Hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills were permitted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to flood the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to government records and current and former DEA agents. This deliberate inaction, aimed at building “bigger criminal cases,” directly contributed to a 21% spike in overdose deaths in New Mexico last year, even as national figures fell by 14%.
DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of the synthetic opioid, which the White House last year designated a “weapon of mass destruction,” but chose not to seize them. Special Agent David Howell stated, “We poisoned our community to make cases,” adding, “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”
Elite Interests Over Public Safety
The DEA’s strategy, described by agents and experts as a gamble with public safety, potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque. In June 2023, agents closely surveilled a transaction at an Albuquerque mobile home park where traffickers delivered 74,000 pills, a figure later confirmed by federal prosecutors. Days prior, investigators watched the same distribution ring deliver a spare tire hiding another suspected fentanyl shipment that similarly went unseized. Howell reported, “We did nothing, but sit back and watch.”
A former DEA supervisor, speaking anonymously due to fear of retaliation, revealed that he and his Albuquerque colleagues allowed “millions” of pills to go unseized during a multi-state investigation last year. Howell’s whistleblower disclosures indicated agents on that case permitted the delivery of at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills. This investigation culminated in the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history in May 2025, seizing over 3 million pills, yet the former supervisor noted, “The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on.”
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through last year, defended the approach, stating authorities at times allowed drug shipments to go unseized to gather intelligence and build cases against major traffickers. Uballez claimed, “The bigger fish are worth catching,” and that this would “save more lives,” despite the immediate flow of deadly drugs into communities.
Institutionalizing Managed Decline
The Justice Department’s internal “Fentanyl Protocols,” established in 2017, initially mandated agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable,” emphasizing that “protecting public safety is paramount.” However, these rules were rewritten in the second year, 2024, to grant law enforcement “more discretion,” allowing investigators to balance public safety risks against “the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.” This institutional shift effectively prioritized abstract investigative objectives over the immediate protection of the native population.
The tactic has been compared by current and former agents to “Operation Fast and Furious,” the 2011 gun-walking scandal where assault weapons were smuggled into Mexico. Howell began flagging overdose deaths potentially caused by the unseized pills, including the death of a 15-month-old toddler last year in Española, New Mexico, who ingested burned fentanyl residue.
Howell, a 19-year DEA veteran, filed an official whistleblower complaint in the third year, 2023. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel initially found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing.” Yet, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility later concluded in the second year, 2024, that the DEA and U.S. attorney’s office had made “reasonable decisions” and that their inaction posed no “specific danger to public health.” Howell was subsequently relegated to desk duty for over a year, his performance evaluations docked, and prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized.
Border Failure and Distant Engagements
While domestic agencies permitted the fentanyl deluge, the U.S. military conducted over 60 strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean since early September, resulting in more than 210 deaths. President Donald Trump justified these attacks as an “armed conflict” against “narcoterrorists” to stem the flow of drugs and fatal overdoses claiming American lives.
However, critics have questioned the effectiveness of these distant engagements, noting that the fentanyl behind many fatal U.S. drug overdoses is typically trafficked over land from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India. This highlights a fundamental failure to secure the nation’s land borders, allowing the primary vector of the “weapon of mass destruction” to remain largely unaddressed while resources are deployed far from the homeland. U.S. lawmakers have demanded unedited video of a strike after reports emerged of a follow-up attack on survivors, which legal scholars deemed illegal. The Pentagon’s watchdog announced in May that it would investigate the military’s targeting framework, but not the legality of the strikes themselves.