Carrie Frost is well equipped for hydration. A registered nurse and a mother of two from Colorado, she estimates that her family has accumulated “upward of 25 to 30” reusable flasks at home for keeping cold drinks: flasks large and small, of various designs and colors, with a straw and without. But last month, as she sat in 90-degree heat at her son’s travel baseball tournament, she drank from a plastic water bottle that she had purchased for $3 at a local grocery store.

“Convenience,” she said, laughing, as she tried to piece together why, once again, she was not using one of her many beverage containers. “I guess we’re just a lazy society.”

Americans are drinking a lot of water, but they are on the fence about how best to do it. More than $2 billion in reusable water bottles were sold in the United States in 2022, up from around $1.5 billion in 2020, according to Greg Williamson, the president of CamelBak, which is a maker of reusable bottles.

And sales of single-serving water bottles have been rising steadily, too, reaching 11.3 billion gallons in 2022, according to the most recent data from the Beverage Marketing Association, which tracks beverage sales.

In other words, consumers are spending billions of dollars a year on reusable bottles to stay hydrated and then buying bottled water anyway, even as faucet water remains free.

“Faucet?” said Jason Taylor from Georgia, whose son was playing the same Birmingham baseball tournament. “Faucet? I haven’t drunk from the faucet since I was 18.” He had heard stories about tainted water, like in Flint, Mich., and did not trust the faucet water at the hotel, he said, so he filled his reusable flask with ice from the hotel and poured bottled water over it. The hotel ice he trusted; the faucet water there, not so much.

Beverage consumption is in a fluid period. Americans are moving away from empty sugar calories but are still hooked on the convenience of a chilled plastic bottle from the corner-store fridge. So we are amassing containers, single-use and reusable, in kitchen cabinets and landfills alike.

Sales of reusable water bottles “are absolutely skyrocketing,” said Jessica Heiges, a sustainability consultant based in Berkeley, Calif., where she recently completed a Ph.D. in the creation of waste-free systems. But, she added, people who fill their reusable flasks with water from a bottle have not fully embraced the environmental proposition.

“They are not all the way there or are not fully convinced,” Dr. Heiges said. And, she noted, reusable water bottles take resources to make, so having too many isn’t great for the environment, either. “You can find them at every Goodwill and Salvation Army. People are overflowing with them.”

Alaina Waldrop, in Birmingham, has around 20 water bottles, as precious to her as purses, she said: “You have a decent water bottle and you get sick of it, or you’re used to seeing it all the time, and find a new one that’s pretty or it’s a new color or it holds more water or fits in a cup holder better.”

Ms. Waldrop, 20, works at Dick’s Sporting Goods, about a mile from Birmingham’s baseball fields. The store has multiple displays of reusable flasks, featuring major brands like Yeti and Hydro Flask. A display of Stanley flasks ($45 each) came with a sign: limit four per customer. “They’re so popular,” Ms. Waldrop said. “I bought one for my mom and one for my sister. We’re all water-bottle freaks. We all have this obsession. I wish it made more sense but it doesn’t.”

She tends to fill her bottles at home with filtered water but doesn’t trust faucets on the go, so she buys single-serving bottles at the gas station or convenience store and pours that water into her reusable container. “I drink whatever is in the plastic and then I throw the plastic away,” she said with a laugh. Why not simply drink all the water from the plastic bottle she just purchased? “It doesn’t stay cold for as long,” she said.

In practice, there may be little difference in quality or safety between bottled water and tap water, said Ronnie Levin, an instructor and expert in American public drinking water at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s often just some random tap filling those water bottles,” Ms. Levin said. “Monitoring of bottled water is somewhere between zero and not routine.”

When putting bottled water in the flask, “you’re not necessarily getting anything better, except that you’re now polluting the environment.”

In the baking heat at the baseball fields, a line had formed at a snack shack that sold water for $3 and charged $2 for ice in a Styrofoam cup. Steps away was a refillable filtered-water tap that was used by some people but had no line. Maybe that’s because the filtered tap was free.

Water has become popular enough that it is often as or more expensive than soda, despite having less substance — in the form of sugar — to offer. At a handful of nearby convenience stores, the prices of water and soda were neck and neck; at Walgreens, bottles of Dr Pepper and other sodas sold at $4 for two, as did bottles of Dasani and Aquafina water.

Michael Bellas, the chairman and chief executive of the Beverage Marketing Company, said that bottled water remained far less expensive if purchased in bulk, at Costco, say, or the supermarket. But prices rise sharply for single-serving bottles when the retailer has a thirsty audience on the go, he noted.

“The airports just soak you,” Mr. Bellas said.

At the Hudson store at the Birmingham airport, 20-ounce bottles of Dasani water and Smartwater (both owned by the Coca-Cola Company) cost $4.29 with tax, while all the 20-ounce sodas (Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Sprite) cost $4.09.

“Everyone has to hydrate, and people think it makes their skin look nice,” Kim Shoemaker, a Hudson employee, said of water. “No sugar, no chemicals, no additives.” Ms. Shoemaker, 60, said she bought cases of water at Costco and kept single-serving bottles in every room of her home, but also owned many reusable flasks. “Oh, my gosh, probably about six,” she said. “I don’t use them. I don’t know why.”

Just outside the Hudson store was a water dispenser for reusable containers, its water filtered and free of charge and mostly going unused.

Out at the baseball fields, Ms. Frost, who had traveled from Colorado for the tournament, said she had family members who didn’t understand why a person would spend on a reusable water container and single-serving water bottles and not just fill a cup from the tap.

“Ask my husband,” she offered. “He thinks it’s the stupidest thing in the world.”

To which her husband, Spencer Frost, gruffly added: “Just drink from the hose.”

