Monday, October 31, 2016

Why Queer Retellings of Classic Stories Are So Necessary

If it's true that, as Christopher Booker wrote, there are only seven plots reiterated throughout fiction, it should come as no surprise that every year's literary crop brings a fresh spate of retold myths, folktales, and classics. From Wide Sargasso Sea to West Side Story to Clueless, great retellings have become beloved in their own right, filtering timeless themes through contemporary sensibilities. (There are, of course, occasional missteps on this path—the less said about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the better.) Revisiting a story gives us an opportunity to explore universal experiences from the perspective of those who weren't represented in the original, and nowhere is this more apparent than in today's generation of young writers and artists bringing overt queerness into the literary canon.

I've always loved anything that puts an original twist on a well-known story. As an adolescent, I devoured the feminist, sometimes queer, fairy tales of Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch and wished there were more books like it. In the last few years, interest in queering the classics seems to be gathering momentum with books like Malinda Lo's Ash, in which a Cinderella-esque character chooses a huntress over a prince; former VICE contributor Sara Benincasa's Great, an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where both Gatsby and the object of her affection are girls; and Sassafras Lowrey's Lost Boi, a Peter Pan story about queer and trans street kids.

Queer retellings aren't limited to the written word, either. In June, Lifetime remade its own original movie Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, this time featuring lesbian vampires. Even more recently, the band It Was Romance debuted the video for "Hooking Up with Girls," which visually echoes every shot in Fiona Apple's iconic "Criminal" video. At this point, it's safe to say that queer retellings are mainstream, and more will certainly be forthcoming. (Next month, Manifold Press will release A Certain Persuasion: Modern LGBTQ+ Fiction Inspired by Jane Austen's Novels.) Any story about forbidden love is especially easy to queer, but just about any plot can be reworked to suit LGBTQ characters and audiences.

Of course, queer retellings are only a small facet of a larger movement toward LGBTQ representation and visibility in every corner of art and culture, but they're a crucial one. We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique: the recognition that the stories that connect us across cultures and generations belong to all of us, LGBTQ people included. Lane Moore, the singer/songwriter behind It Was Romance and director of their video paying homage to "Criminal," says her goal was to "normalize queer culture because to me, it's all the same. I just love the idea of people all starting to see that we're more alike than we think, because that helps people become more compassionate with each other, and oftentimes feel less alone." By elaborating on the canon in this way, LGBTQ writers carve out a space for themselves—and for queer readers.

We'll never stop telling new stories and exploring underrepresented aspects of the human experience, but retelling old stories from a queer point of view adds something unique.

Robin Talley's novel As I Descended, released in September, tells an all-too-familiar story of potential outmatched by destructive ambition. It's recognizable as Macbeth, but the antihero this time is a bisexual teenager named Maria, nudged along the path toward success and then disaster by her closeted girlfriend Lily. Just as her Scottish predecessor struggles to navigate between his goals and his morals, Maria is torn between her desperation for a coveted scholarship and what she knows is right. Lily has her own agenda, which is intimately connected to her fear of the consequences should anyone find out that she's gay.

The plot of As I Descended both hinges on the characters' queerness and transcends it—there's nothing about the book that would be inaccessible to a straight reader, but same-sex romance is an inextricable part of its plot. In a literary environment where LGBTQ representation is still catching up from centuries of erasure, it's refreshing to see a queer protagonist like Maria, not a stereotype nor a trope but a deeply flawed, complicated person battling conflicting desires. When Maria gives in to her worst impulses, it's not a validation of homophobic stereotypes but an illustration of what could happen to any desperate person in a moment of weakness. Worth noting, too, is the fact that the Macduff stand-in who threatens to foil Maria's plans is also gay; no single character in As I Descended must bear the burden of representing all LGBTQ people.

Talley says that writing classics from a queer perspective shows readers "that there's nothing inherently 'straight' (and for that matter, nothing inherently male, white, or Christian, etc.) about the stories that we think of as defining our culture." While straight, white, and male is overwhelmingly the profile of literary characters typically deemed "universal," As I Descended proves that a bisexual Latina student makes an equally compelling and relatable lead.

For Sara Benincasa, author of Great, turning Jay Gatsby into a teenage girl with a borderline obsessive crush on her childhood best friend was not just a question of offering a relatable character to queer readers, but of making the story more real. She says, "For stories to be authentic, they must include LGBTQ folks, because we're everywhere. We're in every town, every school, every gym, every grocery store, every club... So why shouldn't we be in stories?"

As a queer writer and reader, and as someone endlessly fascinated by the ways stories evolve across time and distance, the growing popularity of queer retellings inspires and delights me. Writers and artists like Talley, Moore, and Benincasa help readers to understand that not only are LGBTQ people part of the story now, but that in fact, we always have been.

Follow Lindsay King-Miller on Twitter.

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The Artist: The Artist Gets a Pet in Today's Comic by Anna Haifisch

Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.

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Nu-Horror: A Retrospective on the Y2K Era's Worst Movie Trend

When I was in high school in the late 90s and early 2000s—also known as the Y2K era—horror movies weren't what you would call "scary."

Somehow at the turn of the millennium, the tech-paranoia of Canadian horror master David Cronenberg, and the testosterone-fueled action of Aliens, gave rise to what I call nu-horror: a mix of monster horror with sci-fi action, enhanced with computer animation. The movies were plot heavy, often adapted from video games, filmed in bright colors, and they were full of un-spooky subject matter like space travel and the internet. It was an exciting new high-tech millennium, and these were apparently our high-tech new fears.

Movies that set the stage for nu-horror included The Faculty, Event Horizon, and Blade. Examples of the subgenre at its height include Thir13en Ghosts, Resident Evil, Jason X, The House of the Dead, Dracula 2000, Ghosts of Mars, and How to Make a Monster.

In the Y2K days, horror's sister musical genre, metal, was going through a similar rough patch. Bands like Korn, Mudvayne, P.O.D., and Linkin Park were stretching the term "metal" to its breaking point by making what we now derisively call "nu-metal"—the term I'm obviously co-opting here.

NME called nu-metal "the worst genre of all time." The nu-horror era in movies is not fondly remembered either.

According to film scholar Steffen Hantke, horror fans in the Y2K days were in a panic about their precious genre coming apart at the seams. In Hantke's 2010 book American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium Hantke wrote that, "from a pessimist's point of view, the last ten years have seen American horror film at its worst." He also noted that the movie blog Bloody-Disgusting.com hosted a discussion in 2005 called "'Do you think horror movies are done for?'"

A lot of this geek anger was in opposition to teen slasher movies like Scream, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and a glut of American horror movies that were just inferior remakes of Japanese movies. Still, much of the blame also lands at the feet of the cheesy, sci-fi-tinged horror I'm labeling nu-horror.

Here's a very brief history:

In the late 90s, Robert Rodriguez's aliens-ate-my-teachers movie The Faculty, and the blue-tinted gorefest in space Event Horizon, helped set nu-horror in motion.

The Faculty starts out as a garden-variety Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style paranoia thriller, but set in a high school so it can be marketed to teens. But then at the end, the monster is revealed as sort of a mix between the alien from Alien, and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, and computer animation takes over. Event Horizon is sorta the opposite, starting as a space opera on a grand scale, and then making a left turn into horror movie territory, with demons, torture, and glimpses of literal Hell.

In the ensuing few years, things like space travel, computer read-outs, and shootouts with aliens became commonplace in ostensibly scary movies. Also, in 1999, The Matrix came along, and as a cultural juggernaut, its influence can definitely be felt in the horror movies of the time. For instance, Uwe Bol's 2003 House of the Dead includes several shots that mimic "bullet time," The Matrix's time-stopping camera technique (link is NSFW).

