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  • LAPD officers involved in Keenan Anderson death found out of policy

    LAPD officers involved in Keenan Anderson death found out of policy

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    Several Los Angeles police officers broke with department policy in the arrest of Keenan Anderson, whose death after a traffic stop in January reignited debates about the suitability of police for dealing with people in distress, the Police Commission ruled.

    Although not unanimous, the commission Tuesday found that officers deviated from LAPD policy on multiple occasions when they restrained and shocked the 31-year-old teacher and father with a Taser while trying to take him into custody.

    The civilian oversight panel generally agreed with the conclusions of LAPD Chief Michel Moore and an internal department review board, which itself was split on several policy questions.

    Moore and police commissioners concluded that one of the officers continued to use a stun gun on Anderson, a Black man, even after he no longer posed an immediate threat. Moore and the commission also ruled that, whether inadvertently or not, two of the officers did not have cause to hold Anderson down by the neck. Under the department’s policy, such contact to a person’s neck is considered deadly force.

    Anderson’s case garnered international attention, in part because he was a cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass strongly condemned the incident, which happened weeks after she took office and sparked calls for changes to police policies related to traffic enforcement and the use of stun guns.

    It also added kindling to a fiery debate about how police interact with people in crisis, after a string of high-profile deadly encounters in recent years.

    Veteran civil rights attorney Carl Douglas, who filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Anderson’s family, called Tuesday’s ruling a rare but welcome decision from an oversight body he said too often signs off on police misbehavior. The finding was “one small step toward justice,” he said.

    “However, we are mindful that this fight is not over. The city is going to be defended vigorously by the city attorney as they do in virtually every case,” Douglas said Wednesday, pointing out that the city has already filed motions denying any responsibility for Anderson’s death. “We are heartened that the commission saw the decision to Taser Mr. Anderson as an abomination. They don’t call it an abomination, but I can.”

    What the body camera footage captured was the lack of training for officers on when Taser use is appropriate, Douglas said, adding that officers often misinterpret a person squirming as a form of resistance that justifies the device’s use.

    Douglas joined about two dozen activists and members of Anderson’s family who held a press conference before Tuesday’s Police Commission meeting, demanding the officers involved be held accountable. Afterward, the group appealed directly to the commissioners in what became an emotionally-charged meeting.

    The commission’s ruling was denounced by the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents the city’s rank-and-file officers.

    “We strongly disagree with these politically influenced findings, each responding officer acted responsibly in dealing with Mr. Anderson who was high on cocaine and ran into traffic after fleeing a car accident he caused,” the League’s board of directors said in a statement to The Times Wednesday.

    “The coroner confirmed he was not tased(SIC) but rather drive-stunned when he refused to follow simple directions while in the middle of a busy street, the board wrote. “Mr. Anderson and Mr. Anderson alone was responsible for what occurred.”

    The encounter that ended with Anderson’s death began sometime before 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 3, when Joshua Coombs, a motorcyle officer assigned to the West Traffic Division, responded to what the LAPD referred to at the time as a “felony hit-and-run” car crash at Venice and Lincoln boulevards.

    Coombs encountered Anderson darting on foot through traffic in apparent distress and ordered Anderson to sit on a nearby street corner. Anderson complied for some time, but then took off running, yelling that he was fearful for his safety.

    Coombs followed after him, as did officers Jaime Fuentes and Rasheen Ford, who had seen the incident unfold as they drove past in their department squad car. The officers eventually caught up to Anderson and pinned him to the ground, as he resisted their efforts to put him on his stomach and handcuff him. They were eventually joined by two other officers, Christopher Walters and Stephen Feldman.

    The commission reviewed the case during a closed-door session of its regular meeting, which was was briefly interrupted when president Erroll Southers ordered the room cleared because of disruptions in the audience.

    Much of the criticism of the police response centered on Fuentes discharging his Taser six times in the span of 42 seconds. But Moore ruled, and the commission agreed, that officer Fuentes’ first four deployments of the stun gun were within policy.

