Red Tape Podcast, Episode 6 – Where’s The Lie?
Red Tape is the newest R Street podcast about the country’s biggest problems and the surprising ways that governments (and regular people) often get in the way of solving them. It was produced in partnership with Pod People. Listen wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and learn more about the podcast here.
Episode description:
The Pope was wearing what?! Get ready to find out as we navigate the murky waters of misinformation. R Street’s Resident Elections Fellow, Matt Germer, joins host Kelli Pierce to talk about election misinformation, and unpacks mail-in ballots and the strengths and weaknesses in states’ voting infrastructures that were revealed by the 2020 election. They also discuss election fraud in the US, recapping recent cases of ballot harvesting and bad apples.
Kelli also speaks with Stacey McKenna, R Street’s Resident Senior Fellow for Integrated Harm Reduction about the complexities of the illicit drug crisis. Stacey breaks down how fear-based anti-drug campaigns riddled with misinformation are doing more harm than good. Stacey also gives insight on effective harm-reduction methods, and shares her personal experience with addiction.
Episode transcript:
Kelli Pierce:
Hey, Shosh. Did you see the video of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy surrendering to Russia?
Shoshana Weissmann:
What? Oh, wait. I don’t follow foreign policy very well, but how did I miss that?
Kelli Pierce:
Oh, because it was a deep fake.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Hang on, I’m watching this right now.
President Zelenskyy Deepfake:
[Foreign language 00:00:17].
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, it looks pretty real. That’s not great. But at least can we do one of Putin surrendering to SpongeBob?
Kelli Pierce:
We should totally do that. I love that. But, you know, some hackers published that fake video on a Ukrainian TV station’s website, and even though it was debunked right away, what would’ve happened if they just let it run wild?
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I could see real disaster coming from that. You could imagine foreign policy going nuts, different officials in different countries making their statements. That could cause some real stuff. Thanks for freaking me out to start the show. I really appreciate that, Kelli.
Kelli Pierce:
Aw, don’t be mad at me. Here, let’s bring in our fun theme music to make you feel better, and I’ll give you some more lighthearted fake news stories because, after all, today’s episode’s called, “Where’s the Lie?”
Shoshana Weissmann:
I don’t know what’s real anymore, but I love the simulation.
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
Kelli Pierce:
I’m Kelli Pierce, an award-winning journalist and Digital Media Associate at R Street.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I’m Shoshana Weissmann, Director of Digital Media at R Street, and also maybe living in the simulation.
Kelli Pierce:
And this is Red Tape.
All right, Shosh, feeling better now that the theme music has played?
Shoshana Weissmann:
No, I’ll never feel good again. Thanks so much, Kelli.
[THEME MUSIC ENDS]
Kelli Pierce:
Oh, hang on for the rest of this podcast. Okay, so let’s go into some other stories. Okay. Did you see those pictures of the Pope that just went viral?
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I remember. He looked really funny in the overcoat. It looked pretty real.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, but that was totally generated by AI.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I’ll be honest, I thought those were real. But I’d love to see you in that coat.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, that would look terrible. Okay, last one. Speaking of AI, there was another hoax. Did you see the image of an explosion at the Pentagon that went viral?
Shoshana Weissmann:
No.
Kelli Pierce:
This actually caused the stock market to briefly dip. 100% fake, but caused real people to lose real money before it was debunked.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah. That’s really terrifying that people believe this stuff.
Kelli Pierce:
That’s the thing. We have a lot of misinformation and disinformation. They’re rampant these days. Our listeners know that. But we have some really great people here at R Street who are tackling this critical issue of understanding fake news. First, I’m going to be speaking with Matt Germer on election misinformation. If you think you’ve heard everything about this topic ever, you actually really haven’t. Matt’s our resident Elections Fellow for the Governance Program at R Street, and he’s an expert on a lot of legislative matters, including election laws and how elections happen in various states. But, he has such a unique take on things. What he says is going to surprise you.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I doubt he could surprise me, but I think he’ll surprise listeners. Most people who hear about election policy are listening to people who are yelling and flipping out, and he’s pretty mild. Who else are you speaking with?
Kelli Pierce:
I’ll also be speaking with Stacey McKenna on the overdose crisis and the kinds of misinformation surrounding that issue. Stacey’s R Street’s Resident Senior Fellow for Integrated Harm Reduction, and she’ll be talking about one big story that shows how misinformation’s hurting our efforts to help people struggling with addiction. And she’s not talking from just like an academic perspective, she has an incredible story about her own journey to get where she is today.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I love the personal tie-in because I think it’s kind of extra special if you can apply evidence and logic and solutions to stuff that you’ve been through.
Kelli Pierce:
I think her interview is absolutely amazing. So Shosh, are you ready to fight some misinformation?
Shoshana Weissmann:
I guess. Here’s Kelli’s conversation with Matt Germer.
Kelli Pierce:
Over the past couple of years, for a variety of different reasons, it seems like elections changed in major ways. And it’s, A, understandable that people are nervous, and B, it’s been really unhelpful, in my opinion, if you want to fight something like election misinformation to shut down the conversation completely and scream, “You’re an election denier,” just because someone has a question.
Matt Germer:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And it’s important to recognize, as we talk about elections, how quickly our brains turn, I think, to the 2020 election, and that election was just so unique for so many reasons. We had two candidates on the ballot that a lot of Americans were uncomfortable with to varying degrees. We had a pandemic going on at the same time. People were afraid to leave their homes. We had cities experiencing something on the scale of protests to full-blown riots. We had confidence issues with our health professionals and officials. Our country was in a tough spot, and so on top of all of that, we had this really momentous election, and an election, as you noted, where things were done differently.
