What a reporter found when uncovering why federal agents allowed a deadly drug to hit the streets

This is an interview of Mustian by Del Quentin Wilber, who edited the story.

It is usually very hard to get such an inside account of DEA operations. Where did the idea come from and how did you track it down?

Goodman, my AP colleague, first spotted the whistleblower complaint accusing the DEA of allowing fentanyl to hit the streets of New Mexico. The report was sent to the White House in September but escaped media attention at the time.

As government records often go, it was heavily redacted to shield not only the whistleblower’s identity but the amount of fentanyl that was not seized.

There was a critical oversight in the government’s redactions. I noticed that the whistleblower’s name ended in an “l” — a single letter that, for some reason, was missed by the black marker.

I sent a flurry of messages on LinkedIn to DEA agents whose named ended in “l” and had worked in Albuquerque. One afternoon in March, I was at my desk when I received a response from an agent who connected me to the whistleblower, David Howell. A couple weeks later I flew to New Mexico and met with Howell.

The DEA has long allowed drugs to ‘walk,’ as you described it in the story, in an effort to catch bigger dealers. What is different about fentanyl that makes this tactic, in the eyes of some current and former agents, problematic?

The simple answer: the sheer potency and lethality of fentanyl. In its “One Pill Can Kill” campaign, the DEA warns that just a couple of milligrams — an amount that would fit on the tip of a pencil — is enough to kill the average adult. Nowadays with fentanyl, we’re usually talking about counterfeit pills designed to mimic name-brand painkillers. The pills are almost always manufactured by cartels in Mexican labs and contain an unknown amount of fentanyl.

Our reporting highlighted the example of a 2023 fentanyl shipment that DEA agents monitored — but did not seize — at an Albuquerque mobile home park. Agents gathered such detailed intelligence that they wrote in their investigative report that 74,000 pills had been delivered. Howell told me that decision, which came as fatal overdoses hit their peak around the country, was akin to “providing one fentanyl pill to each person at a football stadium.”

Federal officials defended the decision to not seize the drugs.

Alex Uballez, the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque at the time, acknowledged that authorities sometimes “walk" drugs in the name of catching an ultimately “bigger fish” — an approach he said saves more lives than attempting to interdict every shipment.

The DEA said in a statement that “public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts.” Spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote in an email that “the investigative decisions at issue were lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.”

What was the most intriguing take-away for you in the reporting process?

This story highlights the enormous gulf between what law enforcement does with taxpayer resources and what the public knows — or is supposed to know — about those activities. That’s true even in something as consequential as the drug war. Federal agents enjoy enormous discretion and make decisions every day that affect public safety.

In many instances, the government asks us to simply trust it’s doing the right thing. Indeed, the records we uncovered would not have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. These records and interviews with Howell revealed the complexity of these investigations that we rarely see. Even as Howell’s complaint was raising serious concerns about allowing fentanyl to reach drug users, DOJ rewrote its non-public rules to afford law enforcement more discretion in deciding whether to seize the deadly painkiller.

The DEA’s decision to allow fentanyl to hit the streets bothered some long-time agents, one in particular. What did Howell do to raise the issue with his superiors?

Howell, a 19-year veteran of DEA, filed a formal whistleblower in late 2023 with the Office of Special Counsel, a government agency that protects whistleblowers. He submitted DEA reports, emails and text messages, including one in which colleagues discussed a 100,000-pill transaction they witnessed but chose not to stop.

The OSC was initially so concerned that it found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and took the unusual step of asking the Justice Department to investigate.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, a kind of internal affairs office, found in 2024 that the DEA and U.S. attorney’s office had made reasonable decisions in deciding to allow drugs to go unseized and that their inaction posed no “specific danger to public health.”

Howell and other critics said internal investigators overlooked the question of whether DEA permitted massive amounts of fentanyl to hit the streets.