Science
Deaths from drug overdoses plateaued in L.A. County in 2023 after years of increases
Deaths from drug overdoses and poisoning reached a plateau last year in Los Angeles County — the first time in a decade that such fatalities had not continued a year-over-year rise, public health officials said.
Across L.A. County, 3,092 lives were lost to drug overdoses or poisoning in 2023, a slight decline from 3,220 deaths the year before, according to a newly updated report. County officials welcomed the change after years of devastating increases in overdose deaths but said much work remains to be done to save lives.
Dr. Gary Tsai, director of the substance abuse prevention and control division at the L.A. County Department of Public Health, said that as the county has pushed to expand treatment, prevention and harm reduction efforts, “we’re excited to see the progress, but also recognize that it’s not a win.”
“We’re still in the worst overdose crisis in history,” Tsai said. Still, he said, the new numbers could at least disrupt the “sense of inevitability that comes with trend lines that don’t seem to ever change.”
Earlier this year, L.A. County officials said they were relieved to see that the rate of deadly overdoses had stopped surging among unhoused people in 2022. Health officials credited a dramatic increase in community distribution of naloxone, a medication that can rescue people from an opioid overdose.
The flattening numbers also echo early estimates on the national level, which showed that overdose deaths had fallen slightly last year in the U.S. Experts have cautioned against declaring victory, however.
“It’s too early to tell,” said Dr. David Goodman-Meza, an overdose researcher in L.A. County who works with Wellness Equity Alliance. “On an optimistic side, we would hope that this flattening is related to all the harm reduction activities that we’ve been undertaking” in L.A. County and nationwide, such as handing out more naloxone, as well as making it easier to access medications that help people shake off addiction.
But in the past, the U.S. has seen deadly overdoses dip one year, only to resurge. “It’s hard to know at this point if we’re in the eye of the storm,” Goodman-Meza said.
As drug-related deaths have slowed nationally, health researchers have also raised the grim possibility that fentanyl has had such a devastating effect that there are fewer people remaining to be killed.
Fentanyl and methamphetamine have both played a fatal role in drug deaths in L.A. County, with many overdoses involving a mixture of drugs. The updated analysis from the L.A. County Department of Public Health focused specifically on the toll of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that has caused a skyrocketing number of deaths in the county — rising from 109 to 1,970 fatalities between 2016 and 2023.
Among the other findings:
- Death rates from fentanyl dropped for young adults ages 18 to 25 for the second year in a row but continued rising for other age groups, particularly adults ages 26 to 39. Tsai said one possible reason is that for younger people, it may be easier to avoid risky decisions before they have started using drugs regularly. “For them, the decision may be, ‘OK, there’s this bowl of pills at this party I’m at — I’m not going to do it,’” Tsai said. “It’s easier to hold back on that than someone who’s been using methamphetamine for the past 20 years trying to avoid fentanyl-tainted drugs.”
- There is a growing gap in the mortality rate from fentanyl overdoses between Black and white residents: The death rate from fentanyl continued to grow for Black residents of L.A. County, hitting a point roughly twice as high as that among white residents, whose mortality rate from fentanyl fell slightly last year. “We’re beginning to sort of bend the curve in the right way on overdose deaths, but not for everybody,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of population and public health sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. Harm reduction has had “a historic challenge in consistently reaching Black communities,” he said. In the past, Bluthenthal and fellow researchers found that in L.A. and San Francisco, Black and Latino people were less likely to have received naloxone than white people. In light of the widening gap, he said, the question in L.A. County should be, “What can we be doing different that’s going to make sure that Black folks who are using fentanyl have naloxone readily available to them?”
- Latino residents also saw a rising rate of fentanyl-related deaths. Although their rate remained lower than that of white people in L.A. County, the increase drove the number of Latinos in L.A. County who died from fentanyl above the number of white residents killed by fentanyl for the first time, public health officials said.
- Although fentanyl has taken lives in rich neighborhoods and poor ones, the death rate from fentanyl was at least twice as high in the poorest areas of L.A. County than in areas with lower poverty. The rate of fentanyl deaths continued to surge in the poorest parts of the county. The report also divided L.A. County into geographic regions and found that the rate of fentanyl-related deaths has been starkest in its “Metro” region, which spans from Eastside neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights and El Sereno to West Hollywood and includes downtown L.A., Westlake and Hollywood.
