New Mexico governor says state could seek billions after DEA let fentanyl hit streets

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: ABC News/AP

June 29, 2026, 3:32 PM


ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- New Mexico's governor said Monday that state officials could pursue billions of dollars in civil damages after revelations that U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents repeatedly allowed shipments of fentanyl to flow into drug-plagued communities as investigators sought to build bigger cases.

Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vowed to take her outrage “right to the White House and Congress” to seek assurances the DEA is no longer using the risky law enforcement strategy in New Mexico — and that it is not being replicated elsewhere. Overdoses have surged in New Mexico, even as fentanyl deaths declined in other states.

“This is a stunning failure by the federal government,” the governor told reporters at a news conference in the state medical examiner's office in Albuquerque, joining a host of state and local law enforcers and officials demanding answers. “It’s disgusting and despicable.” The White House and DEA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lujan Grisham's remarks came a week after The Associated Press reported that DEA agents repeatedly monitored — but did not seize — shipments of fentanyl as part of an effort to build bigger criminal cases between 2023 and 2025.

Read more: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/new-mexico-governor-state-seek-billions-after-dea-134321148

[littlemissmartypants]

1. Good!

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143682945

[DenaliDemocrat]

2. It's on purpose

My tiny town has been inundated with homeless people. I have no idea why they would want to stop in a rural mountain town that is poor and isolated with few services but they do. Recently they have been dying at an alarming rate - 2 or 3 per week. Bad fentanyl hit the market. So many have died we don’t have nearly the problem we had six months ago. It’s like when HIV first started. Oh, this disease kills it drug users and gay men? We will get around to it.

[RVN VET71]

3. Not a first for America's government.

I seem to remember stories of heroin and crack distributors getting a go-ahead from DEA to infiltrate and sell poison in the inner cities of L.A., Frisco, San Diego, Seattle,.

Yep! Just checked the story out. Gary Webb was a Pulitzer winning investigative reporter who broke that story in in the 1980's and published a book about it, "The Dark Alliance" and was basically ostracized by the journalist community with the help of the Feds. Driven into obscurity by an oddly conspiratorial-seeming set of circumstances, he killed himself in 2004, just as his book went to press.

Interesting how what goes around (during Reagan's "City on the Hill" reign) comes around half a century later. The reason the DEA turned the other way as heroin and coke, especially coke, entered the cities of America, was that Reagan's favored "Contras", right wing insurgents in Nicaragua, needed the profits from their drug dealing (and life ruining) in the States to continue fighting the "communist menace." Ollie North was a major supporter of this "turn the other way" strategy. He bragged about it but, to my knowledge, never attended any of the many American funerals caused by his untiring efforts in support of Fascism in Central America.

Interesting times. Ollie said, publicly, that he kept a lot of his drug-pushing bullshit from Reagan's ear in order to provide the Sainted Conservative "plausible deniability." Ollie had a famous affair with Fawn Hill -- a 10, definitely, who once got arrested for eating a banana on the subway platform in D.C. -- an affair consummated 40 years later when the couple married --and always wore civilian clothes while working at the WH. I recall, though, that when summoned to Congress to testify, he got his Marine uniform out of moth-balls so he could, I guess, impress the people watching. Ollie was a graduate of Annapolis and served as a marine officer in Vietnam. No one questions the man's courage or leadership ability. But he trashed his combat rep in order to help drugs enter the inner cities of America.

(Also, while at Annapolis, he beat Jim Webb in a boxing tourney, a fact which Webb said was made possible by North's getting outside coaching from a professional boxing master -- a fact that, had the Nacy pursued it, would have disqualified him from the tournament and given Webb the title.)

[Kid Berwyn]

4. Excellent memory, yours.

The press excoriated Webb and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) for telling the truth about CIA crack and its impact on California’s communities.

[OldBaldy1701E]

5. "...take her outrage "right to the White House and Congress"..."

Yeah, good luck with that.