    However, a department force review board faulted Fuentes for his final two Taser uses, delivered as other officers used their body weight and arm holds to control Anderson. Fuentes, a patrol officer in Pacific Division, told internal investigators that he used the so-called drive stun function, in which the device is pressed directly against someone’s skin rather than fired from a distance, to prevent the incident from escalating further. Fuentes said he continued shocking Anderson because he wouldn’t stop resisting.

    The ruling wasn’t unanimous. The majority of the board said that, although Anderson was still pulling away from the officers, he didn’t present a threat to them and appeared instead to be starting to comply with their commands.

    The majority noted that Fuentes admitted in his department interview to using the drive-stun mode for pain compliance, against department policy, and said it would have preferred that he had reassessed the situation and switched “to a different force option after the third TASER deployment.”

    Several board members argued that the first four stuns were in compliance because the officers believed they could still be harmed due to Anderson’s continued resistance.

    Moore wrote in his report that, in making his decision, he considered that “Anderson was violently resisting the officers’ attempts to take him into custody.”

    “I noted the use of the TASER to be effective in assisting officers to take control of Anderson,” Moore wrote. “As it pertains to TASER activation five and six, I opined the officers had sufficient control of Anderson and that his level of resistance, while still ongoing, did not justify the use of a TASER as a reasonable force option.”

    During the final activation, Fuentes told investigators that he saw Anderson tense up, which he interpreted as an attempt to prevent officers from handcuffing him.

    Anderson was taken to an area hospital, where he later died.

    Last month, the department announced it would soon start testing out a new generation of Tasers with greater range that would preclude officers from having to use higher levels of force against uncooperative people. The eventual switch to the next-generation Taser 10 model comes on the heels of changes in the department’s Taser policy, including barring officers from using the drive stun function.

    The officers’ tactical decisions were scrutinized almost from the onset. Anderson’s family, some elected officials and police watchdogs decried what they saw as an overly aggressive response by police against someone who was disoriented and needed care after being involved in a traffic collision.

    Several policing experts who reviewed video for The Times of the Jan. 3 incident — from cameras worn by officers — previously said the amount of force used by the officers seemed excessive given Anderson’s actions and that their tactics appeared haphazard.

    An autopsy by the L.A. County coroner’s office later identified an enlarged heart and cocaine use as the causes of death, and did not rule it a homicide. Whether his death was natural, an accident or a homicide remains undetermined, according to the coroner’s website. Anderson’s family has disputed the report’s findings, contending that it deflected blame from the police.

    During their investigation, detectives from the LAPD’s force investigations division slowed down footage of the encounter and counted nine times in which officers Fuentes and Ford made contact with Anderson’s neck during the struggle. Both officers denied applying pressure or otherwise restricting Anderson’s ability to breathe.

    At one point in a video of the encounter, Anderson is lying on the pavement and struggling with officers when he yelled out, “They are trying to kill me. Kilo tried to kill me.” After being told to stop struggling, video showed Ford’s right hand on the side of Anderson’s jaw, with his thumb apparently near Anderson’s neck, the report says.

    With a 3 to 2 vote, commissioners also found fault with officers for failing to put Anderson “in a recovery position as soon as practical.”

    After days of mounting public pressure, Moore took the rare step of releasing additional footage from the encounter, which showed a distraught Anderson crying out for help as multiple officers held him down. Eventually, he washandcuffed and hobbled at his ankles before paramedics take him away. He later died at a hospital.

    Anderson’s death also galvanized a push for removing police from responding to minor traffic collisions, as well as to stop them from pulling over motorists for traffic violations, arguing that communities of color have historically borne the brunt of such enforcement. Instead, they said, such tasks could be handled by unarmed civilians.

    Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and a professor at Cal State L.A., said she was heartened by the commission’s ruling, even if it was a somewhat hollow “victory” since it wouldn’t bring Anderson back.

    “Justice for Keenan Anderson would mean that he were there to raise his child, that he was there to continue to be a model for his brothers, that he was there to be a model teacher,” said Abdullah. “But justice in his name looks like accountability, making sure that the cops who killed him are held accountable.”

