The week of February 20, 2017, J.D. Vance moved home to Columbus, Ohio and began promoting Our Ohio Renewal, a charity he was developing to address the opioid epidemic in his home region of Appalachia. But the charity was a scam and closed less than two years after its official launch.
Filled with platitudes and short on specifics, “Our Ohio Renewal” promised to help Ohioans touched by the opioid epidemic with new job opportunities and educational resources. But as The New York Times reported in October 2022:
Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets.
The New York Times
The short-lived nonprofit had its fair share of controversies when it was active. It seems Vance’s charity was never interested in doing charitable work.
A review by Business Insider found that Our Ohio Renewal dropped more cash into the pockets of executive director Jai Chabria in its first year than it spent on any programs to combat opioid abuse. Like Vance, Chabria had no background in non-profit work. He was a longtime Ohio political strategist and investment banker. A few years after “working” with Vance on Our Ohio Renewal, he would join Vance’s Senate campaign as chief strategist and top policy advisor.
Another issue with Our Ohio Renewal? The “addiction specialist” Vance hired for a year-long residency actually had established ties to right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which receives funding from Purdue Pharma, maker of Oxycontin.
Dr. Sally Satel, as AP’s Julie Carr Smyth reported, was an “AEI resident scholar whose writings questioned the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis, published in The New York Times and elsewhere before she began the [Ohio Renewal] residency in the fall of 2018.”
After the residency ended, Satel claimed that the opioid crisis was caused by “behavioral and environmental forces,” not predatory marketing or easily accessible prescriptions.
American Enterprise Institute
At the time of this writing in 2024, Dick DeVos, husband of Betsy DeVos and son of former Council for National Policy president Richard DeVos, sits on AEI’s Board of Trustees. Also on the board is GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow, known by most of the public for providing expensive gifts, trips, and other likely bribes to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Sources
Sidney Daily News, Archived – This article, published Thursday, March 3, 2017, states that Vance moved to Columbus “last week.” This is how we nailed down the date of this post.
Wikipedia – Jai Chabria, Archived
