Pro-choice protesters march on the Texas State Capitol in 2013, fighting similar legislation. Photo via Flickr user Ann Harkness

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Texas is already notorious for passing restrictive abortion legislation, but a new law that went into effect at the beginning of 2016 has taken it even further. The law, known as HB 3994, requires all abortion clinics to ask their patients for government-issued identification; it's meant to ensure minors only get abortions with parental consent or approval by a judge in emergency circumstances. But the ID requirement also severely limits abortion access for undocumented immigrants.

This is significant because Texas had the second-highest undocumented population in the US as of 2010, with an estimated 1.8 million undocumented residents, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

HB 3994, which was signed into law last July, obliges every abortion physician to request "proof of identity and age" from each patient. Acceptable identity documents include driver's licenses and identification cards from a US state or from a Canadian province, according to Texas's Family Code. Local identifications from Mexico and other countries, however, are not accepted documents.

"It's patently discriminatory," said Heather Busby, executive director of the reproductive rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. "By saying you can have a Canadian ID, it is discriminating against all other countries. The reality is we know it's people from Latin America who are hit the hardest."

The bill allows patients to present a variety of other IDs, including their birth certificate or passport, but Busby said undocumented immigrants were unlikely to have such papers in the country.

The identification requirement is just the latest blow to reproductive rights in Texas. The controversial anti-abortion bill HB 2, which is currently being challenged in the US Supreme Court, included restrictions that prompted half the state's 41 clinics to close, and could soon leave only ten clinics to serve all 5.4 million women in Texas.

"Texas politicians have worked very hard to cut short women's constitutional rights to abortion," said David Brown, staff attorney for the national Center for Reproductive Rights. "Adding this unnecessary requirement is simply a tool to prevent some women from being able to access abortions. The purpose of this bill is the same as HB 2—to saddle women with unnecessary requirements, just as HB 2 creates unnecessary medical requirements for clinics."

HB 2 rules have already shuttered all but one clinic south of San Antonio, where many of the state's Latinos live. Now women must endure long wait times at the last remaining clinic in McAllen or travel north to find another provider.

"We know wait times have gone up and delays have occurred, and with Texas's 20-week cap on abortions, timing is a huge issue, so a woman might have to travel to another clinic in another city or another state," said Amanda Williams, executive director of the Lilith Fund, an Austin-based organization that helps women pay for abortions in Texas.

But traveling north means crossing Border Patrol checkpoints (agents check individuals' immigration status up to 100 miles north of the border). Undocumented women must decide whether to risk deportation to reach another clinic.

"We hear from undocumented people who are really concerned about the checkpoints they might have to cross to get an abortion. If you're undocumented, you don't have the privilege of going to other cities like people without identification barriers, because you have to cross the checkpoint," Williams told me. "The compilation of these laws is a blatantly obvious attack on undocumented people."

"When you drastically reduce access to safe and legal abortions you see more women turning to self abortion or illegal abortion." —David Brown

The cost of abortions—around $500 (about £347) on average, according to the Guttmacher Institute—is yet another obstacle for low-income women, including many undocumented immigrants. The stigma of visiting a clinic can also deter some women from going. Sofia, a volunteer who escorts women to Whole Woman's Health, the only clinic in McAllen, said fear was a pervasive experience for the patients she encountered.

"They're afraid of lots of things. The situations they've been in have already been traumatic, and then they're afraid to reach out because they don't know if they'll be treated or deported," said Sofia, who requested her last name not be used to protect her from abortion opponents. "The uncertainty creates a lot of fear for them, and then they have to figure out how to pay for it and who's going to help them. A cousin of mine needed these services, and people were making it so much harder, protesting outside the clinic and making a difficult situation even more difficult."

In the face of these obstacles, undocumented women are increasingly turning to DIY abortions. As many as 240,000 females in Texas have attempted a self-induced abortion, according to a study released in November by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project. The report also found that Latina women living in counties that bordered Mexico were "significantly more likely to know someone who had attempted self-induction or to have done it themselves."

"Given that the populations we found to be most familiar with abortion self-induction are among those to have been most directly affected by the closure of abortion clinics in the state, we suspect that abortion self-induction will increase as clinic-based care becomes more difficult to access," the researchers predicted.

Advocates suspect that since HB 3994's passage, self-induced abortions have indeed increased in the Latina community. Brown, with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said such a trend was nearly guaranteed.

"At one clinic, a client called and said, 'Tell me what in my medicine cabinet under my kitchen sink I can use,'" Brown said. "When you drastically reduce access to safe and legal abortions, you see more women turning to self abortion or illegal abortion. The harder you make it for women, the more of that kind of conduct and desperation we're going to see."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott's office did not immediately return calls and emails requesting comment about the bill's effect on undocumented women. But Abbott did issue a statement when he signed the bill into law that boasted about its defense of the "unborn."

"Lawmakers made significant strides to further protect innocent life and ensure the health and safety of mothers across Texas with this bill," the statement said. "HB 3994 successfully closes loopholes in current judicial bypass laws that were exploited to circumvent parent authority and yielded more abortions to minors. I am proud to have signed HB 3994 into law, and, as governor, I will continue to ensure that the State of Texas leads the way in protecting our most vulnerable—the unborn."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

More on immigration from VICE:

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We Asked Refugees in Denmark to Show Us Their Most Valuable Possessions

Photo via Flickr user Ben Husmann

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

You know that feeling when you walk into your office and discover that there's a robot sitting at your desk doing your job? No? Neither do most Americans, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center released on Thursday. Two-thirds of the those surveyed believe that robots will "probably" or "definitely" do most of the work that humans currently do, but 80 percent of respondents somehow think their job won't be affected by automation. In other words, a lot of people are wrong.

The survey responses, said Andrea Kuszewski, a behavioral therapist who specializes in the intersection of humans and machines "is the good old-fashioned optimism bias—a tendency to think that we are less at risk of having a negative event affect us than other people are. In other words, the 'it won't happen to me' effect."

Obviously, people want to think of themselves as a special snowflake at work, not merely the sum of a few simple functions that create more value on a company's balance sheet. But as machines get better at performing all sorts of tasks, it stands to reason that they may start to take over tasks that humans are paid to do—including the stuff you're doing right now.

Doctors, lawyers, stand-up comedians, CEOs, models, journalists, personal assistants, architects, clergymen—there's evidence that all of these gigs, and many more, could be automated in form or fashion in the coming decades. Even people like Kuszewski could one day be forced out by intelligent machines if we continue to develop robopsychologists. (If you really want to squirm, consider that a rudimentary form of a robot therapist has existed since 1966.)

"During the 21st century, I think it will become technically possible to automate essentially all human jobs," said Stuart Elliott, an analyst at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the author of research on how new technology will transform the workplace.

Elliott is mainly concerned with the development of artificial intelligence as it relates to four human skills: language, reasoning, vision, and movement. Language use is the most far-off at this point, so jobs that require negotiations or interpersonal communication are the least likely to be displaced by robots right now.

Data from a 2013 Oxford University study on the future of employment came to a similar conclusion: The more social intelligence a job required, the less likely it was to be automated—so therapists and social workers were pretty safe; bookkeepers and bill collectors, not so much. (If you're curious about where your job fits in, NPR made this handy tool to calculate your risk of being replaced by a robot based on the Oxford data.)

But even if your job isn't at immediate risk of disappearing, it doesn't mean that machines won't change it in significant ways. Daniel Susskind, an economics lecturer at Balliol College at Oxford University, makes this point in his recent book, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts.The effect of automation, he argues, will be in replacing various tasks rather than replacing entire occupations.

In fact, it's already happening: Just look at ATM machines, which have automated the work of bank tellers, or the 27 million Americans who use software like TurboTax instead of hiring a human accountant to file their taxes. If you look at automation this way, the good news is that not every job will be replaced outright. (Unless you're a factory worker, or one of those people who waves signs on street corners. Sorry.) The bad news is that, unlike studies that predict automation will affect about half of jobs in the United States, Susskind's view suggests that close to 100 percent of jobs could be at least partially automated.

On Motherboard: Robots Won't Steal Our Jobs, They'll Be Our Minions

According to research published last year, a CEO could outsource at least one fifth of her tasks to a robot—things like data analysis or reviewing status reports—using currently available technology. And while jobs that involve emotion, creativity, or abstract thinking are the hardest to automate right now, it doesn't mean machines won't be able to do some form of that sort of thinking in the future.

"An architect might say because the job requires creativity, and creativity is something that can't be done by anything other than a human being. That's a mistake," Susskind told me. "If you look at the job of an architect and decompose it, many of those tasks don't require creativity at all"—and those ones, he said, are ripe for automation.

Take an example from religion, which seems least likely of all to succumb to robot intervention. In 2011, the Catholic Church endorsed an app called Confession, which included tools for tracking sins users commit, a step-by-step guide to the sacrament, and seven options for contrition. According to Susskind, some Catholics took this as a sign that they didn't have to go into that box anymore and stopped going to confession altogether. "It caused such a scare that the Vatican itself had to step in and say, 'You're allowed to use this technology to help you prepare for confession, but it's not the substitute for the real thing,'" Susskind told me.

Some jobs require flesh and blood—like pardoning sins, apparently. And as automation becomes more common, there may be jobs that we choose not to automate even though it's technically possible to do so. "I think such exceptions will involve jobs where we particularly care that a human is doing the job and where people are willing to do the work for free," Elliot told me. "Acting might be a good example, and probably also being president."

Related: Can Machines Write Musicals?

So if virtually every job will change because of new technologies, and humans will give up increasingly bigger chunks of their work to robots, what will be left for humans to do?

One option is that we let robots do all the drudgery that produces needed goods and services, spread the resulting prosperity around, and spend our days creating art, thinking profound thoughts, and just kind of lounging around eating grapes or whatever. (This vision of the future was popular in sci-fi back in the first half of the 20th century.) The other option is that corporations profit off robot labor at the expense of humans, who can't find work and consequently starve to death. I guess only time will tell?

