Mailers touting Poliquin’s opioid stance are funded by opioid manufacturers

Second-district households in recent weeks have been flooded with glossy campaign mailers touting Rep. Bruce Poliquin’s efforts to “curb the opioid crisis.” What may not be clear from the text of the flyers is that they were produced not by Poliquin’s campaign, but by a conservative SuperPAC that has received millions of dollars from Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying arm for some of the same pharmaceutical companies whose practices have contributed to the opioid epidemic.

PhRMA is “one of the largest and most influential lobbying organizations in Washington,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s resource SourceWatch, and has deep ties to the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Going back as far as the early 2000s, PhRMA has funnelled money into what the watchdog Public Citizen describes as “stealth PACs” to help elect politicians who are “sympathetic” to the pharmaceutical industry’s interests.

The American Action Network (AAN), which is associated with House Speaker Paul Ryan, distributed the mailers at the same time that it launched a $2.5 million ad campaign to help vulnerable incumbent Republicans like Poliquin.

“Congressman Bruce Poliquin is working in Congress to help curb the opioid crisis by bringing both political parties together to ensure the days of countless headlines on opioid overdoses are over,” one mailer reads. “Hope is on the way.”

The materials describe the Second District representative as “a leading advocate” for the passage of 50 House bills to combat the opioid crisis. But not only have those bills been criticized by addiction researchers for not expanding treatment options and not increasing access to health insurance, they also conspicuously fail to address the outsized role that the pharmaceutical industry has had in the proliferation of opioids.

Over 320 counties, cities, and states throughout the country, including Portland, have filed lawsuits against opioid companies, arguing that the industry’s misleading advertising that exaggerated the benefits of opioids in the 1990s, paired with overprescription, led to the current crisis.

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the creator of OxyContin and a member of PhRMA, is at the center of these lawsuits, with a confidential Justice Department report revealing that Purdue knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin the first year after the pain killer’s introduction and yet stayed silent.

Purdue and other companies have also come under the U.S. Senate’s scrutiny for pouring millions of dollars into nonprofit health and pain management organizations that, in turn, amplified and reinforced messages favoring increased opioid use, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The mailers also reference a bill Poliquin supported that would “provide greater authority to law enforcement to crackdown on synthetic drugs,” a strategy recently endorsed by the Trump administration and criticized by Maine experts as a rehashing of the same policies that have made drug misuse more difficult to treat.

Poliquin voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and slash $839 billion from Medicaid, threatening the existence of a program that has financed a substantial proportion of addiction treatment. According to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2016, adults with opioid addiction who were covered by Medicaid were also twice as likely as those with private insurance or the uninsured to have received treatment.

Last year, a law enforcement task force on Maine’s opioid epidemic identified expanding Medicaid as the number one step that could be taken to address the crisis.

“It’s funny, as a cop sitting here, I’m not going to tell you that I need more drug agents. I’m going to tell you I need more treatment and I need more prevention work” said then-Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck.

Poliquin also voted for the the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which removed the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act and put 550,000 Mainers with pre-existing conditions at risk of losing coverage, including those with an opioid or substance abuse disorder.