The Matrix is no more or less scary than one of the high water marks of the nu-horror subgenre: 2001's Jason X, in which Jason Voorhees wakes up on a space ship, having been frozen for 445 years, and starts killing the sexy astronauts he encounters. The sexy astronauts fight back with killer robots and super guns. It is not a scary movie, but it is an immensely entertaining movie.

2001 was the biggest year for nu-horror. Thir13en Ghosts (which I think is pronounced "Thir-one-three-en Ghosts") is the most useful all-around snapshot of the subgenre I can find. It offers the viewer the kind of bright, colorful sets and lighting design they might typically expect from a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical, costumes reminiscent of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, the visuals of a Slipknot video, and a Ghostbusters-style mix of science fiction and horror.

There's also a needlessly convoluted story, in which (deep breath) a giant steampunk house is murdering people, but ghosts also live in the house, and a cursed document written by the devil is all over the walls which can be used to trap the ghosts, and the characters who are still alive can only see the ghosts if they wear hi-tech glasses that work like the glasses from They Live , and in addition to the house being able to kill people, the ghosts can also kill people.

The plot doesn't stay with you, and neither do the attempted scares. Instead, after watching Thir13en Ghosts, like so much Y2K-era culture, you just remember a kind of strobing, screaming, technicolor mess.

Because of their low budgets, horror movies will always be laboratories for cheap special effects that look dated a few weeks after the movies leave theaters. And because they're for teens, horror movies will always try to riff on the cultural fads of the moment, and the results will be ridiculous. So nu-horror may not be some uniquely crappy era in movies, but just possess a unique lack of aesthetic limits, as if the filmmakers were hitting you with every sight, color and noise they possibly could.

The time period itself had its high points as well, with non-nu-horror horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Gore Verbinski's Ring remake. In that vein, over the next few years non-Hollywood horror movies like High Tension, Wolf Creek, and The Descent came along and injected some new ideas—restraint mostly—into Hollywood's horror vocabulary. Say what you will about the flash-in-the-pan that was torture porn, movies like Saw and Hostel helped usher in a new era of gritty, pared-down movies.

These days, instead of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the audience and hoping some of it scares them, filmmakers are working on a relatively microscopic scale, making horror movies like The Witch and Green Room, and audiences seem to dig them.

But then again, another Resident Evil movie will hit theaters next January. So maybe nu-horror isn't dead.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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These Dogs Have Better Halloween Costumes Than You

Every Halloween, New York City opens itself up like a hellmouth, spilling out creatures and drunks and parties by the thousands. Sesame Street characters eat cart food at four in the morning. Wasted Princess Leias slump over in the subway seats. And dogs, oh the dogs!

This year, VICE sent photo and moving image team GIFRIENDS to capture some of the chaos at both Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade and the PUPkin Dog Costume Contest in Fort Greene, because who doesn't love puppers cosplaying as Princess Mononoke? They brought back collages and diptychs of the dedication behind some of these homemade creations.
–Elizabeth Renstrom, VICE Photo Editor

All photographs and GIFs by Marisa Gertz and Alex Thebez of GIFRIENDS. You can follow their work here.

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Halloween Is Fine

Photo by Taj Bourgeois

Today, thousands of Donald Trumps will take to the streets, shouting "pussy" jokes and demanding treats from strangers. Hundreds of Hillary Clintons will follow close, trying to remember a catchphrase. Ken Bones will be there, too, wondering where they can use the bathroom. Harambe the dead ape will rise from the grave, as will David Bowie. You may catch Prince and Willy Wonka making out, or puking, or crying. I'm tempted to stay in.

Like most reasonable people, I do not love Halloween, but I'm not such a spoilsport as to hate it, either. I think that Halloween is fine. It's obviously better than St. Patrick's Day and Valentine's Day (if you're single), but not nearly as nice as Christmas (if you like family) or New Year's (if you use "party" as a verb). It is the median fun holiday.

The main problem with Halloween is that it lacks a central purpose. There are costumes, yes, but unless you're a child young enough to trick-or-treat, the holiday is missing a culminating event. It lacks the mission provided by Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas presents, or the shouts of "Happy New Year!" The most exciting part of Halloween is seeing what people are wearing; if you go to a Halloween party, this happens at the very beginning of the night (if it's not spoiled ahead of time on Instagram). The rest of the party is anticlimactic.

Halloween doesn't really have food, or even a special drink. (Candy is great, but you're an adult and can already buy all the candy you could eat for like $6.) To make matters worse, costumes turn everyone into a slightly or even seriously more awful version of themselves, either emboldened and obnoxious or self-conscious and uncomfortable. Plus the entire night they're all thinking about going to another party they heard about, or maybe a bar. Meanwhile, cabs are scarce, Ubers are surging, and there are dudes dressed like the Jared Leto Joker on the subway.

This is what happens when a day for children to pretend is repurposed into a night for adults to binge drink. It's an awkward transition. Halloween is fun for kids because they get to dress and eat the way they wish they could every day; adults don't actually want to look like superheroes or eat only candy. Halloween forces grown-ups to pay lip service to their inner-child, leaving everyone feeling (and acting) like morons.

Photo by Flickr user Ed Yourdon

Halloween can suck, but it doesn't have to. What our spookiest holiday has going for it is that it's an occasion when people try to do something with friends. The importance of gatherings shouldn't be discounted. Actually planning to hang out with people can be an arduous task. Large gatherings can be tedious, but when they do work out, they're way more memorable than staying in or seeing a movie or whatever you do on most nights. On Halloween, people at a minimum aspire to have fun. Compare this to the group of holidays collectively known as "the Mondays." These days—when banks are closed and you might not have to go to work—seem like they'd be good for a barbecue or a trip upstate, but they're usually treated like surrogate Sundays. Halloween might be full of annoyances, but at least it's not just another day for errands.

To make the most out of Halloween, try less. Don't spend too much of your night trying to find the best possible thing to do. Halloween is when "good enough" truly is, so just pick a party and stick with it. How many people's costumes can you remember from last year? No one cares what you wore, either. Unless you were in theater or a sorority, your best bet is to just wear something simple. Elaborate costumes are expensive and time consuming; if you don't get some personal satisfaction from dressing like a woman giving birth to herself, don't bother. Don't try to for anything political; avoid memes and topical gags—they're not original, and you'll feel embarrassed and sick of the joke before the night even gets started. Unless you want to end up in a cautionary listicle, be careful about anything that may be construed as racially insensitive. Dress up as something obvious that people will recognize, like a mime, or buy a thrift store overcoat and be the guy from Twin Peaks. It doesn't matter if it's not clever. Your costume can be as sexy as you'd like, but Halloween is usually the first truly cold night of the year, so try to bring along a scarf or sweater if you're going to be outside much.

When Celtic pagans or early Christians (the holiday's origins are fiercely debated) held feasts to celebrate the autumn harvest, they couldn't have imagined that one day a man dressed as an Italian plumber created by a Japanese corporation would commemorate the night by peeing on my stoop. Halloween, then, is evidence that our culture is a living, breathing dialogue across centuries and continents. Isn't that reason enough to celebrate? It might not be the coolest or the most fulfilling of our holy days, but that's fine. After all, something has to be in the middle.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

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What Defense Will Walter Scott's Killer Use at His Trial?

One morning last April, a South Carolina police officer named Michael Slager pulled over a Mercedes with a busted brake light. Walter Scott, the 50-year-old forklift operator driving the car, quickly took off on foot. Millions have watched cell phone footage of what happened next: Slager fired into Scott's back eight times as he ran away, killing him.