If you ask Elliot, though, there's no reason not to be optimistic. "As work is increasingly automated, we'll be forced to implement some sort of universal basic income so that it will become possible for people who don't work to be able to live comfortably," he told me. Cue the grape eating.

Kuszewski is hopeful too. "Automation allows us to spend our cognitive resources in higher-level activities, which ultimately moves society forward even more," she told me. "The most successful industries will be the ones embracing what technology makes possible, rather than what it takes away."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Tensions over Donald Trump's incendiary presidential campaign finally erupted into chaos Friday night, when protesters in Chicago shut down a scheduled campaign rally, clashing with the Republican frontrunner's supporters in massive demonstrations on the streets and at the University of Illinois campus where the candidate was supposed to speak.

In a statement issued about 40 minutes before Trump was scheduled to go on stage, the campaign announced that it was canceling the rally due to security concerns. "Mr. Trump just arrived in Chicago and after meeting with law enforcement has determined that for the safety of all of the tens of thousands of people that have gathered in and around the arena, tonight's rally will be postponed to another date," the statement read. "Thank you very much for your attendance and please go in peace."

Activists in Chicago had been planning the demonstrations since the moment the Trump campaign announced he would visit the city in advance of the Illinois primary next Tuesday. A Facebook group for a Trump Protest Rally, which encouraged people to register to attend the Trump rally, had 11,000 RSVPs by Friday afternoon.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

As he languished in prison for 25 years, Andre Hatchett insisted that he did not murder Neda Mae Carter. On Thursday afternoon, Brooklyn prosecutors finally agreed with what he and his defense team have been saying all along: There's no evidence tying him to the crime. As the New York Times reports, an audience applauded when Hatchett's conviction was vacated by a judge, and the 49-year-old walked out of the courtroom with his sisters en route to a steak dinner at Dallas BBQ.

When Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson took office in 2014, he put an emphasis on reviewing suspicious cases, and Hatchett is the 19th person person to be exonerated on his watch. The plan is to review about 100 cases, about 70 of which are tied to infamous former NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella. That cop had no connection to this case, but Hatchett's story is especially glaring in that it shows how the criminal justice system can fail on every single level.

On February, 18, 1991, Hatchett gave money to Carter so that she could buy crack. Later that evening, at around 11 PM, police responded to a call that there was a woman unconscious in a Bed-Stuy park. When they arrived at the scene, they found Carter's naked, brutalized corpse, her limbs apparently having been arranged so as to resemble the aftermath of a crucifixion.

Hatchett, who at the time of the murder was a new father and an ice delivery man, had an IQ of 63 and read at a first-grade level. He was also using crutches after getting caught up in an unrelated shooting. The only person to testify against him at trial was Gerard Williams, a criminal who originally identified another person.

When that first alleged perp ended up having an alibi, Williams picked Hatchett out of a lineup.

Andre Hatchett enjoying his freedom. Photo by Sameer Abdel-Khalek

The first attorney assigned to Hatchett's defense was so incompetent that the case resulted in a mistrial. The second lawyer failed to disclose to the jury that his client had such a low IQ and was physically incapacitated at the time of the murder. That second attorney was also never told by the prosecutor Nicholas Fengos or his team that the sole eyewitness originally tried to finger another suspect.

While Hatchett was in prison, he lost his son. The judge and trial defense lawyer also died. Meanwhile, Fengos—who subsequently took a gig at the International Rescue Committee—is no longer a prosecutor.

Last year, a bill passed the New York State Senate that would have required police to record interrogations, but the measure never made it into law. The idea was to prevent coerced confessions, which frequently play into wrongful convictions. A similar proposal has gained support this year from Governor Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Bar Association, and the District Attorneys Association. According to the Innocence Project, which helped secure Hatchett's release, about half the states in the country have similar procedures already in place.

"It's frightening how easy it is to convict an innocent person in this country," Seema Saifee, a staff attorney for the organization, told the Times."And it's overwhelmingly difficult to release an innocent person."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

These photographs are a record of my eight visits to Fukushima since the summer of 2011. It's only an hour and a half train ride from busy Tokyo to the quiet town of Fukushima. The recovery slogan on the side of the train reminded me of what happened, the nuclear disaster and the long recovery effort. On my first visit to Fukushima, the city was frighteningly empty. Later on, more people returned, and the city has regained some of its vigor as time has passed.

The town of Soma, in Fukushima prefecture, is located 14 miles north of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Soma used to be a prosperous fishing town. Now you can see the scars from the tsunami everywhere, with blank white signs standing in empty commercial lots.

The village of Iitate is 25 miles away from the power plant, but it was still hit by a wave of radiation due to the wind pattern on the day of the disaster. Most of the village's former inhabitants still live in government-supplied temporary housing, and the place sits empty and eerily silent.

Many of the people of Iitate used to enjoy the slow pace life in big farmhouses, but they are now forced to live in 325-square-foot prefabricated houses or tiny apartments.

One woman I spoke to, Mrs. Kanno (below), laughed as she recalled the days when she chased a wild boar from her farm. But her eyes turned blank as she pictured the landscape that she could never forget.

From Kaz Senju's book Fukushima: Forgotten Landscape. Follow him on Instagram

The flagship Topshop in London, a while ago (Photo: Magnus D via)

It takes the average Topshop cleaner about a week to earn enough money to buy a Topshop Boutique trench coat. Low-wage workers are holding a protest this Saturday 12th March outside the Oxford Street flagship store in London, against being paid what they consider to be poverty wages. Their goal is to pressure Arcadia Group – the company that owns Topshop and recently reported an annual profit of over £250million – into paying cleaners and shop-floor staff the living wage: £9.40 in London and £8.25 elsewhere in the UK.

In its Code of Conduct, Topshop's official line is to "fully subscribe to the concept of the 'living wage'". We spoke to some of the cleaners planning to protest, alongside the United Voices of the World (UVW) union, about what it's like to earn less than £800 per month in the country's most expensive city.

"The supervisor used to call me 'donkey' in English. Probably because it was quite an unusual word and he didn't think I'd understand it," says Susana, a 40-year-old cleaner and single mum. "He also kicked a bucket at me, and that was the last straw." As a cleaner, Susana is contracted by company Britannia Services Group to work at Topshop.

Roberto has also been working as a cleaner for three and a half years, along with two other jobs. At a meeting held on Wednesday, he and other low-wage staff were offered £7.50 per hour by the contractor in a last-effort attempt to dissuade them from protesting on Saturday. "I spoke on behalf of my colleagues on the unfair distribution of hours," Roberto says. "Why do they hire new people when there are old people there who could have done more hours? Some people want but most were not happy; we know we could get more, and deserve more."

UVW have been struggling to gain the support of shop-floor assistants at Topshop, who are also on poverty wages. "There's a real culture of fear," Roberto says. "A lot of people are afraid of having their hours cut so they are not showing their faces or publicly supporting the campaign."

But does he think they'll succeed? Roberto pauses. "I'm sure we can win our campaign. We're not going to win on Saturday, but how ever many times it takes we can win, if we have to go back 100 times, then 100 times it will be."

At the time of writing, an online petition fronted by Susana and asking Topshop to pay all staff a real living wage had picked up around 5,100 signatures, and only about 300 people were expected to turn up the protest.

Susana sounds dead-set on the campaign anyway. "I earn roughly £720 a month. £300 goes towards childcare, my travel card is £130. It's just not enough to live on in a dignified way. The hours are also constantly changing, so I cannot allocate money for rent and food because I don't know how much I will earn." Both she and Roberto feel that the living wage could help in feeling respected at work and more able to survive poverty-free.

But there's a bigger picture here. The UK retail sector is forecast to shed 900,000 jobs by 2025, because the national living wage and apprenticeship levy will have become too costly, according to the British Retail Consortium. The tired excuse of "we cannot afford it" only serves to highlight the unfair distribution of profits that is considered the norm.

After the forced increase in the minimum wage starts in April, reports have surfaced detailing how cutting overtime and weekend pay rates may be the route to companies making back money spent on paying a healthier wage. Is it worth it?

"£7.20 is not enough. Especially when there is a rent bubble in London," Susana says, and Roberto agrees. "This increase looks like an election stunt so that people might vote in favour. I call on all companies to pay a fair wage. I call on everybody who is in these same circumstances to stand up and fight and reclaim your right to demand a living wage."

We put the questions to Arcadia Group, about Topshop low-wage staff feeling they aren't paid the living wage that the shop 'subscribes to". Here is their statement, in full:

"At Arcadia we value and appreciate our staff and are proud of the contribution they make to our business. In the interests of transparency and in response to some factually incorrect allegations made by United Voices of the World, we wish to confirm that all our employees are paid hourly rates which are legally compliant.

"In central London we currently pay rates well above the UK Government's National Minimum Wage. For us, it is essential to remain competitive and in line with other major retailers to attract, grow and retain the best people."

@daisy_field

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Not drugs from this actual bust, but you get the idea (Photo: NCA via)

It seems like only yesterday we silently processed the gall of a drug gang that smuggled heroin, cannabis and MDMA into the UK from Europe in flower boxes. Oh – right.

Now there's news that a group of drug traffickers have all got a combined 78 years in prison, for ferrying heroin, coke, MCAT, amphetamine and cannabis into the East Yorkshire area. As luck should have it, the gang – allegedly led by a man called Philip Bell – happened to move drugs into and around Boston, where a rate of about 15 murders per 100,000 people apparently makes the Lincolnshire city this year's "murder capital" of the country.

In total, 16 people linked to the gang all pleaded guilty to drug-related offences, after first slipping up in October 2015 when two drug runners were stopped making an amphetamine, cocaine and MCAT delivery worth £40,000. Ten men and four women were sentenced to prison time on Friday at Lincoln Crown Court, with another two due to serve community service hours. One man, Stephen Hopkins, didn't show up to the sentencing and his case has been adjourned until later this month.

