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BlackRock has thrown its weight behind a coalition of US police and firefighter labour groups that is making the case for getting politics out of pensions, in its latest effort to navigate the backlash to environmental, social and governance investing.

The world’s largest money manager is the only financial group among the founding members of the Alliance for Prosperity and a Secure Retirement, a Delaware-registered non-profit that warns on its website that “politics has no place in Americans’ investment decisions”. After coming under fire over its advocacy for sustainable investing, BlackRock has increasingly highlighted the primacy of investor choice.

A handful of small business and consumer non-profits are also members of the alliance, which launched earlier this year amid a flurry of ESG-related activity. Forty-four state legislatures considered 162 bills in 2023, and 76 more proposals have been put forward this year, according to law firm Ropes & Gray. Roughly 80 per cent of the proposals sought to ban consideration of sustainability factors, while the rest actively promoted it.

“We are not pro-ESG. We are not anti-ESG. What we are is ‘pro’ letting investment professionals, who have a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries, do the work that they’re supposed to do,” Tim Hill, a retired Phoenix firefighter who is president of the alliance, told the Financial Times. “We are ‘anti’ politicians, from either the right or left, interfering with that fiduciary duty so they can carry out a political, social agenda.”

Hill said the group had been set up to rally pension industry participants in support. “We decided we were going to try and take this different tack of enlisting the industry to assist us, primarily in the financial burden of pushing back and protecting our funds and fund managers,” he said.

BlackRock said in a statement that it was “proud” to back the alliance, adding: “As a fiduciary, our mission is to help more people experience financial wellbeing in all phases of life. The alliance is one of many organisations that BlackRock supports which are committed to helping more Americans retire with dignity on their own terms.”

The $10.5tn money manager has been at the centre of the political fight over ESG since 2020 when chief executive Larry Fink beat the drum for sustainable investing, pledging in his annual letter to make “sustainability integral to portfolio construction and risk management . . . governments and the private sector must work together to pursue a transition that is both fair and just”.

BlackRock became a target for both Republican politicians who objected to what they described as “woke capitalism” and progressives who wanted the firm to go further in forcing its investee companies to decarbonise.

In the past three years, BlackRock’s stewardship has become much more sceptical of climate-related shareholder proposals. Last year it voted against most of them, saying the others were too prescriptive or were not in the financial interest of its clients. At the same time, assets in the firm’s largest ESG fund have halved since late 2021.

BlackRock revamped its lobbying and public relations operations last year, and Fink has been putting far more emphasis on pensions policy and infrastructure investment. He used his 2024 letter to warn of a looming retirement crisis caused by changing pension and working patterns.

BlackRock’s website lists the Alliance for Prosperity as one of 13 organisations that it is working with to encourage discussion of retirement issues. The group is backed mostly by public safety unions, which have a history of being more conservative on climate and social issues than some of their counterparts in service industries. It also includes a federation of builders’ unions whose pension funds have $800bn in assets, including the US’s largest electricians’ union.

The group has approached more liberal unions, including at least one big teachers’ union but so far none have them have joined.

Hill said that for several years, labour groups and pensioners have grown more concerned that politicians view pension funds as “a pot of money that they could use to enact whatever their current political or social agendas were”.

“It’s always labour who does the work, pays the political cost, and pays the financial cost to defend [pension systems], typically without any help from the rest of the industry,” Hill said.

In early May, just a few weeks before graduation, Zoe Ramsey and Niko Peterson were sitting in an unlit, empty classroom at Animas High School in Durango, Colo., sorting through photos on a laptop.

The two high school seniors were wrapping up work on a two-page yearbook spread of words and images to honor their friend Gavinn McKinney.

In one photo, Peterson sits, wearing a knit cap and a goofy expression on his face. Another boy, with a tousled puff of dark hair, looking more sober and serious, stands behind with his chin on Peterson’s head.

This is Gavinn McKinney, who died two years ago during their sophomore year, just nine days before his 16th birthday.

“It represents our friendship pretty well, I think,” said Peterson. “I would have never imagined that this would be an in memoriam type of picture, but it’s a pretty good one.”

Youth susceptible to fake pills

On the evening of Friday, Dec. 10, 2021, McKinney and a friend took pills they believed to be the narcotic Percocet. But the pills were counterfeit and laced with fentanyl. Paramedics saved the other boy’s life with Narcan, a nasal spray that can quickly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. McKinney died before anyone could reach him.

“He was just like a wise soul,” Ramsey said. “I feel like he just knew something that none of us knew. And I’m never going to know what that is.”

Historically, drug overdose deaths among teenagers have been extremely rare. Even today, teen overdose deaths account for a small fraction of the total number of overdose fatalities nationwide. But in the past five years, the number of teen overdose fatalities rose sharply and suddenly, driven by a surge in the availability of counterfeit pills.

“I think people don’t realize just how complex and terrifying the illicit drug supply is becoming in the age of synthetics,” said Joseph Friedman, who studies addiction and illicit drugs at UCLA. “There’s this huge array of novel substances that are being synthesized, mixed in with fentanyl, in many cases sold as these preformulated counterfeit pills.”

