Why do Republicans keep calling Cinde Warmington an opioid lobbyist? Here’s the backstory.

When former Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington launched a campaign challenging Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte, the Democratic candidate was immediately met with loud and persistent accusations that she was an opioid lobbyist, and in the months since those accusations haven’t stopped.

“Cinde Warmington spent her career as a lobbyist for the opioid industry, promoting OxyContin and defending New England’s most notorious pill mill,” John Corbett, a spokesperson for Ayotte’s campaign and a policy adviser to the governor, told news organizations immediately after Warmington’s February announcement. “Cinde chose to make money off big pharmaceutical companies who hurt Granite Staters, and she is absolutely disqualified from serving as our governor.”

Granite Solutions, a conservative political action committee run by House Deputy Majority Leader Joe Sweeney, created a website lambasting Warmington’s work for the pharmaceutical industry, and the New Hampshire Republican Party put up a billboard in Manchester telling Elm Street drivers and pedestrians the candidate “sided with the opioid industry instead of us.”

In April, when Warmington held a press conference in Concord to rail against Ayotte for recent budget cuts, she was met by counterprotesters holding signs that labeled her an “opioid lobbyist.” Protesters have staged similar demonstrations at subsequent events.

Through it all, Warmington’s campaign has often sought to deflect with criticisms of Ayotte.

“Kelly Ayotte is attacking Cinde because she can’t defend her total failure to protect the people of our state from the opioid crisis,” Jon Levin, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement. “This is par for the course for Kelly Ayotte, who will do anything to dodge accountability for her own repeated failures.”

The opioid criticisms aren’t new. During Warmington’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2024, she was bombarded with the same attacks from her challenger and the eventual nominee, former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig.

But for Warmington herself, the story begins decades earlier.

What did Warmington actually do?

While campaign rhetoric often involves exaggerations and half-truths, Warmington’s career working with the opioid industry as a healthcare attorney for the Shaheen and Gordon law firm is well documented.

In late 2001 and 2002, Warmington was hired by Purdue Pharma, the now-disgraced pharmaceutical company that manufactured the opioid painkiller OxyContin and is widely blamed for the opioid crisis that killed an estimated 645,000 nationwide.

With that session’s House Bill 1218, state lawmakers had launched an effort to require New Hampshire doctors to attempt at least three alternative therapies before prescribing OxyContin or generic versions of the drug for their patients. The medical and regulatory communities were beginning to learn about the drug’s addictive qualities, which pushed many patients to abuse the drug or later resort to even more dangerous drugs.

Warmington was tasked with fighting HB 1218.

During a Senate hearing on April 9, 2002, Warmington argued the measure would “arbitrarily and inappropriately restrict access to medically necessary medications,” according to an official transcript of the hearing testimony in the General Court archives. She said the proposal “is not supported by clinical data,” “places patients at risk,” and “restricts access even when there is a distinct clinically therapeutic advantage to OxyContin.” She then went on to rave about the drug’s efficacy and safety, about which Purdue Pharma has since admitted to misleading doctors, patients, and the public.

“OxyContin is a miracle drug for many patients,” she said during the hearing, “and that’s why it has been so popular, that’s why it is used so much because it has very few side effects and it is able to address patients’ pain.”

She then acknowledged overstepping her bounds “on speaking to the pharmacology issues,” deferring to a doctor employed by Purdue Pharma testifying alongside her.

This official transcript from the April 2002 legislative hearing shows Cinde Warmington defending OxyContin against safety regulations state senators were considering implementing.

Warmington later worked for a clinic chain called PainCare in an even more extensive capacity. PainCare was a major prescriber of opioid painkillers in New Hampshire in the early 2000s. It has been labeled a “pill mill” by many — including recovery advocates opposed to Warmington’s past campaigns — who argue it dispensed too many opioid painkillers in the pursuit of profit.

PainCare was owned and operated by Dr. Michael O’Connell, who in 2012 agreed to surrender his medical license following allegations that he had inappropriate romantic relationships with patients, according to a settlement in which he did not admit wrongdoing.

According to the settlement agreement, Warmington represented O’Connell during the proceedings. Years later, before his death in 2023, O’Connell donated $10,000 to Warmington’s first gubernatorial campaign, according to campaign finance reports. O’Connell and PainCare’s parent company also donated to Warmington’s 2020 and 2022 Executive Council campaigns. (Ayotte also received campaign donations from Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family during her U.S. Senate campaigns, per campaign finance reports.)

In 2014, O’Connell was also indicted on two felony counts of witness tampering for allegedly trying to get his two accusers to retract their accusations to the state medical board, according to online court records. Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges before trial. Bill Christie, Warmington’s husband and an attorney, represented O’Connell in the criminal case.

Warmington also represented Dr. Anton Heins, a PainCare doctor who lost his medical license over double charging for suboxone medications, in his effort to have his license reinstated, according to medical board ruling documents. Heins also pleaded guilty to submitting false claims to the state Medicaid program and was sentenced to 30 days in county jail in a separate criminal case.

Is it fair to blame Warmington for her work?

Julian Jefferson is a law professor at the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law who teaches professional responsibility courses. After reviewing Warmington’s work for Purdue Pharma and PaineCare, he said nothing stood out as unordinary. Attorneys often represent bad actors because that’s how the system works.

