Most columns generate a modest response, but some strike a chord. That’s how it was with one published in August about my granddaughter the honor student – and drug addict.
The column detailed her years of Oxycontin addiction, stealing to support her habit, jail time and, ultimately, the glorious day that she graduated from Ada County Drug Court. She’s been drug-free since and – knock on wood – has her life back.
Few of my columns have had a greater response, much of it from recovering addicts or their family members. Many of the responses reiterated the August column’s point that addiction knows no boundaries. It’s a genetic disease striking families of every socioeconomic background.
John (last name withheld) wrote to say that his son, “a high school honor student, valedictorian, captain of three sports, college graduate and business owner – got hooked on opiates,” and was awaiting sentencing. “Despite cautioning my children that all four of their grandparents were addicted to either tobacco, alcohol or both, Oxycontin hijacked his brain during his last year of playing college football … If it can happen to my son, it can happen to anyone. And statistics show that it does so without regard to gender, ethnicity, religion or socioeconomic status.”
Chuck wrote that he and his wife were shocked to the core to learn that their daughter – a wife, mother of two and a respected professional – was addicted to meth and alcohol. A career military pilot, he added that he could “not begin to tell you how many times I preached no drug use in this family. Don’t even think about it.”
An Oregon reader shared a story of parental heartache caused by his young nephew, a heroin addict: “He got there through Oxycontin after a sports injury. … Heroin and opiates are a huge national problem in every socioeconomic rung.”
The stories, many of them heartbreaking, had a common theme of addiction at an early age and a system that too often fails to address the underlying problem of addiction as a disease. Some excerpts:
“As a grandmother, I am dealing with this disease hitting the third- generation victim, my 23-year-old-grandson.”
“The disease is always in control, and you would sell your soul to keep it that way.”
“My daughter is dealing with drug problems with her 16-year-old son, and it is heartbreaking for her and all the family who love him so much.”
“I am a 42-year-old woman who became addicted to prescription opiates at age 17. I’ve been in recovery for three years.”
“The real tragedy is that with few exceptions, our legislature, judiciary and law enforcement still see addicts as moral failures that need to be punished instead of treated. … we continue to lock them up at great expense to taxpayers and with no end in sight.”
Ginny Gobel wrote about her experience with her teenage son, which led to her ongoing role as an activist working to help other families and correct misconceptions about addiction and the stereotypes associated with it.
Gobel’s son started using marijuana at 14 and went from there to other drugs. He’d been popular and a good student with wholesome interests – pets, soccer, skiing, diving – he dove the Great Barrier Reef at 11 – but lost interest in them and became, in his mother’s words, “dark, secretive and nasty.”
Unable to find adequate services for him in Boise, she and her husband sent him to a therapeutic boarding school in another state. It helped a lot, but returning to Boise was problematic for a 15-year-old in recovery.
“Just when he started making new friends, his old friends started seeking him out and he started using again. Drugs robbed him and us of his high school years.”
Her son is grown now, lives in another state and is doing “all right,” she said. “But he knows what his life could have been without drugs. He’d have played sports and gone to college. … Drugs derailed those dreams, at least for now.”
These days Gobel devotes much of her time helping others deal with drug-related problems. She started a blog, http://www.blindersoff.org, on drug-use awareness for parents of adolescents. Boise High School is using it with positive results.
How widespread is drug use among teens? The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that one in four have used an illegal drug by the time they graduate from high school.
Is yours one of them? Red flags, Gobel says, include lying, irritability, changes in interests, sleep patterns, friends, health and acceptance of responsibility. If grades are plummeting and responsibilities at home are being neglected, you have reason to be concerned.
Help is available. Gobel’s blog has useful information, as does Dr. Ruth Potee’s video, “Addiction is a Brain Disease,” https://youtu.be/qjyvRQFbseQ. If you’d prefer a book, Gobel recommends “What’s Wrong with My Kid: When Drugs or Alcohol Might Be a Problem and What to Do about It,” by George E. Leary, Jr. Help also is available from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s Behavioral Health Services and from private treatment centers.
Idaho is making some progress on treating addiction as a disease rather than a failure of morals or willpower. Boise is training police officers to deal more sensitively with the mentally impaired. Idaho will soon be the first Western state to have a chapter of Learn to Cope, a peer group for parents. Rep. Raul Labrador is supporting sentencing reform for non-violent offenders, many of them suffering with untreated substance-use disorder, and Idaho Atty. Gen. Lawrence Wasden is on record as supporting the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act.
