The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flood the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, even as the state grappled with the deadliest drug epidemic in American history.

This controversial tactic, revealed by three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press, involved agents monitoring but deliberately not seizing fentanyl shipments, a strategy purportedly aimed at building larger criminal cases against traffickers of the synthetic opioid.

However, this approach has been vehemently condemned by agents and experts as a dangerous gamble with public safety, potentially imperiling communities in and around Albuquerque and possibly violating U.S. Justice Department rules designed to protect the public.

"We poisoned our community to make cases," DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP. "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."

While the DEA maintains that seizing every drug shipment is impractical, the decision to allow staggering quantities of counterfeit painkillers to circulate shocked several veteran agents who spoke with AP.

Fentanyl, manufactured primarily in Mexican labs, became the DEA's top priority due to surging overdose deaths and its extreme lethality, which complicated traditional drug interdiction methods. Justice Department guidelines for fentanyl encourage seizure...

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