Slager was fired and arrested on murder charges that same month, and jury selection for his murder trial finally began Monday. There is, of course, plenty of precedent for white cops getting away with killing unarmed black men in America. But this case—even more than the Samuel Dubose police killing going to jury selection in Ohio this week—seems pretty cut-and-dried. Slager shot an unarmed man in the back, over and over again, as he fled, and the shooting was captured with video evidence. What could the former cop's lawyers possibly say to convince a jury this wasn't murder?

A series of motions recently filed by Slager's defense team—which did not respond to a request for comment for this story—offers some insight. For starters, as the Associated Press reported, the attorneys asked that the jury not be made aware of the civil settlement the city paid out to Scott's family—some $6.5 million—or of the fact that the ex-officer faces federal civil rights charges in a case that's set to begin next year.

The defense has also asked that the jury not be sequestered because the lawyers fear taking people away from friends and family over a long period of time might make them resentful toward the trial process—and the defendant in particular. (The prosecution might counter that a lengthy period of isolation didn't seem to hurt OJ Simpson, whose 1995 not-guilty murder verdict came after the longest jury sequestration in California history.)

But perhaps the most illuminating defense motion was the one asking that the legal system be brought outside the courthouse. Essentially, the defense wants to take the jurors on a field trip to see where the incident took place, which could be key to bolstering Slager's version of events: that Scott attacked him and even tried to use the cop's taser against him. (Scott's DNA was, in fact, reportedly found on the device, though Slager picking it up, moving it closer to the dead body, and then re-holstering it—as seen on the cell phone video—raises a whole bunch of other questions.)

Eric A. Johnson, a professor of criminal procedure and evidence at the University of Illinois law School, says the technical term for jurors checking out a crime scene is a "jury visit." Typically, he said, the visits are silent and the jurors do not speak to one another. It's unlikely that there would be any sort of demonstration or re-enactment of the shooting, he added.

Johnson went on to note that it's unclear what the defense attorneys hope to gain from the visit, since the video itself is pretty clear in showing the scene and the distance between Slager and Scott when the shots were fired. The judge would have to determine if the visit's potential usefulness to the defense outweighed the risk of a reversible error—that is, some event or development that might bias the jury and force a mistrial.

"You'd also want to make sure there weren't protestors milling around the scene, shouting things to jurors," Johnson told me. "So judges are going to try and execute a lot of control over the jury view if it happens."

But Colin Miller, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and expert on criminal procedure, says the trip is probably integral to the only strategy any reasonable attorney in this position would pursue––trying to show that some kind of altercation happened before the shooting, even if it didn't go viral.

It's unclear what, exactly, at the scene might serve to illustrate such a struggle. But inserting even a hint of reasonable doubt is "pretty much all they can do," Miller said, to possibly spare Slager of the 30 years to life sentence he faces if convicted.

"It's always possible something could come out," he told me. "But a guilty verdict seems a near certainty."

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The Ordinary Things That Terrified Us as Children

Halloween: the time of year in which we temporarily let go of modern life's perpetual, banal horrors and indulge ourselves in simpler spooky symbols: jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, ghouls, witches, a black cat or two (although, really, most of them are quite nice), and our favorite horror movies and TV shows. But sometimes—especially when you're a child with an impressionable mind—the entertainment that scares us the most are the things that aren't meant to scare us at all. Some of VICE's finest employees shared tales of what irrationally spooked them the most as children—so take off your mask, turn off Poltergeist, and read on for the things that scared us silly that probably shouldn't have...

Teddy Ruxpin was an animatronic teddy bear you put an audio cassette in, and it would tell stories and sing. It's easy to imagine why that might scare kids, and I was very much one of them. That's because I was an infant during the Teddy Ruxpin craze in the mid-to-late 80s. By the time I was lucid in 1988 or 1989, kids a little older than me all had one, but the batteries were dead and the cassettes were lost, so it just sat there like any other teddy bear. I didn't know there was anything else to it.

One day at daycare, our teacher was sick of us all running amok or whatever and was like, "OK, kids, story time!" She plopped a fully loaded Teddy Ruxpin down in front of us, and I was like, "Are you serious?" But then it fucking TALKED. It actually started telling a story. I was fully one of those surprised kids from the first Teddy Ruxpin commercial, except instead of being delighted, it sent a chill straight to my soul. One minute it was this inert toy, and the next minute, it was an orphaned alien telling me about a treasure map it found.

After a couple minutes, I calmed down. Even a four-year-old can figure out there's a tape in there, and the face is motorized. But the initial shock kinda never wore off even if over time it turned from fear to melancholy. All because there was that moment when I fully believed this living creature with hopes and dreams had been sitting there awake, staring at me from across the room, and I'd been ignoring it. - Mike Pearl, VICE Staff Writer

When I was a kid, HBO scared the living shit out of me. I'm not talking about old Tales from the Crypt episodes (although I also had a more serious and more rational fear of the Crypt keeper, too)—what really spooked me was the intro that used to play before the Saturday night movie. Truthfully, watching it as a 29-year-old still gives me the heebie jeebies: The family in the window settling down to watch some HBO stokes my fear of what other people could be doing at any moment, the dramatic orchestral music sounds ominous and then terrifyingly bombastic, and the gigantic HBO logo that comes from the sky like a glowing scion of televised humanity makes me feel like HBO is coming to invade my town (or, at least, my dreams). Sadly, I was subject to this intro hundreds of times even after it was taken off the air, as my parents had taped a showing of The Pope of Greenwich Village on the channel and watched it many times with me, subjecting me to my most recurring nightmare all for the love of Eric Roberts. - Larry Fitzmaurice, VICE Senior Culture Editor, Digital

I used to suck my thumb a lot, so my dad would read me this 150-year-old German children's book called Struwwelpeter, about a boy who gets his thumb cut off with giant scissors because he won't stop sucking it. The only other time I have ever seen this book mentioned is as Dwight Schrute's favorite book on The Office.

I also used to regularly have nightmares about this fire alarm commercial, and have spent my entire adult life regularly waking up with a start, convinced I'm dying from smoke inhalation. But I guess that's also meant to be scary. - Jamie Taete, VICE Executive West Coast Editor

Close Encounters of the Fuck Nah. Photo via Columbia Pictures

This is something that STILL scares me, but when I first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was completely terrified of it, especially the ending, when the aliens, those bizarre big-headed silhouettes, take that dude away in their spaceship. Are we supposed to be cool with that outcome? Like, oh good he is joining a higher life form or serving as the Earth's ambassador to the stars? FUCK no. Five minutes after he walks into that light inside the spaceship he is at best being splayed open like a frog in biology class and at worst something horrible is happening to him that we can't even comprehend. Most horror films to me lose steam once it's revealed that the mysterious masked killer/evil presence is actually just a deranged drifter/Mayan curse/whatever. But Close Encounters never reveals the menace that hovers over everything—remember, this is a suspenseful movie about a dude losing his mind. There's no resolution.

Every movie about aliens making first contact with humans assumes that these races would be so advanced that they would basically hold humanity in the palm of their hands. In Independence Day and Mars Attacks, the aliens are antagonistic; in Mission to Mars and Contact, they're basically benign. (I've seen all these movies in theaters by the way.) In Close Encounters we don't know what they're about. They're just floating out there in the nothing-y blackness, watching, inscrutable. Some people are comforted by idea of an unknown omnipotent force hovering out there. At 12, I sure as fuck was not. -Harry Cheadle, VICE Senior Politics Editor

When I was about eight or nine, my dad or my mum—maybe both—got me a subscription to National Geographic. Which I read religiously and adored. Until one issue had a piece on the Black Death (bubonic plague) that swept through Europe in the 14th century. I think there was an illustration, or maybe a reproduced etching, of one of the plague doctors in their fucking awful beak masks and goggles, with their long robes, which utterly terrified me. I started getting extremely worried that the new subway lines they were at that time digging in London would hit a plague pit, and that the city would be full of dead bodies on carts and mass graves, and of course that my family would all die with pustules and swollen armpits and waxy faces. I vividly remember sitting at the top of the stairs in my house at night, a few times, crying, hoping my parents would hear and come up and tell me that it was definitely not going to happen. I can't remember if they did, but I do remember sitting there. - Bruno Bayley, VICE European Managing Editor

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Relapse: Facing Canada's Opioid Crisis: How North America Found Itself in the Grips of an Opioid Crisis

This post originally appeared on VICE Canada

The story of today's prescription opioid overdose crisis didn't start this year, or ten years ago, or even 100 years ago. It starts with a plant—the opium poppy—that has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years.

