At the high-security US Penitentiary in Atwater, an inmate named Jamar Jones was allegedly sent mail from his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Ferreira and a man called Jersey Rudd III. Prosecutors say that multiple pages of the letter were “soaked” in drugs—including amphetamines, fentanyl, and “spice,” or synthetic cannabinoids, according to drug testing. They say the paper looked like it was dipped in wax. 

The senders attempted to conceal the alleged drug shipment by sending it via “legal mail,” meant to be confidentially between an attorney and inmate. All three have been charged for conspiracy to distribute.

According to an FBI affidavit, the mailroom supervisor, Marc Fischer, came in contact with the envelope and handled its pages. Within five minutes, he began stumbling around and told coworkers he was “having trouble breathing.” Fellow corrections officers called for medical support, and after two hours and a trip to the hospital, Fischer died. 

The cause of death is still unknown and won’t be identified until toxicology reports are finalized. Secondhand fentanyl exposure shouldn’t be fatal, experts say. 

This is hardly the first case of drug-soaked mail in prisons. In 2019, 122 federal prisons began photocopying inmate letters instead of giving them the originals in an attempt to stop the distribution of any drug concealed in mail or postage. A bill to mandate digital mail-scanning in prisons passed the Senate last year, but it stalled in the House.

The post A Prison Worker Died After Opening Fentanyl-Laced Mail appeared first on VICE.

But Diamond Shruumz, part of California’s vape e-liquid company Prophet Premium Blends, has come under serious fire because seemingly no one knows what the heck is actually in their stuff—and that has led to a lot of their customers getting sick and some even dying. 

An ARS Technica report describes 145 cases of illness associated with consuming Diamond Shruumz, including 59 hospitalizations and two deaths spread out among 29 US states. Diamond Shruumz had nationwide distribution, and Georgia (23) and North Carolina (17) were the states with the most reported illnesses. The FDA has feverishly been trying to identify what exactly is causing it.

An FDA Alert issued in June warned not to eat, sell, or serve any Diamond Shruumz brand products. It cautioned: “People who became ill after eating Diamond Shruumz-brand products reported a variety of severe symptoms including seizures, central nervous system depression (loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness), agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting.”

This week, the FDA issued an update that revealed their test results, which included finding 4-AcO-DMT, a semi-synthetic psychoactive drug similar to shrooms, and plain psilocin, a hallucinogen that produces effects similar to LSD. The FDA also pointed out that muscimol, a chemical found in some magic mushrooms, was in 9 of the 22 bars they tested. Some included the prescription drug pregabalin, used to treat seizures, and some had chemicals from the Kava plant. 

But none of these chemicals, on their own, is known to cause the effects that Diamond Shruumz users have reported—though the FDA notes that there’s little research on combining them. 

Today, the Diamond Shruumz website has a pop-up that shares the company’s response. They’re claiming not to know what happened either:

“At Prophet Premium Blends, we prioritize the health and safety of our consumers above all else. Recently, we have been made aware of reported incidents involving our product, Diamond Shruumz. Due to consumers becoming ill after consuming the entire chocolate bar and some products containing higher levels of Muscimol than normal, it is crucial that all of our consumers refrain from ingesting this product while we, alongside the FDA, continue our investigation as to what is the cause of the serious adverse effects.”

The post ‘Microdosing’ Candy Investigated After 145 Illnesses and 2 Deaths appeared first on VICE.

This week, five people were arrested and charged over Matthew Perry’s death, including Sangha and another alleged dealer named Eric Fleming, two doctors named Mark Chavez and Salvador Plasencia, and Perry’s assistant Kenneth Iwamasa.

“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction issues to enrich themselves,” said US. Attorney Martin Estrada.

Sangha, a 41-year-old dual British and American citizen, appeared in court wearing a bright green Nirvana sweatshirt to plead not guilty. Prosecutors claim that Sangha played a central role in Perry’s drug supply chain and that she provided Perry with the ketamine that ultimately led to his death. She was denied bail and remains in custody. Her trial is scheduled to begin in October.

Prosecutors allege that Sangha is part of a larger criminal network and that her North Hollywood home doubled as a drug distribution hub, where investigators found over 80 vials of ketamine and thousands of other pills, including methamphetamine, cocaine, and Xanax. 