It’s, I think, fair for people to be concerned about how an election is being conducted in the midst of all of that. And as you note, people were being accused of being an election denier who had meaningful questions to ask. And that’s tough because there are good questions to ask. There are also people out there who were using the “I’m just asking questions” framework with the intent of sowing mistrust in elections, and so drawing that line is difficult and every American was just put in a tough spot.
Kelli Pierce:
Let’s kind of start with the basics. How are elections run in the United States? It seems like each state has its own rules, or is there similarities there? How does it actually run?
Matt Germer:
We really do have 50 different elections across the country every cycle. And even within that, most of the time the policy and the actual administration of the elections are done at the county level, so we have hundreds or thousands of elections taking place simultaneously. And while that can make for quite a bit of complexity, if you’re trying to get ahold of all of it, also really diffuses the power of election policy, and that has upside as well, to make sure that if there is someone who’s trying to game things, it’s very difficult to game them across all 50 states and in an every jurisdiction. That’s the beauty of federalism and localism. And so for someone like me whose job it is to try to keep an eye on what’s going on all across the country, it’s difficult. There’s always changes. There’s always these different systems, but there’s also an upside to that as well.
Kelli Pierce:
And I also think that federalism, maybe that local control, it lets people have more buy-in or more trust in the system than the feds coming in and telling you or dictating election laws.
Matt Germer:
I think that’s right. That extra level of personal awareness and accountability helps for trust. I think it also would be damaging for our country if election policy were done nationally. Not only is that just both physically, geographically distant from people, but it also just continues to raise the stakes of winning national elections. And I think there’s a real point brought in there that right now, with the amount of power that is centralized in Washington, D.C., Americans are following elections just on a different level than they ever did. It’s not just about whether your local congressperson is someone you like. You’re following elections all the way across the country, because a change in a senator or a change in a house member, or particularly the change in the presidency, seems to have so much importance on our lives, like far outside what it really should. And that creates incentives for bad behavior, it creates incentives for a toxicity in our politics. All of that, I think, kind of comes down to putting too much power in one central place just creates damage to the system.
Kelli Pierce:
Though we do think there should be laws to make sure that elections are not disenfranchising people based on race or something like that.
Matt Germer:
Absolutely. This gets back to, what is the point of federal law? We don’t have just state law. We do have federal law. We have enumerated rights in the Constitution and we have post-Civil War amendments for a reason, and they’re important. And they need to be enforced and we need to have federal regulations uphold them. I think there’s a difference though between making sure that we’ve got some level of federal oversight versus a world where the federal government is uniformly in charge of elections at a much more micro level all across the country.
Kelli Pierce:
And going back to that more micro level, at least state level, a lot of states expanded or turned to completely mail-in balloting during the pandemic. Did you see any bumps in the road when it came to mail-in ballots during the 2020 election, or any of the elections afterward?
Matt Germer:
It’s a good question. I think the 2020 election was all over the place when it came to vote by mail. At a high level, I think it’s worth noting that vote by mail has a long history in our country. It’s only recently become prevalent, and only in a few places that have really leaned into it. Before 2020, the overwhelming majority of votes were cast in person, and I expect them to continue on that trend, although I think more people will vote by mail. Some states have been doing it really well.
I think Utah’s one of those states that is doing it well. I think they first started offering mail-in voting at the beginning of the 21st century, something like 2004 time, but few people used it. I think after a number of years, it was something like 15% of Utah voters were using it by like 2010, but by 2018, something like 90% of voters in Utah were voting by mail. It was an option for voters. They could do other things, but it became their preferred option, and that kind of slow ramp up and introduction to it meant that Utah could work out the kinks of their system, and so that by the time 2020 came and the pandemic fears were swirling, Utah was ready to go.
But there are states that didn’t do it so hot. I think the one that really comes to mind for me is Arkansas. Arkansas has long restricted its mail-in voting system. It was only allowed for people who had an approved excuse, like age or disability. So when 2020 came, they saw a dramatic increase in mail voting. I think the governor opened up the excuse system to include fears around COVID-19. So you had all these first time mail-in voters signing up who hadn’t done it before. The systems weren’t ready for it. Arkansas had no process in place to let voters fix technical mistakes on their ballot, something known as ballot curing. And so I think, if my memory serves, something like 4 or 5% of the ballots that were mailed in Arkansas were rejected, and voters weren’t even told that the ballots were rejected. And so Arkansas ended up having some of the lowest turnout rates in the entire country, if not the lowest rate in the entire country, and the mail-in voting system was just unhelpful to that effort.
So it really spans between state by state, how much experience they had with it, how much prep they did coming into 2020, and how much familiarity the voters had with it.
Kelli Pierce:
Wow. I wouldn’t have suspected Arkansas would be the laggard in this one. But I do think it points to a point that you’re making, where it really comes down to how you structure the rules with mail-in balloting. Because even if there’s no shady business going on, if you have a system… I feel like if there’s a room for doubt, things not enforced uniformly, you might end up with a good chunk of the population not having buy-in to your system. Another thing that has really caused controversy, in both red and blue states, is something called ballot harvesting. Can you tell us what that is and what effect it’s had on elections?
Matt Germer:
Sure. So ballot harvesting is a term used to describe the collection of ballots from multiple voters and dropping them all off at once. I think, at a high level, if this is the first time you’re grappling with the issue, it sounds fine. You might think, “Hey, I’m going to go turn my ballot in. Do you want me to take yours too?” And I think there’s a well-meaning version of that practice. It’s also not hard to imagine a few other versions like a campaigns Get Out the Vote staffer knocking on doors in targeted neighborhoods to remind them, “Hey, vote for so-and-so. And if you already have, I’d be happy to drop your ballot off for you.” That kind of thing starts to get a little… Not that it’s illegal, but it just feels a little different.
And then there starts to become these questions around chain of custody. What happens if you hand your ballot to that person? How much can you trust them to actually go drop it off? Particularly because they might be presenting themselves as a supporter of a campaign you like, but you don’t know and you don’t know that they’re not going to walk through the whole neighborhood and get rid of them. We do have some safeguards in a lot of states in place that if turnout is abnormally high in a neighborhood, higher than it should be, that could flag a reason for a more detailed audit. These are all post hoc ways to try to guard against it.
So ballot harvesting I tend to look disfavorably upon. I think for the most part, maybe with the exception of close family members, or roommates, or friends, or a caretaker, where you’re really helping someone who’s having a hard time getting their ballot turned in, that there are reasons to drop them off. But I’ve become a big fan of places that have put in limits on how many ballots you’re able to drop off. Instead of collecting your entire neighborhood, you’re turning in for a couple of key people in your life.
There’s actually a great story about ballot harvesting that has been used nefariously. I think it comes from the state I live in now, in North Carolina. A few years ago, I think it was 2018 election, one of the congressional districts had a pretty substantial election fraud ballot harvesting case go through. I believe it was the Republican candidate Harris, who was paying a gentleman to effectively ballot harvest. It started by just passing out voter absentee registration forms, and over time, it escalated to collecting and perhaps even filling out ballots on behalf of other people. And at the end of the day, they held another election to make up for it, because it was just such a problem they couldn’t set aside the ballots or figure out exactly which ones to quarantine, and so they held a fresh election again. So it does happen.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, that was a very famous case, and I’m glad you brought that up. I remember looking at a state legislative session, won’t say which state it is, but they were talking about whether they should allow ballot harvesting or not, and both the Republicans and Democrats had come to an agreement that they weren’t going to do that because there’s nothing inherently nefarious about ballot harvesting. But there have been cases like the one you talked about that doesn’t inspire confidence in the election system.
But it’s not just ballot harvesting that makes people raise their eyebrows. Last year in Pennsylvania, you have a former US congressman, his name’s Michael “Ozzie” Myers, so Michael Myers. He was convicted, along with a couple of judges, of inflating the vote totals in the Philadelphia area. So those things do exist. The question I would ask you is, really, how common is election shenanigans in the United States?
Matt Germer:
I think looking at a 30,000-foot level, it’s very uncommon. It does happen, as you’ve pointed out, and we have cases in Pennsylvania that you pointed out. I brought up the North Carolina ballot harvesting. I mean, North Carolina’s got other examples. I think they had a small town in the Smoky Mountains where a candidate would win with like 15 votes. So it became this question of folks who had a vacation home there registering to vote in that county and participating. We have these examples of folks finding loopholes or opportunities in the system and taking advantage of them. I mean it is a how are we going to slice the pie, one person wins kind of system, and so the incentives to cheat are there, and there will be people who will act on those-
Matt Germer:
So the incentives to cheat are there and there will be people who will act on those incentives. And that’s why we have rules and it’s why those rules should be and must be rigorously enforced. But it also creates a little bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to discussing voter fraud because we should know when a bad guy was caught trying to do bad guy things. That’s just healthy for our public and it shows that our enforcement system is working. But on the other hand, considering our partisan environment and just our political environment generally, it also makes people wonder, “Well, wait, was this the only instance? How many more instances are out there that aren’t being caught?”
The research doesn’t back that up. There are a lot of institutional safeguards in place for checking our elections. We do have audits across the country. We have recount procedures. We have requirements that members of both parties be present when picking up ballots from drop boxes. We do what we can to put procedures in place to ensure trust. So when people get caught, it should be a sign that the system is working, but I can also see the incentives to cheat are high. And because of that, we need to be scrupulous in the way that we enforce those rules.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely, and this is also not popular to say in some circles, but there are legal ways to challenge an election if you think something’s not right. And former Senator Joe Lieberman, he talked about the lawsuits President Trump filed in 2020. He was speaking last year on the show Inside Sources with Boyd Matheson on KSL News Radio out here in Salt Lake City. And Boyd is a great friend of R Street. We’re going to play what Senator Lieberman said about challenging election, and I’d love to get your take.
Joe Lieberman:
Of course, the 2020 election, which President Trump felt was decided as a result of fraud and he did what Americans should do. He filed a lot of lawsuits, over 50 as I recall, and in each case, judges of all sorts of different backgrounds, ideologically, politically ruled against him. Well, that’s time to stop it. Look, I went through that myself in 2000 and the ultimate decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, Al Gore, and I thought was profoundly wrong. And yet, and I give Al Gore the most credit because some people were arguing, “Well, the Supreme Court decision really allows us to go back to the Florida Supreme Court and appeal.” And it was mid-December 2000 and Al Gore late at night, because the decision came down late, decided, “We have to end it now. It’s just totally unfair, but for the good of the country, because we’re just weeks away from Inauguration day and we can’t jeopardize the continuity of the American government.”
Matt Germer:
Yeah. I think former Senator Lieberman makes a good point here. They engaged in what was the most famous challenge of an election prior to 2020, and as it all came down to one state and one county in particular and how to count votes. And at the end of the day, I think to this day, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman both think that they actually won that election and that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong, but they conceded. Gore famously gave a great concession speech, basically saying, “I disagree with what the court said, but I will accept what the court said.” And as Lieberman pointed out, that’s what the rule of law means. It means that even if you don’t like the outcome, you need to accept the outcome. Fight like hell, but know when to call it quits and to be able to just dust yourself off and fight again another day.
I think there is a distinction that’s probably worth pointing out, that Gore and Lieberman’s case is different from the Trump cases in that there wasn’t too much dispute over evidence in the Gore and Lieberman cases. We knew the circumstances around the ballots. There was a question around uniformity of the law as it was being applied in different counties in Florida. We had meaningful arguments on both sides that ultimately was resolved at the highest court in the land. Trump’s cases were largely frivolous. They were based on specious evidence, if it even existed at all. And it’s why very few of them even made it past the earliest phases of a trial. And it’s what makes the Trump cases so much more frustrating because to compare them to the Gore Lieberman situation, where you had the best attorneys in the land duking it out in courtrooms, working their way up ultimately into the Supreme Court, the Trump cases just weren’t the same.
