NJ gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mikie Sherrill accused Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli of personally profiting off the opiate crisis in the tensest moment of Wednesday night’s debate.
“My opponent likes to talk a lot about being a businessman, but I think what New Jersey doesn’t know much about his business,” she said — pivoting from a question about the unemployment rate.
“How he made his millions by working with some of the worst offenders and saying that opioids were safe, putting out propaganda, publishing their propaganda.”
Sherrill was referring to controversy that emerged during Ciattarelli’s 2021 bid for governor about training materials his company published, which critics said included pharma industry talking points about opiates that were dangerously inaccurate.
Galen Publishing, one of two medical publishing companies Ciattarelli co-founded alongside American Medical Publishing, had produced content on pain management that critics say minimized the potential repercussions of opioid use.
“Misuse or diversion of pain relievers is a significant problem, especially among adolescents and young adults. Concerns about opioid dependence, addiction, or non-medical use often create barriers to effective pain management,” one of the papers said, NJ.com reported in 2021.
“The risk of opioid misuse is low among patients with chronic pain who do not have preexisting substance use disorders.”
The material was published as part of a deal with the University of Tennessee that was underwritten in part by key players in the pharmaceutical industry.
Sherrill tried to use the work by Ciattarelli’s company to tie him to the opiate crisis.
“Tens of thousands of New Jerseyans died. And as if that wasn’t enough, then he was paid to develop an app so that people who were addicted could more easily get access to opioids,” she said.
Ciattarelli did not directly address the allegations and instead counterattacked.
“First of all, shame on you,” he snapped back.
“During the Biden administration, she had no problem whatsoever with tens of thousands of people crashing our border each and every day, not knowing what impact they had in our communities with regard to the fentanyl crisis,” he continued.
The NJ.com article reported that Ciattarelli’s company, Somerville-based Galen Publishing, made $12.2 million between 2007 and 2016 on a contract for continuing education materials with the University of Tennessee’s pharmacy school.
Critics claimed that the materials used pharma industry talking points.
In 2023, Ciattarelli’s campaign said that the University of Tennessee picked the topics, had its faculty write the articles and oversaw the editorial content.
Galen acted as an intermediary to help get industry funding for the publications.
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“An absurd, unhinged attack by a candidate who is in freefall and hasn’t the slightest clue about New Jersey or how to bring the change we desperately need,” Chris Russell, a GOP strategist for the Ciattarelli campaign, told The Post about Sherrill’s attack.
After the debate, Sherrill was pressed about whether she had any proof that material published by Ciattarelli’s old firm, which he sold in 2016, actually exacerbated the opioid crisis and led to the deaths of New Jerseyans.
“I guess he’s not really expressed anything about this. I think there’s a lot we don’t know. I think he continues to not be very transparent about it,” she told reporters.
“I think he’s responsible for publicizing the propaganda from opioid companies, when he was saying opioids were safe and the publishing company was saying they were safe, and people were dying,” she explained at another point.
The Post has reached out to the Sherrill campaign for separate claims she made that Ciattarelli was involved with an app which which she alleged enabled people to “more easily get the opioids once they were addicted.”
The opioid issue had largely been dormant in the 2025 gubernatorial race until Sherrill raised it in the debate.
According to state data, 2,800 New Jersians died of opiate overdoses in 2023 — down form a high of 3,100 the prior year. The state’s drug overdose death rate was 28 per 100,000 residents, lower than any of its neighbors, including New York.
