ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) â Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press.
DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills â but did not seize them â as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a âweapon of mass destruction.â
Agents and experts, however, said the tactic amounted to a gamble with public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public.
âWe poisoned our community to make cases,â DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. âThrough our own willful blindness, we get to say, âWe donât really know what happened to the drugs.â But we 100% got people killed.â
The DEA has long contended it would not be plausible to seize every shipment of every drug. But the strategy of allowing staggering amounts of counterfeit painkillers to hit the streets shocked several veteran agents who spoke with AP.
Ridding the streets of illicit fentanyl, manufactured mostly in Mexican labs, became DEAâs top priority over the past decade as overdose deaths surged. At the same time, its lethality â a few grams can kill the average adult â upended time-tested tactics that had been used to combat drugs like cocaine and heroin. Those methods have included allowing drug transactions to be completed so agents might follow the narcotics through the supply chain. Fentanyl, however, is so dangerous that the U.S. Justice Department developed guidelines for agents in such circumstances, encouraging them to seize the opioid whenever âpracticable.â
Albuquerque, which has a neighborhood so besieged by drugs itâs known as âWar Zone,â and other regions in New Mexico remain at the epicenter of the fentanyl epidemic. While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike.
Precise intelligence on drug deliveries
In some cases, the DEA had such detailed intelligence about drug deliveries that agents were able to tally precise pill counts, according to reports reviewed by AP.
Agents, for example, deciphered coded chatter over cellphones and closely surveilled a transaction at a mobile home park in Albuquerque in June 2023, according to a 66-page report reviewed by AP. Agents wrote in the report that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills as part of that deal, a figure federal prosecutors later confirmed in a court filing.
Days earlier, another DEA report showed, investigators watched the same distribution ring deliver a spare tire hiding another suspected fentanyl shipment that similarly went unseized.
âWe did nothing, but sit back and watch,â said Howell, who filed an official whistleblower complaint in 2023 to bring attention to what he thought was a tactic that risked public safety.
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