Will Claire McCaskill Win A Tight Race In Missouril?

Will Claire McCaskill's fight against opioids help her win a tight race in Missouri this fall?

- Julia Lurie

When her elderly mom was dying in the hospital, Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator now facing a tough reelection fight in Missouri, noticed a disturbing pattern. Betty Anne McCaskill, 84, would seem energetic and upbeat until nurses came to check her pain levels on a 1-to-10 scale. Then she’d moan, “Ten! It’s a 10!”

“She knew that the more she said 10, the more opioids she’d get,” says McCaskill, whose mom died in 2012. “There’s no question my mother was addicted at the end of her life.”

People chat around us in a gilded reception hall outside the Senate floor, their conversations echoing off the marble walls, but McCaskill sits chin on one hand, leaning forward, green eyes unwavering. She talks as if she’s confiding in a good friend, though in reality she’s squeezing in a quick interview between votes. “The other part of the story about my mother,” she says after a pause, “is realizing that younger members of our family were stealing from her.” After some of Betty Anne’s pills went missing, safes were bought and home health aides were monitored. “First there’s the sinking sensation that my mother’s addicted to opioids, combined with this sinking sensation of, ‘Who’s taking them?’” she says. “And then, of course, people started dying everywhere around me in Missouri.”