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    Libor Jany, Richard Winton

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  • Off-duty pilot may have been on psychedelic mushrooms when he tried to shut off plane engines, official says

    Off-duty pilot may have been on psychedelic mushrooms when he tried to shut off plane engines, official says

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    The FBI is investigating whether an off-duty pilot who tried to shut down the engines of an in-flight jetliner on Sunday was on psychedelic mushrooms, an official told The Times.

    Federal prosecutors in Oregon have charged Joseph Emerson, 44, with interference with flight crew members and attendants. Emerson was arrested after pilots and crew members detained him Sunday following an outburst in the cockpit during a Horizon Airlines flight from Seattle that was headed to San Francisco. Horizon Airlines is a regional carrier owned by the parent company that owns Alaska Airlines.

    In a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday, an FBI agent revealed that Emerson told investigators about his use of psychedelic mushrooms and said “it was his first time taking mushrooms.”

    But FBI officials declined to confirm that Emerson had taken mushrooms at the time of the midair incident.

    “It is vague in [the complaint], but that is part of what [the] FBI is investigating,” said Joy Jiras, an FBI Portland field office spokesperson. “The FBI is investigating the timeline of his use of magic mushrooms. We are trying to figure out whether he was on them that day or whether they were in his system or not.”

    Emerson had been flying in the “jump seat,” a foldout seat usually placed behind the captain’s seat, according to experts.

    “I am not OK,” Emerson said during the flight, after he had been casually engaging the two pilots in conversation, a federal agent said in the complaint.

    Both pilots then saw Emerson grab onto the red fire handles, which are used to extinguish engine fires and shut down all fuel to the engines, potentially turning the plane into a glider, the pilots told federal investigators.

    One pilot struggled with Emerson for about 25 or 30 seconds before the off-duty pilot “quickly settled down,” according to the complaint.

    The other pilot saw Emerson throw his headset across the cockpit before saying he was not OK.

    The pilots said the interaction with Emerson lasted about 90 seconds before they were able to remove him and secure the cockpit, the complaint said.

    Flight attendants then saw Emerson “peacefully walking to the back of the aircraft,” the complaint said. They had received a call from the pilots saying that Emerson was “losing it,” and he told one attendant that he “just got kicked out of the flight deck,” according to investigators.

    “You need to cuff me right now, or it’s going to be bad,” he told the attendant.

    He was cuffed and seated in the back of the plane, according to the complaint, where he tried to grab the handle of an emergency exit before he was stopped by a crew member.

    Another crew member said that Emerson made statements about how “he tried to kill everybody,” the complaint said.

    “The flight attendant noticed Emerson take out his cellular phone and appeared to be texting on the phone. Emerson was heard saying he had just put 84 peoples’ lives at risk tonight including his own,” FBI Agent Tapara Simmons wrote in the complaint.

    After the plane made an emergency landing in Portland, Ore., Emerson was detained. He told police he had become depressed six months ago, according to the complaint.

    He talked with the officer about “the use of psychedelic mushrooms” and said “it was his first time taking mushrooms.”

    “I’m admitting to what I did. I’m not fighting any charges you want to bring against me, guys,” he told police, according to the complaint.

    Emerson was booked by police in Multnomah County on suspicion of 83 counts of attempted murder. It was not clear whether the state case would continue in light of federal charges.

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    Noah Goldberg

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  • The Missing Piece of the Foraging Renaissance

    The Missing Piece of the Foraging Renaissance

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    Harvesting wild local produce in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park may not seem like the best idea. And yet, on a foraging tour of the lively public park last month, a straw-hatted forager named “Wildman” Steve Brill and his teenage daughter, Violet, led roughly 40 of us amateurs into the grassy areas beyond the park’s paved footpaths for a four-hour tromp. Among plastic wrappers and bottle caps we found edible roots, fragrant herbs, and sturdy greens, all ripe for experimentation in the adventurous cook’s kitchen.

