“[Rogers’] refusal to reckon with the consequences of his actions raises a troubling question: whether he was willing to sacrifice his constituents’ well-being for pharmaceutical money”

LANSING — Mike Rogers is getting slammed over his “inability to come clean about his role” in “shaping the policy environment” that allowed “powerful prescription opioids [to become] widely available, marketed aggressively, and treated casually.”

Donald Morrison, a survivor of opioid addiction, writes that Rogers “has long downplayed his role in advancing legislation that helped ‘pain management clinics’ proliferate, even as he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies profiting from extended-release OxyContin.” According to Morrison, “That refusal to reckon with the consequences of his actions raises a troubling question: whether he was willing to sacrifice his constituents’ well-being for pharmaceutical money—and, decades later, still cannot express even the slightest contrition.”

While in Congress, Rogers was a self-described “champion” for the pharmaceutical industry while he advanced dangerous legislation that “helped fuel the opioid crisis” and repeatedly voted to block lower prescription drug costs for Michigan seniors and veterans—all while his campaigns and political committees have accepted more than $1 million from Big Pharma. During his Senate campaign, Rogers has repeatedly “misrepresented” the disastrous opioid legislation he authored in Congress, which “did not include penalties” or safeguards for overprescription and addiction, despite his claims to the contrary.

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Current Affairs: The Opioid Crisis Looms Over Michigan’s Senate Race

• Today, the history of America’s opioid crisis is returning to the surface in Michigan’s Senate race. Republican nominee Mike Rogers’ inability to come clean about his role in that crisis does not exactly inspire confidence among voters seeking a leader willing to be honest with the public, or, more importantly, with himself. The revelations aren’t new, and his failure to show even a modicum of regret for his role in what documentarian Alex Gibney called the greatest crime of the 21st century isn’t either.

• Rogers, who represented Michigan’s 8th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2015, has long downplayed his role in advancing legislation that helped “pain management clinics” proliferate, even as he accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies profiting from extended-release OxyContin. (The FDA, meanwhile, had either been complicit in—or misled into—approving the drug’s marketing and labeling.)

• He continued to minimize his role in the larger epidemic during his most recent Senate campaign against Elissa Slotkin in 2024. I can understand why he would want to distance himself from that record. Harder to accept is his apparent inability to acknowledge his role in the broader crisis. That refusal to reckon with the consequences of his actions raises a troubling question: whether he was willing to sacrifice his constituents’ well-being for pharmaceutical money—and, decades later, still cannot express even the slightest contrition.

• Rogers may not have been there at the epidemic’s inception, but he and his team have taken conspicuous pains to scrub away his own small, yet consequential part in shaping the policy environment that allowed it to deepen. For me, this is not an abstract argument about chronology or campaign rhetoric. The opioid epidemic changed my life and reshaped the lives of my family and countless friends; Rogers’s record deserves to be weighed with that human cost in view.

• I was 16 in 2007 when I took my first OxyContin pill. It was an alarming age to encounter a drug that powerful—then, and certainly now. As I wrote in a previous piece, timing shaped the course of my life in ways that are hard to overstate. Had I been born five years earlier or five years later, I doubt OxyContin—and, eventually, black tar heroin—would have been so easy to find while I was still in high school.

• The years I spent suffering as a heroin addict in Tigard, Oregon, roughly from 2008 to 2013, were shaped by a perfect storm of legislative and regulatory decisions championed by Rogers and others. These policymakers helped create an environment in which powerful prescription opioids were widely available, marketed aggressively, and treated too casually. That access did not remain confined to doctors’ offices or legitimate patients; it filtered into suburban high schools and communities like mine outside Portland, many of which were profoundly unprepared for the scale and severity of addiction that followed.

• In September 2003, as overdose deaths climbed, Rogers introduced what would become a signature bill: the National Pain Care Policy Act. He aligned himself with leaders of the American Pain Society, an industry-funded pain advocacy group, whose messaging echoed opioid manufacturers’ push for more aggressive pain treatment. Backed by organizations linked to Purdue Pharma—the Sackler family-owned maker of OxyContin—and promoted through a media campaign financed by the American Pain Society, the bill sought to make expanded pain care a federal priority through robust funding and a loosening of regulations around the prescribing of certain narcotics. For an industry still fighting to grow its market and deflect responsibility for the mounting death toll, it offered a powerful ally in Washington.

• Rogers has spent the remaining years doubling down on his support of policies that he claims were meant to battle real physical pain felt by his constituents. He does this by reframing his work as helping people who suffer from chronic pain get access to medication, and even invokes his brother’s many back surgeries to drive home the point, saying, “Without that relief, the last ten years of his life would have been, well, candidly, we wouldn’t have had him for that last ten years of his life.” He doesn’t seem to place the bill he supported on the timeline of the national opioid epidemic. This assumes that without the bill someone like his brother would not have been given pain medication at all.

• For the Sacklers, the reckoning came in dollars, not criminal convictions. In October 2020, Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced that Purdue Pharma, the family’s OxyContin manufacturer, would plead guilty to three felonies: one involving fraud against the federal government and unlawful opioid dispensing, and two involving kickbacks for paying doctors to prescribe opiates, and for paying Practice Fusion, an electronic health-records company, in exchange for referring, recommending, and arranging orders. The company faces more than $8 billion in penalties. The Sacklers themselves agreed to a separate $225 million civil settlement. The company admitted criminal wrongdoing; its owners did not. Asked why prosecutors had not brought criminal charges against family members, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen declined to explain. The agreement left future prosecutions possible, but delivered no such charges against the Sacklers.

• The legal fight did not end there. In 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a bankruptcy arrangement that would have shielded the Sacklers from civil claims without the claimants’ consent. A replacement $7.4 billion settlement took effect in May 2026, ending the family’s control of Purdue, barring it from selling opioids in the United States, and directing money toward treatment and recovery. But in an ironic twist of fate, a large chunk of that money never reached the treatment centers and recovery communities that are so greatly underfunded. Instead, more than a dozen law enforcement agencies have used opioid settlement money to increase surveillance through the purchasing of AI-powered automatic license plate readers.

• Rogers has closely aligned himself with the president whose first administration negotiated the 2020 deal. Trump gave Rogers his “complete and total” endorsement in July 2025, and Rogers has made his access to the president a selling point of his Michigan Senate campaign. He’s leaning on Trump’s pedigree among the Republican Party while sitting comfortably alongside the administration that secured a guilty plea from their company while letting its owners escape relatively unscathed.

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