In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Elizabeth Warren pushed to lock up bankers responsible for the economic turmoil.
As a 2020 presidential candidate, Warren is now taking similar approach to the opioid crisis and calling for laws that would imprison pharmaceutical executives for criminal negligence if they knowingly played a role in the escalating addiction epidemic.
In a Medium essay posted Wednesday morning, Warren presented an updated version of her previous legislative proposal that would spend $100 billion over the next decade to combat the opioid crisis. Warren will also campaign on Friday and Saturday in places that have been particularly afflicted by the crisis in West Virginia and Ohio. Warren also called for punishing executives who helped create the epidemic and took specific aim at the Sackler family, the controllers of Purdue Pharma which manufactures OxyContin.
“An America where when people like the Sacklers destroy millions of lives to make money, they don’t get museum wings named after them, they go to jail,” she wrote, referencing the large number of museums bearing the Sackler name because of the family’s philanthropy.
That philanthropy has extended to political contributions, including to Warren herself. After POLITICO noted that Beverly Sackler — a prominent member of the family whose late husband Raymond ran Purdue Pharma with his brother, Mortimer — contributed $2,500 to Warren’s 2018 reelection campaign, an aide said that she would donate the money to charity. Asked which charity, the aide did not respond.
Beverly has also given money to Warren’s 2020 rivals Sens.
Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).The Sackler family is currently facing numerous lawsuits from states, cities, and counties across the country alleging fraudulent and negligent behavior that exacerbated the opioid crisis. The lawsuits brought by the Attorneys General of Massachusetts and New York name eight members of Sackler family, including Beverly.
The accusations have made the once-heralded family pariahs in some elite circles. Prestigious museums on both sides of the Atlantic have either canceled planned donations or announced they would no longer accept them. The Sacklers have dismissed the various allegations against them, dubbing them “baseless” or “unsupportable by the actual facts.”
The crisis, however, is real. In 2017, there were six times as many opioid deaths as they were in 1999 with the number increasing every year, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The issue resonated politically in 2016 as then-candidate Donald Trump frequently discussed it on the campaign trail and tried to tie the issue to border security. Shortly after Trump won, he told the president of Mexico that "I won New Hampshire because New Hampshire is a drug-infested den."
While Trump points his finger to below the southern border and synthetic opioids from China, Warren is instead railing against corporate America starting with the Sacklers.
“This crisis has been driven by greed, pure and simple,” she wrote Wednesday. “If you don’t believe that, just look at the Sackler family.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine