David Howell spent 14 years as a DEA special agent in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During that time, he watched his own agency allow shipments of 50,000 and 150,000 fentanyl pills pass through without interdiction — part of what his attorney now says totaled more than 1 million pills deliberately allowed to flow into the country illegally.
The same DEA was running a national campaign called "One Pill Can Kill" at the time.
Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight and Howell's attorney, laid out the case. "DEA has a campaign that says one pill can kill, and so the DEA allowing this to happen was really significant," Leavitt said. The comparison he drew wasn't subtle: this was Fast and Furious with fentanyl instead of firearms.
Operation Fast and Furious, for anyone who needs a refresher, was the Obama-era operation from 2009 to 2011 in which the ATF allowed semiautomatic weapons to flow to Mexican drug cartels, ostensibly to track them. The weapons were tracked about as well as you'd expect. People died. After the scandal broke, the Justice Department adopted a protocol in 2019 requiring agents to interdict contraband — including fentanyl — when they had knowledge of trafficking through wiretaps.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in New Mexico apparently didn't get the memo. Or got it and filed it somewhere creative. According to Leavitt, "the Justice Department's guidance was really ignored in Albuquerque, because the U.S. attorney decided to cowboy and do his own thing."
Howell's position was straightforward. "Howell's view was, if you have fentanyl in front of you, you need to interdict it. That's how we save lives," Leavitt explained. That view, evidently, was not popular with the people running the operation.
So Howell did what you're supposed to do when your agency is letting poison pills reach American communities. He filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in late 2023. And then came the part that keeps happening to whistleblowers: he was told he could no longer testify in cases. The 14-year veteran agent was effectively sidelined for the crime of objecting to a million fentanyl pills reaching the street.
Howell himself put it in terms that don't require interpretation. "We poisoned our community to make cases," he said. "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."
During the period in question, New Mexico experienced higher fentanyl overdoses than any other state over a two-year span. That's not a coincidence that requires a conspiracy theory to explain. The pills were there because the DEA let them be there.
The Biden administration's position on fentanyl was, publicly, one of grave concern. Press conferences were held. Statements were issued. Meanwhile, in Albuquerque, agents who wanted to actually seize the drugs were told to stand down so the cases could be built. The cases were apparently more important than the bodies.
President Trump signed an executive order in December 2025 designating fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction and has since overseen the largest DEA fentanyl seizure in Albuquerque's history. The DOJ Inspector General now has the complaint.
The original Fast and Furious scandal produced years of congressional hearings, a contempt citation for Attorney General Eric Holder, and exactly zero structural changes that prevented it from happening again with an even deadlier substance. A million pills. One pill can kill. The math was never complicated — the agency just chose not to do it.