Things started well enough for the gang. Philip Bell met two of his co-defendants, Hull local Leslie Hodgson and Liverpool man Gary Perry, in Hatfield Prison not far from Doncaster. They were all doing time for previous drug offences, according to the case's prosecutor, George Aspden.

"This was a professional drug trafficking operation," he said in the trial, according to local Lincolnshire press. "The motive appears to have been financial gain rather than drug addiction. Arrangements were coordinated using unregistered pay as you go mobile phones. Significant amounts of money must have changed hands."

The gang was spread across East Yorkshire, Merseyside, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, according to police. Bell and his associates apparently started moving drugs into Boston from Merseyside and West Yorkshire, before distributing them in the area.

After the October 2015 bust – where police stopped Linda Haw and her husband Joao Dos-Reis making that amphetamine, coke and MCAT delivery – a search warranted raid on the Kirton, Lincolnshire home of Amber Medina uncovered 4kgs of coke with a street value of £158,000 in November, according to Lincolnshire police.

John O'Connell, the guy who'd made the delivery to Amber's house, was then arrested carrying £15,500 in cash. In December, a Merseyside man called Ian Jones was arrested in Boston carrying 1kg of heroin, worth about £66,000.

(Outer circle, clockwise from top left) Raymond McNally, Neil Grant, Leslie Hodgson, David Towers, Ian Jones, Francis Kelly, Amber Medina, Linda Dos Reis, Philip Bell, Louise Baxter. (Inner ring, clockwise from top left) Margaret Wattam, John O'Connell, Garry Perry, Michael Chand (Photo: Lincolnshire Police)

When authorities started to connect the dots between people affiliated with the gang, they learned about the family members and friends drawn into its network. Hodgson, who had previous drug-related convictions dating back to 2006 and was known to Hull police, brought his partner Paula Jackson into the group. Her house was used for stashing drugs, for which she pleaded guilty. While he's got five years in prison, she's been handed an eight-month jail sentence, suspended for 18 months with 100 hours of unpaid work – in other words, she won't have to go to prison if she does the unpaid hours.

Amber Medina, of the 4kg of coke at home raid, was convicted alongside her 55-year-old mother Linda Dos Reis. They've both been charged with conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of cocaine with intent to supply; Amber's due to spend six years in prison, and her mother five years and three months. Philip Bell has been singled out by the prosecution as the ringleader at the centre of it all, and has picked up the longest individual prison sentence of 12 years and eight months.

"This was a major drugs business organised by Bell," said Detective Inspector Paul Myers, of the East Midlands Police special operations unit, who he headed the investigation. "He not only sourced drugs from Merseyside and elsewhere but arranged for their storage and distribution."

Myers also described Bell as "manipulative and amiable" and the "mastermind of the operation", according to the BBC.

The other defendants in the case were named as Michael Chand from Cambridgeshire, Margaret Wattam, and Louise Baxter from Lincolnshire and David Towers from Leeds. From Merseyside, Gary Perry, John O'Connell, Ian Jones, Francis Kelly and Neil Grant were all charged.

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A photo of Olivia Troy (left) training actress Annapurna Sriram how to use a whip. Photo courtesy of Natasha Gornik

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Growing up, Olivia Troy dreamed of being just like Xaviera Hollander, the high-class call girl who ran 1960s New York's busiest brothel and wrote a best-selling memoir called The Happy Hooker. When parents and teachers asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she said madam.

Troy's childhood fantasy didn't come to fruition, but sex is still her professional domain. For the past decade, Troy has become a career BDSM expert, consulting for TV shows, film sets, and Broadway plays to help actors and writers get it right when it comes to portraying kink on screen or stage. Her resume includes advising Paul Giamatti about the submissive he plays on Showtime's Billions and training actors on the Zach Braff-starring Broadway play Trust, and she's currently working on the forthcoming movie The Books.

A native New Yorker, Troy began exploring BDSM in her mid-twenties after an acquaintance confessed his shoe fetish to her at a company holiday party. They spent the rest of the night holed up in a corner while he pointed out women's shoes and explained what makes a hard stiletto so sexy. Her interest piqued, she began going to fetish parties, reading BDSM literature, and practicing the art of domination. At the time, she was a freelance lifestyle writer covering food, music, and relationships. But her curiosity for BDSM led her down the rabbit hole, and she eventually set up her own private dungeon.

Now in her mid-30s, Troy practices her kink personally, professionally, and legally with her business Kink on Set. At her consulting studio in New York's Flatiron District, she teaches actors, writers, and private clients how to play and punish. The studio is a BDSM enthusiast's dream, with over £62,500 worth of equipment she often rents out to production crews. Recently, I sat down with Troy among her whipping benches, puppy cages, and gimp masks to talk sex and power, on set and off.

VICE: Can you tell me about how someone becomes a BDSM consultant? What does the job actually entail?
Olivia Troy: Like a lot of the things I've gotten into in life, I fell into this unintentionally. It was 2010, I was practicing as a domme, and a colleague of mine was helping out with the Broadway play Trust, about a guy who goes to see a professional dominatrix who turns out to be his high school classmate. She wanted to show the crew what a real dungeon looks like and how to handle some of the equipment, so she brought one of the producers and three of the principle actors over to my space.

I ended up talking to the actors and coaching them on everything, from things like how to handle a flogger to how create that dominant presence. From there it snowballed, mostly via word of mouth.

What do you mean by dominant presence?
Like, how you talk to a submissive: the tone of voice you use, the different cues you use. When you talk, you talk with intention; you speak with purpose. The idea is to seduce, to be very clear and active. is very much about owning your power. There are no questions when I speak to someone. The language is very decisive.

It sounds kind of similar to having a stage persona, as if it's a character you put on.
It is a little bit of a stage persona. There's the cliché of the stentorian-voiced dominatrix who speaks in very clipped tones and says, You will obey me . There was a time, when I first started playing going to fetish parties and playing in "the scene," when I thought the way works is that you meet a man, you say hello, you tell him to strip, kneel on the floor, kiss your feet, etc.

Eventually, I thought, this was really dumb. I don't like having my feet kissed and it's often very awkward. So I thought, Well, what do I like? And that made it easy. For instance, I started undressing my partner myself. Some people start by putting a collar on their sub, but I would come up behind them, put my hands around their throat, and say something like: I'm going to claim you with my hands. My hands are your collar. Where I touch you is the thing that tells you that you are mine. My fingerprints on your skin are what tell you that you are mine and you will feel my touch long after you are gone from here.

It sounds really sensual and like there's a lot more subtlety to it.
Yeah, for me it's less about language like "piece of shit" or "worthless pig," etc. Though there are some women who love to say that and some men who love to hear that. But if the goal is to make someone feel pathetic or humiliate them, it's less about calling them clichés like "filthy worm," and more about what is real that you can remark on. There are ways you can do that with just body positioning—how you position your own body, with how you position their body in relation to yours. There's a lot more subtly to it. There's effort, as well.

You have to actually see the person and understand who they are and what their vulnerabilities are. And that kind of comes to the heart of what my practice is as a consultant. It's about taking away those stereotypes. Teaching people is not really that cartoonish. It's about energetically setting an intention and having your actions lead to the inevitability of that fulfillment. So that's what I try to convey to the actors, too. It's not really about stomping around in boots, though you certainly can do that.

For more on sex subcultures, watch our doc 'Cash Slaves':

On the submissive side, I feel like there's this fantasy of the cold read, of finding a dominant who knows exactly what they want.
One of the things people often get wrong about kinky sexy is that, sure, people have their fetishes, but being kinky is just like any other sex. The way to make sure that someone is into it—the way you do that cold read and make it accurate—is that, as the domme, you do what you do with pleasure and gusto. As the dominant, they'll like anything I tell them to like because I love it.

Can you give me an example?
I know people who have gotten subs to agree to a golden shower who might not have been up for it otherwise. If you just say, Oh can I pee on you? that doesn't sound very sexy. But if I straddle you. Look you deeply in the eyes. Kiss you. And then I say, I want to do something for you. How would you feel if I just squirted all over your cock right now? And just imagine this warm wetness just gushing over you, and I can share that with you and you're just gonna feel this warm wetness between us and be soaked in it like I've just cum all over your cock. How does that sound?

OK, yeah. Sign me up.
If you're thinking about doing any BDSM with a partner, think about selling it. How can you say it in a way that's going to make them want it? I think anyone who wants to explore BDSM needs to think of the things they already like and try to amplify it or add a little imagination. And if you present it to your partner as something that is really fun that you can do together—and isn't just something that they are doing to you cause you want it—that makes all the difference.

When you go onset and speak to directors, actors, etc. what's the one thing you want them to take away?
I was working with Paul Giamatti for his Showtime series Billions. In the show, he's a high-power, high-profile district attorney and he and his wife have a kink relationship where he's the sub. When I talk with the actors, I try to give them language to think about their character's motivations—why they're doing what they're doing—outside the language of BDSM. It's not so much how you tie this person up, but more about the energy in which you approach the action, and what that character's motivations would be.

So for Paul's character, there's that erotic tension between his desires and the risk of getting caught. And there's an uncertainty there, too. Is his wife doing this for him or because she really wants it, too? And Maggie Siff, who plays the wife, is a therapist who analyzes Wall Street dudes all day. Is exercising this more explicit control over her husband a sort of therapy for her? What are the other dynamics at play here?

"Being kinky is just like any other sex. The way to make sure that someone is into it is that, as the domme, you do what you do with pleasure and gusto."

It seems like getting it right is also a big part what makes it sexy when it's depicted on screen.
Getting it right makes it sexy because fundamentally it is about two people connecting over something they both desire. In fact, a lot of the more explicit depictions of SM—spanking, making someone crawl on the floor, binding and tying someone up—is not that compelling in itself. That's part of the reason 50 Shades of Grey failed. You didn't sense any chemistry or connection between the actors. Yes, the environment was beautiful, but you always wondered why are they doing this? Why is she saying yes to this? Why is he interested in her? You could never sense the connection. The leather, the whips, the shoes, the catsuits, etc. are just costumes. It's trappings. It's visual. Depicting accurately is about the relationship between the two people.

