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The agency keeps finding new ways to prove their uselessness

Even as Donald Trump’s war against Iran drags on with no end in sight, let alone any sort of victory for the U.S., there’s another conflict America will definitely never win: the drug war. Even though “war” is somewhat metaphorical here, it has still been waged like one, with military-grade equipment used to police neighborhoods, clandestine spying operations and invasion of cities. But given that the main opponent of the Drug Enforcement Administration is, well, drugs, which don’t possess the ability to surrender, there can never going to be a end to this war, only further escalation.

On Wednesday, it was announced that the DEA is now helping investigate the death of actress Hayden Panettiere earlier this week, apparently as the result of an overdose. No official cause of death has been announced, but Panettiere was open about her struggles with addiction and chronic pain. While her sudden death at age 36 is nothing but tragic, why this is a good use of DEA resources is beyond me. This wasn’t some high-level cartel assassination or a major drug trafficking operation, it just seems to have been a (sadly) routine accidental poisoning. 

But as with the death of actor Matthew Perry in October 2023, which the DEA also jumped on, superstar overdoses are attractive bait for an administration that thrives on celebrity energy and little else. Such a high-profile investigation, even if entirely meaningless, may lend the DEA a veneer of competence, although its billions in annual funding have done little to stop the tide of deadly overdoses, or to make a meaningful dent in the flow of drugs entering the country. Investigating Perry’s death — which, it must be emphasized, was a result of drowning while on ketamine, not purely an overdose of the drug itself — resulted in several arrests but no significant reforms for addiction treatment or healthcare access.

But the DEA is also itself being investigated for allegedly allowing the powerful opioid fentanyl to flood into New Mexico between 2023 and 2025 in yet another of their many botched undercover operations, as revealed by an AP News report. The agency is accused of allowing drugs to “walk,” meaning that fentanyl deliveries were allowed to happen in order to build bigger cases against drug traffickers. On Monday, a Department of Justice internal watchdog announced a review of this controversial tactic, which may have resulted in overdose deaths or injuries, which are exactly what the DEA is supposed to prevent.

The irony here is extra thick when you recall that the Trump administration designated fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction" last year. Does that make the DEA a terrorist organization, or perhaps “enablers” of terrorism? Imagine if the Department of Homeland Security allowed white supremacists to blow up a few bridges so they could get a bigger conviction against them.

This underscores the absurdity of labeling fentanyl a WMD in the first place. The drug is used safely every day in every hospital in America, and in fairness, most drug users who ingest fentanyl do not die immediately. Many don’t die at all. It’s an opioid, not sarin gas. More importantly, the hysterical label does nothing to help people struggling with addiction or to reduce overdose deaths. It does, however, give cover for Pete Hegseth’s ongoing campaign to blow up boats in the Caribbean, which has widely been condemned as a war crime.

Whether it’s spreading myths about “rainbow fentanyl” in kids’ Halloween candy, or promoting the ludicrous lie that simply touching fentanyl can cause an overdose, the DEA is a bigger source of drug misinformation than that kid in your high school who channeled a lot of Joe Rogan. For all the phony celebrity investigations, in more than 50 years, the DEA has made no  progress in ending the war on drugs, let alone making America healthier. There’s a reason it’ll never work. Addiction is a health problem, not a policing problem. It can’t be solved with more cops or more guns. Amid all the talk about abolishing ICE, there are other three-letter agencies that deserve the same fate.—Troy Farah

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