We had certain instances that are probably worth pointing out, like Pennsylvania made changes to their law, that was a consent decree between the governor and the Secretary of State and that they have a partisan state supreme court. But by and large, the vast majority of the Trump cases were laughed out of the courtroom. And so it’s probably worth noting that there is that difference as well.
Kelli Pierce:
However, I do appreciate Senator Lieberman clarifying to the public that you do have legal recourse. You are allowed to do that. So even though I personally don’t think that former President Trump proved his cases in court, I do agree with Senator Lieberman that he does have a right to file those lawsuits. And I also think, pivoting to something else, when we’re talking about election misinformation, is that yelling fraud all the time really kind of lets people off the hook who are not running these modern campaigns or really don’t do the work to get out the vote.
Matt Germer:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And election misinformation is really pernicious because it’s playing to our partisan and tribal instincts as a people at a time when our emotions are the highest. Right? We have fear about the other side winning. We have anger if it seems like our side’s not going to win or that our lives might change in a way that we don’t like. And election-related … not just misinformation, there’s probably a distinction to be made here too. I apologize. I’m a nerd, so I’m going to go ahead and get nerdy on definitions.
Kelli Pierce:
It’s all right.
Matt Germer:
There’s a difference between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation, you could largely think of it as just wrong information. Disinformation comes with an element of intent. I’m sharing this wrong information in order to generate some kind of response from people, whether that’s to tell them, “Hey, the election date has actually moved, turn in your ballot next week.” That kind of thing that’s done to cause chaos is another level of wrong in this system. But it does happen. I mean, in 2020, we had all sorts of examples of misinformation and disinformation happening. On the disinformation level, we saw foreign actors monkeying in our elections. The Russians were posting flagrantly false news stories on social media, not caring that they were false because they were just trying to sow discord.
The Iranians were posing as American paramilitary members in sending threatening messages to people telling them not to vote. The Chinese became famous for creating fake accounts on social media and distributing misleading or false stories to make the U.S. seem incompetent or to make our election system seem untrustworthy. And federal authorities tried flagging a lot of the content. There’s good questions to ask about how much the federal authorities should be working hand in glove with social media, but I think even at some level, shooting it over to social media saying, “Hey, this account is a fake Chinese account trying to promote a false narrative. Just want to let you know in case this violates your terms of service,” is maybe a healthy practice.
Again, we could get into the details of exactly where the boundaries should lie on that, but we did see foreign actors, but we also saw just misinformation spreading in the United States. And the example of that that sticks out to me is something that became known as SharpieGate in Arizona in 2020. There were claims that some polling places were giving voters sharpies to fill out their ballots, that the sharpies were bleeding through the ballots and that those ballots were then being thrown out, and that this was being done intentionally in certain jurisdictions to invalidate Republican votes.
The truth of it, as the Arizona election officials tried to communicate, they’re just behind. You can’t always keep up with the tide. But they were trying to communicate that Sharpies were commonly used because they actually were preferred to regular pens. They didn’t smudge as easily. The ballots were designed recognizing that there might be believed through, so the machines were calibrated in a way to make sure the votes were counted properly, but it didn’t really matter. The bad story was out there, and then it continued to spread and people started sharing screenshots of a ballot tracking page on Arizona’s website that said that a vote was canceled. And then they blamed the Sharpies and said, “Look, I voted by Sharpie and now my ballot doesn’t count.”
But the truth was that the person who received that notice, they received a ballot in the mail, chose not to use it, went in person, submitted their ballot that way, so their mail ballot was properly canceled. That’s what that means. But the combination of rumors swirling, misinformation spreading, a screenshot without context being shared, it undercut trust in the election. And it became very difficult for the election officials in the area to keep up, to get the correct information out there.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you hear election misinformation, maybe a relative’s ranting on social media or something, it doesn’t really do anything. It’s absolutely protected by the First Amendment, in my opinion, even if they’re dead wrong. But we have to be honest, this has spiraled in certain cases to election workers getting threats.
Matt Germer:
It absolutely has. And it’s a shame because by and large election workers at our counties are folks who signed up to do a public service, either because they love voting and they love democracy, and they wanted to participate on that level, or because this is just a job that has always appealed to them, to help be a neutral arbiter of our election system. These are folks that should not be receiving death … I mean, no one should be receiving death threats, but these of all people should not be receiving death threats. They’re performing a vital public service and they’re doing it as best they possibly can.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah. I will end with this though, as far as the election counting going super long, someone had tweeted, our elections are now becoming like Hanukkah.
Matt Germer:
Eight crazy nights of ballot returns. Yeah, it’s become a real thing. And I’m very grateful at the moment that a number of states that are awful at producing quick results, California, chiefly among them, don’t matter to the national political narrative, but heaven help us if they ever do. We might be waiting around for two weeks for California to count their votes if they actually turn into a swing state. We need to write these things before those states matter because we never really know what state’s next. Who would’ve thought that Georgia or Arizona was going to be the next frontier, 10 years ago, as these election laws are being written? You always got to be prepared for political swings you don’t see coming.
[TRANSITION MUSIC PLAYS]
Shoshana Weissmann:
So I really like Matt’s nuance, especially because election policy really often is all yelling, and I think he brings it back down to earth in a more evidence-based calm approach that I think is really needed.