What's one of the most extreme things you do in your work?
I've seen a lot of crazy shit and done some wild things in my time, so a lot of it is just normal for me. When I was working with Paul, he asked me what's one of the most awful things that could be done to him. And I said, well, "awful" is kind of in the eye of the beholder. For example, I've taken stainless steel urethral dilators and inserted them into someone's penis. He immediately cringed and he said it was too much. I told him it was kind of like I was fucking him. There's a way to talk about penetrating someone's urethra that sounds really awful. But if I say it's like I'm inserting this stainless steel rod and fucking your cock with it and then when I pull it out it's like this jet of stainless-steel cum that's shooting out of you, you're going to want to know what that feels like.

@juliacalsop

More kink on VICE:

An Architect Was Just Found Guilty in an Insane BDSM Murder Trial in Ireland

I Went Looking for Ball Torture in a North London Gastropub

The British BDSM Ban Is Just Like the Outrage Over 'Video Nasties'

We don't know much about what goes on inside Yarl's Wood. It's a detention centre in Bedfordshire – the most notorious of its kind in the UK – where asylum seekers and "immigration offenders" can be held indefinitely while waiting to find out if they're going to be deported.

Over the years, Yarl's Wood has found itself at the centre of some controversy, leading to staff being fired or dismissed based on information uncovered in investigations by The Observer newspaper in 2013 and Channel 4 in 2015.

Yesterday, thousands of protesters hopped off coaches and gathered outside Yarl's Wood to call for the centre's closing. People let off colourful flares, chanted and banged their feet and hands against the high chainlink fence that rings the centre, while some women held inside waved their hands and makeshift flags outside their windows to acknowledge the protest. We were there, amongst the coachloads of protesters from around the country, to see what all the fuss was about.

Check out Cecilia on her website and Facebook.

This originally appeared on VICE US

Normally, a photographer in search of a subject finds something interesting – a place, a person, a subculture – and trains their lens on them. The result is often revealing, even beautiful, but incomplete. What if you don't want photos of interesting people, but photos of what the world looks like to those people?

Welcome to First-Person Shooter, a photo essay series that aims to offer a brief vantage into the lives of compelling and strange subjects. Each Friday, we'll give two disposable cameras to one person to document their evening. The majority will not be trained photographers, and we're not expecting the shots to look "good". Rather, we want them to be an honest depiction of what each subject found interesting during one night of their week – hopefully inspiring that Being John Malkovich sensation we're going for.

For this first installment, we gave a camera to Carlos Porras, a tattoo artist at Brooklyn's famed Greenpoint Tattoo Co. Here's what Carlos had to say about the night he photographed.

VICE: Can you tell us about what went down on Friday night? Where did it start? What'd you get up to?
Carlos Porras: The night started around 9PM after me, some friends, and some coworkers left work. We went to the bar Matchless first and had a few drinks and started a foosball tournament. From Matchless we went to the bars Enid's, No Name, and then back to the shop.

What are Friday nights typically like at the tattoo shop? Was this night any different?
Friday night is usually a busy time. There are a lot of clients who want to get tattooed. As the shop gets closer to shutting its doors, friends starts to show up and we start brainstorming what we should do with our nights. This night was no different.

There are some people getting inked in the photos? What did they get tattoos of and who tattooed them?
We all tattooed each other: Jason, Carlos, Mike, Rachel, Richie, Ashley. We all got matching smiley faces.

How did you spend the next morning?
Everyone was pretty hungover the next morning, but we got back to work and settled in pretty quickly.

See more of the photos below.

Visit Greenpoint Tattoo Co.'s website to learn more about their shop and check out Julian Master's website for more of his photo work.

Illustration: Dan Evans

In all the squabbling and politicking around Brexit, we may have forgotten about the migration deal that David Cameron wrangled last month, when he convinced EU leaders to grant Britain an "emergency brake", basically preventing EU nationals working in the UK from accessing in-work benefits for their first four years here. But what will this mean, in practice, when it kicks into effect in 18 months?

Mostly it will hit those in low-paid, long-hour jobs – and therefore eligible for benefits – hardest. To put it simply, two people could be working for the same basic wages, but one would be barred from claiming any in-work benefits because they're from the EU, and not the UK. Working Tax Credit and housing benefits are the two main types of benefits to be cut, and EU migrants were already banned from claiming out-of-work benefits like Jobseekers' Allowance a year ago.

For Noel Dandes, who moved to the UK in September 2010 from Greece, in-work benefits were the difference between surviving and sinking. "When I came here and I worked in a bakery for a year, I wasn't getting paid enough," he says, "so for four months I claimed Working Tax Credits. It really helped me out. In London the minimum wage is not enough to survive".

Noel, looking rather chuffed now that he's off the low-wage job

When I ask Noel, who now works as a teacher in an international further education college, how much benefits were part of the "pull factor" in bringing him to Britain, he scoffs. "Every European I've met in the last six years in the UK has come here either to study or to work; I've never met anyone who came here with the explicit purpose of getting benefits," he says. "I think the changes will have zero impact on the number of EU migrants coming."

Veronika Susedkova, who came to Britain from the Czech Republic, says she would have considered benefits while working a minimum-wage job as a shop assistant in Huddersfield. "It was really low-paid, around £6 an hour – it wasn't easy to survive. If I'd known I was entitled to support, I would have claimed. I would consider myself someone who is fairly geared up about things but I didn't have a clue I could claim any kind of benefits while I was working".

Labour introduced Working Tax Credit in 1999, with the intention of providing benefits for people in low-wage jobs – something useful in an economy like that of Britain, where thinktank Resolution Foundation found that more than one-fifth of workers earn less than the suggested national living wage of £7.85 per hour, or £9.40 per hour in London.

It's worth noting that Veronika's experience isn't an anomaly. The majority of EU migrants never come into contact with the British benefits system, according to recent research conducted by the Universities of Glasgow and Swansea. To put this into context, in 2013 in-work benefits for EU migrants constituted 1.6 percent of the country's total tax credit spending. It's the minimum wage, jobs market, studying opportunities and English language – rather than benefits – that tend to draw people here.

"There's no longer a dispute about this; the evidence is overwhelming. EU migrants come for jobs," says Don Flynn, director of non-governmental organisation Migrants Rights Network. "There's simply no such thing as benefit tourism. It's a myth. Sixty percent of them have jobs on the day that they arrive here. The other 40 percent have jobs within a very short period of time". According to a study by UCL migration economists, EU migrants have made a net contribution of £20billion to the UK between 2000 and 2011.

Nevertheless, Don remains deeply concerned about the changes. "It will produce hardship," he argues. "One group of EU migrants accessing in-work benefits are people doing residential social care jobs. I've been having discussions with people working in the care sector about the changes, and there's a large element of straightforwardly feeling indignant. They want to know why they're being blamed. It seems to them that they're doing all the right things. They're coming and taking jobs that are in the industries which nobody else seems to want to work in, for fairly low wages".

While Cameron may have touted the "emergency brake" as a victory, it's proven unpopular with both Europhiles and Eurosceptics. UKIP have branded the move as the "#EmergencyFake" in one of their slow, zoom-filled YouTube videos. Closer to home, Eurosceptic Tory MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis has said the "emergency brake on migrant benefits would not stop a push bike". And on the other side of the camp, Labour MP Alan Johnson branded it a "sideshow", arguing the issue of in-work benefits wasn't a pull factor.

There's that political tug-of-war again. Taking away in-work benefits was supposed to be Cameron's green card to the UK staying in the EU, but it's hardly kept back the pro-Brexit babble.

In Noel's view, the so-called "emergency brake" has more to do with tough rhetoric than the here and now. "I think it's just a smokescreen for other issues," he says. "Cameron is doing all this because he's afraid of losing the EU in or out referendum, and I understand that, but there are so many good things about Europe that you shouldn't be focusing on scaremongering."

@MayaOppenheim

More on VICE:

A Myth-Busting Guide to Migration to the UK

Untangling the Truth Behind Benefit Claims for Migrants Across Europe and In the UK

A Liberating Guide to Life Without Benefits

This article originally appeared on VICE US

The are many reasons people deal drugs, but they are generally pretty simple. Some do it because they don't have any other way to survive. Some do it because it gives them power, or it gives them the trappings of status, wealth, and control that can result from the hustle. A few do it because it seems easier and more fun than a "normal" job. But whatever the reasons, dealing—as well as the US legal system's treatment of drugs—has a way of complicating lives and relationships.

An example: I was once friendly with a dealer who was selling weed and occasionally other stuff to help pay his way through school. Regardless of his self-sufficiency, he knew that if his parents learned about his job they would most certainly freak the fuck out. When he visited home wearing expensive new clothes and other swag, they began to ask questions, and he told that that he'd gotten hired to be a doorman at a fancy, membership-only traditional gentleman's club—a well-paid gig that my then-roommate actually had.

To convince his parents the job was legit, he'd take photos in our friend's uniform and send them to his parents. He'd also borrow anecdotes from the real doorman and invent stories about how much he was tipped to explain why his pockets were so heavy.

I'm pretty sure he got away a lot of it, but the layers of lies and occasional slip-ups made him anxious and distanced him a bit from his family. He still deals today, and has to continue lying to people (his landlord, for example) to keep his career under wraps.

Breaking Bad is probably the best known pop-culture example of a drug merchant's life getting turned inside-out, but it happens to ordinary people the world over—though maybe not with the same level of melodrama. When you deal drugs in America you risk arrest, but you also have to deal with strained relationships with people you're intimate with, being alienated from mainstream society (not always the worst thing), and possibly suffering from mental health problems or addiction.

What follows is accounts from dealers interviewed by VICE explaining how dealing complicates their lives, and how they handle the side effects of hustling. Because they are discussing illegal activity, all are anonymous.