Sangha lived a loudly lavish life that she flaunted on Instagram, attending high-profile events like the Golden Globes and the Oscars, according to the Daily Mail, and taking trips to Japan and Mexico shortly after Perry’s death—all while being linked to ketamine distribution and a different case of a ketamine-related death. 

In 2019, Sangha was reportedly contacted by a family member of a deceased customer named Cody McLaury. In response, investigators claim that Sangha then searched online to determine if ketamine could be listed as a cause of death. Not a good look! 

Now, the so-called “Ketamine Queen” could face a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life in prison.

The post “Ketamine Queen” Arrested for Matthew Perry’s Death appeared first on VICE.

Auckland City Mission, a 100-year-old charity that works with homeless people in Auckland, New Zealand, received what it thought was a donation of candies. The food bank only accepts sealed items, and the pineapple candies in wrappers from the Malaysian brand Rinda “appeared as such when they were donated,” according to City Missioner Helen Robinson.

They weren’t laced with meth. They were just straight-up drugs. 

According to the New Zealand Drug Foundation, the candies contained up to 300 times the average amount one would consume. Unfortunately, disguising drugs in this way is a common smuggling practice. A few years ago, $1 billion worth of meth was found in a shipment of coconut water. Last year, New Zealand confiscated meth in jugs of maple syrup and cooking oil. 

Ben Birks Ang, a Foundation spokesperson, believes even more laced sweets were likely distributed throughout the country. Ang said the candies had a high street value of NZ$ 1,000 ($608) per piece. Surely, the donor didn’t realize what was in the candies at the time.

A representative of Rinda denied any involvement in the incident. “We want to make it clear that Rinda Food Industries does not use or condone the use of any illegal drugs in our products,” said Steven Teh, the company’s general manager. He said they are willing to cooperate with authorities. 

As for those who consumed the candies, one of them reported the “funny-tasting” candy, while others were taken to the hospital for treatment—including one food bank staff member, one child, and one “young person.” Thankfully, they have all since been discharged.

The New Zealand Drug Foundation is now advising everyone to steer clear of the pineapple candies altogether, as it’s unclear how many are still out there.

The post New Zealand Charity Accidentally Gives Out Meth Instead of Candy appeared first on VICE.

But after over a decade of study, MDMA still isn’t a legal psychedelic medicine—and this week only laid down more roadblocks. 

On August 9, the FDA denied an application for MDMA treatment from Lykos Therapeutics—which would have been the first of its kind—and requested additional trials to evaluate its safety. Lykos had presented promising data from two late-stage trials showing MDMA’s potential benefits when paired with talk therapy. But, the FDA’s advisory committee raised concerns about trial integrity. One of the biggest roadblocks is that it turns out it’s pretty difficult to convince someone they’ve taken a placebo when they know they’re not on ecstasy because they’re not feeling the high. 

On top of all that, a scientific journal called Psychopharmacology retracted three studies on MDMA-assisted PTSD therapy due to “unethical conduct” and conflicts of interest. It’s alleged that some researchers didn’t fully disclose their affiliations with a non-profit research group that is an off-shoot of Lykos. For advocates, it’s a frustrating setback but not a dead end: Lykos says that these problems don’t mean the scientific findings or the data submitted to the FDA is wrong. 

Experts in psychedelic psychotherapy, like Rachel Yehuda and Michael Bogenschutz, both quoted in this CNN article, agree that what’s most important for the space is adherence to ethical standards. The treatment needs to undergo these rigorous stress tests to ensure safety before full-on FDA approval. 

Lykos says it will request a meeting with the FDA to figure out a path forward.

Watch the VICE doc below:

The post MDMA Therapy for PTSD Hit Even More Roadblocks This Week appeared first on VICE.

A team at the University of Southern California conducted interviews with 30 people who were “co-using” opioids and cannabis. They were all patients at a Los Angeles methadone clinic and syringe exchange. 

Through interviews, the participants described how cannabis provided them with “rapid relief” from opioid withdrawal, which helped them reduce opioid use overall. According to the researchers, this was an especially relevant finding for places where weed is legal and dispensaries are more common.

They see their research as a way to fight the ongoing opioid mortality crisis. With just a few dozen participants, though it’s hardly the most definitive study—and the methods were interesting, too. The researchers said they used “constructivist grounded theory methods for identifying and comparing the emerging themes that appeared across transcripts.” In other words, the study was qualitative rather than quantitative.

