High Society (2016)

The UK is experiencing a psychedelic renaissance. Young people in England and Wales are taking three times more LSD than they did five years ago, scientists at top universities are claiming hallucinogens can revolutionise how we treat mental illness and the use of magic mushrooms has been increasing by around 40 percent year on year. Music festivals are awash with recreational trippers, but we also see how psychedelics have become a new health craze by attending a shamanic magic mushroom ceremony in which 50 people trip out in a London warehouse. Despite studies showing that psychedelics are some of the safest drugs you can take, we meet one person who spilled a bottle of acid on himself and never stopped hallucinating. What is making this new generation of drug takers so interested in self-transformation? And as the self-help trend grows, what happens when thousands of people start trying to solve their mental health problems themselves by taking powerful hallucinogens in unregulated settings?

What happens when neighboring countries have completely different drug policies? While Sweden rigidly sticks to its zero tolerance laws, liberal Denmark introduced drug consumption rooms (DCRs) in 2012, with special areas surrounding them where you won’t get arrested for drug possession if it’s for personal use. Copenhagen is home to one of the world’s largest government funded drug consumption rooms, H17, where users can safely smoke or inject their drugs with clean needles and medical staff on hand. This has resulted in the local areas being safer and cleaner, as there are no longer thousands of used needles littering the streets. But Denmark’s liberal policy has had an unexpected consequence: an influx of heroin users from neighboring Sweden. We find out why Swedish heroin users prefer to sleep rough on the streets of Copenhagen rather than stay in Sweden, and which of these policies is most effective at tackling overdoses.

Why are more and more young men using Viagra? Obi, a 24-year-old man who would like to stop relying on Viagra, explores what’s behind this new boner renaissance and whether young men like him really should be taking erectile dysfunction medication.

Drugs have never been more marketed than they are now. The most recent European Drug Report refers to this as an “uberisation” of the drug market, with it now being easier to order a gram of cocaine than a pizza. But with this ease of access and glossy marketing has come a dark outcome; a sharp uptake in drug use in children, as young as 10. The world has been hit by a wave of deaths of children who have taken Class A drugs such as ecstasy, and many have been found to have bought those drugs on Instagram and Snapchat. VICE’s Tir Dhondy investigates how easy it really is to pick up, and whether it’s possible to regulate this digital wild west.

Paracelsus in Switzerland is the most expensive rehab in the world, serving a clientele of royalty, politicians, oligarchs, business tycoons and A-list celebrities. Forget the £20,000-a-month celebrities spend at The Priory in Surrey, or the £41,700 they shell out for 45 days at the Meadows in Arizona - a five-week residential rehab here costs a whopping £315,000 – about ten times the average UK annual salary. Staying at a lakeside villa in Zurich with 24/7 limousine transportation, a personal chef, a butler and a concierge, clients have access to a five-star hotel spa and a live-in therapist (who sleeps in the spare room). Activities include tennis, yoga, martial arts, weightlifting, massage and more. We sent writer and model Sydney Lima there to see if it could help her kick her partying lifestyle. But while she was there, she uncovered a strange, unexpected world.

Deadly synthetic drugs made by Russian darknet cartels are spreading through Tbilisi’s world-famous nightlife scene. VICE’s Bo Hanna went there to find out how this has happened in a country where just one milligram of drugs can land you in jail for almost a decade.

While weed laws are becoming more progressive in many states across the US, cannabis cultivation can still get you some serious prison time in the UK. Most smokers have no idea where their buds come from, but the higher demand and continued criminalisation of weed in the UK has engendered a black-market supply chain of human deprivation: ‘Cannabis slaves’, often trafficked from Vietnam, are forced to tend to massive grows worth millions in street value – completely against their will. For spliff connoisseurs who have been smoking their whole adult lives and hold down regular jobs and have families, picking up poor-quality hydroponic weed from dodgy dealers in blacked out cars or down dark alleyways has become less and less desirable. Guerrilla growers are an online community of cannabis cultivators in the UK who harvest their weed plants in the wild, hiding in plain sight sometimes on the side of motorways.