Nearly a year ago, I scribbled “Replace Brita filter” on my to-do list. But the errand perpetually fell by the wayside. There were so many more pressing tasks to complete.
“Oh, it’s fine,” I thought. “How bad can it be?”
Let’s just say that a day into reporting this story, I ran out to the market and bought a three-pack.
We reach for our water taps more than almost any other object in our homes — to brush our teeth, wash our faces, make coffee or tea in the morning. To cook meals, rinse dishes and wipe countertops. To water the plants, do laundry and fill our pets’ bowls. To shower and shave. And most often for a drink.
In L.A., water rules everything around us. Drink up, cool off and dive into our stories about hydrating and recreating in the city.
But how much do you really know about what’s in your tap water? And if you filter it, are you using the right technology? Many of us may not be fully aware of where our water even comes from.
That’s because the water that flows into our homes in the L.A. area can be surprisingly different, ZIP Code to ZIP Code. The level of arsenic found in Compton’s tap water may differ wildly from that found in Glendale. Malibu’s tap water may have more hexavalent chromium while Pasadena’s doesn’t have any. One tap does not fit all.
“Where you are, the location, it really makes a difference in your water quality,” said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy group focusing on environmental health.
We went to the source, so to speak — experts in the realms of science, academia and water filtration — to help you navigate the often complicated, ever-fluid world of residential tap water, so that you can make smarter and more informed choices about how to purify your H20.
L.A.’s water sources | Federal and state protections | Determining your water quality | How to test | How to filter | The bare minimum
L.A.’s water sources
Like most major cities, the Greater Los Angeles area is served by a dizzying number of community water systems. In California, there are 2,913 of them to serve about 39.025 million people — and those are just the larger ones that operate year-round, according to the EWG’s Tap Water Database.
Each utility company treats the water in its assigned municipality differently before it flows through consumers’ faucets. That’s because each draws from different water sources. One area’s tap may be coming from rivers and lakes (otherwise categorized as “surface water”) while another’s could be pumped from wells from beneath layers of rock and sediment (categorized as “groundwater”).
Depending on where the water travels, it may pick up different undesirable contaminants. Surface water, for example, could have runoff that includes nitrate used to fertilize land in agricultural areas. Groundwater could have naturally occurring chemical elements, such as arsenic, that come from bedrock.
More often than not, L.A. area tap water comes from a mix of these sources. Our utility companies draw from different aqueducts, those large, often concrete ditches or canals that extend from the source to the water treatment plant. From there it flows through pipes, underground, to your home.
In 2023, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power — which serves about 4 million people throughout the city of Los Angeles — sourced its tap water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the California Aqueduct and the Colorado River Aqueduct as well as from local groundwater, according to its most recent drinking water quality report.
The specific geographic location of a water source also determines what ends up in your tap water. A lake near a highly industrial area risks containing more pollutants than water coming from a lake in the High Sierras.
Another reason the water might be different between ZIP Codes: Utility companies have different resources at their disposal.
“The size of the drinking water system can be an indicator of the drinking water quality,” Stoiber said. “It’s based on economy of scale. The larger ones have more resources for treatment. Smaller systems can be at a bit more of an economic disadvantage.”
Federal and state water protections
There are federal regulations that require utility companies to stay below maximum contaminant levels for more than 90 pollutants in drinking water. They’re also required to publish an annual consumer confidence report with information about contaminant levels and water sources.
“But many of our drinking water regulations were set in the ’70s and ’80 and are not as protective as they should be,” Stoiber said. “There are contaminants in your drinking water that don’t have regulations around them.”
How harmful these contaminants are, and how much you’d have to ingest over time to affect your health, is contested. But in general, however many pollutants you might find in L.A.’s tap water, there are not enough to make you seriously ill in one gulp.
Some good news: In April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized new regulations around a family of about 15,000 chemicals known as PFAS. They’re often referred to as the “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. California also voted in April to finalize a limit for hexavalent chromium, or “Chrome 6,” which many people know as the carcinogenic chemical that the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. contaminated residents’ groundwater with, from 1952 to 1966, in Hinkley, Calif. — the legal upshot of which was depicted in the film “Erin Brockovich.” But those changes won’t be immediate.
