The Drug Enforcement Administration, the top agency in the United States tasked with preventing drug use and sales, advised its agents to avoid enforcing drug laws in rich white areas, according to a former employee, reported Bennorton.com.

Retired Chief Deputy U.S. Marshall and former DEA special agent Matthew Fogg spoke of his experience as a DEA agent in an interview with Brave New Films, comparing the 40-plus-year “War on Drugs” to actual military wars, laden with inherent racism and classism.

Fogg said the agency would use “attack tactics … that you would use in Vietnam, or some kind of war-torn zone. All of the stuff that we were doing, just calling it the war on drugs.”

When he would go into the war room, where teams would set up task forces to determine which cities they planned on going to next, “I would notice that most of the time it always appeared to be urban areas,” Fogg said.

“That’s when I asked the question, well, don’t they sell drugs out in Potomac and Springfield, and places like that? Maybe you all think they don’t, but statistics show they use more drugs out in those areas [rich and white] than anywhere,” he continued.

But according to Fogg, the special agent in charge warned that more affluent residents know judges, lawyers and politicians, and if the DEA starts locking their kids up, “somebody’s going to jerk our chain” and shut the operation down, which would jeopardize their overtime pay.

Read the full article here.