By 2002, it was abundantly clear the powerful opioid painkiller Oxycontin was beginning to wreak havoc in the United States.
From an uptick in burglaries and robberies to a stark warning from former Attorney General John Ashcroft in a 2001 congressional hearing calling it a “'very, very dangerous drug,” Oxycontin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, was already on the defensive.
Even though the company was only at the very beginning of a decades-long and multi-billion-dollar legal battle with families seeking accountability for the overdose deaths of their loved ones, Purdue began dispatching legions of lobbyists to state legislatures to defend the drug.
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In New Hampshire, one of those lobbyists was Cinde Warmington. Speaking before the state legislature in 2002, Warmington defended Oxycontin as a “miracle drug” with “very few side effects.”
She suggested the opioid was being unfairly maligned.
“Oxycontin has been abused—it certainly has been in the press,” Warmington told a state Senate committee in April 2002. “I think we can all say that it is a drug of abuse as are all narcotics.”
Two decades later, Purdue Pharma has gone bankrupt over lawsuits concerning its culpability in a nationwide opioid epidemic that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. It turned out that Purdue Pharma knew all along that Oxycontin was highly addictive, even as the drug manufacturer claimed it carried a low risk of addiction or abuse. And in New Hampshire, a state particularly hit by the opioid epidemic—where fentanyl-related overdose deaths are three times the national average—Granite Staters are still reeling from the effects of Oxycontin addiction in the early 2000s.
Twenty years after sticking up for Purdue and Oxycontin, Warmington is running for New Hampshire governor on promises to prioritize fighting the opioid epidemic.
In her campaign launch video, Warmington—a Democrat—promised to “finally tackle the mental health crisis and fentanyl crisis in a real way, so that families can get the help they need.”
On her campaign website, she touts her work advocating “for the expansion of substance use disorder treatment services, increased funding for mental health services and increased access to telehealth services.”
In a sit-down interview with the Keene Sentinel during her successful 2020 campaign for the state’s Executive Council, Warmington presented herself as an ideal candidate with a background in health care, starting with a side job drawing blood to help pay her way through college all the way up to a career as a health-care lawyer and administrator.
One thing that didn’t come up was her work for Purdue Pharma.
After eight years of Republican Gov. Chris Sununu—who has indicated he may not run for a fifth term because he needs “a real paycheck”—Democrats are optimistic about reclaiming the New Hampshire governorship. (The state has two-year gubernatorial terms with no term limits, and the New Hampshire governor makes around $143,000 per year.)
But in her dubious record on this marquee issue, Warmington is providing a headache for the party even before any other Democratic candidates enter the race.
“The ads clearly write themselves,” a New Hampshire Democratic operative with experience on several statewide campaigns told The Daily Beast. “It’s potentially a death knell in a general election.”
This operative pointed to Warmington’s comments “basically regurgitating the worst talking points from the worst company at the core of this crisis,” calling those comments “fairly damning.”
In June, Warmington’s campaign dismissed initial reporting in the New Hampshire Union Leader on her ties to Purdue Pharma as an “unfortunate” political attack. ”Like many others,” Warmington said, she wishes “she knew then what we all learned later.”
But that version of events isn't quite so clear-cut.
The campaign claimed in a statement to The Keene Sentinel that “twenty years ago we were all unaware of Purdue Pharma’s fraud and the harm they would cause to so many New Hampshire families.” By conflating Warmington’s knowledge with that of the general public, the statement brushes over the main points of contention she was being paid to combat back in 2002.
Former Manchester Fire Chief Dan Goonan, who served in the department for 37 years and helped shepherd more than 8,000 people struggling with opioid addiction through the since-shuttered Safe Stations program, told The Daily Beast he has serious questions about Warmington’s claim to having known as much as the general public at the time.
Goonan said he has revived hundreds of people using the fast-acting agent Naloxone—better known under its brand name Narcan—and recalled seeing the first wave of overdoses in the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly related to prescriptions like Oxycontin. When Oxycontin became less available, former users turned to heroin and fentanyl, creating the crisis Warmington is now campaigning on.
“It’s hard for a guy like me who was on the street and in those homeless encampments and seen the consequences of some of those decisions that were made early on—to say you didn’t know about it? You had to know something,” Goonan said, recalling extra work he did as a part-time police officer on top of his firefighter duties in the early 2000s, providing security at pharmacies frequently robbed of Oxycontin.
During the early 2000s, Warmington was pushing back against mounting evidence that Oxycontin was addictive and overprescribed, with internal Purdue documents at the time warning that the “media’s attention to abuse and diversion of OxyContin Tablets has provided state Medicaid plans and some HMOs, concerned about the affect the product is having on their budget, an excuse to look for ways to limit the prescribing of OxyContin Tablets.”
That problem was precisely what Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), then the governor, was concerned with in 2002, singling out the drug as “an example of what is wrong with the current Medicaid prescription plan,” according to an April 2002 story in the Union Leader.
Crossing Shaheen, the most powerful Democrat in the state, didn’t end Warmington’s career, but with a low profile around the state while serving in a relatively obscure position, the Purdue Pharma ties could sink Warmington’s campaign before it really gets going.
New Hampshire Democrats have been quietly worried about the stumble out of the gates from Warmington, even if she does have defenders.
“Candidates open themselves up for all kinds of criticism when they run for office, some well-deserved,” a prominent New Hampshire Democrat told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly on the sensitive issue.
Calling the Warmington links to Purdue Pharma “a cheap shot,” the New Hampshire Democrat added that Warmington was opposing a requirement that doctors have patients try three other drugs before they prescribe OxyContin. “One of those alternative drugs was fentanyl,” they said.
While Warmington’s campaign has pointed to her record of advocating for increased recovery and prevention services while also securing funding for those efforts on the executive council, one of her most recent lobbying gigs before working for Purdue Pharma gives more insight into what she knew at the time.
In 2000, Warmington faced the New Hampshire legislature representing Community Substance Abuse Centers, advocating for increased methadone access for those struggling with opioid addiction. The bill history from that year shows another Union Leader article about an uptick in Oxycontin-related robberies.
Warmington’s early stumbles would be one thing if Democrats were facing near-certain doom against Sununu once again, University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala told The Daily Beast.
With a blank slate going into 2024—unless Sununu changes his mind—an early candidate like Warmington with the field to herself should be able to enjoy a level of media coverage few of her predecessors in recent years have been able to reach.
“So going from that, trying to beat Sununu, to an open race, that’s a big help to Democrats,” Scala said.
The Warmington campaign did not return a request for comment.
“Being associated with those types of firms, especially Purdue Pharma, they don’t have the best reputations in New Hampshire,” Goonan said.
“To me, it’s gonna take some convincing for your average person to believe her when she says I didn’t know anything about this and was just like you, working for a paycheck,” the former fire chief continued. “It doesn’t fly.”
