An aide for Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she would give a political donation from Beverly Sackler to charity. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images 2020 Elections Warren to donate campaign money she previously took from opioid titan

Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday rolled out a new version of her aggressive plan to combat the opioid crisis, hoping the crackdown will appeal to 2020 voters in states hit hard by the epidemic.

But even as she has repeatedly vowed to punish executives profiting off the booming industry, Warren’s campaign in 2018 accepted money from a prominent family member of one of the nation’s top opioid manufacturers.


After POLITICO pointed out to Warren’s campaign that her 2018 Senate reelection effort had accepted $2,500 in donations from Beverly Sackler — whose late husband Raymond ran Purdue Pharma with his brother, Mortimer — an aide said late Tuesday that Warren would donate the money to charity.

Asked which charity, the aide did not respond.

And while Warren is not the only 2020 contender to have received money from Beverly Sackler — Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) also took donations from her — Warren has been more critical of the Sacklers’ role in the addiction epidemic and has called for them to go to prison.

“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,” Warren wrote in a Medium post on Wednesday, referencing the large number of museums bearing the Sackler name because of the family’s philanthropy.

Other members of the Sackler family, which controls Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, also made financial contributions to Warren in her 2012 and 2018 campaigns, and she will donate $4,500 in total.

“Beverly Sackler is well into her 90s and denigrating her personal donation, made with the best intentions, can serve no proper political purpose," said a spokeswoman for the Sackler family. "We would welcome a genuine dialogue with the senator that’s fact-based, as the facts clearly demonstrate that the company started by Beverly's family has for decades been the industry leader in combatting opioid abuse while providing products essential for the treatment of serious chronic pain."

In her Medium post, Warren presented an updated version of her previous legislative proposal that would spend $100 billion over the next decade to combat the opioid crisis. She is also calling for laws that would imprison pharmaceutical executives for criminal negligence if they knowingly played a role in the escalating addiction epidemic.

To promote her plan, Warren will campaign on Friday and Saturday in places that have been particularly afflicted by the crisis in West Virginia and Ohio.

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 having real imeffects. In 2017, there were six times as many opioid deaths as they were in 1999 with the number increasing every year, according to the Centers 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 across the southern border and to 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.”