    At least in theory. There was food here, for sure, but hardly of the practical variety. We recovered fallen pods from the Kentucky coffeetree, whose seeds can be used to brew a caffeine-free alternative to a morning cup. That is, if one is willing to harvest enough of them, wash them of green toxic goo, and roast them for hours—though even then, it won’t really be coffee. I stuffed a few pods in a canvas bag alongside sassafras root, once used to make root beer the old-fashioned way, and a handful of lettuce-flavored violet leaves that could, in the right quantities, constitute a small salad. Two weeks later, I’m still wondering what, if anything, I’ll actually make with these odd new ingredients.

    What I didn’t anticipate were all the medicinal plants. Just a few minutes into the tour, we came across enough wild analgesics and anti-inflammatories to insure a casual hike. Here among the cigarette butts was broadleaf plantain, an easy-to-miss herb (unrelated to the bananalike fruit) known for calming mosquito bites. Over near the urinating puppy was jewelweed, which soothes poison-ivy and stinging-nettle rashes. Twigs snapped from a black birch tree exuded wintergreen oil, also known as methyl salicylate, a relative of aspirin that powers pain-killing ointments such as Bengay and Icy Hot.

    Interest in foraging for food has taken off in recent years, owing in part to the gourmet-ification of eating locally and in part to its popularity on social media, where influencers make chips out of stinging nettles and add fir needles to granitas. Foraged ramps and morel mushrooms have become so well known that they now appear on restaurant menus and in high-end grocery stores. But the foraging boom has largely left behind what has historically been a big draw of scrounging for plants—finding treatments for minor ailments. To be clear, medicinal plants aren’t likely to save the casual forager’s life, and they lack the robust clinical data that back up pharmaceuticals. But even some scientists believe they can be handy in a pinch. In a way, being able to find a jewelweed stem is more useful than identifying a handful of leaves that can substitute for lettuce.

    That has definitely been the case for Marla Emery, a scientific adviser to the Norwegian Institute for Natural Research and a former research geographer for the U.S. Forest Service who studies community foraging. Several years ago, when huge, oozing blisters formed on her legs after a run-in with poison ivy on a hunting trip, Emery visited an herbalist in Scotland who applied lobelia, an herb with pale-violet flowers, and slippery elm, a tree with mucilaginous properties, to her calf. Soon, she felt a tingling sensation—“as if someone had poured seltzer over the area”—and within an hour the blisters had healed, Emery told me.

    Both plants, traditionally used to treat skin conditions, “are supportive of health and have medicinal value,” she said, and they’re especially useful because “you’re highly unlikely to poison yourself” with them. Such anecdotes illustrating the profound utility of medicinal plants are common among botanist types. “If you get a cut and put [broadleaf] plantain on it, you can see it close up,” Alex McAlvay, an ethnobotanist at the New York Botanical Garden, told me. At least for some species, he said, “the proof is in the pudding.”

    Though foraging has long been a medicinal practice, and so many modern drugs are derived from plants, in the West, medicinal flora has largely been relegated to “traditional” or “folk remedy” status. Still, their use lives on in many communities, including immigrant groups that “come with medicinal-plant uses from their homelands and seek to continue them,” Emery said. People in Chinese, Russian, and certain Latin communities in the U.S. commonly forage dandelion, a weed with diuretic properties, to support kidney and urinary-tract health, she added.

    Along the concrete footpaths of Prospect Park, the Brills pointed out stands of burdock; its roots, in addition to being a tasty potato dupe, are used in some cultures to detoxify the body. Pineapple weed, found in baseball diamonds and sidewalk cracks, can calm an upset stomach, Steve told me later. Scientific data for such claims are scant, much like they are for other foraged plants, and using the plants for health inevitably raises questions about scientific credibility. Many medicinal plants that a casual forager will encounter in the wild will not have been studied through rigorous clinical trials in the same way that any prescription drug has been. Whether people ultimately embrace foraging for medicinal plants depends on how they believe “we make evidence and truth,” McAlvay said. “A lot of people are like, ‘If there’s no clinical research, it’s not legit.’ Other people are like, ‘My grandma did it; it’s legit.’” Nothing beats clinical research, though clearly some plants share valuable properties with certain drugs. Lamb’s quarters, a dupe for spinach, is so packed with vitamin C that it was traditionally used to prevent scurvy; stinging nettle, traditionally used for urination issues, may have similar effects as finasteride, a prostate medication.

