Did the Drug Enforcement Agency break the law and gamble with public safety when it permitted large quantities of fentanyl pills to be trafficked in New Mexico in the hopes of getting a larger drug-trafficking bust?

That is the question at the heart of an explosive story published in the Associated Press, based on information provided by a former DEA agent turned whistleblower; the whistleblower filed a complaint in 2023 that claimed agents had allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills into Albuquerque – a city still reeling from the opioid crisis while many others across the country are seeing overdose rates decline.

“We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA special agent David Howell told the outlet. “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.”

Howell told the AP that, in some cases, the DEA had detailed intelligence about drug deliveries, including precise pill counts in shipments to Albuquerque.

DEA agents deciphered coded chatter over cellphones and closely surveilled a transaction of 74,000 fentanyl pills at a mobile home park in Albuquerque in June 2023, according to documents reviewed by AP. Days earlier, another shipment had also gone without seizure.

“We did nothing but sit back and watch,” Howell said.

One kilogram of fentanyl, which equates to thousands of pills, has the potential to kill 500,000 people, per the DEA’s own reporting.

The DEA has since challenged the AP’s reporting, saying in a statement to the Guardian that “public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts”.

“The cases in question involved complex, court-authorized Title III investigations in which agents and prosecutors conducted real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering, and operational analysis targeting larger drug trafficking organizations,” it added.

The agency further said that in “operational decisions in investigations like this, DEA is mandated to coordinate investigative decisions with USAO (offices of US attorneys) leadership to ensure investigative steps are carefully coordinated to prevent harm to the public” and the decisions it had made “were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances, and consistent with department guidance”.

Nonetheless, in a subsequent statement, the DEA asked the US justice department’s internal watchdog – the office of inspector general – to investigate Howell’s complaint.

Meanwhile, New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez announced Friday the opening of a formal investigation into allegations.

“If those allegations are accurate, the consequences for New Mexicans were not abstract. They were fatal,” Torrez wrote in his letter to governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. “New Mexico already ranks among the states hardest hit by fentanyl overdose deaths, and the families who have lost children, siblings, and parents to this crisis deserve a full accounting of what the federal government knew, what it did, and what it failed to do.”

Torrez said he was “committed to pursuing every appropriate legal avenue to hold the responsible parties accountable” but warned while federal agents “are not above the law, the supremacy clause of the United States constitution provides substantial protections for federal employees acting within the scope of their authority”.

But the report has raised question about whether the US’s premiere drug enforcement agency underplayed the threat of fentanyl.

Additionally, there are questions about whether they have focused too much on largely Mexican criminal groups behind the trade instead of local or retail distribution and the tens of thousands of overdose deaths attributed to it.

While drug fatalities have fallen by 24% from roughly 105,000 in 2023 to 79,384 in 2024, the downward trend has not been seen in all regions – including in New Mexico, particularly along the Rio Grande valley, with its long history as a trans-shipment route for Mexican black tar and brown heroin. For decades, the Los Alamos dormitory town of Española, 80 miles north of Albuquerque, was known as the heroin-addiction capital of America.

But the issue was largely localized. Addiction soared in the area with the relaxation of the opiate prescription practices in the late 1990s. When those gates were closed 15 years later, Mexican cartels switched from costly heroin production to the cheap, synthetic and more unpredictable fentanyl.

Overdose deaths in New Mexico increased 23% over the past year, marking the second consecutive year the state led the nation in overdose mortality. During the first half of 2025, three north-east counties, Rio Arriba, Santa Fe, and Taos, saw drug-related emergency room visits increase by as much as 204%, according to the New Mexico department of health.

Howell was uncovered as the author of the complaint to the justice department’s office of professional responsibility after reporters noticed the redactions had missed the last letter of his name; they contacted DEA agents who had worked in Albuquerque on LinkedIn. He reportedly paid a price for making the complaint – getting relegated to desk duty and getting docked in his performance evaluations.

Internal records also show prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court, citing his “pattern of refusing to heed” admonitions to allow drugs to go without seizure during long-term investigations.

Alex Uballez, who served as US attorney in New Mexico from 2022 through 2025, told the AP that drug shipments had been allowed to go through without seizure as part of a broader effort to gather intelligence and build cases against major drug traffickers.

“The bigger fish are worth catching,” he said, “And that will save more lives.”

The finding that federal agents allowed hundred of thousands of pills to be distributed in Albuquerque has sent political shockwaves through the state.

Governor Lujan Grisham called the DEA’s actions “reckless and dangerous” and urged the New Mexico attorney general’s office to prosecute anyone responsible, “regardless of whether they are a federal agent or not.” Grisham also told the Albuquerque Journal that the result of this influx of pills was “hundreds of New Mexican parents burying their kids. Hundreds of New Mexican kids growing up without stable parents. All while the federal government stood by.”

A Democrat who is facing a re-election contest with former interior secretary Deb Haaland, Grisham said she repeatedly petitioned Joe Biden’s administration and federal officials for help with the fentanyl crisis.

“While my administration was doing everything we could to stem the tide of fentanyl coming into our state, the federal government deliberately allowed it to flood in,” she said. “I plan to hold the federal government accountable for this disaster and will explore every possible avenue of action to right these wrongs.”

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller said on X that the fentanyl epidemic has “torn through our streets” and “it is disgusting to think that federal authorities may have allowed hundreds of thousands of these deadly pills to move into our community and possibly killed people through their actions.”

Keller said at a news conference on Thursday that DEA had made an “immoral decision” and called it “a huge slap in the face to all of us as New Mexicans”.

Bernalillo county sheriff John Allen, which incorporates Albuquerque, told the Albuquerque Journal that the DEA had been allowed “to feed poison to our community for a bigger case”.

“I agree with getting the big fish and everything, but not when people are dying while we’re doing these investigations,” he added.

In 2017, the Department of Justice issued an internal “fentanyl protocols” guidance that directed federal agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable” and said that “protecting public safety is paramount” irrespective of larger investigations.

But two years ago, the DoJ revised that guidance to give agents more discretion, saying investigators “may exercise discretion in determining whether to take action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl”, balancing public safety risks against “the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.”

In December last year, Donald Trump issued an executive order designating fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and gave defense secretary Pete Hegseth and then attorney general Pam Bondi broad latitude to use the resources of both departments to combat the scourge.

Empower Oversight, whistleblower organization that now represents Howell, says DEA routinely “walked” fentanyl shipments from at least 2023 to March 2025. As the DEA did, it called on the justice department’s office of inspector general and congressional oversight committees to investigate.

“The same agency that warns the public, ‘one pill can kill’, should not intentionally allow hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets,” the organization said. “It’s outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case.”