For more perspective, though, check out this episode of WEEDIQUETTE, the VICE documentary series, which first aired on VICE TV in 2017.

The show’s host, Krishna Andavolu, visited an unaccredited detox facility in Maine, where he spoke with recovering addicts who were assisting other people earlier on in their recovery. 

Their process? Providing patients with massive amounts of cannabis.

In the documentary, many of the people swore by the medicinal marijuana, claiming it helped lessen their withdrawal symptoms as they were getting clean.

Opioid withdrawal can become so severe that it leads to blackouts—or worse. Though weed might work for some people through their recovery, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. 

The film also features James Li, an emergency room physician, who explained that getting withdrawal requires pharmaceutical support and close medical attention. He acknowledged that this kind of help isn’t easily accessible, though, and that it’s complicated by the housing and financial situations of many addicts. In the recent University of Southern California study, for example, 57% of participants were unhoused or unstably housed, and 70% earned a monthly income of less than $2,100.

Together, these studies and interviews certainly suggest there’s hope in having cannabis at the center of treatment. The fact that the USC study exists in the first place is notable: the team received federal funding through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has a history that some consider anti-cannabis. That alone is a step in the right direction. 

The post Promising New Study Shows Cannabis Can Help With Opioid Withdrawal appeared first on VICE.

A bitter legal fight is now underway for the $15 million that the court ordered Soul Quest and its owner to pay Begley’s family, who say they will use it for charitable good. It’s all a far cry from what you’d think psychedelic medicine is supposed to be about.

On Easter weekend in April 2018, Begley participated in three ayahuasca ceremonies and one ritual involving kambo—the non-psychoactive secretions from a frog that are purported to have detoxifying effects—in less than two days. It was a grueling psychedelic regimen that some experts would recommend against. Begley drank far too much water and was found unresponsive on Easter Sunday—yet an ambulance was not called until more than three hours later, once he had experienced a catastrophic seizure.

In May, following a long legal process, a jury at the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court in Orange County, Florida ruled that Soul Quest and its owner Chris Young—a self-described “medicine man [and] purveyor of tribal medicine”—were guilty of negligence. Soul Quest has served ayahuasca to more than 20,000 people since 2014, many of whom paid in excess of $500 for a weekend retreat, according to one former retreat board member, all while fighting an unsuccessful, lengthy, and costly battle with the Drug Enforcement Agency to gain a legal exemption to use ayahuasca legally (the potion contains the federally prohibited drug DMT). But Soul Quest and Young recently claimed they were unable to compensate the Begleys and filed for bankruptcy, court documents reviewed by VICE show.

On July 30, Soul Quest had its motion to declare bankruptcy rejected by a Florida court because it continues to supply ayahuasca to its members; a whole slate of ayahuasca retreats are still planned to take place before the end of the year. During the bankruptcy proceedings, Soul Quest revealed it had income of almost $7.5 million from 2022 to July 2024, with Young taking home annual pay of almost $320,000. Young’s personal bank accounts, however, contain a little over $20,000, with possessions including a bunch of giant umbrellas, bongos, and more than 100 chairs valued at another $5,000. He also owns a Chrystler van and a live-in trailer worth $20,000.

“Although we anticipated that Soul Quest was generating large earnings, seeing these numbers is still rather shocking, especially where I was told over and over again by Soul Quest’s and Mr. Young’s counsel that they have no money to resolve Brandon’s wrongful death claim,” William Chapman Esq, the Begley family lawyer, told VICE. “Although there is legal validation in Soul Quest’s financial capitulation for Brandon’s death, Soul Quest’s financial collapse pales in comparison to the devastating emotional loss which Soul Quest and Mr Young have imposed upon Brandon’s mother and father for the remainder of their lives.”

During the civil court case, questions over book-keeping at the retreat center were raised by Dr Scott Irwin, a former director who was also a senior minister in charge of group counseling sessions. “There’s never been any financial transparency,” he told the court, according to a transcript of the 2022 deposition. “There’s never been any disclosure of any accounting records of any kind […] All that was done by Christopher Young exclusively.” After raising his concerns, Irwin said that he was told it was not “anybody’s business.”