    Naturally, the experts I spoke with unanimously recommended using foraged medicinal plants only for minor ailments. Just as foraging for food comes with some risks—what looks like a delicious mushroom can make you sick—the same is true of medicinal foraging. Take established, reputable classes and use books and apps to correctly identify plants, many of which have dangerous look-alikes; the edible angelica plant, for example, is easily confused with poisonous water hemlock, of Socrates-killing notoriety. Learning about dosage is important too. A benign plant can become poisonous if too large a dose is used, warned Emery. When working with medicinal plants, she said, “you’ve got to know what you’re doing, and that doesn’t lend itself to the casual TikTok post.” Beginner foragers should stick to “gentle but definitely powerful, easy-to-identify herbs,” such as dandelion and violet, said McAlvay.

    As the Brills instructed, when I got home I submerged a foraged jewelweed stem in witch hazel to make a soothing skin tincture. Days later, when I dabbed some onto a patch of sunburn on my arm, I felt, or maybe imagined, a wave of relief. Whatever the case, my delight was real. When I had asked both tour-goers and experts why foraged medical plants mattered in a world where drugs that accomplish the same things could be easily bought at a pharmacy, some said it was “empowering” or “satisfying,” but the description that resonated with me most came from McAlvay, who called it “magic”: the power to wield nature, in nature, in order to heal.

    When I got home from the tour and opened my bag of foraged goods, I found a black birch twig, still redolent of wintergreen. Coincidentally, that is the one smell I have craved throughout 38 weeks (and counting) of pregnancy, but moms-to-be are advised to avoid the medicinal ointments containing the oil. I sniffed the twig deeply, again and again, recalling that it might become useful in the months to come. When teething infants are given black birch twigs to chew, the gently analgesic qualities of the low-dose wintergreen oil helps soothe their pain, Brill had said. All of a sudden, their crying stops. What’s more magical than that?

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • Political Campaigns May Never Be the Same

    Political Campaigns May Never Be the Same

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    Depending on whom you ask in politics, the sudden advances in artificial intelligence will either transform American democracy for the better or bring about its ruin. At the moment, the doomsayers are louder. Voice-impersonation technology and deep-fake videos are scaring campaign strategists, who fear that their deployment in the days before the 2024 election could decide the winner. Even some AI developers are worried about what they’ve unleashed: Last week the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT practically begged Congress to regulate his industry. (Whether that was genuine civic-mindedness or self-serving performance remains to be seen.)

    Amid the growing panic, however, a new generation of tech entrepreneurs is selling a more optimistic future for the merger of AI and politics. In their telling, the awesome automating power of AI has the potential to achieve in a few years what decades of attempted campaign-finance reform have failed to do—dramatically reduce the cost of running for election in the United States. With AI’s ability to handle a campaign’s most mundane and time-consuming tasks—think churning out press releases or identifying and targeting supporters—candidates would have less need to hire high-priced consultants. The result could be a more open and accessible democracy, in which small, bare-bones campaigns can compete with well-funded juggernauts.

    Martin Kurucz, the founder of a Democratic fundraising company that is betting big on AI, calls the technology “a great equalizer.” “You will see a lot more representation,” he told me, “because people who didn’t have access to running for elected office now will have that. That in and of itself is huge.”

    Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.

    Kurucz told me that his firm, Sterling Data Company, has used AI to help more than 1,000 Democratic campaigns and committees, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and now-Senator John Fetterman, identify potential donors. The speed with which AI can sort through donor files meant that Sterling was able to cut its prices last year by nearly half, Kurucz said, allowing even small campaigns to afford its services. “I don’t think there have ever been this many down-ballot candidates with some level of digital fundraising operation,” Kurucz said. “These candidates now have access to a proper campaign infrastructure.”

    Campaigns big and small have begun using generative-AI software such as ChatGPT and DALL-E to create digital ads, proofread, and even write press releases and fundraising pitches. A handful of consultants told me they were mostly just experimenting with AI, but Kurucz said that its influence is more pervasive. “Almost half of the first drafts of fundraising emails are being produced by ChatGPT,” he claimed. “Not many [campaigns] will publicly admit it.”

    The adoption of AI may not be such welcome news, however, for voters who are already sick of being bombarded with ads, canned emails, and fundraising requests during election season. Advertising will become even more hyper-targeted, Tom Newhouse, a GOP strategist, told me, because campaigns can use AI to sort through voter data, run performance tests, and then create dozens of highly specific ads with far fewer staff. The shift, he said, could narrow the gap between small campaigns and their richer rivals.

    But several political consultants I spoke with were skeptical that the technology would democratize campaigning anytime soon. For one, AI won’t aid only the scrappy, underfunded campaigns. Deeper-pocketed organizations could use it to expand their capacity exponentially, whether to test and quick produce hundreds of highly specific ads or pinpoint their canvassing efforts in ways that widen their advantage.

    Amanda Litman, the founder of Run for Something, an organization that recruits first-time progressive candidates, told me that the office seekers she works with aren’t focused on AI. Hyperlocal races are still won by the candidates who knock on the most doors; robots haven’t taken up that task, and even if they could, who would want them to? “The most important thing for a candidate is the relationship with a voter,” Litman said. “AI can’t replicate that. At least not yet.”

    Although campaigns have started using AI, its impact—even to people in politics—is not always apparent. Fetterman’s Pennsylvania campaign worked with Kurucz’s AI-first firm, but two former advisers to Fetterman scoffed at the suggestion that the technology contributed meaningfully to his victory. “I don’t remember anyone using AI for anything on that campaign,” Kenneth Pennington, a digital consultant and one of the Fetterman campaign’s earliest hires, told me. Pennington is a partner at a progressive consulting firm called Middle Seat, which he said had not adopted the use of generative AI in any significant way and had no immediate plans to. “Part of what our approach and selling point is as a team, and as a firm, is authenticity and creativity, which I think is not a strong suit of a tool like ChatGPT,” Pennington said. “It’s robotic. I don’t think it’s ready for prime time in politics.”

    If AI optimists and pessimists agree on anything, it’s that the technology will allow more people to participate in the political process. Whether that’s a good thing is another question.

    Just as AI platforms could allow, say, a schoolteacher running for city council to draft press releases in between grading papers, so too can they help a far-right activist with millions of followers create a semi-believable deep-fake video of President Joe Biden announcing a military draft.

    “We’ve democratized access to the ability to create sophisticated fakes,” Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at UC Berkeley, told me.

    Fears over deep-fakes have escalated in the past month. In response to Biden’s formal declaration of his reelection bid, the Republican National Committee released a video that used AI-generated images to depict a dystopian future. Within days, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke of New York introduced legislation to require political ads to disclose any use of generative AI (which the RNC ad did). Early this month, the bipartisan American Association of Political Consultants issued a statement condemning the use of “deep-fake generative AI content” as a violation of its code of ethics.

    Read: Just wait until Trump is a chatbot

    Nearly everyone I interviewed for this story expressed some degree of concern over the role that deep-fakes could play in the 2024 election. One scenario that came up repeatedly was the possibility that a compelling deep-fake could be released on the eve of the election, leaving too little time for it to be widely debunked. Clarke told me she worried specifically about a bad actor suppressing the vote by releasing invented audio or video of a trusted voice in a particular community announcing a change or closure of polling sites.

    But the true nightmare scenario is what Farid called “death by a thousand cuts”—a slow bleed of deep-fakes that destroys trust in authentic sound bites and videos. “If we enter this world where anything could be fake, you can deny reality. Nothing has to be real,” Farid said.