Dealer 1
Male
Sold "Everything Imaginable"

I grew up really poor but ended up going to a very wealthy high school because I was smart—Beverly Hills High School (a.k.a. 90210). Affording a $5 (£3.50) lunch was a big deal for me, while all the other kids at school were driving luxury cars and living in mansions. I wanted a piece of that, and didn't have the best home life. My childhood was pretty rough—my mom had me when she was 19, my parents were divorced, neither of them finished high school, and my dad had mental illness. Dealing was very much about survival. For me, it was a way out of my then-reality, and into coolness and money.

I started selling when I was in tenth grade by buying one gram for $5 (about £7) – I didn't eat lunch for two days so I could afford it. Then I sold it for $20 (£14). Then I had $20 (£14) and I bought two more grams, and it went from there. Flash-forward several years, and I was selling ten to 20 pounds of weed—plus various quantities of every other drug you can imagine—every week and was making thousands and thousands of dollars.

At first, I didn't have to hide anything from my family. My best friend lived three blocks away from our high school in a really nice house. We kept our stash, money, and whatever else we needed to hide in his basement because his dad was cool and didn't care that we were dealing. I'd get dropped off at his house in the morning, get high, go to school, then go back and get higher before we started selling drugs out of the mansion. It was like a rich-kid trap house.

Things became obvious when I'd show up at home wearing nice clothes. My mom was literally working five jobs and I was making more money than her. I didn't even have to lie about dealing because it was so clear that I was high on drugs all the time.

That being said, she didn't know the extent of our operation—one moment sticks out when I think about how dealing fucked up my already fucked-up relationship with my mom. When I couldn't keep my stuff at my friend's house, I had a stash box at home. It was one of those Gateway computer speakers that were made out of five parts, and each one of those parts was filled with like weed, cash, coke, MDMA, etc. In California, you get what's called a "grower pound," which is when you buy from a grower and you get seven to 12 extra grams. I'd shave the extra off the pound and keep it as my personal supply.

One time, I had hid the pound in my room under a T-shirt and kept my personal stash on top of the shirt out in the open. My mom called me while my friend and I were driving around slanging, and told me she found my drugs. I freaked out and immediately went home, thinking she found the whole pound or looked in my speakers or something. When I got there, she was holding my tiny personal supply up, thinking that little Ziploc was the extent of my stash.

I immediately packed my shit, grabbed the pound, grabbed what was in my speakers, and bailed. That was the last time I lived at home until I stopped dealing. My dad ended up passing away during the peak of my career, and my mom never found out the scale of my operation until pretty much the time I stopped selling. It's been over five years since then, and my relationship with my family is very good today. I talk to my mom almost every day.

For more on dealing watch our documentary 'How to Sell Drugs':

Dealer 2
Female
Sold Prescription Pills

In high school, I used my parent's health insurance to see a psychiatrist so I could be prescribed pills like Adderall and sell those to my classmates. I totally abused the opportunity to see a shrink, and ended up with a substance abuse problem myself. My dad ended up finding out about the dealing and my addiction, and I was sent to rehab.

When I got out, I tried to see the psychiatrist again to get back to selling. By then, my dad had caught on to my lies about why I was seeing a psychiatrist and knew I wasn't using it for therapeutic reasons or self-improvement. Every time I called my doctor, he would immediately hang up the phone the moment he heard my voice. I tried calling a million times, but no reply.

I later found out my psychiatrist was avoiding me because my dad had called him and told him to hang up immediately if I ever tried to book an appointment, or else there'd be consequences. I'm pretty sure he threatened the guy. I ruined the opportunity to see an expensive therapist, which could have been good for me. But that's how it goes when you're doing everything on the low, hiding your life from the people around you.

It's easy to convince someone when they don't want to believe the worst of you. But it was right in front of her face. A lot of parents are in denial.

Dealer 3
Male
Sold LSD and Weed

I come from a middle-class family and grew up in the suburbs. I got into doing drugs around age 13 and quickly progressed to dealing. I saw it as a way to get high for free and later as a way to make a lot of money. I sold LSD and marijuana for three years as a full-time gig. At the peak of my career, I was making upwards of $20,000 (almost £14,000) a month.

I have a good relationship with my parents today, but it was rocky during my teenage years because I was high all the time and lying to them all the time. They had their suspicions, but they didn't want to believe that their baby boy was selling drugs. It's a tough pill to swallow for parents. They always want to believe the best of their kids.

I gave my mom $10,000 (about £6,950) once and asked her to hold it for me. I wanted her to have it, but she wouldn't take it because she thought it was drug money. I told her I was paid to introduce a friend to someone else involved with drugs, but I wasn't involved myself. I convinced her to "hold" the money for me, though I had no intention of getting it back.

My mom looked surprised and even bewildered when I told her I made ten grand by hooking a friend up with another friend to make a drug deal. She wanted to believe that I wasn't involved, and I convinced her I wasn't. I told her I "technically" wasn't a drug dealer—I just made some introductions between people. It's easy to convince someone when they don't want to believe the worst of you. But it was right in front of her face. A lot of parents are in denial.

She wanted to crack the whip on me, but she knew I would bounce at the first sign of adversity from her. We had an unannounced mutual agreement: She didn't ask and I didn't tell. The story was very basic, but she bought it. She had to in order to maintain our relationship.

I eventually got arrested, charged with LSD conspiracy, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. It was fairly obvious what was going on because of the newspaper headlines and news programs focusing on my case, so not a lot was said among my family. They wanted to help me, but I had put myself in a situation where they couldn't and that made them feel powerless.

I am pretty open with everything now. It was just a chapter in my life that I have moved on from—just like prison. I have no problem being honest today, but there are still certain things that aren't appropriate to discuss with mom about my past.

My dad is an entrepreneur himself, so it was pretty amusing to see how he acted once it was all in the open. We would have long talks about how I should launder my money...

Dealer 4
Male
Sold Weed

I sold weed for about three years. I was doing food delivery and messenger work, and selling drugs was a natural progression—especially once I saw I could live comfortably doing it three days a week. I won't go into specifics, but I was making considerably more at the time than any of my peers who were working five days a week and paying taxes.

My relationship with my dad is good. He is an understanding parent and doesn't abide by society's norms for the most part and can get behind less-than-conventional ways of doing things. When he was suspicious at first, though, he gave me this doomsday talk about how I was putting myself in a world of trouble: one of those speeches like, You're gonna live in a van down by the river!

Once he saw how self-sufficient I was and that I was able to fund my own personal projects, he seemed to look the other way. By the time I got around to telling him, it wasn't a surprise. He respected me enough to trust that I could weigh the risks smartly. My dad is an entrepreneur himself, so it was pretty amusing to see how he acted once it was all in the open.

We would have long talks about how I should launder my money, and he would take on that commanding tone when you're getting dad advice, making it clear he had forgotten the nature of the topic. I have always had a hard time lying to people, so I had a better relationship with him—and less anxiety or guilt about dealing myself—when I knew he was in the loop.

@zachsokol

More dealing on VICE:

Why Do So Many Failed Premier League Footballers Become Dealers?

Everything I Learned Dating a British Weed Dealer

All the Different Types of British Drug Clients, As Told by a Dealer

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Under the community standards for many social media sites, a baby crowning through a mother's vagina is defined as explicit, or even pornographic. Australian-based birth photographer and doula Angela Gallo is all too familiar with messages telling her as much. Every time she uploads photographs from the births of families she works with, they get taken down.

Gallo is on strike two from Facebook, one away from having her account shut down. She's already lost her Instagram account with more than 8,000 followers. It's especially frustrating for her since her work is partially about spreading the notion that there's nothing icky about birth.

Recently we talked to Angela about stigma, beauty, and satisfying censors with photoshopped lens flairs.

VICE: What do you think is the main issue with social media censoring your images?
Angela Gallo: Look, I understand that not everybody wants to see boobs and vaginas on their timelines, but there are alternatives and there has to be a compromise. Even cesarean birth images are getting banned because they're "explicit acts of violence and aggressiveness." Censoring is really symptomatic of a system that needs addressing in general, where porn is more normal than birth, but birth is called porn.

How do you think changing attitudes towards birth would change the experience of birth?
If we look at mainstream culture, birth is portrayed as very surgical, cold, sterile, and dramatic. Women are conditioned since they are young to believe that this is what birth is, and as they get older they still believe this in a subconscious level. What I am hoping to do is to use these images to challenge what they think is normal and how they can frame it in a positive way. If I do that, I can hopefully remove the fear and anxiety that is associated with birth.

How have people on social media reacted to your work?
It's been interesting. Because I understand it can be graphic and of a sensitive nature. For the most part I have received amazing responses from women opening up and saying things like, "I orgasmed at birth, but for ten years nobody has known, because I felt so ashamed of my body and myself and seeing these images has made me feel good, excited, and normal." Things like that really push me.

So where do you get the most resistance from?
There are some ridiculous comments, but most resistance is on the nature of birth itself. The most common comment I get is like, "Oh, no, not this shit again, women want to meddle." We have been doing this since the beginning of time, it's not a big deal, it's bullshit.

Don't you think the digital world has also helped to break through these stereotypes?
Definitely. Forty years ago men weren't allowed in the birth room. Women couldn't see their placentas and birth was something you did behind closed doors. So we are slowly and surely breaking away stereotypes. For example, with menstruation there are now women using tampons to make art, saying: "You know what, this is a part of me, this is who I am, I also make babies, I birth a placenta and I want this documented."

How has censorship affected your career?
Most recently I had a photo that got a honorable mention in the International Association of Birth Photographers. It is basically a woman who is crowning. I lost a lot of coverage because it was showing boobs and vagina, and I got banned from Instagram and Facebook.

