Marsha Blackburn Tells Voters She’s Fighting Opioids. Her Track Record Doesn’t Agree.

“There’s a lot of lip service paid.”

Mark Humphrey/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

“Every death from opioids is heartbreaking,” said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican running for senate, in an earnest September campaign ad. Looking straight into the camera, Blackburn talked about new funding for treatment and the need to crack down on “drug makers who flood Tennessee with pills.”

In fact, Blackburn has been repeatedly criticized for taking money from the same pharmaceutical makers and distributors she alludes to in her ads—and crafting policy that benefits their bottom lines.

The opioid crisis is personal in Tennessee, which has among the highest overdose rates in the country, and now, the epidemic is playing a prime role in the tough race between Blackburn and former Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen. 

“It’s super popular to talk about” opioids along the campaign trail, said Michele Johnson, director of the Tennessee Justice Center. “There’s a lot of lip service paid.” Tennesseans are looking for more than lip service: Health care topped the list of priorities for likely voters, according to a recent CNN poll. “When Tennesseans say they care about healthcare, one of the things they talk about is the opioid crisis,” said state Democratic Party spokesperson Mark Brown. The epidemic, he went on, “is absolutely the defining issue of this race.”

So what, exactly, is Blackburn’s track record on opioids? Here’s a primer:

Pharma funding

Blackburn has long been among the House’s top recipients of pharmaceutical funding, and the trend has continued during her Senate run: Of all the senate candidates running this year, Blackburn ranks 9th in campaign funding from pharmaceutical or health product PACs and employees, taking in nearly $200,000. The companies make and distribute a variety of drugs, including, but not limited to, opioids. Over the course of her career, Blackburn has received $46,500 from the three pharmaceutical distributors—McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen—often accused of flooding small towns across rural America with painkillers.

Muzzling the DEA

Among Blackburn’s signature pieces of legislation is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, a 2016 law that hampers the DEA’s ability to go after companies suspected of illegally distributing opioids. Blackburn maintains that the legislation, which passed with bipartisan support, was intended to ensure that those who needed medications could access them, but critics say that the law played to the interests of the pharmaceutical distributors, which lobbied heavily for its passage. After an investigation by the Washington Post and CBS’ 60 Minutes revealed the law’s shortcomings, Blackburn said that any negative effects on the DEA were “unintended consequences” that she vowed to fix.

Joe Rannazzisi, former head of DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, has a different recollection of the story: In a 2014 conference call with congressional staffers, Rannazzisi warned that the bill would make it far more difficult for the DEA to tackle the opioid crisis, he recently told the Associated Press. “For [Blackburn] to say she didn’t know, or those were unintended consequences, that’s nonsense because I told them what the consequences would be,” he reportedly said. 

The legislation has been an issue on the campaign trail. “We were trying to address the problem of the opioid crisis, cracking down on drug companies,” says a now-retired DEA agent in a recent campaign ad for Bredesen. “Congresswoman Blackburn introduced legislation in the middle of this crisis that’s gonna make it more difficult for DEA to do their job. The industry got exactly what they wanted.” 

In September, Blackburn co-sponsored legislation that would ease the law, though the new version would still hinder the DEA more than the original, pre-2016 rule. (The bill has yet to move out of committee.)

Calling for—but not funding—treatment

As in much of the United States, access to addiction treatment in Tennessee remains a major barrier: As of 2016, nine out of 10 Tennesseans addicted to illicit drugs didn’t receive treatment.

This spring, Blackburn co-sponsored CARA 2.0, legislation that called for a three-day limit on initial opioid prescriptions and expansion of treatment and overdose response programs. But critics contend that without more funding, such legislation isn’t helpful. “When the rubber meets the road about actually providing funding to solve the problem or to make any changes, it’s far too little, far too late,” said Johnson.

What would be helpful, research suggests, is expanding Medicaid. Tennessee is one of 17 states that opted out of the Obamacare provision greatly expanding the publicly funded health care program for the nation’s poorest residents.

Blackburn has been a vocal opponent of Obamacare and voted to repeal it last year—a measure that, if it had passed, would have led an estimated 3 million Americans with substance use disorders to lose coverage.

Access to addiction treatment—including buprenorphine, the gold standard opioid addiction treatment medication—is substantially higher in states that expanded Medicaid. Expansion also frees up federal grants for longterm recovery: A recent AP analysis on states’ use of emergency opioid funding found that expansion states tended to spend federal grant money on long-term recovery programs, such as job-training and housing, while non-expansion states used the money on treatment basics. “In effect, Medicaid expansion states had a running start on the opioid crisis, while states without the extra Medicaid funding hastened to catch up,” it concluded.

Another key effect of not expanding Medicaid, particularly in rural swaths of Tennessee, is the shuttering of hospitals. Faced with uninsured patients and unable to turn them away in emergency situations, hospitals in non-expansion states frequently go uncompensated for their care. It’s a financial hardship that can, over time, force them to close their doors. When they disappear, so too does a primary source of addiction treatment.

“The hospital closures are bad both because people wont have jobs, so you’re gutting rural Tennessee, but also because then there’s no place for folks to get [addiction] treatment,” said Johnson. “If they have an emergency, getting to the next hospital could be hundreds of miles away.”

Blackburn’s office declined to comment to Mother Jones.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate