The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to circulate in New Mexico communities between 2023 and 2025, a deliberate tactic to build "bigger criminal cases" against traffickers. This systemic choice, which DEA Special Agent David Howell stated "poisoned our community to make cases" and "100% got people killed," occurred concurrently with the U.S. military conducting over 60 strikes in the eastern Pacific, resulting in the deaths of more than 210 people in an ongoing campaign against alleged drug smugglers.
State-Sanctioned Poisoning
Government records reviewed by The Associated Press confirm that DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills but did not seize them. This strategy, aimed at securing larger criminal cases, potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules designed to safeguard the public.
In June of the third year, DEA agents closely surveilled a transaction at an Albuquerque mobile home park, observing traffickers deliver 74,000 pills, a figure later confirmed by federal prosecutors. Days earlier, investigators watched the same distribution ring deliver another suspected fentanyl shipment hidden in a spare tire, which similarly went unseized, prompting Howell to state, "We did nothing, but sit back and watch."
Howell, who filed an official whistleblower complaint in the third year, reported that authorities cannot account for the unseized shipments. A former DEA supervisor, speaking anonymously, stated that he and his Albuquerque colleagues allowed "millions" of pills to go unseized during a multi-state investigation in the first year, with Howell disclosing that agents permitted the delivery of at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills in that case.
This investigation culminated in the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, announced in May of the first year by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, resulting in the seizure of more than 3 million pills. However, the former supervisor noted that "The amount we ultimately seized was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on," suggesting the organization could have been dismantled six months earlier.
While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike. Howell began flagging overdose deaths potentially caused by DEA-permitted pills, including the death of a 15-month-old toddler who ingested burned fentanyl residue last year in Española, New Mexico.
Alex Uballez, who served as U.S. attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through last year, justified allowing drug shipments to go unseized as part of a broader effort to gather intelligence and build cases against major traffickers. Uballez stated, "The bigger fish are worth catching," arguing this approach would "save more lives" despite the immediate human cost.
In the second year, the Justice Department rewrote its internal "Fentanyl Protocols," which previously called for seizing fentanyl "as soon as practicable" with "public safety paramount." The revised rules now grant law enforcement more discretion, allowing investigators to balance public safety risks against "the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation," effectively legalizing the gamble with community lives.
Howell, after taking his allegations to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which initially found a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing," was relegated to desk duty for more than a year and barred from testifying in federal court. Internal records cited his "pattern of refusing to heed" admonitions to allow drugs to go unseized, demonstrating the state's suppression of dissent that challenges its operational priorities.
Imperial Violence Abroad
In the eastern Pacific Ocean, the U.S. military conducted another strike against a boat accused of smuggling drugs on Thursday, immediately killing two people and leaving six survivors. This latest attack, part of an ongoing campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America, brings the total number of people killed in boat strikes by the U.S. military to more than 210 since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls "narcoterrorists" in early September of the same year.
In a previous strike on June 16 of the same year, two men initially survived, clinging to wreckage, only to be killed in a follow-up strike. The White House confirmed this second strike, claiming it was done "in self-defense" to ensure the boat was destroyed and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict, a justification legal scholars have questioned as illegal under any circumstance.
U.S. Southern Command stated it targeted alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes but provided no evidence that the vessel was ferrying drugs. Critics have highlighted that fentanyl, responsible for many fatal U.S. drug overdoses, is typically trafficked over land from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India, exposing the disconnect between military action and the actual flow of the drug.
President Donald Trump has declared the U.S. to be in "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America, framing these attacks as a necessary escalation to stem drug flow and save American lives, despite offering little evidence to support his claims of killing "narcoterrorists." The Pentagon’s watchdog announced in May that it would investigate whether the U.S. military followed an established targeting framework, focusing on procedural compliance rather than the legality of the strikes themselves.
The Cost of Capital's War
The actions of the DEA and the U.S. military illustrate a consistent pattern within the state apparatus: prioritizing institutional objectives, such as prosecuting "bigger cases" or projecting military power, over the immediate safety and lives of working-class communities and the dispossessed. The systemic neglect inherent in these strategies, from allowing fentanyl to flood neighborhoods to lethal strikes on unverified targets, reveals how the "war on drugs" serves as a pretext for state violence and the consolidation of power, rather than a genuine effort to address public health or safety.