    This alarm extends well beyond politics. A consortium of media and tech companies are advocating for a global set of standards for the use of AI, including efforts to authenticate images and videos as well as to identify, through watermarks or other digital fingerprints, content that has been generated or manipulated by AI. The group is led by Adobe, whose Photoshop helped introduce the widespread use of computer-image editing. “We believe that this is an existential threat to democracy if we don’t solve the deep-fake problem,” Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, told me. “If people don’t have a way to believe the truth, we’re not going to be able to decide policy, laws, government issues.”

    Not everyone is so concerned. As vice president of the American Association of Political Consultants, Larry Hyuhn helped draft the statement that the organization put out denouncing deep-fakes and warning its members against using them. But he’s relatively untroubled about the threats they pose. “Frankly, in my experience, it’s harder than everyone thinks it is,” said Hyuhn, whose day job is providing digital strategy to Democratic clients who include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Am I afraid of it? No,” Hyuhn told me. “Does it concern me that there are always going to be bad actors doing bad things? That’s just life.”

    Betsy Hoover, a former Obama-campaign organizer who now runs a venture-capital fund that invests in campaign tech, argued that voters are more discerning than people give them credit for. In her view, decades of steadily more sophisticated disinformation campaigns have conditioned the electorate to question what they see on the internet. “Voters have had to decide what to listen to and where to get their information for a really long time,” she told me. “And at the end of the day, for the most part, they’ve figured it out.”

    Deep-fake videos are sure to get more convincing, but for the time being, many are pretty easy to spot. Those that impersonate Biden, for example, do a decent job of capturing his voice and appearance. But they make him sound slightly, well, younger than he is. His speech is smoother, without the verbal stumbles and stuttering that have become more pronounced in recent years. The technology “does require someone with some real skill to make use of,” he said. “You can give me a football; I still can’t throw it 50 yards.”

    The same limitations apply to AI’s potential for revolutionizing campaigns, as anyone who’s played around with ChatGPT can attest. When I asked ChatGPT to write a press release from the Trump campaign announcing a hypothetical endorsement of the former president by his current Republican rival, Nikki Haley, within seconds the bot delivered a serviceable first draft that accurately captured the format of a press release and made up believable, if generic, quotes from Trump and Haley. But it omitted key background information that any junior-level staffer would have known to include—that Haley was the governor of South Carolina, for example, and then served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.

    Still, anyone confident enough to predict AI’s impact on an election nearly a year and a half away is making a risky bet. ChatGPT didn’t even exist six months ago. Uncertainty pervaded my conversations with the technology’s boosters and skeptics alike. Pennington told me to take everything he said about AI, both its promise and its peril, “with a grain of salt” because he could be proved wrong. “I think some people are overhyping it. I think some people are not thinking about it who should be,” Hoover said. “There’s a really wide spectrum because all of this is just evolving so much day to day.”

    Read: Bots are destroying political discourse as we know it

    That constant and rapid evolution is what sets AI apart from other technologies that have been touted as democratic disrupters. “This is one of the few technologies in the history of planet Earth that is continuously and exponentially bettering itself,” Kurucz, Sterling’s founder, said. Of all the predictions I heard about AI’s impact on campaigns, his were the most assured. (Because AI forms the basis of his sales pitch to clients, perhaps his prognostication, too, should be taken with a grain of salt.) Although he was unsure exactly how fast AI could transform campaigns, he was certain it would.

    “You no longer need average people and average consultants and average anything,” Kurucz said. “Because AI can do average.” He compared the skeptics in his field to executives at Blockbuster who passed on the chance to buy Netflix before the start-up eventually destroyed the video-rental giant. “The old guard,” Kurucz concluded, “is just not ready to be replaced.”

    Hoover offered no such bravado, but she said Democrats in particular shouldn’t let their fears of AI stop them from trying to harness its potential. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “We have a choice, then, as campaigners: to take the good from it and allow it to make our work better and more effective, or to hide under a rock and pretend it’s not here, because we’re afraid of it.”

    “I don’t think we can afford to do the latter,” she added.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Do Overdoses Look Different Now?

    Do Overdoses Look Different Now?