“Everything that she did, at least looking at it objectively, was completely within the bounds of representing her client,” Jefferson said. “In fact, she had an obligation to represent her client, to be a zealous advocate for her client within professional norms, to really vigorously pursue her clients’ interests.”

He said both lobbying the legislature on behalf of Purdue Pharma and representing people accused of wrongdoing are legitimate legal services.

“Frankly, there should be no flack that she’s received for representing a client,” he said. “A client’s viewpoints, a client’s wrongdoing, a client’s stated interest should never, ever, ever be imputed to an attorney, or you’re going to have a very chilling effect on attorneys.”

Jefferson acknowledged that there are rules of professional conduct that bar attorneys from deceiving, misleading, or propagating known falsehoods. However, at the time she promoted OxyContin, there was debate over its safety, and he argued you cannot necessarily ascribe Purdue Pharma’s lying to Warmington. Warmington herself has repeatedly said she didn’t know of Purdue Pharma’s lies at the time.

“The attorney has due diligence to make sure that they’re not putting out falsehoods,” he said. “But just because a client did a bad action, that knowledge of a falsehood should not automatically be ascribed to the attorney.”

But when Warmington testified in 2002, there was, at the very least, debate over the addictive quality of OxyContin.

One state senator, Sylvia Larsen, asked her about the drug’s potential for abuse.

“To say that OxyContin has been abused, it certainly has been in the press,” Warmington said at the time. “I think we can all say that it is a drug of abuse as are all narcotics. It is not the most abused narcotic in the state of New Hampshire, but it is a drug of abuse, it is attractive to abusers, and it is an issue that is of great concern to Purdue Pharmaceuticals.”

Still, Jefferson said the legal world he exists in and politics are “two different realms.”

“Politics is a contact sport, so everything is fair game,” he said. “So, in that sense, if people want to be critical and make judgments of her, that’s one thing. And you can certainly have a legitimate conversation about that. But I think it’s really important for anybody who’s digesting this material, that is a very, very different thing from calling somebody unprofessional and violating the rules of professional conduct, and I’ve seen nothing that remotely suggests that attorney Warmington did anything untoward.”

But Ayotte is a lawyer and former state attorney general herself, and her campaign team has pushed back against that argument.

“No matter what Cinde Warmington says to distract from her decades-long career lobbying for the opioid industry, the fact is Warmington repeatedly put her self-interest ahead of what was best for New Hampshire,” Corbett said in response to an inquiry for this story.  

How is Warmington responding?

In her first interview with the Bulletin immediately following her campaign announcement, Warmington wouldn’t directly answer questions about the criticisms.

“I’m not surprised that Kelly Ayotte is attacking me because she doesn’t want to talk about her record, neither her record on this issue or her record of completely failing the people of this state and making this such an unaffordable place for working families to live,” she said in February in Merrimack. “That’s what we need to be focused on. Every decision we make should be seen through the lens of the working family.”

Pressed on whether she thinks the critiques are fair and how she explains that previous work, Warmington said: “I think those are criticisms that Kelly Ayotte is going to continue to throw at me because she does not want to talk about the issues that really matter to the people of New Hampshire. She’s focused on attacking me. I’m going to stay focused on representing the people of our state.”

On Thursday, after filing for office in the Secretary of State’s Office in Concord, she took a similar tack after being asked to respond to Ayotte raising the issue earlier that day.

“My response is that every time you hear Kelly attacking me, you should think that Kelly doesn’t want people thinking about the fact that housing is at sky-high prices, and she’s done nothing about it. That school voucher scheme is nothing but a pickpocket scheme, taking money out of the pockets of working people and putting it into the pockets of the richest people among us. She doesn’t want people thinking about the fact that electric rates are up 15% on her watch because of her addiction to fossil fuels.”

In response to a request for comment for this story, Levin, Warmington’s campaign spokesman, made a more direct argument. In a statement, he said Warmington “has spent decades working to expand access to treatment for people in New Hampshire struggling with addiction.”

He pointed to her work as the sole Democrat on the Executive Council, where she advocated for more state funding for addiction treatment, and as a volunteer on boards for nonprofit organizations like Riverbend Community Mental Health and the Lakes Region Mental Health Center.

“Cinde’s own father struggled with addiction and her family has been touched by the opioid epidemic,” Levin continued, “which have motivated her to raise awareness and support treatment of substance abuse and mental health issues.” 

He said the criticisms “reek of Kelly’s hypocrisy.” He noted that when Ayotte was attorney general from 2004 to 2009, she was not one of the 26 state attorneys general who sued Purdue Pharma (though her successor sued the company in 2017). He also pointed to her support of Gordon MacDonald, who also represented Purdue Pharma as an attorney, when he was appointed attorney general in 2017 and Supreme Court chief justice in 2021.

While New Hampshire has begun to see a decline in drug deaths, it has been one of the states hit hardest by the decades-long opioid crisis.

In 2017, for example, New Hampshire saw 424 opioid-related drug overdose deaths, a broad category that includes drugs such as heroin and fentanyl in addition to OxyContin, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That’s 34 deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the national average of 14.6 per 100,000.

Over the past three years, the state has seen progress in fighting the epidemic. From 2022 to 2025, there was a 44% decrease in opioid-related drug deaths, according to the New Hampshire Drug Monitoring Initiative.

Public health officials are still finalizing 2025’s figures, but their preliminary estimate is 187 deaths.