DEA Special Agent David Howell has a way with words. In a whistleblower account first reported by the Associated Press on June 22, Howell described an operation in New Mexico where the agency allegedly allowed hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to flow onto American streets while agents watched. His summary of the strategy was blunt: "We poisoned our community to make cases."
That's not a critic talking. That's the agent who ran it.
Between 2023 and 2025, the DEA allegedly permitted massive shipments of counterfeit pills — manufactured by Mexican cartels in labs and designed to mimic name-brand painkillers — to reach their destinations rather than intercepting them. The logic, apparently, was to trace the distribution networks and build bigger cases. The problem is that each of those pills contained fentanyl, a drug known to be uber deadly, just a couple of milligrams is enough to kill a person.
Hundreds of thousands of pills. Each one potentially lethal at a dose you can barely see.
If the strategy sounds familiar, it should. In 2009, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms launched Operation Fast and Furious, allowing more than 2,000 firearms to "walk" across the border into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. The idea was to track the weapons to cartel leadership. Instead, the guns disappeared into criminal networks, and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed with one of them.
Attorney General Eric Holder called the tactics "wholly unacceptable" after the scandal broke — then was held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling the investigation. Senator Chuck Grassley led the congressional probe. Nobody went to prison. Holder kept his job for two more years.
So naturally, a different agency tried the same playbook with something even deadlier.
The DEA, for its part, issued a statement insisting that "public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts." That's a carefully constructed sentence. It doesn't say the pills were seized. It doesn't say they were stopped. It says the public descriptions are wrong — which is what agencies say when the descriptions are uncomfortably close to right.
Howell's attorney, Tristan Leavitt, is representing the whistleblower as congressional hearings loom. The fact that Howell is willing to go on record — and use the word "poisoned" — suggests the internal documentation backs him up. Whistleblowers who are making things up don't usually describe their own operations as poisoning the community.
The pattern here isn't complicated. A federal agency decides to let dangerous contraband reach American streets in pursuit of bigger arrests. The contraband does what contraband does. People get hurt or killed. The agency denies it, fights congressional oversight, and eventually admits just enough to avoid prosecution while the political appointees who authorized it move on to book deals and consulting gigs.
Fast and Furious gave us a dead Border Patrol agent and a contempt citation that went nowhere. The fentanyl version gave us hundreds of thousands of lethal pills loose in New Mexico and a press statement that reads like it was written by a lawyer at 2 a.m.
The sequel nobody asked for. Same studio, bigger body count.
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