By Kenneth Rapoza, NH Journal
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case earlier this month challenging a proposed Purdue Pharma bankruptcy settlement paying billions to families harmed by the opioid crisis the company helped create, Justice Elena Kagan summed up the court’s dilemma.
“Among people who have no love for the Sacklers, among people who think that the Sacklers are pretty much the worst people on Earth, they’ve negotiated a deal which they think is the best that they can get,” Kagan said.
The Sackler family still owned Purdue Pharma when it flooded the U.S. with Oxycontin, and one person who worked for them at the time now wants to be the Granite State’s governor: Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington.
A veteran of the Obama White House like Kagan, Warmington is a Democrat and an attorney. As The Keene Sentinel and the Daily Beast have previously reported, when the Sacklers were pushing opioids to doctors’ offices and medical clinics, she was testifying before the New Hampshire legislature in 2002.
“I’m from the law firm Shaheen & Gordon, and I have been retained to represent Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin,” Warmington told the Senate Committee on Executive Departments and Administration during a hearing on HB 1218. When Sen. Sylvia Larsen (D-Concord) asked if she “would consider Oxycontin, a well-known drug, to have a high potential for misuse or abuse,” Warmington defended her client’s product and blamed media coverage.
“To say that Oxycontin has been abused, it certainly has been — in the press,” Warmington told the senators. “I think that we can all say that [Oxycontin] is a drug of abuse, as are all narcotics.”
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Years — and untold earnings from the Sackler family — later, Warmington is now running in the Democratic gubernatorial primary as a self-described “health care advocate” and lifelong health care attorney. And she is promising to end the fentanyl crisis in the state.
Read the rest here.
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