So what did you do?
I modified the image with bright lights in her boobs. I thought that it was so funny that it was less offensive when it is pretty obvious that those are boobs. Then I wrote around her vagina, "Respect your mother, stop censoring birth." My point is that we all came from the same place, whether it was surgical or vaginal—you came out of your mother and I find it so disrespectful that we constantly censoring and shaming our mothers.

What is your plan to fight back this censorship in the long run?
This was a huge reason I want to do my photo book and the online campaign because I want to use visual media as a platform, but I have hit a brick wall with social media. I cannot do what I actually wanted to do because every image is getting flagged and this doesn't fit my purpose to produce very honest accounts of birth.

Still, I do not want to lose my account, as it is a very important place to discuss things with people, but I know I have to do it from a different angle, I can't rely on Instagram or Facebook to support this message.

See more of Gallo's work here and below.

Interview by Laura Rodriguez Castro. Follow her on Twitter.

Screenshots and concept art courtesy of Deck13/Focus Home Interactive

Tactical dismemberment. Games have asked us to be accurate with our appendage removal before – Dead Space told us, early on in that particular nightmare, to "cut off their limbs". But that was simply to avoid Horrific Death by Necromorph. In German studio Deck13's upcoming sci-fi adventure The Surge, where you slice your enemies can have a direct effect on how you get ahead in the game. See that tasty piece of power armour on your left leg? I'll be having that, thanks very much.

Not that removing limbs – and, immediately afterwards, the stats-raising technology attached to it – is going to be easy in this near-ish-future game world. Deck13's previous game was 2014's action-RPG Lords of the Fallen, which borrowed a trick or two from Dark Souls and its series brethren, not least of all the fact that even the dumbest grunt can kill the player, if they're not careful in combat. And The Surge's enemies, even at their most shambling, can deal out significant damage given half a chance.

It'd be easy, then, to call The Surge "Dark Souls goes sci-fi", but that's being unfair – indeed, it'd be like calling Halo 3 "GoldenEye 007 with a Warthog or four". With a release date simply of 2017 right now, it's way too early to pass any kind of judgement on The Surge. All I can tell you is that it looks great in motion – I've sat through a demo, which while hands-off certainly felt pretty intense – and that Deck13 CEO Jan Klose is, naturally, pretty excited about it.

"We're looking for something where the players won't know what to expect, so we can really surprise them," Klose tells me, a few days after I've seen The Surge for myself. "And, we will." I pick his brain a little further, to find out more on what these surprises might be.

VICE: So where are we in The Surge, setting wise? I know the demo I saw was set in the player character's place of work, not long after, for want of a better expression, everything's gone to shit. It's clearly in the future. Are we on Earth, or elsewhere?
Jan Klose: Yes, we're on Earth, and actually not too far away from today in terms of the time. The game is set just a couple of decades into the future – but in our scenario we assume that mankind didn't really make the most out of its opportunities. Politics, environment, technology, economics – there might be a dark path ahead of us, and with The Surge, we'll take you there.

I've heard about how The Surge is influenced by themes around us today –environmental concerns and technological progress, for example, as you've just raised again yourself. Can you expand a little more on this? What sort of research were you looking at to end up with this game world?
We've done extensive research regarding the current state of AI and robotics, especially those enhancing the human body, leading to a fusion between man and machine. But we were also looking at big companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Foxconn, and thought about what might happen if they stepped just a little bit away from their positive objectives. From what we found, it really doesn't take much until you've reached the world of The Surge, with an environment that gets hostile and a world that doesn't get more peaceful in terms of politics, either. So there will be a lot of everyday topics that you will find hidden inside the game. If you look for them, that is.

What lessons has the team taken away from the experience of making, releasing, and reading the feedback to Lords of the Fallen? That game was loved in some quarters, but criticised too, and you obviously want the next game to be bigger. Is there anything you know you didn't quite realise on Fallen that you're definitely making up for with The Surge?
Yes, a lot. Firstly we were of course happy that so many people played and enjoyed Lords of the Fallen; we would never have dreamed that this would actually happen. But with a lot of gamers come a lot of opinions, and of course criticism. So we tried to listen to this as much as possible, and mix it with our own observations and ideas. Take the level design, for example. It's a bit open at the beginning of Lords but then it becomes rather linear. With The Surge we're creating levels in a completely different way, all revolving around game design and story to create a vast world that opens up as you play. You don't just "revisit" locations you already encountered, but you need to "dig deeper" later in the game to harvest its full potential. Attentive players will always find the path leading through the levels; but every level consists of a lot of different layers that can't be explored on the first visit. You'll need to come back there later with your newly acquired powers and skills to unlock all of the secrets. Well, at least most of the secrets. Unlocking them all will be really tough. If you just try to find the fastest way through the game, you'll most likely become beaten up rather badly by the final opponents.

Article continues after the video below

Watch 'Street Fighter V: KO Dreams', co-created with Capcom

I saw a boss in the demo, a big bastard whirling thing. Now, presumably this is a robot that's gone a little crazy after whatever's happened in the company – but will later enemies not be "born" of this place of work? Will we see weirder enemies, maybe more flesh and blood than metal and circuitry?
There will definitely be some very weird, and huge, enemies in the game, and we're using the full bandwidth between humans, hybrids and machines. Every opponent is supposed to look, feel, and play very differently, and everyone has their special place in the story and lore of the world. This is something the player can always find out if they play close attention, and it will help them to acquire advantages in combat.

Will the game move out of this company's HQ, so we'll see diverse environments?
There are a lot of different environments in the game. There are inside and outside locations, some high in the sky and some deep inside the Earth.

When your character dies, what do they keep? Is it a Dark Souls system where you have to collect what you've dropped – or do you retain all the armour and weapons you've picked up – well, sliced from – your enemies?
If you die, you are allowed to keep your gear, and the quest progress is also kept. But you do lose resources and the enemies are, of course, back in action.

Will your character meet other survivors of this disaster, and how might they impact upon their own chances of survival? Will you be able to gain perks from saving certain people?
Um, I'm not allowed to say too much there, yet, but you are not far off. You will meet a lot of characters that you can talk and deal with. Every character can help you progress in the game – or hinder you. You can make choices and influence the outcome of the quests. Also, every character will reveal a bit of the overall story. There's not one big revelation about what happened and what will happen next; instead, you will acquire this knowledge bit by bit, character by character and level by level. If you're the inquisitive type of player, anyway – otherwise, you'll just have fun breaking things.

Related, on Motherboard: The Dawn of Killer Robots

On the combat itself, will it be a case of grinding making you stronger – or more that finding certain equipment is the way to go, to improve your chances of beating tougher enemies? You've said enemies respawn on the player's death – but is that ad infinitum?
Not all enemies will respawn all the time, but generally this is the rule. There is a certain part of grinding in the game, but that's more the second layer. First of all it's all about duels, tactics and survival. But once you've mastered this for a certain type of enemy, you'll feel in control and you'll want to take a closer look at the weapon and gear he's carrying. And then it's a bit of grinding – finding more of those enemies to tactically strip them off their valuable gear, piece by piece and enemy by enemy.

The demo came with the promise of an "original character progression system". Can you give me a sort of 101 guide to just how the character will level up, and become an ultimate badass?
The key to character progression is that it's not really the hero levelling up but his equipment, most importantly his exo suit. The suit has a power level that more or less corresponds to a classic "player level" in an RPG. The higher the power level is, the more energy can it provide to its components, meaning that you can equip better gear and use stronger weapons – which you can also upgrade, by the way. Your exo suit also connects you to the "implants" which correspond a bit to classic "skills". Implants can be acquired in the game world, through fights and otherwise, and you can plug them into your system to enhance your mental abilities and, for instance, get more information on your HUD. All the on screen displays are part of the game world, too. The higher your exo power level, the more implants can you use at the same time. So, by defeating a lot of gruesome enemies, solving side quests and exploring the world, you will gather enough resources to increase your exo power level, and also you will acquire new gear, weapons and implants. So it won't suffice to simply slash away at enemies – you need to gather loot to really become an ultimate badass.

So we'll learn, through the game, that a reliance on technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. Does that also mean, though, that all this amazing, power-boosting gear that the player picks up could ultimately be their undoing?
Well, that might very well be. But let me tell you that there are some surprising twists within the story. We won't tell you what's right or wrong in the end. But we'll hopefully surprise you every now and then.

The Surge is currently in early alpha and will be released for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC sometime in 2017. Find more information on the game's official website.

@MikeDiver

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I recently spent a week visiting witch doctors in their clinics around Sierra Leone. Each person I photographed is a member of The National Council of Traditional Healers, most of whom use a combination of black magic and herbal medicines to cure the sick. As well as offering antidotes to bodily illness, many also claim to be able to curse – and even kill – enemies. Incantations to the devil are often chanted during their ceremonies as they ask for help with difficult magic.

Dr Tarawallie, President of the Union, says, "I often speak with the devil alone at night, he helps me in my work. We do have the power to kill – there is a spell you can do with a bowl of water. The enemy's face appears in the water, and when you hit it, it disappears and the liquid turns red. Then the person will drop down dead."

Belief in witch doctors is widespread throughout Sierra Leone, and they are visited by everyone from politicians to priests, farmers and even doctors of modern medicine.

During my time with the witch doctors I witnessed a young girl with paralysed legs being treated. Blood from a half dead chicken's neck was sprinkled onto her knees. She was then shaken vigorously, in the belief doing so would expel the witch hiding inside her. I also had my own forehead anointed with goat's blood and my arm cursed after being sprinkled with itchy witch dust.

@aclandoli

READ: The Slow Death of Council Housing in the UK

The government says its new housing bill is supposed to "turn generation rent into generation buy". Which, granted, sounds alright. However, thousands of people aren't convinced that the government plans to be as altruistic as it makes out, so marched through London on Sunday chanting that they want to "kill the bill".

If it's passed in the form the government intends, the bill will see "pay to stay" measures imposed. This would mean that council households earning more than £30,000 – or £40,000 in London – would have to pay the market rate for rent. Also, the right to stay in a council house indefinitely – to make it a home, in other words – would be scrapped, with tenancies reviewed every five years. That means we could see mass evictions and people displaced far away from where they want to live. Campaigners say it could effectively kill off council housing for good.