Irwin declined to be interviewed by VICE in July of this year, stating he “didn’t want to get into a big legal battle with Chris” over his comments. He died that same month in Ecuador following a longstanding illness.

Nonetheless, Irwin had earlier claimed that attorneys representing Soul Quest had threatened him with litigation after he posted a video on YouTube explaining his reasons for suddenly leaving the church. Irwin recalled how he was once allegedly punched in the face by Young while Young’s daughter was on Irwin’s shoulders at her third birthday party. According to a police statement, given by Irwin to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office on May 20, 2017, and reviewed by VICE: “Chris Young attacked me. Hitting me on the left side of the head with his fist while I had a three-year-old girl on my shoulders at a birthday party. He threatened to kill me. Tried to attack me again and [the] crowd held him back.”

After the alleged punch, he and Young’s wife Verena were banished from Soul Quest—known for its ‘free love’ atmosphere—for starting a relationship. “Chris was playing dirty with Verena,” Irwin told the court, “and I was receiving, for probably six months or so, death threats.” However, the pair were beckoned back to the church after Begley’s passing in 2018. At the time, Young was in crisis management mode. In an interview for (Un)Well—a Netflix documentary about ayahuasca featuring Soul Quest—he falsely suggested Begley was to blame for his demise and had concealed a history of seizures.

“Everyone here knew that there was nothing we did wrong,” Young claimed in the documentary, which aired in August 2020 and is still online despite the court ruling. “We found out, shortly thereafter, he had a history of seizures […] We understand you want healing, but you can’t lie to us. If you lie, you die.”

During the civil case, circuit judge Eric Netcher rejected any suggestion that Begley had epilepsy. “There’s no competent evidence of a prior medical condition or prior medication that [Begley] failed to disclose,” he wrote. Soul Quest and Young’s defense failed “to create a genuine dispute of material fact.”

The details of Begley’s death are grim. The retreat’s shaman and musician, both of whom refused to give evidence in court, used spiritual tools such as reiki, prayed, and sang to try to “ground” Begley on the grass but their efforts to save him were unsuccessful. Begley suffered convulsions that were so intense they caused skin to tear from his arm and face as his body writhed against the ground. Eventually, a blanket was brought outside so he wasn’t in direct contact with the earth.

After initially flitting between lethargy, screaming, and unresponsiveness, Chapman says Begley was given sugar water tea, but this did nothing to hold off the lengthy seizure that followed. “We want to take him to the hospital, but currently right now it might just be best for you guys to come here instead of us taking him,” Young then told 911 responders. “He’s unresponsive.” Begley was admitted to hospital comatose more than three hours after he was first found ill and died on April 4 from complications of acute hyponatremia.

An unnamed witness told the court that others at the center had advocated calling an ambulance long before Begley’s seizure, but Young decided to follow the shaman’s advice and give him sugar water instead. “Everybody seemed to trust [that] Chris knew what they heck he was doing,” they said during the depositions. “They just gave, like, a very small amount of the sugar water to him, and then I remember things seemed to take a turn for the worse, and he started convulsing.”

Rob Heffernan, an independent psychedelics researcher and activist, told VICE that the Soul Quest story “illustrates the danger of combining a grandiose mission with a business model marketing medicine retreats.” Heffernan issued a stark warning to future visitors to certain psychedelic retreats: “Authentic spiritual practice and integrity can take a second seat to filling seats, operating a center and generating income. In this case, it resulted in tragedy for the Begley family and disillusionment for those who trusted in Chris Young and Soul Quest.”

Soul Quest did not respond to requests made to their attorneys for comment.

Follow @matthabusby on Twitter

The post The Bankrupt Ayahuasca Church Where Negligence Led to Death appeared first on VICE.

The Nazi Eagle symbol was developed by Hitler’s party in the 1920s, and is also known as the Imperial Eagle or Parteiadler. As well as the tablets bearing its image, cops seized half a kilo of weed and 100 grams of coke. The arrest was only reported by an Irish tabloid newspaper, the Sunday World, but the Dutch police confirmed its accuracy to VICE.

The irony is inescapable: to see an ecstasy pill (a drug synonymous with feelings of love, euphoria, and empathy) juxtaposed with Nazi insignia (synonymous with hate, brutal intolerance, and genocide, if you hadn’t been paying attention) is jarring in the extreme.

