Portland, MAINE — Senator Susan Collins has accepted over $100,000 from companies and individuals linked to Maine’s opioid crisis, while voting to give the same companies — and the millionaires who run them — billions in tax breaks.
“Instead of holding these companies accountable for the devastation that opioids have brought to Maine, Senator Collins is taking their money and giving them tax breaks,” said Willy Ritch, executive director of the 16 Counties Coalition. “Mainers are calling on Susan Collins to stand up for us, not sell us out to the corporations whose products are destroying Maine families.”
Most of the companies that have supported Senator Collins and sold opioids have been named in lawsuits for aggressively pushing the drugs in states around the county. In August, for example, a federal judge found pharmaceutical manufacturer Johnson & Johnson responsible for fueling the opioid crisis and ordered the company to pay over half a billion dollars to remedy the devastation wrought by the epidemic on the state and its residents. Johnson & Johnson is also the principal developer of the opioid fentanyl, which has been implicated in the “third wave” of the opioid crisis, and has been linked to a majority of recent overdose deaths in Maine.
In Maine, in 2018, nearly one death a day was linked to drug overdose.