Papaver somniforum, literally, 'sleep-bringing poppy,' is the scientific name for the type of poppy that produces opium, which humanity has relied on since before history was even a concept. Along with wheat, the opium poppy is one of the world's oldest cultivated plants, with some estimates suggesting that humans have been growing it for 10,000 years or more. It's been cultivated so widely we don't even know where it originates. Some think it's indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean or the Swiss Alps, but frankly nobody really knows. What's clear, though, is that the relationship between humans and this strange and hardy plant (it can grow basically anywhere) goes beyond curiosity and into the realm of symbiosis.

There's a line from Lars Von Trier's Antichrist: "Nature is Satan's church," and perhaps there's no better example of the curious and uncanny relationships that form across species and time than the one between humans and the poppy. Opioids, the chemicals produced by papaver somniforum, somehow fit perfectly into the human body's opioid receptors, which are scattered throughout the brain, spinal cord, and digestive system, and this precise fit makes them exceptionally effective at suppressing pain. The geometry is so exact that some experts theorize that the opium plant and our neural architecture is the result of symbiotic co-evolution (some even think opium poppies shaped the development of human consciousness). The mystical pain-dampening plant on the one hand, the upright ape on the other.

So when we talk about today's opioid crisis, we're really talking about just the latest chapter in an inter-species relationship that spans millennia. That's important to remember because for all their potential harms, opioids are a critical part of human civilization given their unique capacity to numb our pain. The issue, then, isn't so much how we stop people from using opioids, but instead how we make sure that these drugs bring us the most benefits with the fewest harms.

Unfortunately, over the past few decades it seems that the harms of opioids are increasingly outweighing their benefits in North America, to the point where governments are declaring public health emergencies in response to epidemics of opioid overdose deaths. In Ontario, one in eight deaths among young adults are the result of opioid overdoses, while drug overdose—driven primarily by opioids—is the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. But how did we get here? The answer is a cautionary tale about the power of Big Pharma, the unintended consequences of government intervention, and the tenacity of drug markets.

Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Photo via Doug Healey/Associated Press

OxyContin has been widely hailed as a wonder drug and in many ways, it is. A prescription drug with billions in R&D behind it, OxyContin was put on the market in 1996 as a fast-acting, controlled release formulation of oxycodone, which is an opioid used to treat moderate to severe pain, and which was originally designed to treat cancer patients. In its first year on the market, OxyContin sales reached $48 million; in 2000—just four years later—annual sales had reached almost $1.1 billion, representing an increase of roughly 2,200 percent. It remained among the top 20 best-selling drugs in the US until 2013, when it was taken off the market. By the conventional metrics of the pharmaceutical industry, then, OxyContin was a massive and highly profitable success.

Part of that success, though, wasn't just a natural result of OxyContin's effectiveness as an opioid painkiller. Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical giant that developed the drug, also threw millions behind marketing the drug to its key customer base: medical doctors. This meant, for instance, holding over 40 all-expense-paid conferences for over 5,000 attendees and paying out $40 million in bonuses to Purdue sales reps in the first five years OxyContin was on the market. In some cases, the marketing strategies verged into the ridiculous, as with Purdue Pharma's creation of a promotional song—"Get in the Swing with OxyContin"—to try to entice doctors to prescribe the drug.

Other strategies went further. One of the major breakthroughs in expanding the number of OxyContin prescriptions came with Purdue Pharma's decision to switch focus from marketing OxyContin as a drug to manage cancer-related pain—a relatively stable market—and instead promote it as an effective and safe treatment for the more nebulous class of "chronic non-malignant pain" (aka, non-cancer pain), a market that was exploding in the late 1990s. It was a masterstroke, and it paid off: between 1997 and 2002, there was a near tenfold increase in OxyContin prescriptions in the US for chronic non-malignant pain, from 670,000 to 6.2 million annually. It was the opening up of a massive new market for opioids that would prove incredibly profitable: Purdue Pharma made nearly $3 billion in revenues from OxyContin in the first five years it was on the market.

The true genius, though, was Purdue Pharma's use of granular geographic data to identify doctors with the highest OxyContin prescribing patterns in specific area codes, and then targeting those clinicians with marketing materials that included patient coupons for free 30-day trials of OxyContin prescriptions (as laid out in a American Journal of Public Health review.) The idea was that these techniques would help identify doctors with the highest number of chronic pain patients. Of course, it also opened up the possibility, if not the probability, that Purdue Pharma was pushing doctors who were already over-prescribing OxyContin to ramp their prescriptions up even further.

Photo via Toby Talbot/Associated Press

In some cases, Purdue Pharma's marketing verged on the sinister and even crossed into the illegal. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the pharmaceutical giant's downplaying of the addictive potential of OxyContin, which it did in a multitude of ways. In 2010, two doctors at St. Michael's Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto's medical school (and where I hold a position), started voicing concerns about pharmaceutical industry involvement in a pain management course that was part of U of T's med school curriculum. It turned out that the lecturer for the course, Dr. Roman Jovey, was a member of Purdue Pharma's speakers' bureau and was paid by the company to lecture. Worse, a book on pain management that was co-authored by Dr. Jovey and funded by Purdue had been used as a textbook within the class. In the book, free copies of which were given to U of T medical students, oxycodone (the active agent in OxyContin) was described as a moderate-intensity opioid despite the fact that it is twice as potent as morphine. It was also characterized as having a low risk for addiction among non-malignant pain patients, despite the fact that at the time, rates of opioid dependence among patients prescribed OxyContin were soaring.

In 2007, during a time when the dangers of OxyContin over-prescribing were starting to become clear to public health experts, three top executives at a subsidiary of Purdue Pharma pled guilty to fraud and paid $600 million for "misbranding" OxyContin as a result of the company's claims that the drug was less addictive than other comparable opioid-based drugs like Percocet or Vicodin. In internal Purdue Pharma documents dating to before OxyContin was marketed, company officials expressed concerns that they would face resistance from medical doctors concerned about the potential for patients to become addicted. Despite these doubts, Purdue Pharma went full steam ahead in marketing the drug as having a "reduced-risk" for addiction; in the court case, it was found that this constituted fraudulent and deceptive marketing, and in a guilty plea, Purdue Pharma agreed, with the company stating that "e accept responsibility for those past misstatements and regret they were made."

By the time public health experts started sounding the alarm about the addictive potential of OxyContin, the damage was done. Beginning in the early 2000s the infusion of billions of OxyContin pills into the drug market had caused a seismic shift in drug use patterns, with increases in heroin use and injection drug use among working-class white people in suburban and rural communities across North America for the first time in decades. Purdue Pharma had wedged open a massive new market of people seeking to numb their pain, aided and abetted by a legion of clinicians without the requisite knowledge about the drug's dangers and a lack of expertise in managing the associated risks. But now, the market was out of control. The alarm had been sounded. It was time to act.

