The Vice Guide To Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll by Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith, HarperCollins, 326 pages, $29.95

If you're never heard of Vice, a free, full-colour glossy started in Montreal by three misanthropic entrepreneurs, that's exactly the point. The target audience is 16- to 26-year-old urban hipsters, and the publication is now so popular that it has a 100 per cent pick-up rate. Now celebrating its fifth anniversary, the cover of the current issue features a line of coke on a mirror.

Vice is nothing if not truth-in-advertising. It's impossible to quote most articles in this anthology at any length, at least until the Toronto Star decides to become a dysfunctional family newspaper. And that's also the point.

With such articles as "The Vice Guide To Shagging Muslims" and music reviews by the physically handicapped ("Special Reviews By Special Kids") and an etymology of racial slurs, Vice hates you and everything you stand for -whoever you might be.

This nu-gonzo journalism involves the prodigious drug intake of Hunter S. Thompson, minus the brilliant prose. Vice pays contributors nothing, or next to it, and it shows. Writers get cachet, not cash, for appearing in Vice. Besides, who else will print an article about a guy who eats nothing but corn for four days and then photographs the results?

"I guess a magazine started by a junkie is inevitably going to be duplicitous," notes founder Gavin McInnes in the introduction, explaining why Vice often made up entire articles in the magazine's early years. This Just Say Yes drug policy permeates the book. One article is devoted solely to songs that will best compliment your cocaine high. Consequences are rarely mentioned, save for stories about bad acid trips or the following bit of cautionary wisdom: "Speedballs (coke and heroin) feel great but tend to kill people." Some of their readership actually lives like this, but most readers are no doubt curious tag-alongs who enjoy the vicarious thrill: "Being wired on Adderall, users can get, like, three days of work done in an hour whilst also figuring out the 4,000th digit of pi." This is a lifestyle magazine that describes an existence to which few aspire.

The articles in this anthology are fun and funny. Most are written in the first person. They are heavy on style, light on enlightenment. The best pieces in the book stand out due to their rarity value. "The Authority To Kill A Minority" describes the insane bravery of journalist Allan Nairn, who returned to East Timor in 1999, despite being on a government blacklist. Equally powerful is "The Last Kiss," in which Susan Musgrave and Stephen Reid simultaneously explore the 1999 bank robbery that put Reid behind bars for "18 Christmases."

So irreverent it will make your moral compass dizzy, this uneven collection succeeds best as an anthropological record of youth culture's underbelly. As a collection of quality writing that will remain relevant for years to come, it flunks. Few articles are longer than three pages, a testament to either the real or the perceived attention span of Vice's target readership.

When McInnes rates the accomplishments of French Canadians (or "Frogs," as he calls them), he boasts of his ability to "perfectly evaluate an entire culture in a matter of paragraphs." Ditto contributor Christi Bradnox, whose entire summary of Christianity reads: "Christians believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Jews and Romans killed Jesus, but he came back from the dead so he must have been a zombie."

There is an argument, popular amongst those who defend Maxim, that suggests it takes very smart people to produce such wilfully juvenile content. Suroosh Alvi echoes this in the introduction by noting, "We learned Vice has to be a well-balanced combination of smart and stupid content -- stupid done in a smart way and smart done in a stupid way."

Vice clearly favours stupid stupid, except when it comes to business matters, where they exhibit Mensa-worthy acumen. They have three clothing stores in North America, a record label, a large office in Brooklyn and magazine distribution in England and Japan. They also have TV and film interest and an impressive circulation of 120,000.

Vice loves to remind its readers that this empire is powered by do-it-yourself principles, daring content and a lack of boundaries. True. But when Vice boasts of using "punk-rock capitalism," the enterprise sinks under the weight of its many contradictions. Punk-rock capitalism is an oxymoron. The two are mortal enemies; mongoose and cobra.

A more accurate description is "heavy metal capitalism." Punk is inherently political, representing a direct challenge to the status quo. Heavy metal is organized solely around hedonism. Punk is egalitarian, anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist in philosophy. Like heavy metal, Vice is none of the above.

Yet, somehow, Vice founders Alvi, McInnes and Smith maintain their Sex Pistols appearance while acting like Motley Crue. It's a nifty trick, and a difficult one to perform repeatedly. True punks, however, do not concern themselves with brand extensions and synergy. Each successive expansion of Vice-the-corporation acts to undermine the subversive authenticity of Vice-the-little-magazine-that-could.

In "The Vice Guide To New York Graffiti," Toronto photographer and journalist Bruce LaBruce explains the motivations of his subjects by arguing that "Things are so f---ked up at this point in history, so monumentally surreal, that only the impulsive moment counts." He might as well be describing Vice, a colourful, attractive, well-packaged but ultra-disposable magazine for those with incomes to match.

These days, the counterculture has its own credit card. Rock and roll has a copyright symbol behind it, and sex is little better. HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who described himself as a "billionaire tyrant" when he appeared on The Simpsons. Capitalism has become no less blunt in the past decade, it's just learned to poke fun at itself more effectively.

Vice is not the first to effectively commodify rebellion and their contradictions do not diminish their accomplishments. Vice is the only Canadian magazine to find real success beyond our borders. Its ability to surf trends, to start and stop fads, to control and contexutalize an ever-mutating landscape of image and music culture is impressive.

Vice has become an 800-pound gorilla of attitude, sitting on whatever and whoever it wants, farting with impunity.

Inhale at your own risk.