Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill accepted more than $25,000 in campaign donations from pharma giants accused of supercharging the opioid crisis, despite claiming her GOP rival had blood on his hands from the same calamity during last week’s crucial debate.
Sherrill, 53, had shocked observers by linking one of Jack Ciattarelli’s medical publishing companies that disseminated a piece downplaying the risks of opioids to the deaths of Garden Staters.
“You killed tens of thousands of people by printing your misinformation, your propaganda, and then getting paid to develop an app so that people could more easily get the opioids once they were addicted,” Sherrill alleged to a visibly taken aback Ciattarelli.
But records show that the Democrat’s three congressional campaigns took in $17,000 from Johnson & Johnson, $4,500 from the Teva Pharmaceuticals PAC, $3,000 from the AmerisourceBergen political action committee, and $1,000 from the Endo Pharmaceuticals PAC — all firms with ties to the opioid epidemic.
The donations were first reported by Fox News.
AmerisourceBergen was sued by the Justice Department in 2022, with the feds accusing the wholesale drug company of neglecting to report suspicious orders of oxycodone, fentanyl and other potentially dangerous substances that were then illegally sold.
That same year, the firm agreed to pay up to $6.1 billion in a nationwide settlement to rectify the “vast majority of the opioid lawsuits filed by state and local governmental entities.”
Johnson & Johnson, a major supplier of opioid ingredients, agreed to pay up to $5 billion in the 2022 settlement, while Teva agreed to pay up to $4.2 billion.
Ciattarelli, a former state legislator, also took $500 from Johnson & Johnson and, in 2017, got $1,500 from Mallinckrodt LLC PAC, which agreed to pay up to $1.1 billion in its own opioid-related settlement.
“Mikie Sherrill has shown time and again that she will take on anyone to stand up for families and fight the opioid crisis,” campaign communications director Sean Higgins said in a statement to Fox News.
“That’s why she helped pass landmark bipartisan legislation, signed into law by President Trump, to help fund treatment, recovery, and prevention programs in New Jersey.”
Higgins also ripped the Fox story as “a desperate attack from perennial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, who refuses to answer for his role [in] publishing misinformation about the dangers of opioids at the height of the opioid epidemic.”
Ciattarelli has since announced plans to sue Sherrill for defamation, calling her debate broadside a desperate smear attack and “reckless lie.”
During the 2021 gubernatorial race, critics alleged that Ciattarelli’s former company, Galen Publishing, published dangerously inaccurate material laced with pharma industry talking points.
“Misuse or diversion of pain relievers is a significant problem, especially among adolescents and young adults. Concerns about opioid dependence, addiction, or non-medical use often create barriers to effective pain management,” one of the published papers said, NJ.com reported at the time.
Galen Publishing’s opioid article was part of a deal inked with the University of Tennessee, backed by two dozen pharmaceutical companies.
Ciattarelli sold off the firm in 2017.
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