While teens are unlikely to experiment with powder substances, they are more comfortable trying what they think are prescription drugs, and the swift rise in counterfeit pills has produced deadly results. Friedman co-authored a January 2024 study in the New England Journal of Medicine linking the rise in teen overdose deaths with the widespread availability of counterfeit pills, especially in the American West.

“We know that many teens (who) are fatally overdosing do not have an addiction, or a problem with drugs,” Friedman said. “In many cases, it’s just teenagers that are just experimenting with counterfeit pills. They may have only experimented a handful of times when a tragedy happens.”

This was precisely what happened to Gavinn McKinney in December 2021, according to his peers — he was experimenting with pills he believed to be safe. McKinney’s death was a sudden blow of shock and despair for the students and staff at Animas High School.

“We ended up just pulling the 10th graders together that morning,” said humanities teacher Lori Fisher, recalling the first morning at school following McKinney’s death. “We had grief counselors on hand, and then we had these three rooms of kids just crying and remembering and dealing with their grief.”

Among those closest to McKinney, Zoe Ramsey and Niko Peterson turned overwhelming grief into a resolve to take action.

“They were adamant from the very beginning that they wanted his death to mean something,” said Fisher. “It took them a while to figure out exactly what that looked like and what that meant for them. When they came upon this idea of harm reduction, Zoe was like, ‘This is it. This is what we need to be doing. This is where we need to be going.’”

Gavinn McKinney and Zoey Ramsey became close friends in their 10th grade year at Animas High School

Zoe Ramsey/courtesy Zoe Ramsey

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Zoe Ramsey/courtesy Zoe Ramsey

Fighting for the right to carry Narcan in school

Harm reduction is an approach to addiction treatment that prioritizes compassion and safety over shame and punitive action. Rather than insist on sobriety and abstinence, harm reduction attempts to minimize the harmful consequences associated with drug use. It’s better to provide tools that help a drug user live, rather than have the person die of an overdose.

As Ramsey and Peterson read up on harm reduction, they learned about fentanyl test strips, which allow a drug user to detect lethal opioids. They also discovered Narcan, with its active ingredient naloxone, which can reverse a fentanyl overdose.

“I had no idea what naloxone was. I had no idea what a fentanyl test strip was. I didn’t even know how little fentanyl it could take to kill somebody until after Gavinn’s death,” said Ramsey. “Then I realized, after the fact, that this could have been prevented, and nobody was teaching us about what could have been done instead…That’s when Niko (and I decided), ‘If the teachers, parents, and administrators aren’t telling us about this, then we need to tell our peers, and we need to do what we can to protect them.’”

Many schools stock Narcan for teachers and staff to use. But when it comes to students, there’s a legal gray area, and school administrators worry about liability. So when Ramsey, Peterson and other teens in Durango asked for permission to carry Narcan on campus, they ran into drug policies prohibiting the possession of any medication.

Undeterred, the teens lobbied Durango’s school board for permission to carry and administer Narcan on school grounds. They carried picket signs outside monthly school board meetings and spoke during public comment periods of those meetings.

Following that successful campaign, the teens worked with a Colorado state representative on a bill to give that same right to students across the state.

By February, Niko Peterson and other teens were testifying at a legislative hearing in the state capital. During that testimony, skeptical legislators challenged the idea that students were emotionally prepared to act as first responders in school.

“My son in high school is 14,” said state Rep. Anthony Hartsook. “I don’t know that he can evaluate whether somebody is having an allergic reaction, a medical reaction, a drug reaction.”

It was a moment when the teens wondered whether the bill would pass.

“I was worried we wouldn’t be able to convince them,” Ramsey recalled. “I spent more time on this than my college applications, and I just wanted all my hard work to pay off.”

The hard work did pay off near the end of April, when Colorado’s lieutenant governor signed the bill into law.

“Seeing it actually pass, and seeing people agree with it, was like a deep breath, a breath of fresh air,” said Ramsey.

After changing local school policy, and helping rewrite state law, it was time to graduate from high school.

But in the final days before graduation, as Ramsey and Peterson wrapped up senior projects and planned a class camping trip, each milestone was another reminder of their friend’s absence.

“We’re grieving still,” said Peterson. “I’ve been struggling with trying to still find the happiness in things … even though he’s not doing them with me.”

“I just finished a 32-page thesis on what the most effective harm-reduction educational strategies are,” said Ramsey. “I wonder what Gavinn would have written about? Would it have been quantum computing? We have no idea. We have no idea.”

On May 24, Animas High School left an empty seat at its graduation ceremony to remember Gavinn McKinney.

“He’s not going to be able to walk with us,” said Ramsey, her voice breaking. “But he would have graduated with us. Yeah. He would have graduated with us.”

Adam Burke and Clark Adomaitis have been covering Narcan in Durango schools since January 2023. You can find their stories here.