“Upgrading water treatment plants is expensive and takes years,” said USC’s Daniel McCurry, who researches water supply and treatment. “Most smaller utilities, especially, just won’t have the money to make the upgrades in the initial time frame.”
2027, McCurry notes, is the deadline for utilities to complete their “initial monitoring” before the new regulations for PFAS go into effect in 2029.
(Henry Hargreaves / For The Times)
How to determine your water quality
So where to start? It’s easier than it might seem. First, search for your consumer confidence report on your utility company’s website. You can then cross-reference that information with EWG’s free Tap Water Database, which allows you to type in your ZIP Code (look for the prompt “Is your water safe?”). It then will populate your water utility company and the number of people it serves. From there, you can click on “View Utility” to produce an easy-to-decipher report listing the source of your water and contaminants detected in it.
When I typed my own Silver Lake ZIP Code in for a water quality analysis, the results did not put me at ease. It listed nine contaminants detected in my water, among them bromate and uranium. Some of these were found at levels that far exceeded the standards of the EWG but were still below the legal limit.
I called the LADWP to make sense of what I’ve found.
“There’s no health concern,” LADWP’s director of water quality, Jonathan Leung, said of my findings, stressing that the contaminants were far below the federally mandated legal limit. “That’s where, collectively, all the toxicologists and water quality specialists and scientists have worked together to set national standards. As a water quality utility, that’s what we set our sights on. The public should take confidence that the legal limits are protective of public health — and we strive to do better than that.”
McCurry added that the EWG and EPA have different standards for the amount of contaminants found in water.
“When the EPA sets a water contaminant limit, it’s a balance between protecting public health while staying realistic about the treatment technology we have and how much it costs,” McCurry said. “Everyone’s perception or tolerance of risk is different, but for me, personally, I drink water straight from the tap and don’t worry about it. It’s very unlikely you’ll get sick from tap water, assuming the tap water meets federal regulations.”
How to test your water at home
Whatever your personal tolerance level, you can improve both the quality and taste of your tap water by choosing the right filter, experts say.
But, given the array of filtration products and techniques on the market, that’s easier said than done. Choosing from options like “ion-exchange demineralization,” “ultraviolet sterilization” and “chemical feed pumps” can be intimidating.
Take a breath. Then step back. Filtering should be a tailored approach, said Brian Campbell, founder of Water Filter Guru, which lab-tests and reports on residential water treatment methods and products.
“There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all water treatment solution,” Campbell said.
He added that even after reading utility consumer reports and nonprofit chemical analyses, you still may need to know more.
“[Those reports] will give you a general sense but not the whole picture, Campbell said. “Because water can be recontaminated after it leaves the treatment plant — like if your home has old plumbing with lead piping. But it’s a start.”
You can test your home’s water quality yourself using fairly affordable water test strips, available for about $15 in stores such as Home Depot. These, Campbell said, will “give you an indication of a handful of the most common 12 to 15 contaminants like lead, arsenic, chromium, nitrate possibly.” However it will only give you a range of those aforementioned contaminants, not the exact concentration in your water.
If you want specific information about the chemical levels, you can run a more in-depth test. The best way to do that, Campbell said, is through a certified lab, where the cost ranges from roughly $100 to more than $1,000 depending on how comprehensive you want to get.
How to choose a filter
Once you know what’s in your water, you’ll be able to choose the right filter technology to treat it, Campbell said. Here’s what he suggests using for some of the most common issues.
PFAS. This is the family of about 15,000 chemicals used for their water repellent and oil repellent properties, such as in nonstick pans or fast food packaging. “The most studied filtration method for this is activated carbon adsorption,” Campbell said. “It’s the most common technology used in pitcher filtration. Even the most simple water pitcher filters should theoretically reduce PFAS.” Reverse osmosis filtration systems also will address PFAS — it’s one of the most thorough techniques and includes activated carbon as one of its stages. Historically, these pricy systems were installed directly into sink pipes, but countertop versions now are available for renters.