Kelli Pierce:
I’m so glad Matt stressed the importance of making space for honest questions because in my mind, we don’t get to confidence in our elections without it. And I remember when I moved to Utah, I was able to ask questions of one of the elections officers here, and he took me step by step on how Utah does elections. He didn’t treat me like an idiot. It was super interesting. I could ask any question I wanted, and it gave me such confidence in our system here. And that’s what I think we really need because you don’t get to better election rules and policies without that open, honest dialogue.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah. And I think you can have the best elections, but if people don’t believe that they’re run legitimately, if people don’t have confidence that it’s being run right, people aren’t going to respect the outcome, and that’s when pretty terrible stuff can happen. So it’s really, really critical to get right and to make people feel confident that their vote matters, so that they vote and that elections are legitimate. I mean, these things really, really matter.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely. And there’s something important that I didn’t get to with Matt, but I really want our audience to hear is, I once talked with a political consultant who genuinely believes that ballot harvesting leads to fraudulent votes, even though there’s never been a court case in his state. But his solution to his perceived problem was really interesting because he said, “Even if you think there’s a cheater around every corner, the solution is actually to vote because there’s a limit to how many ballots those cheaters can generate.” So if you think something’s wrong with your election, get your neighbors, friends, coworkers, people in your community to vote because those votes would override any funny business.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I love that perspective, and I think that that’s a really healthy one for skeptics to have.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely. So Shosh, now we’ve talked about election misinformation. Let’s talk about drugs.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yay. Drugs.
Kelli Pierce:
Okay, let’s take a break. Red Tape from our R Street. We’ll be right back.
[TRANSITION PLAYS]
Kelli Pierce:
Welcome back.
Shoshana Weissmann:
So Kelli, why did you want to bring on Stacey McKenna as the second guest for this episode? I’m not sure I really associate drugs with misinformation.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah. It’s a little out of the box, but stick with me for a second. I remember all the anti-smoking campaigns in my childhood. I went to every D.A.R.E. assembly and activity.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I didn’t have that in my school. I remember the T-shirts like Hot Topic had D.A.R.E. T-shirts, but what is it? What does it stand for?
Kelli Pierce:
It’s an acronym that stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. And what would happen is the police would come to our school, talking about how we shouldn’t use drugs, and this is an elementary school in a safe low-crime area. So it was quite a thing to have cops show up to your playground. It was just very, very bizarre. But by the time I got to high school, it was pretty obvious kids were using drugs. I recently saw research from Stacey and others who’ve pointed out that those anti-drug campaigns, they aren’t quite working. And I want to stress those D.A.R.E. campaigns, they have a great noble goal. They’re trying to get kids not to use drugs. That’s a good thing. But it’s fear-based campaigns like D.A.R.E. that don’t work. It’s misinformation that we’re spending a boatload of money on.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah. And communication matters. You got to know what your audience is going to respond well to, and they should be using evidence-based campaigns that have good outcomes.
Kelli Pierce:
You’re telling people the worst possible scenario to get them to stop, and it might have worked on a couple of kids. But the research isn’t quite there, and it’s making the goal of getting people off drugs that much harder.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I remember when I was 19 and I was drunk. As I did from time to time, I had a cigarette. And I’m like, “I don’t get it.” So it kind of took away the fear around it for me. But it’s kind of funny to think that somewhere in my subconscious, I was terribly afraid of it. And that’s not a great way either to set up kids. You want to make clear consequences, but you also don’t want to implant these super-deep fears that then they’re like, “Oh, this isn’t so bad.”
Kelli Pierce:
Because then some kid’s going to try something and they’ll be fine, and then they’ll not actually pay attention to your messaging. We want to keep you off that stuff. And we got to do it not by fear-based messaging, but by changing the conversation. So here’s my conversation with Stacey McKenna. I think as we start, we have to really address that there are some large, high-profile cities that are going through spikes in crime, and a lot of people attribute that to those city’s tolerance of illicit drugs. I can remember walking through San Francisco’s Union Square and just the changes in those neighborhoods and cities doesn’t seem like it’s for the better. Even one time my husband and I saw people shooting up in the street.
Stacey McKenna:
There are a couple of things that I think need to be addressed when we think about this and talk about this. One is that in cities like San Francisco in particular, what we’ve also seen is a massive growth in recent years in wealth inequalities. When people can’t afford to have homes in a city that maybe they’ve been living in for decades, all of a sudden, where do they end up? They end up unhoused. And what does that mean? That generally, especially in an urban environment, puts them in the public eye. So if it’s a person who’s using drugs who no longer has a home, they’re probably going to use drugs in a place where you can see them.
Kelli Pierce:
Why do people use drugs?
Stacey McKenna:
Oh, man. Why do people drink?
Kelli Pierce:
Because it’s social and it’s, you know, great.
Stacey McKenna:
So I think any explanation, any reason you can come up with for a reason someone might drink alcohol is going to be the same type of reason you’re going to see for most illicit drug use. Some people use because it’s fun and they just enjoy altering their consciousness. Some people use because they are using some sort of coping mechanism to deal with psychological trauma. Some people are using it really functionally. I spent a long time studying methamphetamine use, and I used meth for a long time. And one of the underlying motivating factors when I first started was I wanted to continue being a straight A student while riding horses 40 hours a week. I’m pretty introverted and shy, but I also wanted a normal teenage social life, to go out and about and feel confident. I also had an eating disorder that I had been grappling with. Meth was great, didn’t have to eat, didn’t have to sleep, and it made me want to go out there and be social.
So it was folks a lot of the time who had… One had started when she was driving trucks for a living. They needed to stay awake and alert to work long hours. And if we think about the… I could get into the history of meth forever, but we’ve used it historically for very functional purposes. Opioids, folks might have other reasons for using, sometimes it starts from chronic pain. We saw a lot of that with the rise in the Ox, I guess around Oxycontin. But with drugs, whether they’re legal or illegal, we see a number of different reasons from straight up recreation to emotional coping, to really, really functional use.
