Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts escalated her criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, announcing she would donate the campaign contributions she has received from the family of the pharmaceutical magnate Raymond Sackler, and calling on Harvard University to remove the Sackler name from all campus buildings where it appears.
Ms. Warren, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, made the announcement as she unveiled a plan on Wednesday to fight the opioid crisis raging in the United States. She linked the epidemic to the pharmaceutical industry and the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, which helped explode the country’s reliance on prescription painkillers.
In a Medium post, Ms. Warren said the opioid epidemic had been “driven by greed, pure and simple.”
“The Sacklers made their money pushing OxyContin. Pushing it even as study after study demonstrated its addictive potential,” Ms. Warren wrote. “Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans died. And how did the Sackler family react? They tried to increase their profits by opening a network of for-profit recovery centers to treat the very same health crisis they were fueling.”
Ms. Warren’s plan calls for $100 billion in federal funding over 10 years to combat the epidemic, including changes to Medicaid and expanded access to medication-assisted treatment. It is an expanded version of the CARE act, a bill she introduced last year in the Senate, along with Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who sponsored it in the House of Representatives.
On Friday, she will hold a campaign rally in West Virginia, a state that has been hit hard by opioid deaths, in keeping with her penchant for merging policy announcements with political strategy.
Ms. Warren received $4,500 from members of the Sackler family during her past Senate races, and her campaign said this week after media inquiries that it would donate an equivalent amount to charity. It did not specify which.
A spokesman for Beverly Sackler, the widow of Mr. Sackler and one of the family members who donated to Ms. Warren, said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal that Ms. Sackler was “well into her 90s, and denigrating her personal donation, made with the best intentions, can serve no proper political purpose.”
The call for Harvard to remove the Sackler name from its buildings, made in an interview with CNN, is sure to reverberate in Ms. Warren’s home state, Massachusetts, where the university enjoys significant political clout.
The president of the university, Lawrence S. Bacow, recently said it would be “inappropriate” to remove the family’s name from campus buildings, including an art museum.