Yet this isn’t an isolated incident. “Yesterday, a member of the French Psychedelic Society, who works in a harm reduction association in western France, sent us this,” Dr Zoë Dubus, a post-doctoral researcher specialising in psychotropic drugs, wrote on X this week. Attached to the post was a photo of two grey pills, also stamped with the Nazi Eagle.

According to Dr Dubus, the pills are “starting to circulate in France” and have “been spotted since early 2024 in Switzerland, Iceland, and Holland.” Testing in Zurich revealed this design has also been used to make 2C-B (in 2023) and MDMA (this year).

The trend exists in an interesting context. Far-right political parties have made massive gains in Brussels of late, a situation lubricated by a grim uptick in youth support. In Germany, 16 percent of under-25s voted for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the EU elections earlier this month, triple the number for the same election in 2019. The National Rally (RN) in France was the most popular party for people aged below 34, increasing ten points to 32 percent of the vote for that demographic. Meanwhile, Poland’s far-right Confederation party saw an 18.5 percent increase in support from voters under 30. Similar shit has gone down in Portugal, Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands.

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Is it possible that we’re seeing Europe’s far-right surge play out through the medium of party drug designs? The first sample spotted with a Nazi symbol was in Switzerland in 2019, followed a few years later by a swastika LSD tablet. But until now, Dr Dubus explains, it’s been a “limited phenomenon.” That’s changed this year, however.

“In early 2024, several tablets with the Nazi eagle and swastika were analysed, indicating an increase in production,” she recalls. “What’s more, the pills are all different in quality and composition: 2C-B, MDMA, and a strange mixture which seems to indicate that one of the batches was made by a very amateur chemist.” The chemical diversity with the same pill design, she argues, demonstrates that they come from several different manufacturers. She does not know which groups are making them at the moment, but notes that European MDMA production continues to be mainly focused around the Netherlands.

The far-rightification of Europe’s illicit drug supply isn’t exclusive to ecstasy and 2C-B; it appears to have extended to the coke supply, too. Last year, narcs at a port in northern Peru busted 58 kilos of coke destined for Belgium. Each individual kilo block that made up the haul was wrapped in Nazi regalia and—just in case you missed that glaring swastika-shaped clue—the bricks of gear themselves were stamped with the telltale word ‘HITLER’.

Police Colonel Luis Bolanos told reporters the Nazi coke was worth $3 million and would’ve been “distributed across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain.” Again, it’s hard to know if the special design had been ordered by neo-Nazi drugs gangs, or drugs gangs looking to sell to neo-Nazis, but if there’s one thing worse than being trapped with a neo-Nazi, it’s probably being trapped with a neo-Nazi who’s high on cocaine.

There’s an increasing stockpile of anecdotal evidence of Europe’s Nazi drug surge. Four months ago, a Redditor who self-describes as “a casual stoner” was baffled when presented with drugs branded with Nazi iconography. “A friend of mine showed me a bag of MDMA pills shaped like Nazi Eagles,” he wrote. “He found them funny as hell in an ironic way.” He added: “I kinda forgot about it, but now I’m seeing more and more people posting and having ecstasy shaped as swastikas, SS logos or Nazi Eagles, none of them are white supremacists … seeing how prevalent this has become lately, I’m kinda confused, is there any reason for it?”

I reached out to the Redditor and the subreddit requesting more information. The original poster has yet to reply, but in typical nihilistic fashion, those who did don’t link the design to genuine far-right groups. One said “people just press ‘em into whatever they want for the fun of it,” some said it was done for “marketing” purposes, and a couple believed it was a reference to the fact the original Nazis were themselves tweakers, often meth-ed up to the eyeballs for days on end while conducting their barbaric rampage across Europe.

But others were less optimistic. “I think the use of SS insignia and the Parteiadler as a pressed pill design speaks for itself,” Dr Brian Pace, an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, told VICE. “Attempts to dismiss or excuse it as some kind of troll is to concede that one can troll in this way without some level of adherence to far-right ideologies. The only people who would find that funny are fascists, period.”

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I asked Dr Dubus if she thinks that the people pressing the pills are trolls or actual far-right groups. “Some could be trolls. But some could really be linked to Nazi groups that very openly discuss their use of psychedelics on forums.