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    Most likely, the person’s skin color will change. An ashy tone might creep in, or they could turn a shade of blue. If too much fluid pools in their mouth or lungs and mixes with air, foam will appear at their lips. There might be a sound, too—that of light snoring. These are some of the main symptoms of an overdose. Although the drug causing the reaction might be different, the symptoms look the same. “An overdose is an overdose,” Soma Snakeoil, a co-founder of the Sidewalk Project, a harm-reduction organization, told me.

    But although overdose symptoms have not shifted, the ability to treat it has, most notably because of the availability of naloxone, the medication that can quickly reverse an overdose and that was approved in late March to be sold over the counter, as Narcan. This move happened at least in part because in the past few decades, the entire context of an overdose in the United States has changed. The U.S. has entered its fourth wave of the opioid crisis, and the death toll is different now: Overdoses have been steadily increasing for many years, but this wave, also known as the “era of overdoses,” has seen the highest number of fatal overdoses yet. “I think what makes this current crisis so unique is the volume” of overdoses, John Pamplin II, an epidemiologist at Columbia’s school of public health, told me. And that is happening because the drugs have changed too. “It’s not necessarily that more people are using drugs,” Emilie Bruzelius, an epidemiology researcher at Columbia’s school of public health, told me. “The opioids that people are using now are incredibly strong, and they’re more likely to cause an overdose.”

    The result is that any person using drugs has a higher chance of overdosing than ever before. “There’s no population segment that is insulated,” Bruzelius said. “It’s really affecting everybody now.”

    The origins of the opioid crisis can be traced back to 1999. As doctors prescribed opioids more and more—OxyContin prescriptions for non-cancer-related pain alone increased from about 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million in 2002—related deaths rose swiftly. In that same period, the number of deaths increased almost 30 percent, to nearly 9,000. This first wave largely affected white people: By 2010, the opioid mortality rate was more than two times higher for white people than Black people.

    That year, a second wave began, in which overdose deaths involving heroin grew most dramatically. By 2015, heroin overdose deaths surpassed the number of deaths attributable to opioid pills. This time, the total opioid mortality rate grew for both Black and white populations; death rates increased by an average of at least 30 percent a year beginning in 2010, and accelerated even faster after 2013. In this same period, illicitly manufactured fentanyl—a synthetic opioid approved for pain relief—was being slipped into heroin, counterfeit pills, cocaine, and other drugs. Many of the people taking these drugs did not realize that they were taking fentanyl at all, leading to a third wave of overdoses. Mortality skyrocketed. In 2017, synthetic opioids were responsible for more than 28,000 deaths, while opioid-pill and heroin overdose deaths had leveled off at about 15,000. The demographics of the crisis continued to shift too, and in 2020, the fastest increases in death rates was experienced by Black and Indigenous Americans, surpassing the death rate of white Americans, Pamplin told me.

    Read: What those in power are missing about the opioid epidemic

    The new, fourth wave is characterized by more mixing of different drugs. “People are overdosing from cocaine and fentanyl or methamphetamines and fentanyl or methamphetamines and fentanyl and heroin,” Bruzelius told me. Recently, xylazine—a non-opiate sedative also known as “tranq”—has infiltrated the fentanyl supply, resulting in what the DEA has deemed the deadliest threat yet.

    This is the context in which the FDA approved Narcan to be sold over the counter. Narcan packages naloxone as a nasal spray, and the FDA argued that its approval could “help improve access to naloxone, increase the number of locations where it’s available, and help reduce overdose deaths throughout the country.” By binding to opioid receptors, naloxone blocks the effects of opiates in the system. This reverses the impact of an overdose, restoring normal breathing.

    But drug policies in America tend to swing, pendulum-like, from one extreme to the other, David Courtwright, a historian at the University of North Florida, told me: A response focused on care for drug users might give way to a more punitive policy. Already, some critics of Narcan’s availability have pushed to restrict its use on the grounds that an effective overdose treatment could encourage drug use—even though there’s “just no kind of scientific or empirical backing” for those arguments, Bruzelius said. Here, the simplest logic holds: If overdoses are affecting every community in America, better to have an accessible treatment everywhere.

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    Zoya Qureshi

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