Kelli Pierce:
You have just an incredible story and just an incredible perspective that you can bring to this, and it does make me think that you can misuse legal drugs just as much as illicit.
Stacey McKenna:
Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely people who misuse alcohol. I recently saw a story that was starting to question the actual safety of constant caffeine consumption, and I didn’t read the whole thing, so I can’t speak to whether there really are health related issues associated with that. But I think the flip side is that there are also people who use illicit drugs in ways that we wouldn’t describe as problematic or chaotic or disordered if the drugs were not illegal.
Kelli Pierce:
That is an excellent point to make and something that people should really think about and take to heart when we’re talking about drug policy. This episode is a lot about lies and misrepresentations around the topic of drugs because there’s a lot. We could go on for days probably on this. But let’s kind of narrow our focus right now and start with fentanyl. It does seem like it’s mentioned daily as the main driver of overdoses. What actually is the drug and how are people using it? What’s the real story here?
Stacey McKenna:
Yeah. So fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. So what we’re usually accustomed to thinking about in terms of opiate drugs are things like heroin or morphine. Heroin is an opiate, which means it’s derived from natural substances. It’s derived originally from the poppy. Fentanyl is completely synthetic. So from start to finish, it’s lab produced. It’s a Schedule 2 substance under the Controlled Substances Act when it’s legal. So that means that it’s considered to have a high potential for abuse, but that it also has a well-accepted medical use. When I got my wisdom teeth pulled out, they gave me fentanyl, and a lot of us have probably had fentanyl in some shape or form.
Kelli Pierce:
Actually, when I had my son, one of the drugs they gave me was fentanyl. My epidural failed actually. When they said that they were going to use fentanyl, in my mind I went, “Oh my God,” because I’d heard all of the news stories. So I had this news anxiety, and like you said, actually has legitimate uses.
Stacey McKenna:
Yep, very legitimate uses. So it’s an analgesic and it works great, but obviously in those cases it’s being administered in a very controlled manner. People are taking a good look at dosing. They also know exactly what they’re administering. They have a controlled pharmaceutical supply that was tested, that was approved by the FDA. That makes a big difference.
What folks are using in the street… And I think before I move on, the catch with fentanyl that has really raised so much attention is that fentanyl is substantially more potent than heroin. I want to say it’s about 50 times, 5-0 times, more potent than heroin. So what that means is now when we shift from a medical setting to an illicit market, all of a sudden we started to see fentanyl making its way into the illicit drug supply in the United States in about 2013. But it didn’t just show up all at once. It started in the east, I want to say mostly in the northeast, but I’m honestly not a hundred percent sure because I do think Atlanta saw it very early, but it slowly started to make its way across the country.
This has to do with trafficking networks. It has to do with the types of drugs folks were using and the ease of mixing powdered fentanyl into those drugs. So like out west, people who use heroin are more likely to use black tar heroin, and it’s harder to mix a white powder into black tar than it is the China white that’s more commonly used on the east coast. But what started happening is Fentanyl started making its way into the illicit supply. Because it’s manufactured in labs and because it’s all synthetic, it’s much easier for folks in the illicit production side of things to make adaptations and adjustments, “Oh, we closed down this lab. I’ll just pop up another lab over here.”
Whereas in the context of working with something like heroin where you need a poppy field to begin with, right? If you destroy that poppy field, even if they were to move to another area and try again, it’s going to take a lot more time. So this shift to synthetic drugs has really allowed for, I guess, more innovation and creativity on the parts of the folks who are producing illicitly. Because we have these extremely strict laws in place around illicit drugs and opioids, we start to see manufacturers and traffickers are incentivized to look for something that’s more potent and therefore can be trafficked in smaller quantities, moved more easily and packaged in less identifiable ways.
I watched a shift in the market in Colorado around the time that they started to crack down on precursors for methamphetamine. Backyard cooks couldn’t get what they needed to cook anymore. So we started to see more and more crystal methamphetamine, which is much more potent, and that was being brought in by cartels. So whereas cartels hadn’t previously been major players, all of a sudden they were.
What happens with fentanyl is because it’s significantly more potent, and it just sort of started to show up in the supply in different places and at different times. It’s not like there was a big nationwide announcement that was, “Hey, 45% of your current heroin bag is probably fentanyl.” Nobody knows really what they’re buying. All of a sudden a shot that maybe would get someone high in the past or maybe get them well if they were just going through withdrawals and wanting to not be sick, all of a sudden that was a potentially much more dangerous injection because the supply is much more potent and they don’t know how much more potent.
Kelli Pierce:
I do want to ask you before we talk about drug policy, about this drug that’s getting a lot of press too, Xylazine. They say it rots people’s flesh, turns them into zombies. What’s the real story here?
Stacey McKenna:
Yeah. So Xylazine is a veterinary drug. It’s a sedative that’s often used in working on horses and other large animals. And in humans, it is associated with some additional scary problems. So because it’s a really strong sedative, especially when it’s mixed with opioids, it can increase the risk of overdose. Naloxone does not work on it, not because it’s resistant to Naloxone as some folks say, but because it’s simply not an opioid, and Naloxone is an opioid antagonist, so it stops opioid activity. It doesn’t work on Xylazine because Xylazine is not an opioid. That said, if you think a person has overdosed and it potentially involves xylazine, that does not mean don’t administer Naloxone. If there were opioids involved, which there probably were, Naloxone will still help. They just won’t reverse the xylazine part of the overdose.
There are some indications that it does cause flesh like tissue damage and wounds to a much greater extent. They’re more severe and harder to heal than the ones that are associated with other injection drug use, especially if people miss a vein or something like that. Now, is that guaranteed? No. Are there things people can do to stay safer? Absolutely, yes. The National Harm Reduction Coalition in particular has an amazing fact sheet that gives all kinds of safety tips for folks who suspect that Xylazine might be in their supply. Part of the reason we see Xylazine in the supply right now is because it gives Fentanyl what’s colloquially called is legs. So fentanyl is very short-lived. So if I inject or smoke fentanyl, my high might last half hour, an hour, and I might start to feel withdrawals within two or three hours. Heroin lasted much longer. So folks, all of a sudden, they’re starting to get sick much more frequently than they might have in the past if they’re chronically using Fentanyl.