We sent photographer Chris Bethell to capture the anger of people who don't want our cities to become gated communities for oligarchs.

@CBethell_photo

What is it? Vibe
Where is it? Dalston
What is there to do locally? Vibe
Alright, how much are they asking? Dalston

What is Dalston? Dalston is a state of mind. Dalston is an aura. Dalston is a whispered ley line around a magical area of east London: Dalston begins and Dalston ends, but only a true Dalstonite can tell you where, how. Dalston is the pre-party and the party and the afterparty. Most importantly: Dalston is Vibe.

Immediately watch the worst video ever made in all of recorded human history, a video to help sell personality-free Dalston showhomes to the excessively rich:

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The first thing I am wrestling with here with is: I absolutely hate this woman. And you can't really say that, that you hate a woman. You can't say you hate a woman just because she does sideways glances to camera mid-way through a haircut. But I feel that: I feel that I hate her. Not just the character being portrayed here – the character of the most basic Becky-named motherfucker ever born, kind of girl who had an entire beret phase during her sociology degree, kind of woman who once did a 45-minute train journey to get a cronut when they came out and who kept talking about the cronut for eight to ten days afterwards, "it is a croissant," she said, "but also a doughnut. It tasted alright," kind of girl who forwards Wowcher emails about spa days to her mum with a 'shall we?' addendum, girl who heard about how Dalston was cool once from a friend so spent a Sunday there but left at 5pm before it got fun so she could go home and watch Mean Girls again on Netflix, girl who dropped £500 on a DSLR camera for a three-week photography phase, girl with a Wordpress blog called 'Uncontained Musings' that has exactly one blog post, and that blog post is her explaining how it is her new year's resolution to blog more, dated March 2013, I am talking extremely basic here – but no not just the character, but this video has offended me so deeply, annoyed me to my bones, that I now actively hate the model hired to appear in this video, I hate an innocent woman who just took a simple job, I cannot help myself, the fire in my blood does not bend to the whims of morals and ethics, only instinct, I cannot help myself, nameless model, but I hate you;

Secondly we need to appraise what we know about Dalston from this video. Because here is what I learned about Dalston from this video: Dalston is an area of London that starts on Church Street in Stoke Newington and extends to fucking Paris. Dalston contains the London Eye, somehow. There is a cinema in Dalston where it is acceptable to hold a tissue up to your face but not cry. Dalston is home to two of the worst rights-free songs ever created. There is a 30-second segment about how there is a Beyond Retro in Dalston, and that somehow the filmmakers responsible for this convinced three Beyond Retro employees to stand around watching a girl post-ironically put on a flat cap, and they are all rocking the most awkward right-hand-uncomfortably-sat-on-the-back-of-a-sofa that I've ever seen. Dalston is where people who like grey blankets and anonymous wall art go to live in one-bed flats that cost £440,000. Dalston is dead.

Hell.

We all like to have some fun sometimes on the internet and declare Dalston to be dead, but I am wavering close to serious this time. The apartment block 'Vibe' has been under construction for years, right on top of where a kebab shop used to be, opposite Dalston Kingsland station. Essentially when you go to Dalston now you walk out to be immediately confronted with a grey monolith to gentrification, two twinned buildings called 'Zest' and 'Fuse', where investment bankers called Dominic and their lithe dull girlfriend Helen buy a starter flat to live in for two years before they decide London is too noisy to raise well-behaved children in and decamp to Surrey. "We want something edgy," Dominic – who wears shirts on the weekend, the man does not own a T-shirt – Dominic says, "we want something trendy and edgy, but not too trendy and edgy." He flicks through a specification brochure. "Is there any way this flat can be more expensive?" he's asking. "Can we make the kitchen slightly more granite-y, more soulless?" There's no way Dominic is going to let Dalston's rickety old shitty-ass basement bars stay open late into the night. No way he'll let the council sign off on a kebab shop extraction unit path without a community meeting in a church hall. Another Pret opens up and Dominic goes there. He tweets Tesco Metro to ask if they can add to the two existing Tesco Metros in the area by erecting another Tesco Metro. Slowly all the dirt is replaced with tiles and signs. Dominic moves to Surrey. And just like that, the life has been blown out of the Dalston candle.

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Why am I so precious about Dalston? I'm not. As far as I can tell Dalston is essentially a pizza joint called 'Voodoo Ray's' that got a bit out of control. But at least it has a bit of life about it. Is a computer-generated picture of a home gym that literally says the word 'VIBE' on the wall full of life? No. What about a girl who definitely bought a 'Paris hat' just go to Paris in? No. What about sitting against a tree in London Fields without even a book or a bag, just sitting there looking out at nothing? No, no, no.

A moratorium on the word 'VIBE'. The word 'VIBE' is dead now. There will be a clown's funeral for it. And Dalston – I hate to say it – has to be destroyed. You did this, Dominic and Helen. With your extremely basic thirst for authenticity, you did this. You grasped the rabbit of Dalston and crushed it to death with your cardigan-wearing love.

@joelgolby

More from this increasingly bleak series:

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This article originally appeared on VICE US

The following is an excerpt from VICE drug columnist Maia Szalavitz's forthcoming book Unbroken Brain, published next month by St. Martin's Press.

I opened the door with a needle in my arm.

Seven plainclothes narcotics cops burst in, five burly men and two women, all shouting. I hastily finished my shot and threw the works down, attempting to be discreet about it. I had been expecting my friend Lina, who should have been returning with money for the cocaine Matt and I had just fronted her. I was also suffering from a painful ear infection, which is how I'd obtained the drug I was shooting. It was Demerol, a narcotic I'd been prescribed by the Columbia Health Service. I must have been quite ill: the doctor prescribed me an opiate as well as antibiotics, even though I'd told her that I had a history of heroin use.

Of course, I wasn't supposed to be injecting the Demerol. In fact, I'd actually managed up until exactly that point to abstain from drugs almost entirely for a few months, in hopes of being readmitted to college after my "year off." Now, I was clearly off the wagon and life was about to get exponentially worse. My idea that I'd recovered and could safely use drugs occasionally was about to be definitively falsified.

Before that awful day in September 1986, reining in my drug use had seemed relatively easy, at least theoretically. I wasn't exactly a fan of heroin withdrawal—I'd gone cold turkey about four times at this point—but dope sickness did not keep me from quitting during my rare attempts at it. Instead, I always got in trouble a few weeks after stopping, when I felt well again and thought, "Just one will be okay." This time, though, the brief period of abstinence that I'd now violated with the Demerol had been created by an even worse experience—one that I actually thought had solved my drug problem.

Through sharing needles, I'd contracted hepatitis A earlier that summer. (Typically, people get B or C via injection; somehow, I got A, which is usually spread by bad seafood.) My hep A infection, which is normally less severe than the other types, soon made me so sick that even healthy food seemed poisonous—let alone drugs. Broccoli, for example, was indigestible, and if I tried to eat even the tiniest bit of fat, I'd become overwhelmingly nauseous. One pizza craving ended disastrously in the bathroom.

In fact, the way I found out I was sick was by discovering that heroin didn't work to salve what I'd assumed were withdrawal symptoms. And taking more heroin—from a batch that I could see worked fine for everyone else—astonishingly made me feel even worse. I got terrified. Bloody urine and gray feces soon had me headed for the ER. I was so sick that anything I ingested by any means only made me feel toxic and enervated. In such a state, not taking drugs, even while surrounded by them, was relatively easy.

So easy, in fact, that after I left the hospital, I thought I'd been cured, my problem solved. I still didn't understand that ending addiction wasn't just about making it through withdrawal. I also didn't know that I was almost certain to relapse since I hadn't learned alternative ways of coping and was still living in a drug-filled environment. I continued to believe that addiction was primarily driven by physical dependence. Since I was free of that, I thought I was well.

Now it was less than a week into my first semester back at Columbia after my suspension. I'd been allowed to return because I had convinced not only myself but also the school officials that I no longer had a drug problem, thanks to the hepatitis. I was not alone in my belief that getting through withdrawal was all that was needed.

In my essay seeking readmission, I'd written about my illness and recovery from it—and about my genuine desire to study and learn. For the most part, I was surprisingly open: the school knew that I'd left due to a cocaine problem and I wrote about how I'd then moved on to heroin before "recovering" via my liver disease. I really thought I was making a new start. But I didn't mention that I was still living with and basically working for a coke dealer. I wasn't quite sure what I planned to do about that.

Looking back now, I am shamed and horrified by the entire sequence of events, which took place in our apartment on 49th Street, near Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Center, just off Sixth Avenue. It exemplifies both the sheer mindlessness of addictive behavior—and of the way we deal with it as a society. I had no idea what to do when I opened the door and realized that it wasn't our customer, Lina.

Her "friends" turned out to be Long Island–based narcs who had been set on her by a high school chum who needed to bust someone to avoid prison. They had been desperate to meet me when Lina was arranging the sale. I had refused. To protect yourself as a dealer, avoiding selling to people you don't know is generally a good policy. However, I was recorded on a phone call earlier that day coordinating the meeting for the deal. By declining to leave the apartment to make the sale, I ultimately spared myself an additional charge of selling directly to the cops. But Lina was charged with selling, which is actually a more serious charge than I wound up facing, even though I was far more involved with drugs.

Lina was a naive NYU sophomore from Nassau County in Long Island; she had dyed black hair and a few piercings, but she was hardly tough or sophisticated. Her friend from home had been busted in Nassau County. To get a lighter sentence, he needed to find another dealer to implicate. Lina, unfortunately, became his target. I knew her through a crowd that I had gone clubbing with at '80s hotspots like Area and The Tunnel, in happier times before taking drugs had taken over my life. Ironically, Lina wasn't a dealer or even a regular user—let alone an addict. She occasionally did coke and was making this sale as what she thought was a favor for an old friend. I didn't know it at the time, but while the police were storming my apartment, she'd already been arrested and was being held downstairs in a van.

