FBI informant allegedly helps run darknet site selling fentanyl-laced drugs for years

An FBI informant allegedly helped run a dark-web marketplace that sold fentanyl-laced drugs for years, a case that reads less like a sting operation and more like a government-sponsored business plan.

According to Wired, the site functioned as a long-running venue for narcotics sales—including counterfeit pills containing fentanyl—while operating with the kind of continuity most illicit markets never achieve. Darknet bazaars usually die young: admins get arrested, infrastructure gets seized, rivals hack them, or users flee after an exit scam. Yet here, the most stable stakeholder appears to have been the state.

The classic law-enforcement justification is “controlled delivery”: keep a channel open to identify suppliers, map networks, and build prosecutable cases. In physical policing that already invites moral hazard—how many burglaries are acceptable while you “work the case”? In cyberspace, scale turns that question into arithmetic. A platform that reliably clears transactions can become a de facto regulator: it sets norms, resolves disputes, and lowers transaction costs. If the FBI’s asset was embedded in that machinery, then the state wasn’t merely observing a market; it was, in effect, helping provide the market’s uptime.

That incentive structure is hard to miss. Agencies are rewarded for big cases, not for preventing anonymous overdoses. A prolonged operation can generate more intelligence, more arrests, more forfeitures, and more press releases. The costs—overdoses, addiction, violence in the supply chain—are borne by users, families, and neighborhoods. Externalities are not a bug; they’re the financing model.

Wired’s reporting also underscores a deeper problem: the opacity of informant-driven operations. When the government uses an “asset” to keep a criminal enterprise running, accountability becomes a hall of mirrors. Prosecutors can claim necessity, agents can claim ignorance of day-to-day harms, and the public is asked to trust that the same institution that expanded the market’s lifespan is also the institution best positioned to judge whether that was ‘worth it.’

You don’t need to romanticize drug markets to see the issue. If the state can quietly underwrite the infrastructure of a fentanyl marketplace in pursuit of better evidence, it can do the same anywhere a “bigger case” beckons. At that point, law enforcement stops being a referee and becomes a liquidity provider.

The uncomfortable question raised by Wired’s account is not whether informants should exist, but where the line sits between infiltration and co-production. If the government’s presence makes a market more predictable, safer to transact in, and harder to disrupt, then the state has created a perverse public-private partnership—one where the public pays in bodies.