It was reported recently that President Joe Biden’s nominee for associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, owns between $11 million and $55 million in stock in Avantor, a company that manufactures an essential ingredient used to make heroin and methamphetamine.
A Bloomberg report last year revealed that Avantor produces and sells that key ingredient, known as acetic anhydride, within Mexico, packaging it in “containers that are big enough to make lucrative quantities of illegal narcotics but small enough to load into the trunk of a car.”
Avantor is one of just a few companies that produce acetic anhydride in Mexico. Mexican drug cartels then buy the compound and use it to mass-produce high-grade, “China white” heroin and meth. According to Bloomberg, “the vast majority” of the heroin and meth sold in the United States originates in Mexico.
For Gupta, Avantor is not just a company she holds stock in and has profited from — it’s the family business. Gupta’s father, Rajiv Gupta, is the chairman of the board of Avantor.
Avantor has claimed it took ample precautions to ensure acetic anhydride didn’t fall into the wrong hands, but many of the Mexican distributors that the company partnered with were selling it like candy, often not even requiring photo identification.
The revelation of Gupta’s involvement in Avantor is deeply concerning. Between 2010 and 2018, an estimated 142,000 people died from overdoses involving either heroin or meth. West Virginia suffers the highest overdose death rate of any state, and it recently has been coping with an influx of heroin.
After the Bloomberg report was published, Avantor claimed to stop selling acetic anhydride in Mexico when the Mexican government opened a criminal investigation against the company. It is unknown whether the U.S. government is investigating Avantor.
In 2012, Gupta penned an op-ed in HuffPost, arguing that states “should decriminalize simple possession of all drugs.” This is a fairly shocking statement on its own, but paired with the revelation of Gupta’s significant financial holdings and familial ties to Avantor, it’s abhorrent.
While Gupta was advocating for a change to drug enforcement policy that would only further line the pockets of herself and her family, people across the U.S. suffered the devastating effects of the heroin and meth epidemic.
At her hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gupta disavowed her past position advocating for the decriminalization of all drugs. But for purposes of taking a top leadership role at the Department of Justice, that’s simply too little, too late.
Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee began sounding the alarm after the revelation of Gupta’s ties to Avantor. The committee’s ranking member, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, has asked Gupta to answer a series of written questions about her involvement with the company, “especially in light of the diversion of its products in Mexico and her own previous statements on decriminalization of possession for all drugs.”
Likewise, Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, whose home state saw a disconcerting 15% increase in drug overdoses between 2019 and 2020, said on Friday that Gupta’s Avantor connections are “absolutely disqualifying.”
Sens. Joe Manchin and Shelley Capito, for example, who represent a state ravaged by heroin and meth, need to stand up for West Virginia and oppose Gupta if the White House does not withdraw her nomination. While Gupta made tens of millions of dollars off the drug epidemic this last decade, thousands of lives were lost.
Gupta is simply an unacceptable choice for associate attorney general.
Carrie Campbell Severino is the president of the Judicial Crisis Network.
