9-Year-Old Boy Dies 2 Weeks After Being Medically Kidnapped and Put Into Foster Care

Arizona authorities arrested Richard Blodgett for drug possession, and the state’s family police agency threw his son into foster care. Just two weeks later the boy was dead. The story reminded me of another parent with a similar history of addiction. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, long before my family moved to Alexandria, Virginia, this addict raised her children in our neighborhood. It happened to her as it does to so many others. It started with prescription opioid painkillers. She got hooked. Unlike Blodgett, this addict got hooked on booze, too. "I liked alcohol, it made me feel warm,” she would later say. “And I loved pills. They took away my tension and my pain." On top of that, this addict had serious mental health issues. She was what the tabloids would have called a “druggie mom” – if she were poor, and especially if she were poor and nonwhite. Yet during all this time, no one took away her children. She was never even investigated. And in 1974, when her husband suddenly got a new job and they had to move to D.C., no one from a family police agency ever knocked at the door of the family’s new address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the contrary: Betty Ford was hailed as a hero.