Microplastics. “They get into the environment and break down into smaller and smaller pieces — so small you’d need a microscope to see them,” Campbell said. The best technique to address those — because they are suspended particles, floating in the water and not dissolved — is mechanical filtration, he said. The technology removes suspended particles, like pipe rust or sand and grit coming from a hot water heater. Reverse osmosis also would work. Distillation would be effective as well and is, per Campbell, one of the best to get rid of nearly all common contaminants. But, Campbell warned, “It requires a massive amount of energy and time to treat and distill a relatively small volume of water — so not the most practical.”
Disinfection byproducts. This is a group of chemicals created when common water disinfectants — typically chlorine — interact with organic matter (such as dirt or rust) that’s already present in the pipes that run from the distribution plant to your home or office, Campbell said. “Activated carbon adsorption is the best way to deal with this. Reverse osmosis will also deal with them because a component of that [technique] is activated carbon.”
Pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer. “This is more of an issue in agricultural areas,” Campbell said. Typically, he added, they can be treated using activated carbon and reverse osmosis.
Fluoride. Tap water is fluoridated in many areas because of its dental health benefits. But recent research suggests that prenatal exposure to fluoride may be linked to increased risk of neurobehavioral problems in children at age 3. “Reverse osmosis would be the best treatment for this, but there are a few adsorption media that can reduce fluoride, like a filter using bone char carbon (activated carbon that comes from animal bones) or a filter using activated alumina media, another adsorption media,” said Campbell.
Heavy metals. Lead is obviously the most infamous heavy metal water contaminant, but consumers also should watch out for arsenic (primarily from groundwater) and chromium 6 (which comes from industrial manufacturing). “Typically, for metals, reverse osmosis is the best option,” said Campbell. “Activated carbon works for chromium 6 but not for arsenic. Distillation, again, gets rid of everything but it’s not practical.”
Hard water. Hard water is caused by mineral buildup, which isn’t bad for your health but can create limescale on appliances like your water heater. It also can affect your beauty routine. “Soap doesn’t lather as well with hard water,” said Campbell. “Your hair might feel brittle and it can irritate skin issues like eczema.” He recommends treating the issue at the water point of entry to the home with cation exchange resin, a type of ion exchange.
The best way to know if a product is actually capable of doing what it claims to do, Campbell said, is to look up its performance certifications. “You can do that in databases through the Water Quality Assn., the National Sanitation Foundation and the International Assn. of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials.”
The bare minimum
If nothing else, Stoiber urged consumers to peruse the EWG’s guide to countertop filters — and to purchase one.
Though McCurry is content drinking from the tap, he agreed it couldn’t hurt. “If you have reason to believe there are, say, PFAS above the future regulation target, then yeah, get a Brita filter,” he said.
Needless to say, that task is no longer on my to-do list.
You made it , longer than about percent of readers so far.
The Painting
As you may recall, the painting you just spent time with is “Nocturne in Blue and Silver,” by the American artist James McNeill Whistler. (You may be familiar with one of Whistler’s more famous paintings — a portrait of his mother.)
The one you just spent time with currently hangs on the second floor of the Harvard Art Museums:
Lauren O’Neil for The New York Times
The painting, part of a series that Whistler started in the late 1860s, shows the industrial banks of the River Thames in London in hazy blue tones.
In an 1885 lecture on the interaction between nature and the artist, Whistler spoke of the transition from day to night, “when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night.”
That mark we just saw is Whistler’s “signature,” and we see a version of it in many of his paintings. It is derived from the form of a butterfly; he iterated on the symbol throughout his life.
And the second reflection? Well, this is where things get fun. You may crave a definitive answer, but the painting itself doesn’t really provide one.
Kate Smith, a senior conservator of paintings and head of the paintings lab at the Harvard Art Museums, has looked at infrared photographs of the painting. She has a theory of her own.
She believes Whistler may have started the painting one way and then simply changed his mind, flipped the panel upside down and started over.
Ms. Smith explained that this mystery reflection could be what’s called a pentimento — a change to a piece of art that slowly emerges over time. It’s possible that when this painting was finished, this reflection wasn’t there — by design. It may have emerged only decades later.
Or Whistler may have intentionally left the ghostly reflection in for us to see. He described the paintings in this series as arrangements of “line, form and color first.” Once, he was asked to confirm if figures in another painting were people. He wouldn’t say one way or another.
“They are just what you like,” he said.
(If you want, look again now that you know more.)
