Few attack lines in New Hampshire’s 2026 governor’s race have proven as durable as the three words Republicans keep attaching to Democratic candidate Cinde Warmington: opioid lobbyist. The former Executive Councilor announced her campaign against Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte in February, and almost immediately the label appeared on billboards, on protest signs, and in statements from the governor’s allies. According to reporting by the New Hampshire Bulletin, the accusation has not let up in the months since, and the documented record behind it is more detailed than a single slogan can capture.
For Granite Staters trying to make sense of the charge, the question is not simply whether the words land politically. It is what Warmington actually did, when she did it, and whether the work that took place more than two decades ago should define a candidate today. The story matters in a state that was battered harder than almost any other by the opioid epidemic, and where voters have watched overdose deaths climb and then slowly recede over the past several years.
What the record actually shows
Warmington built a career as a healthcare attorney at the Concord firm Shaheen and Gordon, and that work is well documented in public records. In late 2001 and 2002, she was hired by Purdue Pharma, the company that manufactured OxyContin and is now widely blamed for igniting the opioid crisis that has been linked to an estimated 645,000 deaths nationwide. Purdue has since admitted in federal court to misleading doctors, patients, and the public about the drug.
At the time, New Hampshire lawmakers were advancing House Bill 1218, a measure that would have required doctors to try at least three alternative therapies before prescribing OxyContin or its generic equivalents. The bill reflected an early and growing awareness that the drug carried serious addictive risks. Warmington was hired to fight it.
During an April 9, 2002, Senate hearing, she argued that the proposal would, in her words, “arbitrarily and inappropriately restrict access to medically necessary medications,” according to the official transcript archived in the General Court records. She told senators the measure was “not supported by clinical data” and “places patients at risk.” Then she went further, describing the drug in terms that read very differently today. “OxyContin is a miracle drug for many patients,” she testified, “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 later acknowledged she had overstepped by speaking to the pharmacology and deferred to a Purdue Pharma doctor seated alongside her.
When pressed by state Sen. Sylvia Larsen about the drug’s potential for abuse, Warmington did concede a point. “I think we can all say that it is a drug of abuse as are all narcotics,” she said, while adding that it was “not the most abused narcotic in the state of New Hampshire.”
Her connection to the industry did not end with Purdue. Warmington later worked extensively for PainCare, a clinic chain that was among the largest prescribers of opioid painkillers in New Hampshire in the early 2000s. Critics, including recovery advocates who oppose her campaigns, have labeled it a pill mill. PainCare was owned by Dr. Michael O’Connell, who surrendered his medical license in 2012 amid allegations of inappropriate relationships with patients, a settlement in which he did not admit wrongdoing. Warmington represented O’Connell in those proceedings. Years later, before his death in 2023, O’Connell donated $10,000 to her first gubernatorial campaign, and he and PainCare’s parent company also gave to her Executive Council campaigns. For context, the Bulletin noted that Ayotte herself received donations from Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family during her U.S. Senate campaigns.
Is the attack fair? A legal ethics view
The political charge raises a genuine question of professional ethics, and on that point the answer is more nuanced than either campaign suggests. Julian Jefferson, a law professor at the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law who teaches professional responsibility, reviewed Warmington’s work and found nothing out of the ordinary for an attorney. Lawyers routinely represent unpopular and even harmful clients, he said, because the adversarial system depends on it.
“Everything that she did, at least looking at it objectively, was completely within the bounds of representing her client,” Jefferson said. He argued that a client’s wrongdoing should never be imputed to the attorney, warning that doing so would have a chilling effect on the profession. He noted that rules of conduct bar attorneys from knowingly spreading falsehoods, but added that at the time Warmington testified, the science around OxyContin’s addictiveness was still being debated, and Purdue’s deceptions had not yet been exposed. Warmington has repeatedly said she did not know of the company’s lies.
Jefferson drew a sharp line between law and politics. “Politics is a contact sport, so everything is fair game,” he said. Voters are free to weigh her history and judge it, he said, but that is “a very, very different thing from calling somebody unprofessional and violating the rules of professional conduct,” which he saw no evidence of.
How Warmington is fighting back
Warmington has largely declined to relitigate the 2002 testimony, instead pivoting to attacks on Ayotte’s record. Pressed by reporters after filing for office in Concord, she reframed every mention of the issue as a distraction. “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,” she said, before pointing to school vouchers and a 15% rise in electric rates.
Her campaign has also gone on offense over what it calls hypocrisy. Spokesman Jon Levin pointed out that when Ayotte served as attorney general from 2004 to 2009, she was not among the 26 state attorneys general who sued Purdue Pharma, though her successor did in 2017. Levin emphasized Warmington’s later work expanding addiction treatment access as the sole Democrat on the Executive Council and her board service with Riverbend Community Mental Health and the Lakes Region Mental Health Center. He noted that Warmington’s own father struggled with addiction, framing her commitment to the issue as personal.
Ayotte’s team is unmoved. “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,” said John Corbett, an Ayotte campaign spokesperson and policy adviser.
Why it resonates in New Hampshire
The attack carries weight precisely because of how deeply the opioid crisis cut here. In 2017, New Hampshire recorded 424 opioid-related overdose deaths, a rate of 34 per 100,000 residents that was more than double the national average of 14.6. The state has since made real progress: opioid-related deaths fell 44% between 2022 and 2025, according to the New Hampshire Drug Monitoring Initiative, with preliminary 2025 estimates around 187 deaths. For voters who lost family members and neighbors during the worst years, a candidate’s two-decade-old defense of OxyContin is not an abstract resume line. That emotional weight, more than any single document, is what keeps the label alive heading into November. This is the same dynamic that has shaped other clashes between the two campaigns, including their ongoing fight over Medicaid premiums and the state’s healthcare safety net and an earlier dispute over the Sununu Youth Services Center and child advocacy.
The broader context also includes New Hampshire’s own reckoning with Purdue, which produced a $30 million opioid settlement secured by Attorney General John Formella. And the race itself is unfolding against a Democratic Party still digesting its 2024 gubernatorial loss, a defeat that featured many of the same attacks Warmington now faces.