Xylazine, when it’s added to the Fentanyl supply, staves those withdrawals off a little bit. So it actually keeps people from getting sick so quickly, it enables them to feel the enjoyable desired effects of the Fentanyl for a little bit longer. So it’s not in there with the aim of poisoning people. It’s in there for a purpose. And that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have risks associated with it. It absolutely does. But right now, the last thing we need to do is be over exaggerating those risks because we actually want folks to feel like they can turn to trusted sources to find out how to stay safer and how to stay alive.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, absolutely. And it gets me to thinking about the fear campaigns, like when I was a kid, this is your brain on drugs campaign, the egg in the frying pan and stuff. I think a lot of people when they see that their loved ones or even people that they pass in the street are suffering from addiction, they want to have these strong fear campaigns to maybe get people to stop using. Is that effective at all?
Stacey McKenna:
Not particularly, no. For the most part, fear-based anti-drug messaging doesn’t really do anything to reduce new users or to keep current users from continuing. Around 2007, 2008, we started to see all of these anti-methamphetamine billboards pop up all over northern Colorado, and they were part of the Montana Meth Project’s Not Even Once campaign. The basis of it might be self-explanatory, but don’t use meth even one time or this is going to happen to you. So they were pictures of zombies essentially. They were pictures of worst case scenarios. A lot of really disgusting bathroom stalls with text that read something like, “You don’t want to lose your virginity here.” Things like that implying all of the worst case scenario stuff that could happen if you used methamphetamine.
I was super fascinated by this campaign in part because I had used meth myself for six years or something like that, and I had never in that time seen anybody who looked like that. And I used almost daily for several years of that, and most of my friends for a lot of it, we were all college students. We all got really good grades. We moved on to have good careers. Our worlds were fairly well-rounded even while we were using and included going to school, getting good grades, having oftentimes full-time jobs while going to school. One of the perks of using a stimulant. And I had just never seen people with teeth just crumbling in their mouths because of methamphetamine use. At the end of the day, I’m an anthropologist, I’m a scholar, I’m a curious person. My response to those ads was a little bit, “What the…” But it was also, “Wow, what was so different about my experience? Why didn’t I see that, if this is what’s going to happen?” I decided to start really analyzing media, and I started looking deeply into those campaigns. And then I wanted to talk to people who used methamphetamine to see how they were affected by the campaigns. And two things came from that research and fits into the bigger body of data that we have on fear-based messaging.
Two findings were really powerful. The first is that most fear-based messaging is at best a complete exaggeration, like a gross exaggeration. Because of that, it can undermine trust. For example, one of my young participants had seen the campaigns before they ever started. And so she was like 18, I think 18 or 19 when I met her, and she had started using at the height of when the campaigns were happening. I talked to her a little bit about it and I was like, “Did these ads not affect how you felt about meth?” And she was like, “Oh, no.” She’s like, “I totally thought that I was going to see people who looked like that. And then I went with a friend and we met someone and we went to a room where a lot of people were using meth and nobody looked like that.And all of a sudden I was like, they’re just lying to me. Why would I believe any of these? Because it’s not what you really see in life.”
And what they’ve actually found is that some of these campaigns, because the messaging is so over the top, they can actually make teens in particular skeptical and a little more curious about the substances that they’re trying to keep them from using. When they start to do quantitative studies, what they find is that in general, the campaigns don’t really have much of any effect. They don’t increase use, they don’t decrease use. They just tend not to have an effect at a population level. The second piece that is really disturbing is the potential to perpetuate stigma.
Creating this idea that all people who use drug X are horrible people, are dangerous people. What we see is that it makes people want to hide more. It reduces their likelihood of seeking treatment. It reduces their ability or likelihood to reach out for other resources that might help keep them healthier, safer, and more stable members of our society. The minute we start to tell people, “You’re not part of our society because we are making an assumption about you, not based on your actual behavior, but based on what we think that could mean,” we’re pushing them out of society and we are not really giving them space to participate and take care of themselves even if they want to.
Kelli Pierce:
I also want to touch on this idea that has been floating around, especially Twitter. I know Twitter isn’t real life, but it can drive the conversation and Twitter sometimes blames or people who use Twitter to be more accurate, blames harm reduction policies on our drug problem. Is that correct or is it factoring in any way?
Stacey McKenna:
No. One of the amazing things about harm reduction in 2023 is that it’s been an official movement since the eighties. We have decades of research on programs like syringe services. If we look internationally, we have decades of research on overdose prevention centers. And what we find is that harm reduction is one of the most cost-effective, cost saving, public health interventions that has ever been deployed, and it saves lives. We also see consistently over and over and over again in different environments that it does not lead to increases in drug use. In fact, when communities have treatment available to people… And I use that as a caveat because connecting people to treatment when they don’t have evidence-based treatment available is pointless. But when communities have treatment available, people who use programs like syringe services are four to five times more likely to engage in recovery and reduce or abstain from using illicit substances for significantly longer than folks who aren’t using those services. Harm reduction has the opposite effect of what a lot of folks think.
Kelli Pierce:
And for those who may not remember, we talked about harm reduction with Mazen Saleh on an earlier podcast, but what is harm reduction?
Stacey McKenna:
Simply put, harm reduction is a set of tools, interventions, information, that help folks who are engaging in potentially risky behaviors protect themselves from those risks and empowers them to make more health positive decisions. If we take it really broadly, we probably engage in some sort of harm reduction every day if we get in the car and put on a seatbelt, throw a bike helmet on before pedaling down to the bar, whatever. It’s a really familiar concept, but it’s one that maybe people don’t think about as applying to these other issues.
