Tipsheet

Brutal New Ad Launched Against Manchin, Featuring DOJ Nominee's Alleged Ties to Cartel Heroin

The Judicial Crisis Network has launched a new ad targeting West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin as he considers voting for the confirmation of Vanita Gupta, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to become the next associate attorney general at the Department of Justice. 

West Virginia has the highest overdose rate in the United States and Gupta owns millions of dollars worth of stock in a company accused of making a key heroin ingredient for Mexican cartels. 

From a 2020 Bloomberg investigation into the company:

During the decade-long U.S. heroin epidemic, Avantor has cultivated a remarkable line of business: selling acetic anhydride across Mexico in containers that are big enough to make lucrative quantities of illegal narcotics but small enough to load into the trunk of a car. Sales come via a network of distributors, online sellers, and stores spread across the country.

Without the right chemicals, it’s impossible for cartels to make two drugs that are plaguing America: heroin and methamphetamine. Avantor is one of a handful of U.S. companies that supply the legal market for those chemicals in Mexico—a market the cartels have had little trouble tapping to make narcotics on a massive scale, a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation has found. Mexico is the source of the vast majority of the heroin and meth sold in the U.S., where more than 142,000 people died from overdoses involving the two drugs from 2010 through 2018.

Further, it's a family business:

UPDATE: After the Bloomberg exposé, an opinion piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer says Avantor pulled the heroin ingredient from production last year "when Mexican officials reacted angrily to news...that a chemical the company made there had become heroin makers’ reagent of choice."