There's a phenomenon to describe the ways that trying to intervene in one part of a drug market can make things worse elsewhere. It's called the Balloon Effect, for the way that squeezing one part of a balloon causes other parts to expand, and it's surprisingly common in the history of the drug war. When the US tried to stop cocaine production by eradicating coca leaf cultivation in Colombia, for instance, all that the aerial spraying and destruction of millions of hectares of farmland did was spread production to Colombia's neighbors, Bolivia and Peru. When a sudden drop in the availability of heroin in Australia occurred in 2001,the number of heroin users plummeted, but was offset by a similar increase in the number of people using cocaine and amphetamines. The problem is, basically, that if you don't first reduce demand for a drug, trying to control supply in a global economy only incentivizes drug traffickers to find new supply routes or new drugs to bring to the market.

So it has gone with efforts to control North America's opioid problem, and why it is that we are now facing an even graver crisis than in the era when OxyContin prescriptions were at their peak. Instead of meaningfully scaling up effective treatment for people who became addicted to OxyContin, the major policy change was the removal of OxyContin by Purdue Pharma from the North American market in 2012 and its replacement with OxyNEO, which the company claims is tamper-resistant (i.e., harder to crush up, snort, or inject). The timing of this swap out, though, caused some experts to grow suspicious: in Canada, OxyNEO was introduced just a few months before the patent on OxyContin was set to expire, meaning that it was also an effective way for Purdue Pharma to protect its market share.

Worse, efforts by government agencies and medical associations to reduce opioid prescribing failed to make a meaningful dent. How could it, given that doctors had been acculturated into believing that drugs like OxyContin weren't actually that dangerous, and chronic pain patients had grown accustomed—and in many cases, dependent on—a steady supply of opioids? Instead, with OxyContin's removal, fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine and which carries an even higher risk of overdose, became the opioid of choice to fill the prescription void.

And this is where the Balloon Effect comes into play: without expanded access to treatment, the demand for opioids hasn't gotten smaller. Reducing the supply of opioids like OxyContin, has only served to shift the market to more dangerous ones like fentanyl. As a second wave of alarm has spread about fentanyl, some doctors have become unwilling to treat chronic pain patients at all. The result? The market—this time, contraband fentanyl and lesser known carfentanil (developed as an elephant tranquilizer and 10,000 times more powerful than morphine)—have been filling the void, with deadly but predictable results. The question is, of course, where continuing along this path will get us. If beer was taken off the market, people would drink wine. If wine was taken off, people would drink hard liquor. If hard liquor was taken off, people would drink industrial alcohol. So it goes with opioids, and why we've moved from OxyContin (1.5 times as strong as morphine) to fentanyl (50-80 times more powerful) to carfentanil (10,000 times more powerful).

So how does this cycle stop? Sadly, there is no quick fix when it comes to opioids. Simply banning painkillers would doom hundreds of thousands of people who are legitimately suffering with pain to a barbaric and excruciating existence. And when the problem was caused by a billion-dollar fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting public via one of the most trusted pillars—medical doctors—the solution is just too damn big to be easily dealt with. What's clear though, is that the cycle of squeezing the supply without addressing the demand for opioids will only get us into increasingly more dangerous territory. Instead, we need a broad recognition that the pharmaceutical market is just one part of a larger drug market that includes illegal drugs and regulated substances like alcohol, and that intervening on supply in one part of this larger market will have ripple effects across the whole enterprise. If we fail to come to this realization, we'll be dooming ourselves to the opioid overdose epidemic becoming a permanent fixture of our society. Do we really want to live in a world where we have to worry about one tiny grain of carfentanil killing kids who are experimenting with drugs? In the long history of our symbiotic relationship with opioids, that would be the saddest ending of all.

Dr. Daniel Werb is an epidemiologist and policy analyst with expertise in the fields of HIV, addictions, and drug policy.

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Westworld: Everyone Is Getting Worse on 'Westworld'

Warning: Spoilers from episode five ahead.

We're halfway through the first season of Westworld, so it seems fair to ask: What is this show about? Sure, it's "about" a depraved amusement park set in some unknown future where rich people can pay to shoot and fuck robots. But what is the story that it's telling? Is Westworld the tale of a robot rebellion? A far-future A.I. experiment? A lesson on what might happen when maniacal genius comes undone? More specifically, will Dolores ever find freedom? How did Bernard first fall in love with his creation?Will the Man in Black unravel the whole mystery?

Westworld is still captivating from scene to scene thanks to its brilliant cast, gorgeous vistas, and stacks of dead bodies. But as a whole, the show still has more fan theories than focus. Most prestige dramas tell one or two central stories with a couple of main characters. Breaking Bad tells the story of one man's descent from "Mr. Chips to Scarface"; each season of The Wire tells the story of how a group of police do or don't bring in a case against drug dealers, and so on. Westworld has set up a lot of intriguing subplots, characters, and themes that don't really cohere into a single story, and no one has yet emerged as a definite protagonist. If a story is about a dozen things, does it risk being about nothing?

Still, there are five more episodes to pull all the strands together, and quite a few story lines advanced in intriguing ways this week.

Teddy's No Good, Very Bad Day

The fifth episode is titled "Contrapasso," a reference to Dante's Inferno and hopefully not an indication that "they were all in hell!" will be the answer to the question of what the show is about.

But Teddy (James Marsden) might as well be in hell, as he and Lawrence (Clifton Collins, Jr.) are dragged around by the Man in Black (Ed Harris) as he searches for the maze. They run into the British robot boy—who is almost certainly modeled on either Ford (Anthony Hopkins) or the mysterious Arnold as a child—allowing the Man in Black to remind us he's still a monster. "Too small," he says, deciding against any sex crimes today.

But Teddy, grievously wounded last episode by Wyatt's gang, is fading. To save him, the Man in Black facilitates an impromptu blood transfusion. He slices Lawrence's throat and strings him upside down in a tree, letting him bleed out into a leather bag. After an offscreen transfusion, Teddy is doing all right. Why, you ask, do robots need human blood to live? The Man in Black tells Teddy that back in the day he sliced open a robot and they "used to be beautiful... a million perfect pieces." Then, somewhere along the way, the bean counters realized that "humanity is cost-effective," meaning it was easier to make them out of flesh and bone.

Into the Wild

Nice guy William (Jimmi Simpson), jerk-store employee of the month Logan (Ben Barnes), and Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) head south of the border in search of local criminal kingpin El Lazo. While the Western clichés we've seen previously take place in the section of the park that "feels like it was designed by committee" (as Logan says), they are heading into the "raw" section. Down here is less Tombstone and more El Topo.

Dancing skeletons, gold-painted prostitutes, and drunken Confederates stagger around the town, and the sequences here are filmed with a dreamy Lynchian quality. The show is finally opening up its style and tonal palate, even if the picture isn't filled in yet.

Their guide Slim sets them up with El Lazo a.k.a. Lawrence a.k.a. the dead carcass in the middle of nowhere. In my episode three review, I mentioned the theory that William might be the Man in Black in a previous timeline. The fact that Lawrence appears again, seemingly uninterrupted as the criminal boss across the border, is certainly a point in his favor. (Another possibility, albeit less likely, is that there are multiple versions of each host, their brains connected through something like the cloud. This would explain how Bernard and Ford are able to talk to various robots seemingly in the middle of their adventures.)

Dolores gets to whip out a bandana and six-shooter, and the gang robs a stage coach carrying nitroglycerin in a plot between El Lazo and the drunken Confederate soldiers that all goes to shit—especially for Logan—but leaves William, Dolores, and Lawrence all heading to the front lines where the greatest thrill the park has to offer can be found: war.

Elsie on the Case

By far the most interesting story lines so far have taken place inside the park, but the drama at headquarters finally gets interesting this episode as Elsie (Shannon Woodward) does some detective work. She convinces one of the "creepy necro-perv" repairmen in the basement to let her look at the robot who smashed his head in before it got incinerated. She finds a "laser-based satellite uplink" buried in his arm that someone has been using to smuggle data out of the park.

