As a clinical social worker and master alcohol and drug counselor, Jason Snook doesn’t spend a lot of time around the State House.

“I pull people out of the trenches, the trenches that people fall into because of poor legislation,” he said. 

On Tuesday, he was one of two speakers at an event calling on Democrat Cinde Warmington to exit the race for governor after her past lobbying for opioid-distributing pharmaceutical companies.

“All of this is actually pretty foreign to me,” Snook said from the podium in the lobby of the Legislative Office Building in Concord Tuesday with his service dog Linus by his feet. “But we need somebody in charge that knows better.”

An online petition with nearly 100 signatures from recovery advocates details Warmington’s past involvement in Purdue Pharma and PainCare, two organizations that contributed to the opioid crisis in New Hampshire. 

“The truth is that she has directly contributed to and profited from the opioid crisis in New Hampshire for over two decades,” the petition states.

As a paid lobbyist for Purdue Pharma in 2002, Warmington pushed back against lawmakers trying to place restrictions on OxyContin prescriptions, despite increasing concern about the drug’s side effects and addictive quality. She then worked as a lobbyist and lawyer for PainCare, a New Hampshire-based “pill mill,” throughout the 2010s. Plus, the founder and CEO of PainCare and his associates donated $70,000 to Warmington’s political campaigns, according to the petition.

“She’s using that blood money to get herself into the governor’s office,” Snook said.

Defending her record

Criticism of her past work as a lobbyist isn’t new to Warmington. As soon as she announced her campaign in 2023, she started getting questions about her past in Big Pharma. In response, her campaign has pointed to her substance abuse recovery advocacy in office and accused her chief Democratic rival of fueling the backlash.

“This effort to smear Cinde Warmington with a 22-year-old attack organized by Joyce Craig’s allies disgracefully exploits the pain of New Hampshire families struggling with substance use disorder and shamelessly parrots Kelly Ayotte’s attacks for Craig’s own political gain,” said Miles Cunning, a spokesman for Warmington. 

Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, has been keeping a low profile in the race while she leads in the polls. On the Republican side, Ayotte is facing former state Senate president Chuck Morse for the party’s nomination. 

Warmington’s own father struggled with substance abuse, which has fueled her advocacy for expanded access to treatment, Cunning said.

Bill Rider, the former CEO of the Mental Health Center of Greater Manchester, said he watched Warmington advocate for people who were struggling with mental health and substance use disorders.

“She has always been dedicated to improving lives through her work and tirelessly never leaving a stone unturned,” Rider said in a statement. 

Both Snook and Jessie Hurlbert, the other addiction survivor who spoke Tuesday, insisted they represented those affected by the opioid crisis, not Craig.

“We’re part of the recovery community here in New Hampshire,” he continued. “That’s who we stand with.”

Addiction and recovery

Shortly after 9/11, Snook joined the Navy and served two tours in Iraq. When he returned home to New Hampshire in the mid-2000s, he was traumatized.

“I had all of these mental and emotional injuries” he said. “I mean, just going to war in and of itself is enough to cause any single human being trauma.”

As he reentered his old life, he noticed his friends had started using OxyContin. It was easy to find. All it took was a trip to the doctor and a minor complaint — “Oh, I’ve got a toothache!”— to land a prescription, he said.  

“I was tripping and falling over the amount of OxyContin that was here when I got home,” he said.

He found that OxyContin offered a rare relief to his PTSD symptoms. He used it relentlessly, relying on the minimal warnings he had heard about the drug.

“It was like a miracle,” he remembered. 

But he soon found that only more pain lay beyond OxyContin’s soothing qualities. He sold drugs to pay for his expensive habit, and bounced in and out of jail for five years until 2011, when he’d had enough. He did a 28-day rehabilitation program from jail, and began charting his path to recovery.

“I’m pulling each suffering addict and alcoholic out of the water one at a time,” he said. “And I’d never been concerned with the dam that’s actually broken.”

When Purdue Pharma settled a lawsuit by paying $6 billion to those harmed by the opioid epidemic, Snook was cautiously delighted.

He’s grown worried that money is getting diverted away from recovery efforts.

“Law enforcement is showing up to town hall meetings saying, ‘We need that money for more cars and more pepper spray,’” he said. “And that’s just not right.”

“We need that money,” he said.

In Snook’s eyes, Warmington can’t be trusted with those funds.

“A lobbyist who helped cause this problem in the first place is going   to become governor and tell us how our money is going to be spent?” Snook said. “That is not right. I put my foot down.”

Sofie Buckminster can be reached at sbuckminster@cmonitor.com.