“Ecstasy pills have always been used to spread ideas,” she added. “Counterexamples are the Me Too or Antifa pills. But the increase in the presence of this symbol at several French parties [raves] in recent days, just after the elections giving 30 percent to the worst far-right party in history, is particularly worrying.”

Follow Simon on Twitter @oldspeak1

The post Nazi Drugs Are Sweeping Across Europe appeared first on VICE.

Youds owns a cannabis cafe called the Chillin’ Rooms on Holt Road in Liverpool—a stone’s throw from Anfield football stadium—where members are encouraged to chill, smoke weed, and have a laugh. For operating this service, Youds has been sent to prison four times. In February this year, he was released from a three-year prison sentence related to the running of the cafe. And now, he’s at it again.

“The potheads have been discriminated against for too long,” Youds tells VICE. “All revolutionaries go to jail. But cannabis brings community together, that’s why I’ve always gone back to it. I want to build a golden bridge so the authorities can retreat from the war on drugs.”

His trailblazing crusade started in 2002, when he first applied to Liverpool council to convert a former taxi office into a “private members’ club” for cannabis smokers. When councillors rejected his proposals, the former property developer did it anyway, opening the Amsterdam-style coffee shop in 2005 and selling cannabis grown by himself and other locals. It quickly garnered around 400 regular members, who would hang out, play pool, attend jam nights, and “stay medicated and live the dream” as a sign inside read. On some days, Youds sold more than 1KG of weed, raking in more than $13,000.

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The utopia didn’t last long, though. “We are doing nothing wrong, all we want is tolerance,” Youds told the Liverpool Echo in 2005, when he first received heat from the authorities. In April 2006, he was raided by police for defying a council closure notice—it would be the first of around 20 raids on his property over the following years. Youds was sentenced to a year in prison and, in the courtroom, the nickname the “cannabis martyr” stuck.

The Chillin’ Rooms remained closed for nearly a decade afterwards, but Youds relaunched his holy war permanently in 2015, inspired by cannabis legalisation across the U.S. that he believes has shown him to be a pioneer.

He spent two more stints in jail, plus a few weeks for a probation violation, until his most recent release this year.

His martyrdom motivations aren’t driven solely by a desire to get high. He medicates with cannabis for his arthritis, and has supplied cancer patients with cannabis free of charge to ease their pain. Before he was sentenced to his latest jail term, Youds told the judge he’d been “saving the city by producing the fruits of the earth for the people.”

In fact, Youds says his most recent arrest took place while he was delivering cannabis oil to a terminal cancer patient in Birmingham. Police then raided his house and found what the Merseyside police force estimated to be around £7,000 worth of cannabis. Youds said in an interview with La Vida Liverpool that the police even arrested his mum on one occasion.

On other occasions, he claims to have been manhandled out of the cafe by officers during violent police assaults, causing physical and emotional trauma. “They jump out of hire vans, like 20 [officers],” he says. “I’ve been through that many raids you wouldn’t believe it. The last time they came in here they actually sprayed me with mace and carried me out upside down and smashed my glasses. They’ve kidnapped me in the middle of the night and put me in Walton [prison] because I had a flat battery [on his tag].”

Youds says he has been treated despicably by the authorities, but that he wants to move on and focus on the positives. “I’ve given people jobs and reduced crime,” he said in an interview. “Why make me an evil person in the eyes of the law when I work hard and enjoy a smoke,” he said. “I am a good father of two, a good person in society … It is ridiculous, unfair and illogical to demonise cannabis.”

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Since reopening his refurbished premises on April 20, the most important day in the stoner calendar, the father-of-two has been doing things by the book, thanks to the 2018 legalisation of medical cannabis that enshrined the legality of vaporising prescribed flowers in public. Recently, legal medical cannabis lounges have sprung up on UK high streets, providing a potential blueprint for bona fide public toking. “They’ve got to have a medical prescription,” Youds says of his patrons. It marks a departure from his previous free-for-all, but how can you blame a man for wanting to avoid a fifth prison stint?

Business is slow since he stopped selling cannabis, and visitors must now sign up via The Cannabis App. Locals are also wary of outing themselves as weed-carrying stoners in the establishment too, since previous raids have seen dozens of Chillin’ Rooms clients given police cautions. Youds is now only bringing in cash from beverage and snack sales, plus the £5 entry fee, and must close early when it’s only him on shift as he is wearing a police tag again.

