A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (24 page)

Singleton’s frustration returned.

“He’s looking at possibly a year at the maximum,” the agent said.

“Uh-huh.”

“An obstruction of justice charge is a felony. An obstruction of justice is when you have information and you don’t provide that information.”

“I’m telling you honestly like everything that I know.”

The investigators turned their attention to before the crash. “So before the accident were you two texting back and forth to each other?” Olsen asked.

“I guess, if it says we were.”

“It shows 6:17 in the morning and there’s eleven texts.”

“So I guess we were, yeah,” Briana answered.

The investigators could see there would be no grand admission, beyond Briana acknowledging the existence of the call records. She wasn’t going to say that Reggie admitted to her what he’d been doing, or that he’d been doing it at the exact time of the wreck. At that point in the interview, Briana’s manager interrupted and asked how much longer the interview would take. The investigators began to wind down. They had a few more questions. Singleton asked Briana about a phone call that took place just a week earlier, the night before their previous interview of her. He had gotten the phone records and he could see that Briana and Reggie had spoken. He wanted to know if Reggie had coached her.

“Did he give you any indication of how to answer questions or don’t tell them this or that?”

“No, he never said that. He just said like answer honestly is all he said. I don’t think he’s trying to hide anything.”

Singleton left disappointed. He knew the prosecutors were on the fence, at best, about charging Reggie with negligent homicide. It would’ve helped if Briana could have said something to the effect that Reggie had confessed culpability, or said something about texting, or even coached her to obstruct the investigation. “I was hoping there would be some kind of smoking gun. But it didn’t exist.”

ON JUNE 11, MARY
Jane called Bunderson and told him that Reggie was planning to leave in ten days for the Mission Training Center, then on to Winnipeg. Bunderson put in a message to Michael Glauser, the attorney for the Church, seeking guidance. Reggie was on his way.

CHAPTER 23

THE LAWMAKERS

I
N MAY OF 2007
, as Singleton hunted for answers, the governor of the state of Washington, Christine Gregoire, signed into effect the first state law banning texting while driving. She was, according to the
Seattle Times
, “flanked by children who suffered serious injuries after being hit by drivers.”

The article noted that the texting ban, which would go into effect the following January, would carry a $101 fine for violators, while a second measure, also signed by the governor, would ban motorists from using a handheld phone. That law would go into effect in July 2008.

Across the country, legislators were grappling with whether to regulate cell phone use by drivers. The most intriguing battle had gone on in California. There, a state legislator named Joe Simitian, whose district included Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, had been nearly beside himself since 2001 as he battled the cell phone industry over a proposed ban on handheld phone use by drivers.

When he’d first introduced legislation, he stood in front of a legislative committee and explained that all he was asking for was to codify into law something that, he said, the cell phone companies already acknowledged: Using a handheld cell phone while driving was dangerous.

For instance, in an early hearing at the statehouse, in April 2001, Simitian, a Democratic assemblyman (later elected to the state senate), read from Sprint’s own marketing materials. “When using your Sprint PCS phone in the car, focus on driving, not talking, and use your hands-free kit,” the document read. “Failure to follow these instructions may lead to serious personal injury and possibly property damage.”

As Simitian stood at the podium, reading the document, trying to reconcile the company’s clear recognition of the risks with its opposition to law, he said: “I am at an absolute loss.”

But year after year, his legislation had been killed. Lobbyists from the major cell phone companies, including Cingular, Sprint, and AT&T, threw a kitchen sink of arguments against the rule, arguing, among other things, that mobile phones posed no different a distraction than other tasks, like eating. Lobbyists for Sprint argued that a law banning handheld phone use could be used to discriminate against minority motorists, who were more likely to be pulled over because of racial bias by police. Broadly, the carriers argued that general education was sufficient to remind motorists about the risks of getting distracted by their devices. Never mind that cell phone use by drivers was exploding.

In fact, Simitian pointed out that the California Highway Patrol had been collecting data since 2001 and found that cell phone use was the number one cause each year in distractions leading to car accidents.

In 2006, after five years of battling, he got his bill passed. It was signed by the governor in September of that year, and was slated to take effect in July 2008 (to give law enforcement, consumers, and companies time to adapt).

Next up for Simitian was a texting ban.

But the idea of Utah getting in on the action seemed unlikely and even preposterous. This was, after all, a deeply red state, one that by numerous measures was among the top five most conservative states in the country. State legislators did not look kindly on government regulations they felt would impinge on personal freedoms.

By way of example, there was no primary law requiring the use of seat belts by drivers, and no law requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets. About the time legislators in other states were thinking about restricting bans on cell phones for motorists, Utah legislators were busy rejecting a different safety measure to require booster seats for children up to the age of eight years old, recalls Carl Wimmer, a Utah policeman turned state lawmaker from a Salt Lake City suburb and one of the more conservative members of the state legislature. And he sat on the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee, which was a gateway for these sorts of legislation.

Wimmer recalls safety advocates and families coming to the hearings. “They’d line up these kids who would come up and say: Please help save my life,” he says. Wimmer felt for them, to the point that he at one point put up $1,000 of his own money to buy booster seats and give them away to any family who wanted one. But he wouldn’t vote for such a law, arguing that it was just another example of the government sticking its nose into people’s business.

He felt the same about texting and driving bans.

“If you’re going to live in a free society, you have to give people the liberty to do what they want.”

CHAPTER 24

THE NEUROSCIENTISTS

I
N APRIL 2012, DR.
Atchley attended a traffic safety conference in Orlando, Florida. He found himself on a panel with an Internet addiction expert with a particularly intimate knowledge of addiction, having spent time himself in rehab.

His name: David Greenfield. In the early 1970s, at Paramus High School in northern New Jersey, when Greenfield was just shy of fifteen years old, he was called to the principal’s office and given a choice: Go to rehab or get expelled.

