The two big lies at the heart of the New Jersey governor’s race

If you sit and talk with Mikie Sherrill or Jack Ciattarelli, the candidates for governor in New Jersey, both come across as thoughtful and decent people.

But you’d never know that from this degrading campaign for governor, because they are throwing monstrous lies at each other. Ambition can do strange things to people.

So, if you want to cut through the nonsense, to spot the biggest lies in this campaign, I’m here to help. Let’s look at the worst of the worst from each side.

Sherrill’s top smear is the more outrageous, hands down. In the last debate, she accused Ciattarelli of “killing” thousands of New Jerseyans, including children, because his publishing company promoted Big Pharma’s deceptive story about America’s addiction crisis during the height of the epidemic.

Spoiler alert: Ciattarelli didn’t kill anyone. Sherrill could have called him complicit, perhaps, but he’s no mass murderer. We’ll get to that.

Ciattarelli’s worst distortion comes in his advertisement on electricity costs, which have ballooned by 22% in the last year, and have become a core issue in this campaign.

The key lines in the ad, which is on TV constantly, come when Sherrill is shown on a podcast saying: “We need to move into clean power … It’s going to cost you an arm and a leg, but if you’re a good person, you’ll do it.”

Sounds pretty bad. But Sherill was not describing her own views — just the opposite. A fuller excerpt shows she was criticizing that message, saying Democrats needed to emphasize that adding green power could increase the supply of electricity and lower costs, given it’s now cheaper to build solar and wind farms than a fossil fuel plant.

In other words, she was saying precisely the opposite of what Ciattarelli’s ad suggests.

“That ad is thoroughly dishonest,” said Micah Rasmussen of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. “That’s not her line. She was criticizing her own party’s line.”

That smear is straightforward and tells us nothing real about Sherrill.

Ciattarelli’s role in the opioid crisis is more troubling. He founded Galen Publishing, a firm that received millions of dollars from some of the worst actors in the opioid crisis, including Teva Pharmaceuticals and Purdue Pharma, owned by the infamous Sackler family. With Big Pharma’s money, and in cooperation with several universities, Ciattarelli’s firm produced materials for continuing education programs for doctors.

Here’s the problem: Those materials downplayed the risk of addiction. During the crisis, Big Pharma argued that using opioids for pain relief presented only a low risk of addiction for most people, that the problem was mostly limited to people who had previous problems with substance abuse.

It was a dark strategy to fend off criticism by shifting the blame to those in addiction. During one of the many lawsuits over the crisis, plaintiffs got an internal 2001 email from Richard Sackler at Purdue. “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” he wrote. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

The data expose that as a lie. By the time Sackler wrote that email, 75% of opioid users got their start with prescribed painkillers, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

But the materials Ciattarelli published embraced Big Pharma’s phony narrative. “The risk of opioid misuse is low among patients with chronic pain who do not have preexisting substance use disorders,” one read.

It’s bad because the danger of painkillers was well known at the time, and it was clear from lawsuits that Big Pharma was lying about it. And loads of people were dying, with the toll in New Jersey alone reaching 34,000 since 2012, according to the state Department of Health.

But it’s not murder, or a crime of any kind. There’s no evidence Ciattarelli knew his materials were misleading. And the final authority over the content rested with the universities, not him.

I know this is all depressing, so let me offer my happiest spin: Sherrill doesn’t want you to pay an arm and a leg for electricity, and Ciattarelli didn’t kill anyone. That’s nice.

But maybe when this campaign is done, both of these candidates can revert to being decent and thoughtful people again. Given that one of them will be our next governor, I sure hope so.

Tom Moran is a columnist for Advance Media and a former editorial page editor at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.