But he’s not too concerned. “I’m happy just meeting the people and providing a safe space,” he says. “Just being in there, it’s out of this world. The lighting, the mood, I just love being there. It’s a kind of paradise: I’m planning to run it for the rest of my life.”

The reverence in which the UK cannabis reform community holds Youds is real. A #FreeGaryYouds song was recorded by a Liverpool rapper during his most recent prison sentence, and fellow cannabis campaigners have spoken out in his defence, along with his family.

“Millions of pounds have been wasted persecuting, prosecuting, and imprisoning Gary and others like him,” wrote podcaster Simpa Carter. “The world and the British public’s attitude towards cannabis have evolved and changed over the two decades Gary [Youds] has been trying to lawfully open and operate ‘The Chillin Rooms.’” Another supporter recently said of him: “He’s the Phoenix, he’s Rocky, he just keeps on coming back.”

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Judge David Swinnerton was less than impressed, though, asserting in 2023 that Youds had “deliberately chosen to flout the law time after time”. Swinnerton acknowledged that Youds partly did all this out of a genuine belief in the medical properties of cannabis – not just greed and a desire for money – but urged him to campaign in legal ways. “You are wasting your life going to prison,” said Swinnerton. “You are just going to end up going back to prison. It is not helping anybody.”

There are still risks in running legal medical cannabis lounges, thanks to the police’s apparent inability to accept that the right to vaporise prescribed cannabis in public is enshrined in law. In April, Smokey Joe’s Medicinal Cannabis Consumption Lounge in Kidderminster, Worcestershire – which aims to provide medical cannabis consumers with “a safe, judgement free space to medicate” – was raided by police and a man was arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to supply cannabis.

Many town centres in the UK are shadows of their former selves, with boarded-up shops and tumbleweeds aplenty. But legalising cannabis, which Germany just did, following other EU states Malta and Luxembourg, could create a multi-billion-pound windfall for the legal economy, according to Youds. “I want to bring the ‘high’ back to the high street, in partnership with nature,” he says.

Whether Youds will join the pantheon of eternal martyrs who changed the world remains to be seen. But he has already changed his home city, Liverpool, and written himself into the story of the UK’s continuing journey towards legal cannabis. “I’ve been constantly terrorised by the police, always worrying about undercover cops, but I will never give up, and now I’ve won.”

@matthamundo

The post The UK’s ‘Cannabis Martyr’ Keeps Getting Jailed for Opening Weed Cafes appeared first on VICE.

Sometimes, those cutting agents dilute the drug’s strength. But recently, a relatively new class of synthetic opioids named nitazenes—which can be up to 300 times stronger than heroin—have found their way into the UK’s drug supply. “I smoked [heroin cut with nitazenes] and it felt like the first time I’d ever taken drugs,” said Manny. 

Since 2010, the opioid crisis has been raging across North America. Last year, over 110,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, according to CDC estimates, with almost 70 percent of these deaths caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. 

But up to now, Europe has largely managed to avoid this deadly wave of synthetic opioids and the death tolls they bring. Late last year, the UK saw a spike in overdose deaths attributed to nitazenes. Since then, the substance has been linked to an average of almost three deaths per week in the UK, according to the BBC. 

In VICE’s latest episode of the War on Drugs series, heroin users and harm reduction experts across the UK explain this dramatic rise in nitazene-related deaths. 

“A few of my mates, last month, they died,” said Manny. “[Dealers will] sell anything, they want the cheapest [product] for the maximum money.” 

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“We lost six friends in the space of two weeks,” said Hywel, another drug user in Bristol. 

The UK—and Europe at large—has always been served by heroin made from Afghanistan’s opium poppies. However, since the Taliban took control of the country in 2021, the rate of poppy production has plummeted. And according to drug expert Judith Yates, this has “left a hole in the market which is going to be filled with synthetic opioids”.

If genuine heroin supplies dry up, Europe could be facing its very own opioid crisis – and as usual, authorities are far from prepared. 

Watch the full episode now on VICE’s YouTube channel.

The post Nitazenes: The ‘New Fentanyl’ Killing Drug Users in Europe appeared first on VICE.