Federal regulators have suspended research on human subjects at the Columbia-affiliated New York State Psychiatric Institute, one of the country’s oldest research centers, as they investigate safety protocols across the institute after the suicide of a research participant.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Kate Migliaccio-Grabill, confirmed on Wednesday that the agency’s Office for Human Research Protections was investigating the psychiatric institute “and has restricted its ability to conduct H.H.S.-supported human subject research.”

About two weeks before the federal order, on June 12, the institute had “voluntarily paused all studies that included ongoing interactions with human subjects,” according to Carla Cantor, the institute’s director of communications. The decision affected 417 studies, of which 198 have continuing participation. Of those, 124 receive federal funding.

It is unusual for the U.S. regulatory office to suspend research, and this suggests that investigators are concerned that potential violations of safety protocols occurred more broadly within the institute. Almost 500 studies, with combined budgets totaling $86 million, are underway at the institute, according to its website.

The inquiry followed the death by suicide of a person enrolled in a study led by Dr. Bret R. Rutherford, an associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who was testing a drug for Parkinson’s disease, levodopa, as a treatment for depression and reduced mobility in older people.

Dr. Rutherford resigned his position at the institute on June 1 and is no longer a faculty member of Columbia’s psychiatry department, Ms. Cantor said. Dr. Rutherford did not respond to requests for comment left at his home and office.

Asked about the reported suicide, Ms. Cantor would not confirm that a death had occurred during a clinical trial, saying the institute could not provide any information about study participants because of health privacy laws.

The institute’s “top priority is the health and safety of individuals engaged in our award-winning research programs,” Ms. Cantor said in a statement.

She said the institute “worked to assist federal agencies in their audit and has subsequently restructured and strengthened its research compliance and monitoring programs across the institution.”

The institute, which is operated by the state Office of Mental Health, is seeking federal approval for a new research safety plan so that federally funded studies can resume, she said. It is also conducting a safety review of human research studies not funded by the federal government, which is expected to be complete next month.

After the initial audit of the Rutherford laboratory, the National Institutes of Health requested an external audit of all federally funded research, she said.

A spokeswoman for the N.I.H., Amanda Fine, said the agency was working closely with the Office of Human Research Protections, which is investigating the matter. N.I.H. cannot discuss matters under review, she said.

The subject’s suicide was reported earlier in Spectrum, a news site focusing on autism research. But the U.S. agency’s decision to order a widespread halt to other studies had not been disclosed before now.

The trial of levodopa for late-life depression, which began in 2018 and received $736,579 in funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, aimed to recruit 90 adults over the age of 60 who suffered from mild to moderate depression and a slowed gait.

The team ended up with just 51, of whom 20 dropped out or were found ineligible, according to records provided to federal oversight agencies. The 31 who remained were assigned to one of two groups, one taking levodopa and one taking a placebo.

On the website clinicaltrials.gov, under the heading “serious adverse events,” researchers reported that the individual who died by suicide had been assigned to the placebo arm of the study.

Dr. Rutherford and his co-authors published several articles based on the trial, reporting that levodopa, which increases dopamine concentrations, led to improvement in mobility, processing and depressive symptoms in the study population.

The promising results were flagged in NEJM Journal Watch, which said that clinicians “might consider levodopa” for patients whose cognition or mobility did not respond to standard depression treatments.

It is not clear when the suicide occurred, but records show that the study was temporarily suspended by the National Institute of Mental Health in January 2022 and terminated in May 2023. This year, three scientific journals ran retractions identifying methodological errors in studies from Dr. Rutherford’s laboratory.

One of them pointed to a specific flaw: Eight subjects had only recently stopped taking an antidepressant, rather than waiting 28 days to “wash out,” as required by the study’s protocol. The average number of days those patients had been off medication was 10; one subject had been off medication only for a day.

A member of Columbia’s faculty since 2010, Dr. Rutherford was a prolific researcher, having received 32 grants totaling more than $15.5 million from N.I.M.H. since 2010.

Subjects in the study were paid $15 in cash for weekly visits and an additional $400 for undergoing M.R.I. and PET scans.

Emily Roberts, a former research assistant in Dr. Rutherford’s laboratory and a co-author on one of his papers, told Spectrum that recruiting for the study had been challenging and that some criteria had been relaxed to increase enrollment.

Ms. Roberts, who managed the clinical trial in its first year, said the experience left her disillusioned and contributed to her decision to leave the field. “I was disappointed at the rigor of the research there,” she said. Ms. Roberts verified her comments to Spectrum, but she would not publicly comment further on the matter.

Some studies of psychiatric drugs require participants to “wash out” — to go off the medications they are taking and allow them to clear their system, so that scientists can test the effectiveness of a new one.

This practice is specific to psychiatric research, and it creates a tension about what is best for patients, said Jeffrey Kahn, the director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

“There isn’t another category of drug trial where you ask someone to go off something they are on,” he said. “It’s a violation of a standard of care. You can’t tell someone, ‘Stop taking your chemotherapy so we can compare it to a new chemotherapy.’”

It is rare for regulators to halt research across an institution.

In 2015, the University of Minnesota suspended enrollment in psychiatric drug trials after a critical report by state auditors on the 2004 suicide of a patient who faced commitment to a state institution when he was enrolled in an industry-sponsored clinical trial of Seroquel, an antipsychotic drug.

In 2001, the Office for Human Research Protections ordered Johns Hopkins University to suspend almost all its federally financed medical research involving human subjects after the death of a volunteer who had inhaled an unapproved asthma drug.

In 2000, the federal agency temporarily suspended all medical research involving human subjects at the University of Oklahoma after an investigation showed that patients had been injected with a vaccine that had been made by unqualified laboratory workers.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.