New Hampshire Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte and her campaign have launched an aggressive multimedia offensive against her political rival, utilizing roadside billboards, an airplane-towed aerial banner, and even an inflatable rat stationed directly outside the state capitol.
“Cinde Warmington was a Purdue Pharma lobbyist,” one of Ayotte’s campaign spots declares, incorporating footage of a debate featuring Warmington’s 2024 Democratic primary opponent, Joyce Craig. “She said that OxyContin was a miracle drug.”
Warmington’s historical ties to the pharmaceutical giant responsible for developing OxyContin—an opioid pain reliever inextricably tied to the nation’s severe addiction and overdose crisis—are thoroughly documented.
Warmington has maintained that she was merely a junior attorney assigned to handle the Purdue Pharma account over two decades ago. She has asserted that she lacked a comprehensive understanding of the company’s aggressive promotion of OxyContin until those practices were exposed through subsequent legal battles, adding in a recent interview that she deeply “regrets” taking on that work.
However, an official transcript from her 2002 testimony opposing state legislation designed to place stricter controls on opioid prescribing indicates that even at that early stage, Warmington was directly confronted about the drug’s potential for abuse and addiction.
The rise and fall of OxyContin
During the mid-1990s, Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, an extended-release formulation centered on the synthetic opioid oxycodone. The manufacturer underwrote upwards of 20,000 educational seminars focused on pain management and funneled financial backing into various medical associations to drive up the drug’s adoption.
Between 1991 and 2011, prescriptions for OxyContin surged threefold. Concurrently, fatalities linked to opioid overdoses experienced a near-identical triple-digit increase, with annual distribution peaking in 2012 at more than 255 million individual prescriptions.
Pharmaceutical firms, Purdue Pharma chief among them, were hit with a massive wave of litigation for instigating and fueling the initial phase of the opioid crisis. In 2020, Purdue Pharma entered a guilty plea to multiple federal criminal counts, agreed to disburse over $8 billion toward abatement and treatment programs, and pledged to wind down operations. Additional financial penalties were levied against the Sackler family, who maintained ownership of the company during the height of OxyContin’s distribution, under a comprehensive settlement reached in 2025.
Warmington’s role with Purdue Pharma
While Purdue was actively manufacturing and pushing OxyContin into the market, Warmington practiced law with the firm Shaheen & Gordon. Official state records confirm that by December 4, 2001—roughly two years after completing law school and earning a master’s degree in business administration—she was an officially registered lobbyist representing the drugmaker.
On April 9, 2002, Warmington took the stand before the New Hampshire state Senate to advocate for Purdue Pharma’s interests. The corporation was actively fighting a proposed measure that would have mandated physicians to trial at least three alternative medications before they could prescribe OxyContin or equivalent narcotics.
During the course of the proceedings, Democratic state Senator Sylvia Larsen pressed Warmington, asking, “Would you not consider OxyContin, a well-known drug, to have a high potential for misuse or abuse? … Wouldn’t you agree that it should be monitored for its adherence to clinical protocol?”
Warmington responded by noting she would defer clinical addiction details to medical professionals, yet she conceded, “To say that Oxycontin has been abused — it certainly has been in the press — I think that 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.”
Warmington then pivoted to defend the medication, characterizing it as “a drug that has truly been a medical breakthrough for patients who need it. Restricting access to all of those patients as a means of preventing abuse is inappropriate.”
Later in the hearing, Warmington uttered the exact phrase highlighted in Ayotte’s campaign commercials. Arguing against the bill, she stated that the legislation “fundamentally changes the available options for physicians. OxyContin is a miracle drug for many patients, 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 patient’s pain.”
What has Warmington said about her work for Purdue Pharma?
When Warmington launched her 2004 campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, her primary opponent—former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig—heavily criticized her corporate past.
As these allegations reemerged during her subsequent electoral bids, Warmington addressed the public via a video message, emphasizing that her father “struggled with addiction most of his adult life, and a lot of people in my family have struggled with addiction over the years. … I went into healthcare because I wanted to help people.”
Recalling her tenure in 2001, she explained, “I was assigned a case by a partner to represent Purdue Pharma” and viewed her mission as “fighting for patients to get access to the healthcare that their doctors thought that they needed. What I did not know at the time was that Purdue Pharma was engaged in this massive criminal fraud, something that would be exposed only over years of litigation. … To be clear, if I had known in 2001 what we all later learned, I would never, ever have done this work.” She noted that her legal representation of the company concluded in 2002.
Though the full scope of Purdue Pharma’s deceptive marketing strategy would not be completely uncovered until years of subsequent legal discovery, federal watchdogs and journalists had already been sounding alarm bells regarding the drug’s widespread misuse and the firm’s skyrocketing sales for at least two years prior to Warmington’s testimony in April 2002.
In August 2001, a subcommittee of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee convened an investigative hearing to question corporate executives about the high potential for opioid abuse. That same period saw The New York Times publish an exposé titled, “Sales of Painkiller Grew Rapidly, But Success Brought a High Cost.” Subsequent reporting detailed federal pressures on Purdue to scale back marketing efforts, alongside revelations that Purdue Pharma actively opted against employing available safety protocols designed to prevent abuse.
During an October 19 interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, Warmington reiterated, “I certainly regret having anything to do with this work, knowing what we all know now.”
Conversely, Warmington’s campaign has actively pointed to her record on the state’s Executive Council, where she worked to secure critical funding for addiction treatment facilities. Her camp has also criticized Ayotte for declining—while serving as New Hampshire’s attorney general—to join a 2007 multistate lawsuit filed by 26 attorneys general against Purdue Pharma. Furthermore, critics note that a political action committee spearheaded by Ayotte accepted financial contributions from members of the Sackler family as recently as 2016.
Our verdict
Ayotte’s advertisement asserts that “Cinde Warmington was a Purdue Pharma lobbyist. She said that OxyContin was a miracle drug.”
Archival documentation from 2001 substantiates that Warmington operated as an external lobbyist for Purdue Pharma, a corporation that later settled monumental lawsuits over accusations that its deceptive practices accelerated the opioid epidemic and caused widespread overdose fatalities.
Acting in her capacity as a corporate lobbyist, Warmington addressed the New Hampshire legislature to lobby against a bill aimed at regulating opioid prescriptions that Purdue opposed. At a 2002 legislative hearing concerning the measure, Warmington explicitly defended the medication, asserting that “OxyContin is a miracle drug for many patients.”
While Warmington maintains she would have rejected the representation had she known the full extent of the corporate misconduct uncovered by subsequent litigation, prominent news investigations and congressional inquiries had already raised public doubts regarding the company’s role in mounting overdose deaths by the time she delivered her testimony.
We rate this claim True.