Next week, be on the lookout for the WikiLeaks Westworld email dump.

The Two Stooges

This week's comedy relief comes in the form of the two basement repairmen who were around when Maeve woke up. One of them (Leonardo Nam) dreams of something bigger, and is trying to learn to program a robot bird so he can get a promotion. The other (Ptolemy Slocum) apparently has his "aggro-bro" levels set to max and flips out at him between sessions with a redhead in his "VR tank." But the real point of these scenes is to let us know that Maeve has broken out of her programming and can wake herself up from sleep mode.

Everybody Loves Arnold

The through line of this episode is the ghost—or robotic consciousness?—of Arnold, Ford's co-creator who mysteriously died 30 years ago, and who disagreed with Ford on matters of robot self-actualization. A voice, seemingly Arnold's, instructs Dolores, "Find me." Logan tells William that the family lawyers looked into Arnold and couldn't find a single thing on him. Meanwhile, Ford is also searching for him, especially in Dolores's mind. "Somewhere under all those updates, he's still there," he tells her, making me think that Arnold transformed himself into code that lives in the minds of all the robots.

After Ford's interrogation, Dolores tells an unseen figure that "he doesn't know. I didn't tell him anything."

But the most thrilling scene this week takes place when Ford interrupts the Man in Black's drinking. They speak like old frenemies, with the Man in Black saying that the park was always "missing a real villain," hence his murder spree while Ford acts amused at his quest. "If you're looking for the moral of the story, simply ask," Ford says. The Man in Black, getting testy, makes it clear that he doesn't think Ford knows the moral. It was Arnold who was the real genius of the park. Teddy—seemingly controlled by Ford via telekinesis—stops the Man in Black from skinning an answer out of Ford, and we're left knowing that answers may be out there but we won't find them yet.

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We Asked VICE Illustrators to Draw Their Nightmares

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

While we in Australia don't have a particularly extensive history of celebrating ghosts and candy, we all share some interest in horror. But when we got talking here at the VICE office about what we find captivating, most of us agreed that our notions of fear are tied in with our dreams. So, in honor of Halloween, an idea was hatched: We'd reach out to our illustrators and ask them to draw their nightmares.

Here are some of the responses we got, with a little description of what each dream was about.

Lee Lai

I was about nine when I first had this dream. I'm running through an outdoor mall and watching people explode into masses of weird, wormy noodles. I think the horror wasn't just in the gore, but watching these people trying to fight back the transformation from their loved ones. I can still see a woman in my head, trying to force the writhing tentacles back from her face. I think it's more or less permanently imprinted in my brain.

Michael Dockery

Around the age of nine, I used to get these night terrors, which are basically nightmares when you're not completely asleep. They felt very real, and came on with an extreme sensation of fear and anxiety—and something about the decay of time.

I dreamed that there was an unstoppable magnetic force attracting metal, growing bigger until it consisted of all the metal from our planet. I remember I could feel the pressure of this metal orb, and that every bend and crushing fold was hurting me. And it was deafeningly loud, screaming as it gained mass.

I tried to calm myself down by thinking of a nice beach whenever I felt the fear take hold. Sometimes this would work; sometimes it wouldn't. In the times that a beach wasn't enough to distract me, there was a particular feeling of dread I'll never forget. The dread was this: It's already done, and it's already too late. We are no match for it.

Ben Thomson

My image is from a dream I had when I was living in a really weird student apartment—one time I found two neo-Nazis lighting ping pong balls on fire in my lounge at 3 AM. Anyway, I still remember my dream to this day because it was so surreal. I dreamed I was being dragged across my lounge by two little gray aliens. I remember panicking and trying to gouge one of their eyes out, and they responded by zapping me with something that knocked me out cold. At that moment, I woke up conscious in my bed, completely freaked out.

Michael Hili

Sometimes I dream about accidentally unlocking secrets of the universe. Like if jumped of the bed while shouting out the word "bread" would I be able to fly? Probably.

Usually I dream about carnivores. It's pretty weird, but I have this dream I'm cracking the shells of buttery clams and drink the juice at the bottom of the bowl and this somehow unlocks a group of carnivorous beings beginning with the letter "V." So, for example, I'll get a whole lot of vultures being born out of Venus flytraps. Then for some reason, they're all singing Harry Nilsson's "Put the Lime in the Coconut" in perfect harmony.

I try to find the low part to the harmony to show them I've seen Reservoir Dogs as well, but I fuck it up. This angers them, and they start nipping at me with their buttery beaks.

Ashley Goodall

A few months ago, a close friend asked me to look after some of her grandmother's prized possessions while she traveled through Europe. One of them was an extremely valuable clay vase that her grandmother had made 40 years earlier—a family heirloom.

That night I had a dream that I tripped over and broke the vase into a thousand pieces. I remember trying to glue the pot back together, but every time I touched one of the pieces, it just ran through my fingers like sand. It was a total nightmare, and I woke in panic and sweat.

I immediately went into my lounge room to check the vase was all right. I wrapped it in bubble wrap and put it in the back of my storage cupboard to get it away from me.

Dimitrios Guerrero

Since the age of six or seven, I've had this ongoing nightmare that begins with a faceless man spinning in an empty room wearing a paisley suit. As the man spins, scissors start to appear and shoot toward me. I try ducking them, but the spinning man can control and move the scissors.

I start to feel really anxious and claustrophobic, and the pressure in the room starts to build. The more I try to avoid the scissors, the more the room breaks up and fragments, to the point where everything is completely blurred and distorted and all that's left is this terror. That's usually when I wake up.

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The True Story of the Notorious Trick-or-Treat Murderer

A trick-or-treater in the 1970s, for illustrative purposes and not related to this case. Photo: Don Scarborough, via

On a rainy Halloween night in 1974, the children of Deer Park, Texas were out knocking on doors. Ronald Clark O'Bryan, an optician, was out too, watching over his kids—eight-year-old Timothy and five-year-old Elizabeth—as they trick-or-treated in a suburban neighborhood near their home. Joining them was the O'Bryan's neighbor, Jim Bates, and his young son.

One of the houses the group approached had all its lights switched off, but the kids banged on the door anyway; the vague promise of candy was too enticing.

But there was no answer: either the occupants were hiding or no one was home. Growing impatient, the kids ran off to find another house and Jim followed. Ronald was left alone.

Catching up with the others a short while later, Ronald had good news. He produced a handful of 21-inch Pixy Stix, tubes of powdered sour candy. Turned out someone had been in at the dark house all along. The sweets were handed out—one to each of the children there, one for Jim's other child and another to a ten-year-old boy Ronald had recognized from church as the group walked home.

Before bed, Timothy O'Bryan was allowed one treat from the evening's haul, and picked his Pixy Stix tube—but the powdered sugar was stuck in the straw, and it wasn't until his dad helped him to dislodge it that he could take his first mouthful. It tasted bitter, he complained, so Ronald grabbed him a glass of Kool-Aid to wash the taste away. Less than an hour later, Timothy was dead.

"It was just a coincidence that I was working the police intake that night," says former Harris County prosecutor Mike Hinton, decades later, on the phone from Houston. "I got a call from the Pasadena police department—they told me an eight-year-old boy had died. He was rushed to hospital, but he'd already passed."

Dr. Joseph A Jachimczyk

Wanting to get his investigation underway, Hinton called Dr. Joseph A. Jachimczyk, chief medical examiner of nearby Harris County. "I told him the situation and he asked what the young man's breath smelled like," says Hinton now. A call to the morgue revealed there was a scent of almonds coming from the boy's mouth. "It's cyanide," said Dr. Jachimczyk.

