Albuquerque, 2023. DEA agents stop a vehicle with a child inside and seize roughly 6,000 to 7,000 fentanyl pills and a gun. According to one of those agents, federal prosecutors scolded them for intervening.
That is the account Special Agent David Howell gave CBS News in an October 29 interview. He says he spent three years warning managers that the agency was allowing dangerous quantities of fentanyl to reach the streets while investigators pursued bigger cases.
The Associated Press reported that agents repeatedly monitored shipments without seizing them between 2023 and 2025. The Albuquerque Journal reported Howell’s allegation, backed by two former agents, that one unseized delivery contained more than 1.8 million pills on March 25, 2025.
The DEA tells the public that “One Pill Can Kill.”
Then it owes the public an explanation for every decision to let those pills keep moving.