Kelli Pierce:
What do you say to people who maybe their neighborhoods have been upended by crime? How do you tell them, “Hey, look, we need to not buy into the lies, but instead work towards a better tomorrow, which might be different from what you think it is?”
Stacey McKenna:
The first thing I would say is, “How is your community, your city, your neighborhood, not meeting the needs of the people who live there?” Because at the end of the day, if some of the people are having all of their needs met and then a huge proportion of the population is having none of their needs met, that’s what seems to be driving a lot of the issues that often get blamed on drugs. The other piece of all of this is we spend a lot of time as a society talking about how to stop the supply, how to change the supply. But the other piece of that is that right now there are a lot of people who are struggling with substance abuse disorder. Not everyone who uses has it. Lots of people use recreationally or functionally, but that doesn’t discount the fact that millions of people in the US do have a substance use disorder and are using in a way that is not good for their health.
And oftentimes that they don’t want to be using in that way. Either they want to find a way to manage their use or they do want to quit, but we have a really inadequate treatment infrastructure. We don’t do nearly enough to support and facilitate access to medications for opioid use disorder. I think that’s the other piece of this. We can talk all day long about what do we do about the supply. We can talk all day long about what do we do about trying to keep people from starting to begin with, but then what do we do with the millions of people who are using in a way that maybe they don’t want to be using? And we actually do have some evidence-based answers out there, especially when it comes to opioids, and we need to make it more available.
Kelli Pierce:
And stop the fear and shame, definitely.
Stacey McKenna:
And stop the fear and shame, 100%.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I actually never knew that Stacey had used drugs and why she did until really recently. And I know it’s a thing that some overachievers turn to drugs to stay awake and do more. And as someone who does way too much and would love to stay awake more, I can understand how that happens. I would never, my body would fall apart. I have enough diseases and problems, I don’t need to add anything else into the mix. But that hit home. And also to bring it back to South Park, there’s a great episode where the kids are warned about trying marijuana, and then there’s like your future self. Well, this is what’ll happen to you if you try marijuana. And then at the end, Stan has this great monologue about if you just talk to me and explain the problems with it and why this stuff is bad, I would’ve understood more. And it really hits to the same point we’re getting at Kelli.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely. As we say on our street, all roads lead to South Park. That was a phenomenal episode, and I love the same part where Stan’s basically telling the parents, just be honest about what these drugs do and why it’s not good for you to use. You don’t have to go through this huge production. And so that’s something that we need to avoid. And with all this misinformation about what these drugs do, it’s not surprising that people are attracted to this stuff because they don’t want their loved ones to do drugs. But the question is how do you help someone quit? How do you help someone not start? And I’ve asked Stacy afterward, why did you stop using meth? And her answer was super interesting. She had tried quitting a few times when she was living in LA, but she’d kind of get pulled back because of work going to a party.
Then she moved to New York City, and at the time she was there, meth really wasn’t a thing, especially in her social circle. And the handful of times she did use it there. She had a full-time job, but it was no longer fun. And she told me, there’s pretty decent literature on this topic. It’s referred to as aging out, and it’s really how the majority of people who use drugs quit. They have other life priorities and obligations. They start to take precedent. You have a different social network. Geographic changes, a support system, that can make people quit. Also, other people who have struggled with addiction before have said, I had an addictive personality, so I started to get addicted to something else, just something healthier like exercise. And all this to say is that if we want to help people who are struggling with things like Fentanyl or who are interested in Xylazine or why is this in the drug supply, we have to be honest and look at what works and use those tools, not ones that are ineffective.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I don’t think I could say it better myself.
[TRANSITION PLAYS]
Kelli Pierce:
Well, we survived the DARE Assembly and we made it to the end of the episode, Shosh. Do you feel more informed on what we can do about misinformation and fake news?
Shoshana Weissmann:
Yeah, I like thinking about the election angle and the drug angle because I think they’re both really unique angles and people aren’t always thinking about with misinformation, so I really liked it. What’s on the next episode?
Kelli Pierce:
We’re going to go in a completely different direction because on the next episode I’m going to be speaking with you because it’s all about one of your favorite laws, Section 230.
Shoshana Weissmann:
It might be my favorite law. How weird is that?
Kelli Pierce:
Well, knowing you for as long as I have now, I’m not weirded out, but maybe the first time I saw your tweets, I was a little bit like, “What is this?”
Shoshana Weissmann:
It takes time to get used to me, but I’m just honored to be able to be your co-host and your guest on the next show.
Kelli Pierce:
I know, I’m super excited. And for those of you who aren’t policy nerds like us, Section 230 is really why we have the internet. I’ll also be speaking with Josh Withrow. He’s a resident senior fellow at R Street who focuses on technology and innovation, and we’re going to be talking about how to protect kids online.
Shoshana Weissmann:
That sounds like fun, or at least my kind of fun, which is not fun for a lot of people. Until next time.
Kelli Pierce:
Until next time. See you then, Shosh. Red Tape is produced by R Street in partnership with Pod People.
Shoshana Weissmann:
To learn more about the work we’re doing at R Street, follow us on LinkedIn and on Twitter, and our Twitter is @RSI.
Kelli Pierce:
And for more resources and information on the topics we explore today, you can check out rstreet.org.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Also, if you’ve enjoyed listening to today’s episode, the best thing you can do is share a Red Tape with a friend or an enemy.
Kelli Pierce:
And if you’re an overachiever, please leave a glowing review and rate us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help us introduce the show to new listeners.
Shoshana Weissmann:
I’m Shoshana Weissmann.
Kelli Pierce:
I’m Kelli Pierce.
Shoshana Weissmann:
Thanks for listening.
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