The Point
This painting was well suited as a subject of our experiment: It has mysteries revealed upon close inspection. But the point of the exercise was not exactly for you to notice the mysteries. It was just to get you to notice at all.
The act of focusing is both possible and valuable, researchers say, no matter how intimidating or pointless it might seem. That’s particularly important in a world where typical office workers spend an average of less than a minute at a time on any one screen, according to research by Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Attention Span.”
When you’re used to a manic social media feed, “it’s hard to pay attention to content that doesn’t change,” she said.
Think again about the time you spent looking at the painting.
At first, you may have felt that it was too dull to hold your interest for even 10 seconds, much less 10 minutes.
When Professor Roberts at Harvard first conceived of this assignment — the three-hour version — she saw it as a launching point to help students write an art history research paper. But these days she also sees it as a way to teach patience. (She recommended this Whistler painting for our exercise.)
Many of her students, she says, react to the assignment with “horror.” (This may have happened to you, too.)
“It’s a combination of, ‘Oh, my God, that’s impossible,’” she said. “And also at the same time, the sense that it’s remedial.”
But they usually find the experience, as you may have, neither too difficult nor too simple. The students see that they did not notice everything worth seeing in the painting at first glance, she said. And they find that by being a little bored, and a little outside their comfort zone, they can see something new.
If you liked the way you felt, try the exercise again with any piece of art. Or, if you’re feeling bolder, print out Professor Roberts’s original assignment. Then go to a museum, pick a work of art and settle in.
Consider also a song, or a poem. Or skip art altogether.
“You can just go look at a tree,” she said. “You can look at a rock.”
Your attention is a product of a lot of things, said Professor Mark, not all of which are in your power. But a little practice can help. “We do many behaviors that are automatic,” she said. “Becoming aware of such automatic behaviors is a skill, and we can then better control where we place our attention.”
And with that skill honed, you may linger more, and better.
Temperatures on Venus hover around 870 degrees, but the second-closest planet to the sun got a little bit cooler recently when NASA showered it with Missy Elliott’s hit song “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).”
The feat took place at 10:05 a.m. July 12, when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge beamed the song via a 112-foot-wide radio dish antenna near Barstow, Calif.
The signal crossed the solar system at the speed of light, covering a distance of about 158 million miles in just 14 minutes.
The transmitter, which is coincidentally also named Venus, is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN. The network is an array of radio antennas that’s used to track, send commands and receive scientific data from spacecraft headed to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system.
NASA catapulted Elliott, who released the song on July 15, 1997, into the record books. It was the first hip-hop track, and only the second song ever, that NASA has radioed into space. The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” was the first.
The “Evening Star” — which is also known as the “Morning Star” when visible at sunrise — is the artist’s favorite planet.
“I still can’t believe I’m going out of this world with NASA through the Deep Space Network when ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ becomes the first ever hip-hop song to transmit to space!” Elliott said in a NASA statement ahead of the event. “I chose Venus because it symbolizes strength, beauty, and empowerment and I am so humbled to have the opportunity to share my art and my message with the universe!”
NASA’s collaboration with the futuristic artist arises as the agency prepares for two upcoming, uncrewed Venus missions aimed at gathering data about the mysterious planet, where an atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid create unlivable conditions for Earthlings.
The partnership is fitting because “both space exploration and Missy Elliott’s art have been about pushing boundaries,” said NASA spokeswoman Brittany Brown, who initially reached out to Elliott’s team.
The interplanetary music drop took place on the second night of Elliott’s swing through Los Angeles on her space-themed “Out of This World” Tour at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, the first headlining tour of her three-decade career. And it came days after the famous Cancer treated fans to a free party in downtown L.A. to celebrate her birthday — complete with an air show in which choreographed drones took the shape of her face as well as a flying saucer.
Opening the concert for Elliott were longtime producing partner Timbaland, the rapper Busta Rhymes and singer Ciara.
The “Get Ur Freak On” singer wowed fans again with dancers in glow-in-the-dark costumes, projections of spaceships and an animation of Elliott dressed as an astronaut and grinning as she glides through the cosmos. Fans were given wristbands with remote-controlled lights that flickered like stars to the beat.
At the close of the show, Elliott was lifted by a hydraulic riser with jets of smoke streaming around her, as if she were ascending to the heavens in the mother ship.
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