(Union Leader) EPPING – A local police officer who claims he has been targeted because of his involvement with a group that wants to legalize drugs has been suspended from the force.
Officer Bradley Jardis said he was told Monday that he was being suspended with pay pending an investigation.
Police Chief Gregory Dodge would not comment on the suspension, but Jardis said he believes it resulted from his decision to go public with disciplinary action taken against him in July and claims that he has been ridiculed by certain Epping police personnel because he’s a member of an international organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
According to a letter from the town’s attorney, Philip Petis, the police chief adamantly disagrees that Jardis’ involvement with LEAP has anything to do with the disciplinary action.
Still, Jardis claims trouble began brewing in February when he was featured in a story in the New Hampshire Sunday News about his involvement with LEAP.
Three days after the story ran, Jardis wrote a letter to Lt. Michael Wallace asking that he be “protected from unlawful harassment” by Gallagher, who was then his supervisor. He claimed that on the day after the article came out, Gallagher referred to him as a “dark rain cloud over this place.”
I grew up in a dysfunctional family. My dad was an alcoholic and a drug addict. As I went through various “Al-Anon” type treatments as a teenager, I was taught that dysfunctional families revolve around the addict and they all try to cover for him and protect the family secret. If one family member exposes the secret, it is that family member, not the addict, who is vilified and shunned by the family.
Such is the nature of your average police force, a dysfunctional family addicted to the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs™. So long as they all march in lockstep and protect the secret – in this case the addiction to the easy arrests that pad police résumés and the asset forfeiture that lines their pockets – the family continues on, maintaining the façade of normalcy. But if one cop steps out of line and declares the drug war to be ineffective, cruel, inhumane, and unAmerican, he is a black sheep to be castigated, mocked, and shunned.
Office Bradley Jardis…PLEASE SUE because you have a case!….
Russ, your analogy to the family member that speaks up being vilified and not the addict himself is dead right!
That exactly describes the radical prohibitionist movement in control of drug policy in the U.S., U.K., UN and most countries around the world.
Anybody, no matter how senior, who dares speak up against the failed policy of prohibition is dismissed. In this way we live in a time very little different from when the Catholic Church brutalized humanity with the Inquisition.