It was post-Vietnam, a hippie era, a culture of encouragement and defiance around drugs. And, adding to that, Greenfield’s family was under duress: His dad, a graphic designer, and his mom, an art teacher and art therapist, were on the rocks. A very unstable marriage, with four kids, David being the oldest and most sensitive.

By fourteen, David was experimenting with drugs. Marijuana, barbiturates, LSD. Then he started taking and selling painkillers from his parents’ medicine cabinet.

“It was a cry for help,” he says, looking back. “My parents’ marriage was crumbling.”

He spent four and a half months at a place called Harold House, an inpatient rehab center in an old warehouse. He got clean. Still, he said, his high school guidance counselors had “thrown in the towel” on him.

They were wrong. David became a psychologist, earning a PhD in 1986 from Texas Tech University, and, eventually, becoming an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He now brings a particularly personal perspective to the debate about addiction. He’s the director of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction, one of the first places in the world to treat technology addiction as a medical disorder.

What’s happening today with technology, he argues, is comparable to what happened in the seventies with drugs. “It’s exactly the same, the pace of adoption of technology and cultural acceptance isn’t that much different than the pace of adoption and cultural acceptance of the drug culture, except that one is legal and one isn’t.”

HE GETS RAISED EYEBROWS.
At conferences, people say: Gimme a break; technology’s not like cocaine or heroin or crack, where you can see the tissue damage in the brain. They say: There’s no proof of increasing tolerance levels to technology. And: People can walk away from their devices.

Dr. Atchley, while an admirer of Dr. Greenfield, isn’t convinced that technology is addictive, per se, though Dr. Atchley remains open to the debate.

The so-called bible on the question of psychological illnesses is the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the
DSM
. The disorders, and their classifications, change with each edition, reflecting new science and understanding. Its committees have grappled with the question of technology addiction but haven’t made it an official diagnosis. For now, it falls into a broader category, “Impulse Control Disorders Not Otherwise Classified.”

According to a 2012 article titled “Are Internet and Video-game-playing Addictive Behaviors?,” scholars from Yale and University College London concluded that the features of an impulse control disorder are “a failure to resist an impulse, drive or temptation to perform an act that is harmful to the person or others.” It goes on: “The individual feels an increasing sense of tension or arousal before committing the act and then experiences pleasure, gratification, or relief at the time of committing the act.”

To an extent this is a semantic conversation. The Yale paper notes that the word
addiction
derives from the Latin
addicere
, which translates to “enslaved to” or “bound by.” They are broad definitions. It was only in the last thirty or so years that the definition came to be narrowed to substance abuse, notes Marc Potenza, a psychologist at the Yale School of Medicine and an expert in addiction science who was one of the paper’s co-authors.

In short, most researchers don’t put texting, or video game playing or Internet use in the same category as addictive drugs. They might be compelling, say many researchers, but not addictive.

To Dr. Greenfield, it’s mere semantics. “Whether the word is ‘impulse,’ or ‘compulsion,’ or ‘addiction,’ clearly there is an overtaking of rational, logical processing of information and judgment like we see with other drugs,” he says.

He’s worth hearing out. For one, the way he describes and breaks down our day-to-day interaction with our devices is extremely resonant. His analysis rings true. Also, even though technology is not classified as “addictive,” some neuroscience points to stark similarities between how technology use and drug use trigger chemical release in the brain.

IN 1998, RIGHT ABOUT
the time that Dr. Greenfield sensed the lure of computer technology, neuroscientists at the Imperial College School of Medicine in London observed the brains of eight male subjects playing a video game.

The game entailed using a computer mouse to direct a virtual tank through a battlefield. Subjects had to collect flags while avoiding and destroying enemy tanks. As subjects got more flags, they progressed to a new game level. And they got a reward of seven pounds for each new level achieved.

The players were injected with low levels of a chemical called raclopride. The significance of raclopride is that when it travels through the bloodstream into the brain—crossing the “blood-brain barrier”—it attaches to dopamine. The chemical is also a radioactive isotope, which means it can be visualized using a PET scan.

The technique allows researchers to take a picture of the inside of a body, sort of like an X-ray. But one key difference is that a PET scan lets researchers look at various neurotransmitters, and cellular activity—a power unimaginable just a few generations ago.

The results were interesting, if open-ended. Dopamine levels at least doubled. And not just that, the subjects who performed better at the game had greater increases in dopamine.

To Dr. Greenfield, the true believer, it is a crucial piece of baseline evidence. “When you’re playing a computer video game, the dopaminergic centers light up like a fucking Christmas tree.”

DOPAMINE CENTERS ARE CRITICAL.
They are, in a basic sense, our reward centers. They help tell us when we’ve done a good thing. They light up when we eat, or have sex, when we accomplish something. They are part of what helps us survive.

But they also light up when the brain interprets something as pleasurable, even if the behavior doesn’t appear to have the survival value of, say, eating or procreating. They are activated in lots of circumstances, even when we’re doing something that can be destructive. For instance, the reward centers light up when someone takes drugs, like cocaine, or booze, depending on a person’s susceptibility.

Different drugs use different mechanisms to trigger increased levels of dopamine. Some addictive drugs, like cocaine, appear to prevent dopamine from being absorbed. That leaves more of the neurochemical in the synapses. Other drugs, like amphetamines, appear to induce a greater initial release of dopamine.

To Dr. Greenfield, technology behaves more like the amphetamine model. The way he thinks about it is that even the smallest click of a device gives a little rush, a tiny dopamine squirt. Hit a key and something happens. You click and a letter appears on the screen, for instance, or a picture comes up, an email opens. Each of these, on some level, triggers tiny rewards.