Much more remains to be done, however. Idaho has one of the country’s highest rates of opiate abuse among teens. One in five Idaho teenagers has taken a prescription drug belonging to someone else, usually a relative. We rank 21st among the states in deaths from opiate overdose.
We have a long way to go in fighting a disease that’s erasing the promise and threatening the lives of too many of our young people.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

So many people came to Grace Arnold’s birthday party that it was held at her church because they wouldn’t fit in her home. They came from as far away as Seattle and California.
She was turning 100, but that wasn’t my reason for being there. People live so much longer these days that 100th birthdays aren’t as newsworthy as they once were. I wanted to meet her to learn more about the early years of our mutual alma maters, Boise High School and Boise Junior College. That she had made history at BJC was an unexpected bonus.
Arnold and I had never met, but recognizing her in the crowded church hall shouldn’t have been a problem. How many people there would be a century old?
Actually, it was a problem. A number of the guests were getting up in years, and no one stood out as looking the way we expect centenarians to look. There was a white-haired woman seated at a table with a birthday cake big enough for a marching band, but she didn’t look anywhere close to 100. That couldn’t possibly have been her.
It was. Even after being introduced and conversing with her for a while, I had trouble believing how old she truly was. She walked unassisted, her hearing was better than some people’s half her age and her mind was clear and bright. We should all be so lucky.
It didn’t take long to realize that she was a force of nature, and had been all her life. At Boise High School, she was an “art girl” and a “letter girl,” a member of the art club, history club, home economics club and library staff, an honor student and a member of the National Honor Society. She didn’t tell me any of this herself; it was all in her 1933 Boise High School yearbook.
Then as now, students’ senior pictures were accompanied by predictions of what they’d end up becoming. Hers was “Old Maid.”
“I’m not sure how they came up with that,” she said, laughing. “I certainly wasn’t.”
Hardly. She was married twice, had three children and is a grandmother many times over. Her grandkids call her “GG,” for great grandmother.
I know. You’re wondering how she made history at BJC, now BSU. We’ll get to that, but first a wee bit more about Boise High in 1933.
Teachers stuck around in those days. My mother and one of my kids had the same English teacher I did – the redoubtable Inez Woesner. She was one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer.
“She influenced a lot of us,” Arnold said.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Woesner was her English teacher, too. The number of students she influenced would be in the thousands.
That brings us to BJC and Arnold’s role in its history. For years, I’ve heard that it was a woman who suggested blue and orange as the school colors. Every attempt to track her down, however, came to a dead end. So you can imagine my surprise upon learning that it was indeed a woman – namely Grace Arnold.
“There was a committee of us,” she said. “He wasn’t my husband yet, but my first husband and I were on it along with several others.”
BJC then was nothing like the BSU of today, which offers over 200 degrees to more than 22,000 students. It opened its doors (or quite possibly door, singular) in the fall of 1932 with 70 students and a full-time faculty of eight. It wasn’t even in the same place that the university is today. It was in the former St. Margaret’s Hall, an Episcopalian women’s academy on Idaho Street between 1st and 2nd. It was there that Arnold enrolled in the fall of 1933.
“We thought Boise was a big city then, but it was only about 25,000 people,” she said. “It wasn’t the Los Angeles of Idaho like it is today. And the school was very small. You knew just about everybody.”
A committee was formed to choose the school colors and a name for its athletic teams. Committee members thought that a Western theme would be appropriate, and chose the name “Broncos” for the wild horses of neighboring Owyhee County.
The first mascot was “Elmer,” a paper-mache’ horse that was cremated after every game. Belying a winning tradition that would span decades, the Broncos lost their first football game: St. Joseph’s Academy, 6; BJC, 0.)
A real horse as a mascot didn’t come along until 1965. By then, the word “cremate” undoubtedly had been used – figuratively, of course – to describe what the Broncos had done to opponents on the field.
When the time came for choosing school colors, Arnold suggested blue and orange because “Boise High School had red and white, and other schools had most of the other colors, but nobody had blue and orange.”
She still cheers for the Broncos and proudly wears blue and orange on game days.
One of her birthday gifts was a football signed by the coaches and players.
Appropriate. If not for her, they might be wearing pumpkin and puce.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.