DEA scrutiny grows over fentanyl shipments left to reach New Mexico streets

Federal drug agents in New Mexico are under sharp scrutiny after allowing hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to reach streets from 2023 through 2025 instead of seizing them sooner. The approach was meant to strengthen trafficking cases, but it left Albuquerque and other communities exposed to a drug that can kill in tiny amounts. DEA Special Agent David Howell, who filed a whistleblower complaint, said, "We poisoned our community to make cases."

Howell took his complaint to the Office of Special Counsel in late 2023, and he later alleged that more than 300,000 fentanyl pills had reached Albuquerque and other communities by September 2024. One case he pointed to involved a 15-month-old toddler who died after ingesting burned fentanyl residue in Española, a grim example of how a controlled-delivery strategy can spill far beyond the intended suspects. Some agents and outside experts have compared the tactic to Fast and Furious, the 2011 gun-walking scandal, but the stakes are different when the contraband is fentanyl rather than firearms.

The controversy lands in a state already hit harder than most. New Mexico’s drug overdose death rate has been among the highest in the nation for most of the last two decades, and the rate has more than tripled since 1990. In 2023, New Mexico had the seventh-highest total drug overdose death rate in the nation, including the District of Columbia. State health materials say 2024 and 2025 overdose data are still provisional, but they show rising counts in places including Santa Fe County and Taos County, with fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine driving the increase.

The federal drug threat picture has also shifted. DEA’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment says synthetic drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine account for nearly all fatal drug poisonings in the United States, a warning that underscores why letting shipments move can be far more dangerous than the older playbook used in cocaine or heroin cases. The DEA has long argued that it cannot seize every load and that undercover work sometimes requires transactions to continue. A later Justice Department review concluded that Albuquerque agents and prosecutors acted appropriately and within their discretion.

That defense now faces the harder question of whether investigative gains outweighed the public risk. In New Mexico, where the War Zone in Albuquerque and neighborhoods across the state continue to absorb the toll of fentanyl, the issue is no longer only how traffickers are built into cases. It is whether the strategy itself has become a failure of judgment, oversight and leadership with national consequences.