Immediately after they arrived, two of the officers took me into the hallway outside my apartment. I was now high, still feverish and completely dazed; I was also terrified. Their guns were prominent and visible to me in their holsters. They promised that if I signed the form that they shoved in my face, they wouldn't arrest me. Stupidly, I complied. To this day, I still don't understand exactly why: it must have been some combination of fear, fever, intoxication, and perhaps my ongoing Aspie tendency to take what other people say at face value. Aside from selling drugs, it's probably the single most idiotic thing I ever did. Of course, the police were lying to me; if I had been thinking at all clearly, this should have been obvious. The document turned out to be permission to search. They had no warrant. If I hadn't signed, there might never have been an attempt to prosecute me.

The narcs rushed into the bedroom. There, they found Matt, who was sitting in his underwear weighing coke on the scale. Nearby was obviously a large quantity, at least a kilo. That was not typical: Matt was holding most of it for his connection, who had wanted not to have the weight in his possession in case of just such an event. Stashed nearby in a file cabinet was $17,500 in cash, most of it needed to pay the connect for the drugs. In my blindly compliant state, I showed the narcs exactly where it was.

As they searched, the cops stomped around, sneering at our messy apartment, with one woman saying sarcastically that it belonged in Better Homes and Gardens. Their behavior was so bizarre and over-the-top clichéd that the whole thing seemed even more unreal. One stocky man with a gun wore a Hard Rock Café T-shirt. (It is strange the details you notice and the thoughts you recall from events that forever change your life.)

And it soon got even weirder. Matt had literally been caught red-handed, or I guess I should say white-handed, but they had no interest in him. When they slapped the handcuffs on me and dragged me off, he actually thought I'd been kidnapped by a gang posing as cops, since real police wouldn't throw away the marlin in favor of the minnows. He just sat there, dazed and confused. For my part, I was in shock, too. I remember being pulled into the elevator, walked by the cops past our doorman and into the street. For one second, while I stood on 49th Street, a strange feeling of relief and utter freedom flooded over me. The thing that I most dreaded would happen had already done so: I didn't need to worry about it anymore. Then the fear returned.

All illustrations by Corey Brickley

I would spend the next five years of my life dealing directly with the repercussions of what happened that day. My actual recovery would not begin for another two years—and my addiction only worsened after my arrest. While there are certainly legitimate policy arguments about the best way to deal with crimes like drug dealing, there's no doubt that the criminal justice system is ineffective and often actively counterproductive in dealing with addiction. My experience is just one of millions that shows why.

Addiction is not defined by dependence on a particular substance to function or by a desire to avoid withdrawal or by simply being obsessed with the object of the addiction. If it were merely any of the above, it might be possible, perhaps, to use punishment via the criminal justice system to fight it. If withdrawal was really the problem, hepatitis—or, indeed, a two-week stay in jail or somewhere that I would have no access to drugs—could actually have cured me.

Instead, addiction is defined by using a drug or activity in a compulsive manner despite negative consequences. And "negative consequences," of course, is simply a less morally charged phrase for a whole range of experiences that can be experienced as punishing; the terms are fundamentally synonymous. In other words, if punishment worked to fight addiction, the condition itself couldn't exist.

Think about it for a minute: addicted people continue taking drugs despite losing jobs, loved ones, their homes, families, children, dreams, even sometimes body parts. I continued after contracting a disease that made me feel as though I had been poisoned. I continued after being suspended from the school I'd spent most of my life dreaming of and working toward attending. I continued while facing the daily risk of overdose and AIDS—after I'd already nearly died from an overdose and contracted hepatitis. And I continued even when the cocaine made me feel paranoid, terrified, and as though I was about to die, even though the thing that most frightened me of all was death. While there are many experiences that are not common to all addictions, the compulsion to continue using no matter what is its essence.

In this light, the idea that other sorts of threats or painful experiences will stop addiction makes no sense. Addiction is an attempt to manage distress that becomes a learned and nearly automatic program. Adding increased distress doesn't override this programming; in fact, it tends to engage it even further. If learning were occurring normally during addiction, addicted people would soon learn not to take drugs because the consequences are so bad. The fact that they do not is the crux of the problem.

Moreover, a whole series of studies shows that the brain responses of many addicted people to reward and punishment are abnormal, regardless of what substance is involved. In one, about two thirds of people with substance addictions showed an elevated emotional response to the prospect of monetary gain—an overvaluing of reward. This group, however, responded normally to losses. For these addicted people, similar to what is seen in teens, there appears to be a heightening of desire for reward that may occlude consideration of future punishment. But more interestingly, the remaining third of the participants did not respond to punishment at all. Even after they'd learned that drawing cards from one particular deck resulted in more loss than gain, they continued to select cards from it, showing the characteristic trait of persistence despite punishment. Similarly, other studies have found reduced brain activation during punishment (typically monetary loss) in people addicted to cocaine and methamphetamine.

So why then do so many believe that addiction ends when people "hit bottom" and that criminalizing drug use helps people "bottom out"? Let's set aside for a moment questions about how to deal with drug dealers who don't have addictions and what level of punishment or consequences might be appropriate when selling is illegal. What I want to start to explore here is how punitive and moralistic treatment that claims to view addiction as a disease does not really do so and instead bolsters the law enforcement approach.

The problem begins with the shadow cast by our laws and their history. Indeed, to paraphrase geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky on biology and evolution, nothing about addiction treatment and drug policy makes sense, except in light of history. To understand how we came to use punishment to "treat" a condition that is literally defined by its resistance to punishment, we have to return briefly to the history of ideas about addiction and how this influenced our laws related to drugs.

America's first drug laws were born in a climate of overt racism, during the Jim Crow years. The rhetoric used to win their passage was explicitly racist and supporters played on white men's fears of miscegenation and losing power. The concept of the fiendish "addict" used to advocate for the laws hewed closely to racist stereotypes.

This unfortunate use of drug policy in support of racism did not end with Prohibition; it simply went underground, reemerging in 1971 with Richard Nixon's declaration of war on drugs as part of the Republican Party's "Southern strategy." This strategy targeted southern Democrats who were disaffected from their party because of its support for civil rights laws. Expanded further by Ronald Reagan, the strategy used code words like "crime," "drugs," and "urban" to signal to racist voters that Republicans would "crack down" and be "tough" in dealing with black people. As Michelle Alexander points out in her bestseller The New Jim Crow, selective enforcement of harsh drug laws created a new—and apparently legal—way to segregate, control, and incarcerate black people.

But this is only one part of why America remains addicted to a punitive—and failed—drug policy.

From Unbroken Brain by Maia Szalavitz. Copyright © 2016 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC. Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Image supplied.

This article originally appeared on VICE US

When Molly Lewis opened a string of shows for Kirin J Callanan's recent world tour, the LA-based Australian demonstrated the difference between a party trick and a hidden talent. It's the same thing every time you're at one of Molly's shows, the crowd cycling through the same motions: There's the initial surprise, then the mood turns tense because everyone is waiting for her to fuck up, lose pitch, or take a misplaced breath.

After two minutes of perfectly sustained control with no signs of faltering a palpable ease settles over the audience. She's got this. As Callanan told the Melbourne Pavilion audience, "When you see her whistling, you can't help but smile." And Callinan isn't the only one. Musicians from Connan Mockasin to Blood Orange's Dev Hynes are lining up to collaborate with her.

It was watching the documentary Pucker Up, a dive into the strange world of the International Whistlers Convention (IWC), the first piqued Lewis's interest in professional whistling.

Last year Molly—who's known professionally as Whistler's Sista—competed at IWC, the world's foremost whistling competition, and took home the champion's trophy, cementing her place as the world's best whistler.

We got Molly on the phone for a chat.

VICE: Your performances have all the presence of a professional musician—somewhere between a solo flautist and a vocalist. How did you get so good?
Molly Lewis: Thank you! I was given piano lessons and exposed to lots of music but whistling was never encouraged or nourished in any particular way. I never met anyone who was interested in it or could do it like I could, so I just practiced by myself. Whistling for me used to be a really solitary thing. I think performing and collaborating has helped me gain confidence. People react better to seeing a performance. If I try and explain what I do verbally people don't get what it is until they see it done.

Can you sing?
No! I can't sing at all and people always assume I can because I can whistle well. I bring all the whistling qualities into singing rather than the other way round. Lots of unneeded vibrato.

What excites you most about your instrument?
It's unique, it can work beautifully with other instruments and I love to perform it, because it lets me take part in music that I love.

Whistling has an interesting musical history. There were some professional whistlers in the vaudeville era. In La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands of Spain, a whistle language is still used. Do you communicate with your whistle? It can be expressive. The song I open my whistle show with is "Queen of the Night Aria" from The Magic Flute. It's powerful and dynamic so I have to whistle almost angrily.

Molly Lewis is the world's best professional whistler. Image supplied.

How do you prepare for a whistle show?
Fortunately, I don't have a lot of equipment or scales to practice. I whistle near constantly though out of habit so I consider that my practice. Before I competed in the Whistling Competition though I wrote to my whistling idol, Geert Chatrou asking how to prepare. I was not really expecting a response, but he replied!

What did he say?
"Always stay hydrated, and never forget your chapstick."

What advice would you yourself give other whistle enthusiasts?
I'd just tell them I firmly believe in the whistle as a musical instrument. That I often have people laugh and dismiss it, but I'm excited for the future of whistling. Unfortunately, I find whistling seems to be mostly used in gimmicky ways, and not to its full potential as an instrument.

I'd encourage people to try new applications. For all it's limitations, it's still the most portable instrument and one I can practice in public without being "that guy with a guitar." It's not too in people's faces to walk around whistling to yourself but I much prefer collaborating with other musicians.

Check out Molly's stuff at Soundcloud.