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SMACK TO THE FUTURE
Revisiting OUR drug predictions from 2015 (read NoW)
2015. Do you remember what you were doing? If you don’t, it might be because you’ve spent the decade since then taking drugs. To remind you of how far we’ve traveled from the mid-2010s, we asked Max Daly—VICE’s leading drugs writer across the intervening years—to revisit 16 big predictions he made about the future of drugs and drug-taking back when you were still sending your pals hilarious memes about President Barack Obama on Facebook.
On the face of things, Max actually got a ton of stuff right, but the world has shifted in such a way around drug culture that some of the questions we asked back then now seem semi-redundant—the world, in fact, often seems as though it has become weirder than drugs, or at least less reliable than their effects. What makes you feel more dislocated from the world, three joints or three straight hours of weekend screen-time?
As a sneak preview, and because the idea of seeing you back here a decade from now warms my stomach, here’s Max with his predictions for the next ten years of drugs:
“We will be living in an increasingly techy drug world, one driven on by cutting-edge marketing and PR stunts—and where any dose or combination of psychedelic highs can be taken in ways that make injecting, snorting, and smoking look retro. As the authorities turn their attention to more pressing crimes, impending global disasters, and working out what is real and what is not, the heat will come off the drug trade, which is allowed to flourish, leading to spiralling, but easily treatable, addiction waves.”
You see? There is so much to look forward to. See you in 2035.
READ ABOUT THE FUTURE OF DRUGS NOW!
Bye bye,
ALL HAIL MILLENNIAL CRINGE
AN ESSAY ABOUT “HOME” (Read Now)
It was fun while it lasted, but now that the dust has well and truly settled on the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros discourse, we thought it was time to get regular VICE columnist Drew Austin to write a thoughtful, considered essay on both the band’s widely mocked and now-infamous 2010 performance of “Home” and the nature of cringe—and not just any cringe, the particularly virulent strain of cringe that is Millennial Cringe.
Pulled forward from the forthcoming fall issue of VICE magazine—which we will be bringing you news of next week—the latest installment of Drew’s MILLENNIAL PAUSE column had him asking lots of questions:
“It wasn’t just that the song was bad (and maybe it wasn’t even bad) but how it was bad: Why did the singers look that way, and why were they dancing like that? Were they hipsters or hippies or something else? Was this music ‘stomp clap hey’ or garden variety indie rock or pop music or some other genre? Above all, why were they so cringe? Was it revisionist to say we knew this was bad at the time, or to claim that it was actually good and we all just forgot? Were you the type of millennial who acted and looked like this back then, or did you know better, or were you lucky enough to have missed it completely? What was even going on in 2010?”
For every question in that paragraph, Drew’s column finds an answer, because he’s an insanely perceptive writer on the millennial condition, which is why we pay him to do it for VICE. There is, however, one thing that I do have to pull him up on, namely the claim that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ Tiny Desk performance of “Home” is “the most cringe artifact from the most cringe period in human history.” Because as everyone knows in the depths of their heart, the most cringe thing to ever happen happened to them personally, and anyone else’s embarrassment is profoundly second-rate in comparison.
READ ABOUT MILLENNIAL CRINGE NOW!
Bye bye,
Kevin Lee Kharas
Editor, VICE magazine
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