This story dateline is August 2022.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — When JD Vance founded “Our Ohio Renewal” a day after the 2016 presidential election, he promoted the charity as a vehicle for helping solve the scourge of opioid addiction that he had lamented in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestselling memoir. But Vance shuttered the nonprofit last year and its foundation in May, shortly after clinching the state's Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, according to state records reviewed by The Associated Press. An AP review found that the charity's most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.
The mothballing of Our Ohio Renewal and its dearth of tangible success raise questions about Vance’s management of the organization. His decision to bring on Dr. Sally Satel is drawing particular scrutiny. She's an American Enterprise Institute resident scholar whose writings questioning the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis were published in The New York Times and elsewhere before she began the residency in the fall of 2018.
Documents and emails obtained by ProPublica for a 2019 investigation found that Satel, a senior fellow at AEI, sometimes cited Purdue-funded studies and doctors in her articles on addiction for major news outlets and occasionally shared drafts of the pieces with Purdue officials in advance, including on occasions in 2004 and 2016. Over the years, according to the report, AEI received regular $50,000 donations and other financial support from Purdue totaling $800,000.
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D.R. Gossett, CEO of the Ironton-Lawrence County Community Action Organization, who helped oversee Satel’s roughly $70,000 residency, said she “helped people who were struggling in southern Ohio” and “to this day, people are thankful for her presence.” That included treating an unspecified number of patients in a region long designated a health care shortage area and what Gossett described as “community planning efforts.” After the residency ended, Satel's public remarks suggested she remained as convinced as ever that addiction stems from combined behavioral and environmental forces — not the documented overprescribing and aggressive marketing of OxyContin and other opioids that helped families and state, local and tribal governments ultimately secure a $6 billion national settlement against Purdue in March.
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/vances-anti-drug-charity-enlisted-175919116.html
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