Did US drug agents allow lethal fentanyl to hit New Mexico’s streets?

A man smokes fentanyl in Española, New Mexico. Photograph: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A man smokes fentanyl in Española, New Mexico. Photograph: Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images Analysis Did US drug agents allow lethal fentanyl to hit New Mexico’s streets? Edward Helmore Explosive AP story based on whistleblower testimony suggests agents ‘sat back and watched’ in hopes of securing larger drug-trafficking bust 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. View image in fullscreen David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint, poses for a portrait outside the US district courthouse in Albuquerque. Photograph: Susan Montoya Bryan/AP 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 gui