An autopsy proved the medical examiner's hunch: a pathologist said Timothy had consumed enough cyanide to kill two people. Tests later found that the top two inches of the Pixy Stix had been packed with the poison.

Police officers managed to recover the remaining sweets from the other children before any of them had a chance to dig in, and noted that whoever was responsible had used staples to seal the Pixy Stix after tampering with them. "That's what saved another boy's life that night," Hinton recalls. "They found him in bed with the sweet in his hand, but he wasn't strong enough to undo the staples."

The police took Ronald back to the neighborhood the group had been trick-or-treating in so he could direct them to the house where he'd picked up the Pixy Stix. But he was stumped—he just couldn't find the house, and said he'd never seen the face of the person responsible; that had just emerged from a doorway and handed him the candy. Investigators started to become suspicious.

"A few days went by, and it was incredibly frustrating," says Hinton, "so they took O'Bryan out again and were pretty firm with him."

The tactic worked: Ronald's memory was jogged. He pointed towards the house.

The man who lived there wasn't home, so officers went to his place of work—Houston's William Hobby P. Airport—and arrested him in front of his colleagues. The mystery was over; cased closed.

Only, the man had an alibi. "It turned out he was working that night," says Hinton in his long Texan drawl. "His wife and daughter were home and had turned out the lights early as they'd run out of candy." Colleagues and time sheets confirmed the man's story. "This only magnified my suspicions," says Hinton. "I'd also heard O'Bryan was angry at his relatives for not staying up the night of Timothy's funeral, which was odd."

Ronald, it transpires, had written a song about Jesus, and Timothy joining the Lord in heaven, and had grown agitated when his grieving family wouldn't stay up late to watch a recording of the performance being broadcast on television. "Something strange was going on," says Hinton.

Soon after, while he was teaching a class at the Pasadena police academy, detectives arrived at Hinton's door. They had discovered that Ronald had recently taken out life insurance policies on both of his children—$10,000 per child in January of that year, and then a further $20,000 on each a month before Halloween. Investigators already knew Ronald owed debts of over $100,000, so when they found out he'd called his insurers to ask about the payout at 9 AM the morning after Timothy's death, it was clear the case against him was beginning to come together.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan's mugshot. Background photo by Flickr user lobo235, via

Granted a warrant, a search of the O'Bryan house offered up a pair of scissors with plastic residue attached, which was similar to that found on the cyanide-laced sweets. O'Bryan was arrested and taken in for questioning.

As the investigation continued, says Hinton, the evidence started to stack up against Ronald. "It turned out O'Bryan was going to community college and in class would ask his professor questions like, 'What is more lethal: cyanide or another type of poison?'" says Hinton. "Why would someone ask that?"

Another witness, who worked for a chemical company in Houston, told police a man had come in to buy some cyanide, but left after being told the smallest amount he could buy was 5 lbs. "The man from the store said he couldn't identify O'Bryan, but he remembered that his customer was wearing a beige or blue smock, like a doctor," says Hinton. "O'Bryan was an optician—that was exactly the uniform he wore to work."

Still, this was years before DNA testing and contactless debit cards, and police couldn't put the Pixy Stix in Ronald's hands or prove he'd bought any cyanide. So the 30-year-old optician maintained his innocence.

Hinton remembers the case vividly; in the decades that have passed, his memories have remained sharp. "O'Bryan adored the attention," he says. "I think he even loved it during his trial."

Ronald entered a not guilty plea, with his defense blaming the tainted candy on some untraceable boogieman—a sick individual using the cover of Halloween to poison unsuspecting children. But friends, family, and co-workers all testified against the man the press was now calling the "Candy Man," and on June 3, 1975 it took just 46 minutes for a jury to return a guilty verdict for one charge of capital murder and four counts of attempted murder. An hour later, it was decided that Ronald would be executed by electric chair.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan, right, is escorted from the courtroom by a bailiff after hearing the guilty verdict on June 3, 1975. AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Othell O. Owensby Jr.

Before and since the Deer Park poisoning, rumors of dodgy sweets being handed out have always surfaced around Halloween. But whether the fear is that the candies contain broken glass and razor blades, or that they're actually ecstasy pills, there's not much evidence to suggest parents actually have anything to worry about.

In 2000, a man in Minneapolis was charged with putting needles in the Snickers bars he'd handed out to trick-or-treaters—but the only victim he claimed was a teenager who got a slight prick from the hidden sharp object. Since Timothy O'Bryan, there hasn't been a single case where a child has actually died after consuming contaminated Halloween treats.

Ronald Clark O'Bryan's appeal avenues were explored and turned down for nearly a decade after his guilty verdict, so it wasn't until March 31, 1984, when all routes to survival had been exhausted, that he was finally put to death for his crime. By this point, the US Supreme Court had ruled the electric chair a cruel and unusual punishment, so his life was ended with a lethal injection.

Outside the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, a crowd of around 300 people gathered to hear if the man the Halloween poisoner had met his end, shouting "Trick or treat" and throwing candy at anti-death penalty protesters.

At 12:48 AM, when Ronald was pronounced dead, Hinton was in his childhood home in Amarillo, an eight-hour drive from Huntsville. That evening, he'd gone to his favorite lake, fishing rod in hand, and drunk a beer in celebration as he drifted out into the darkness.

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Are the Feds Finally Going to Press Charges in the Eric Garner Case?

Eric Garner's body lies in a coffin for viewing before his funeral at a church in Brooklyn. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

The internal machinations of federal law enforcement have been the biggest news story in America since Friday, when FBI Director James Comey told Congress agents are looking into a new cache of emails possibly relevant to their investigation of Hillary Clinton. Since then, the Wall Street Journal reported officials at the Justice Department and FBI have been squabbling over how and whether to press ahead with the probe. But there's another weird Department of Justice/FBI dispute that has been hovering in the background of American life for a while now, and this one isn't about classified documents, insecure emails, or the future of a prominent politician.

Instead, this fight is about a man's life and why he lost it.

Last week, the New York Times reported the feds have swapped out the New York investigators and lawyers on the Eric Garner case, signaling NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo might still face charges for violating the black man's civil rights by placing him in a lethal chokehold in 2014. To back up a bit, after a local grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo on charges of manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide that December—igniting protests across the city and country—the feds in Washington announced they were opening their own civil rights probe. "Our prosecutors will conduct an independent, thorough, fair and expeditious investigation," then-US Attorney General Eric Holder promised.

Expeditious probably wasn't the right word, because despite video of Garner begging 11 times—"I can't breathe!"—for air after being wrestled to the sidewalk, Holder's vow came nearly two years ago. Meanwhile, Pantaleo remains with the force (albeit on modified duty), and has even seen his pay go up.

But word of a staffing change has injected new life into the case, even as it raises fresh questions about the federal government's role in probing some of the most outrageous police-brutality cases in America. For a sense of how to read the tea leaves—and what, exactly, it takes to charge a cop with violating someone's civil rights in this country—VICE spoke with Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Before taking that gig, Smith completed 18 investigations as the head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division's Special Litigation Section, including, most notably, the case centering on the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri.

VICE: Before we go into the latest developments in the Garner case, can you break down how the feds get involved in these types of cases generally?
Jonathan Smith: So the federal government has one criminal civil rights statute, the 18 U.S.C. 242, which permits the US to prosecute people for willful violations of someone's civil rights. It's a fairly high standard, and different than most state standards, where you may have various different crimes that a police officer can commit, including negligence or recklessness. Willfulness is the same standard as you'd have to prove someone engaged in deliberate murder, or first-degree murder, essentially for the purpose of depriving a person of their civil rights. It's a very difficult standard to meet, and so that's why, just as a general matter, you see many more state prosecutions of police officers than you see federal prosecutions.

