious man living in the south of Sweden who informs visitors that he started the website to share "regular weekly photos of our cast adventures!" I managed to get a hold of one of his models, who, for obvious reasons, didn't want her real name to appear here.

VICE: So how did you become a Swedish Crutch girl?
Anonymous cast and sprain girl: I started modeling when I was 16 to 17 years old. It was difficult to get paid jobs at the time, and this was an easy way to get some cash. They found me on a site called ModellBilder.se [a sort of Craigslist for models and photographers].

How were you approached? And is there much money in it?
They just asked me if I wanted to be photographed with a cast on my leg for money. At that time, it wasn't much money at all. I think it was around €20-30 ($27–40) for a couple of hours. Nowadays, you can get between €50 and €100 ($70 and $140) if you do videos.

What's the process like when you get the plaster put on?
They bring casts in different colors and just... do it.

Who are "they"?
It's usually one man. But once in a while there were two men. They are the photographers. They put on the casts too.

How genuine do the casts look? Are they real?
I think they’re real. But they're not very carefully made. They just sort of strap on a bandage and some cotton wool, and put two layers of plaster on top of that.

Have you ever been asked to take off your clothes?
Never.

When did you understand why you were wearing casts?
I don't know. All I knew in the beginning was that the girl in the photo was supposed to be hurt and have crutches. I didn't think it was that strange; I've been asked to model nude plenty of times.

The only video currently on the Swedish Crutch's YouTube channel

Do you not mind that someone might be masturbating to photos of you wearing casts?
I think they can [masturbate] to any photo. I've done a lot of art photos where I've been topless and people can jerk off to those too. I think I choose to ignore what they’re being used for because I think people can get off on anything. As long as I feel that I'm not exposing myself in an uncomfortable way, it's OK.

Has it ever been weird to do this?
No, I can't say that it has. Everything is very appropriate. It can be a bit weird when people walk past and the photographers start hiding their cameras. It seems to be a bigger taboo for the photographers than it is for us models.

Are you in any videos?
Yes, a few. But they basically just film my foot as I'm running around with crutches, so it's pretty chill. They don't really care about your face or whatever; they're more interested in taking close-ups of your feet with the casts on.

Does your family know about you participating in this?
Yes. Some of them think it's good that I get a bit of extra cash. Friends have asked for the phone number so they can do it as well. Others think it's a weird thing, and that I'm a bit crazy. Some people like to discuss the morals around it. But we usually conclude the same thing every time: That I expose myself a lot less doing this than when I model for art projects.

What did you initially think when you were contacted?
I mean, I was around 17 years old at the time, and I had just moved to my own place. I had almost no money and went to high school and was supposed to live on my student benefits. So I was extremely grateful that there was a way to get money. I didn't question it at all at that point. And the first time I did it, I just thought it was an idea around the image, that I was wearing casts in the same way as someone would be photographed on a beach with a hat on her head. But when I realized that they were looking for more models for the same kind of photos, as well as using the same models over and over again, I started questioning it all. So I wondered what the photos were being used for, and who's on these websites and what kind of girls are participating in this.

Have your questions been answered?
Some of them. But it's not because I've asked someone about it. The photographers don't have much to do with it, really. They're there to take the photos and send them off to the man behind the website.

Are you in touch with "the man"?
No. No one knows who he is. One of the photographers knows who he is, but he's very careful with not saying anything about him. There are plenty of secrets surrounding him.

Follow Caisa Edyrd on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Matt Kowal

The past few weeks have been messy for Health Canada and its clumsy medical marijuana program. The government agency that purports to look after the health of our nation’s citizens announced it would be rolling out a plan that would force the roughly 40,000 medical marijuana patients (who are registered in the government’s system) to destroy the dank buds they had been legally growing at home and patronize a host of new government sanctioned grow-ops, lest they have their information turned over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

That plan was squashed before it could even get off the ground, after John Conroy, a lawyer in British Columbia lawyer, successfully argued that this new program would limit sick people’s access to medicine so drastically that it’s unconstitutional. A temporary injunction has been granted to Conroy, which means that for now, medical marijuana patients can keep growing at home, while the government contests the decision.

Interestingly enough, while the mandate that would have required medical marijuana patients to destroy their medicine by April 1 has been temporarily halted, the entirety of Health Canada’s new program hasn’t been put on ice. One key change that’s made it through is that new patients who wish to take cannabis (a.k.a. smoke that weed) to deal with their nausea, anxiety, chronic pain, or other ailments can now receive prescriptions directly from their doctor, rather than go through a bureaucratic application process that would require them to earn Health Canada’s approval.

In an official and snappily titled Health Canada statement published today ("Government of Canada Announces New Steps to Help the Medical Community with Marijuana for Medical Purposes"), the agency coldly addressed the court’s overruling of their allegedly unconstitutional plan to snatch medicine away from sick people as such: “Health Canada does not endorse the use of marijuana, but the courts have required reasonable access to a legal source of marijuana for medical purposes.” The statement also addresses the lack of official testing that marijuana has gone through to become a verifiably useful medicine, as Rona Ambrose, Canada’s minister of health, herself says:

“I continue to hear concerns from health professional organizations that dried marijuana is not an approved drug or medicine in Canada. They want clearer guidance on safety and effectiveness and want authorizations to be monitored. That is why I asked Health Canada to consult with provincial and territorial regulatory bodies, companies licensed to produce marijuana and other professional organizations to enhance information-sharing on how doctors and nurse practitioners are authorizing the use of marijuana."

To be clear, this is the same agency that cannot even recall dangerous drugs that get sold to Canadians by Big Pharma. Eleven percent of doctors in Canada already give “off-label” prescriptions, meaning they prescribe drugs in scenarios that are untested, which has led to catastrophic results. Plus, Health Canada whistleblowers have accused the agency of pushing through medicine that didn’t have enough data behind them to be verifiably safe.

Then there’s marijuana, which is at least anecdotally recognized the world over as being a relatively safe drug with strong medicinal benefits. Obviously, no one would want our doctors and government to act on medicinal policy simply based on Joe and Sally’s account of weed being super fucking rad, but clearly the government isn’t all that reluctant when it’s authorizing giant factories to open up on Canadian soil and start pumping out weed.

And if it had gone the way Health Canada had originally planned, these new factories would not only have an exclusive market to the 40,000 patients in the medical marijuana program, but by allowing doctors to directly prescribe weed to new patients, their market would grow exponentially. In fact, Health Canada has estimated by 2024 there will be 450,000 Canadians using medicinal marijuana, which they estimate will create a billion-dollar industry.

I reached out to the Canadian Medical Association this morning to get a doctor’s perspective on the power balance shifting from Health Canada to doctors themselves, when it comes to prescribing patients that kush, but they were busy and bounced me over to the Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities in Canada (FMRAC), whose homepage links to this statement: “MEDICAL MARIHUANA: WHAT THE MEDICAL REGULATORY AUTHORITIES HAVE TO SAY.”

Apparently FMRAC’s position hasn’t changed since 2004, when it stated: “The Federation of Medical Regulatory Authorities of Canada strongly believes that the practice of medicine should be evidence-based, and that physicians should not be asked to prescribe or dispense substances or treatments for which there is little or no evidence of clinical efficacy or safety," adding, "for those stated reasons, we strongly oppose the proposed Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations.”

The doctors of this country have an understandable, professional reluctance, given that Health Canada has still not authorized marijuana as an approved drug or medicine—yet Health Canada has still managed to kick up a ton of dirt by upsetting patients and threatening them with law-enforcement intervention for non-compliance with their possibly unconstitutional program, which of course landed them in court.

Part of the problem doctors are bound to have with medical marijuana is the huge amount of cannabis variants available to weed users: dried buds in strains that vary from sleepy weed and hungry weed to nausea-evaporating weed. Then there are the oils, extracts, and edibles (which, so far, are not being manufactured by any Health Canada–authorized grow op). Or how about medication like Charlotte’s Web, a proven cannabis-based remedy for child epilepsy that is gaining legal acceptance in the US but is still unavailable in Canada?

While doctors seem (at least officially and on the record) very wary of prescribing cannabis to Canadians in any sort of widespread fashion, the fact is that weed is now being grown legally in Canada on a large commercial scale and doctors can directly prescribe it. This alone will likely result in a few weed-friendly doctors operating in a practice near you soon.

Whether or not the regulatory boards are happy about this is somewhat irrelevant, because Health Canada’s plan has passed in a way that should be cause for celebration for medical marijuana patients: It’s easier to get a prescription, you can grow it at home if you want to, or you can patronize one of many new legalized, private grow ops. Obviously these new private grows can’t be happy about their bottom-line now that patients can still legally grow their own happy plants, as opposed to being forced to buy from this new industry; and Health Canada certainly isn’t stoked that its monopolistic plan has been bodyslammed in court.

But despite its being somewhat unintentional, Canada now has better access to medical marijuana than ever before—just in time for 4/20.

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.

Illustration by Nicholas Gazin

Most of us have some body part that we’re self-conscious about. I was born with a dangling piece of cartilage that looked like a third ear—it was cut off and now resembles a zit. I think it's our insecurities that makes us so fascinated with other people’s abnormalities, especially when they open themselves up to the bizarre and diverse circus that is the internet.

One man, TBoneTheOriginal, exposed himself to all kinds of intimate questions and attracted considerable attention after he wrote a post on Reddit last January titled “I have no buttcrack.” The post included a picture of the jagged scar where a plastic surgeon sewed his butt cheeks together. The operation was necessary, he told curious readers, because several cysts below his tailbone were so severe that the doctor couldn’t just cut them out and let the wounds heal. They had to be sealed shut. The condition, known as pilonidal cysts, is thought to be caused by loose hairs that push into the skin and become infected, causing painful boils.

I contacted TBone, who only wants to be identified as Tim because the internet is full of “weirdos,” to find out why he made his condition known on Reddit, what he thinks of Obamacare, and, most importantly, how he poops. We had to communicate via email because Tim said he had bronchitis (can someone please give this poor man some vitamins?), but he did manage to take a picture of his derrière while holding a paper with “VICE” written on it, just to prove he’s not talking out of his ass.

VICE: Why did you decide to post your condition on Reddit?
Tim: I decided to post my condition to Reddit on a whim. It was my “cake day” (Reddit birthday), where you traditionally post something out of the ordinary, so I figured why not? I certainly never expected it to blow up the way it did, but I’m glad it happened. I had dozens of people message me and thank me for educating them on a condition that they didn’t even know they had until seeing my post. They said they were too embarrassed to get it checked out, and my post convinced them to get it taken care of.

A lot of Reddit users asked you how you poop. Is it very difficult?
Going to the bathroom can be a delicate procedure because the last thing you want is fecal matter getting into the wound. Believe it or not, it was a challenge to switch from wiping from the back to wiping from the front.

Are there any other activities that you have difficulty doing or can no longer perform?
Mostly any activities that require sitting for long periods of time. One of my favorite hobbies was playing drums, which I sadly don’t do much anymore. Drumming requires long periods of sitting and bouncing up and down. After doing it for 30 minutes or so, the wound tends to get irritated and flair up. Recently, I went on a seven-day hiking trip through the Paria Canyon in Arizona. It wasn’t an easy journey due to having no access to a shower and having to keep the wound clean. I wasn’t even able to get in the river with the rest of the guys because if any of the sand got into the wound, I’d have been screwed. Sleeping on a hard ground wasn’t easy either.

Has the operation affected your sex life at all?
Other than a couple weeks after surgeries, it hasn’t affected my sex life in the least. My wife isn’t bothered by it.

How long have you had the pilonidal cysts? When were you first aware of them?
I’ve had the pilonidal cysts since seventh grade or so, when I first noticed them. They’re hereditary, so I wasn’t surprised to see them after knowing my mother, aunts, and cousins all had them. But since they flair up temporarily and then go away for a while, I never had them checked out professionally until I was 23 or so.

What did your doctor say when you showed him your cysts?
My doctor was shocked to see my cysts. So much, in fact, that he called someone else into the room and said she needed to see it. I asked him how severe they were, and his response was, “Do you fish? Because if you did, this would be considered wall-mountable.” The wound had to be sewn shut instead of being left to heal from the inside out. The reason for this is because my case was so severe that my doctor had to bring in a plastic surgeon to help close the wound. They ended up removing so much that my tailbone was exposed when they were done. He told me that he had done dozens upon dozens of pilonidal-cyst surgeries and mine was by far the worst he had seen.

How far down are your butt cheeks sewn together?
My butt cheeks are pretty much sewn down to right before they curve into my legs. The wound between my legs is still open to this day because it is having a hard time completely healing due to the nature of its location. It is extremely close to my anus, so it’s a sensitive area.

You have said that you delayed seeking treatment because you changed insurance plans? Can you talk about that?
Insurance wasn't an issue until after I'd already had three surgeries. The problem was that, after five years, the wound was still open and needed regular maintenance to prevent infection. Part of the maintenance was laser-hair removal to prevent future cysts from forming. So when I changed insurance companies, I was told that the wound was a pre-existing condition and would no longer be covered for a minimum of two years. So the wound hasn’t been looked at by a doctor in more than a year, which is why The Doctors TV show provided me with free treatments.

Given what happened with the insurance company, what do you think about Obamacare?
I do not support Obamacare, even with my condition. While it is true that my condition would not be considered pre-existing (and that would have been great), my personal views are that the pros do not outweigh the cons. That said, the end result of my butt cheeks being sewn together wouldn’t be any different regardless of the health-care system. My case was simply so bad that the doctors had to remove a lot more “meat” than normal. Therefore, the wound had to be sewn shut instead of allowing it to heal like most pilonidal-cyst operations would be handled.

Is the operation permanent, or could it be reversed?
My plastic surgeon said they could do reconstructive surgery to “give me back my butt crack,” but honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever do it. There’s no guarantee that the cysts won’t come back one day, and if that happened, we’d be back at square one. On top of that, my wife isn’t bothered by it. I’m happy with who I am no matter how ridiculous I look naked.

The cysts are hereditary, and some of your family members had them too. Do you ever talk about it with them?
I don’t talk much to my other family members about my condition for sympathy because none of them have had the condition as badly as I did. My wife has been my shoulder to cry on as she has seen me at my worst, so she knows exactly the pain that I’ve been through. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have gotten through the mess without her. I certainly didn’t want someone like my mother to maintain the wound at home. That’s some territory I just didn’t want to cross into with anyone but my wife.