Nevertheless, during the Obama administration, the feds have brought about 600 successful "color of law" prosecutions—they are called "color of law" because it's violation of someone's civil rights under the "color of law." A lot of them changes that dynamic.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Still Racist After All These Years: Why David Duke Won't Go Away

David Duke in July. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)

"White people will be a minority in America soon. Every minority has a spokesgroup, except European Americans. We're not allowed."

That's Michael Lawrence's pitch for David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan big shot and perennial political candidate now running for the US Senate in Louisiana. Lawrence ran Duke's campaign before quitting, he told me, to deal with flooding on some properties in Baton Rouge he owned. "For a long time now, David has been the sole spokesman for white people. And he has paid an incredible price for standing up," lamented Lawrence, who still supports Duke, "in being labeled a racist."

The news isn't that Duke has crawled out of the marshes to run for the seat left by fellow embarrassment David Vitter. The news is that Duke recently somehow polled the requisite 5 percent needed to land him in an upcoming televised debate—the most legitimacy the notorious racist and anti-Semite has had in a long, long time. As an added irony, or insult, he will enjoy this honor at New Orleans's historically black Dillard University.

Duke has haunted Louisiana's conscience since the 70s, when he became a regular spouting his rhetoric on Louisiana State University's "Free Speech Alley." To fund his larger ambitions, in 1976, he wrote a pseudonymous sexual self-help book for women titled Finders Keepers. In 1979, he founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People. After failed Senate and presidential bids as a Democrat, Duke turned Republican and in 1989 was elected state senator in a special election. Following a short and uninspired term, Duke ran for governor and lost, though he garnered more votes than he ever would again in his many other failed political attempts.

After his partner Don Black (who married Duke's ex-wife Chloe Hardin) left to start the white nationalist site Stormfront, Duke founded the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO) in 2000. Following a short stint in jail for lying to his own supporters in order to fundraise from them and cheating on his taxes, Duke remained mostly in the shadows until this past September when he came to New Orleans to ostensibly stop protestors who were threatening to tear down the city's famous statue of Andrew "Trail of Tears" Jackson. The mostly black crowd reportedly ran him out of Jackson Square with chants of "Racist, fascist, anti-gay! Right-wing bigot, go away!"

Though Duke is one of the most prominent white supremacists to publicly support Donald Trump, state and national Republican officials have disavowed Duke's latest run at power, which the candidate has said was sparked by the violence against police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. "He became very concerned in regards to the Obama administration and the unhealthy way the mainstream media was affecting the racial climate in this country, with this bias toward African Americans against the police officers," said former campaign manager Lawrence.

I asked Lawrence if Duke represents the opposite of the Black Lives Matter movement. "That's fair to say," he admitted.

There's also a pretty strong echo of Trump's campaigns in Duke's latest run. "The issues that Trump is hammering, it's the same social base as Duke's, playing on the same fears, and offering the same false hopes. And they both are making it respectable to be intolerant," said Lawrence Powell, chair of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a group created specifically to stop Duke in the 90s, and which has removed its mothballs only recently for this Senate race.

John McCusker, a staff photographer for the Times-Picayune for almost three decades, covered Duke's 1991 gubernatorial campaign, where he eventually took nearly 40 percent of the vote—more than 670,000 ballots—in a runoff election. "Those were the salad days for him," remembered McCusker. "You'd go by his house in old Metairie , and there were cars everywhere. It was packed. Just people organizing. Plus, he had that NOAWP bookstore is his basement, a library where he sold his books."

Watching Trump's recent ascent reminds McCusker of that era. "Today the issue is immigration, but back then affirmative action was the monster under the bed. We also got a taste 20 years ago of what these reporters are going through today, being made to feel uncomfortable at the rallies. Duke was the only other candidate I've seen sort of sic the dogs on the media. If you're covering Duke, he'd just bomb you with kindness and graciousness, to disarm you—he'd go on to talk to the crowd about the liberal media and all that, but he didn't single us out and call us scum," said McCusker, alluding to Trump. "His people would make the press all sit in this little fenced area by ourselves, so that it only took one loudmouth to start yelling stuff about the media, and then everyone focuses on you."

Retired now, McCusker has great empathy for reporters trying to cover Trump today: "We also had to cover both candidates equally and fairly, even when it felt almost ridiculous to do that. Doing it tends to legitimize the illegitimate."

Duke and his support may be a stain on Louisiana politics, but as shown by politicians from Senator Strom Thurmond (from South Carolina) to American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (from the East Coast), to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace to Trump (from New York), overt bigotry has proven itself nationally popular. As LCARN's Powell pointed out, back in 1989, New Orleans author Walker Percy told the New York Times, "Don't make the mistake of thinking David Duke is a unique phenomenon confined to Louisiana rednecks and yahoos... Don't think that he or somebody like him won't appeal to the white middle class of Chicago or Queens."

"This is not confined to the so-called fever swamps of Louisiana," Powell told me. "It extends everywhere, from Alabama to Michigan."

It's tough to determine how much of a threat Duke actually poses to the current ticket. The latest poll had him down near the bottom of the pack at 5 percent, but Lawrence claims that these surveys underrate Duke's support and that he's consistently overperformed polls in his career.

But win or lose (again), Duke is happy with what he sees as the results of his hard work. "After four decades, the issues that I've spearheaded and fought for are now mainstream," Duke, who wouldn't comment for this article, told the New York Times last month. "I've won, in the sense that these are now mainstream issues."

If his past campaigns can be seen as a precursor to Trump's alt-right movement, Duke himself shows how an outsider candidate can sink.

"When we'd dig up greater evidence of Duke's old racism, there was no negative effect," McCusker remembered. "You'd think that everyone knowing he was a Nazi in the Klan would sink him... But what finally sunk him was a TV forum with Governor Edwin Edwards. No one knows more about the government than Edwards, from the budget to where the bodies are buried... So the debate moderator asks, 'Who is the biggest employer in Louisiana?' And Edwards is levitating, can't wait to answer. But Duke can't answer it. That was the moment."

"For voters it wasn't, Duke's a racist and my morals won't let me vote for him," McCuskers said. "It was that he doesn't know his stuff."

Follow Michael Patrick Welch on Twitter.

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Photos: Halloween in London Is a Nightmare

Was it 2004? Or 2005, maybe? There was definitely a specific year where Halloween turned from a thing kids did to get free candy into a thing adults do to get drunk on spooky cocktails and go home with a guy dressed like Luigi.

Adult Halloween took place this weekend (kids' Halloween is still the 31st, FYI) and every street was full of crap fake blood and wasted zombies. Photographer Alice Zoo went out on the town in London to shoot the costumes, the fallout, and what it looks like when you get your face paint all mixed in with your kebab's garlic sauce.

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Costume Ideas for People Who Are So, So Tired

All photographs by Michael Marcelle

You know how it is. You want to go out for Halloween, you really do. You mean it when you RSVP to those parties on Facebook, when you plan your elaborate costumes, when you trade excited emojis in group texts. You are going to go to the warehouse party on the edge of town and see some shit. You are going to get someone else's body paint smeared all over you.

But then you realize: Halloween is a Monday. Your hangover from the weekend is still buzzing around the back of your head like an undead bee, your costume is balled up and torn on your bedroom floor, the contents of your purse is scattered in the alley outside the bar, along with your hopes and dreams for the weekend. The only really spooky thing that happened to you was when you accidentally looked at your bank balance at the ATM.

Still, it's Halloween. Fine. You said you would go out. You're going out. Just for a couple. A quiet rehash of the last few days, a huddle with friends where you reassure one another that it was fine, really, and Allison won't hate you and she probably doesn't even remember, and anyway everyone was drunk, who cares dude?

Here's what you can dress up as for tonight when you really don't want to be yourself: