Sniffing Nail Polish Remover Leads to Book Challenge

Twin Spruce Junior High School in Gillette, WY, plans to review a mother’s request to remove a school library book that she says taught her 14-year-old son to sniff nail polish remover.

Sherri Walter says she was alarmed to discover a cut-up soda bottle containing tissue soaked in nail polish remover in her son’s backpack. The teen told his sister that he got the idea from a school library book on inhalants, explains Stephanie Kelly, Walter’s mother and the teen’s grandmother.

When a follow-up check some weeks later yielded a library book about the drug ecstasy, Walter marched into school and demanded the removal of Inhalants=Busted! (Enslow, 2006).

Now Walter and Kelly want Twin Spruce Junior High and surrounding Campbell County school system to remove the entire Busted series, covering such drugs as nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and speed. The middle school has all but one of the 10 books in the series—the volume on “predatory” (date-rape) drugs was never purchased.

Twin Spruce’s review committee plans to examine the matter after the two women file a formal book challenge this week, says media specialist Diane Adler. The school district, located in small-town Gillette (pop. 25,000) in Wyoming’s conservative coal-mining region, has handled at least seven book challenges since the early 1980s.Only one book The Encyclopedia of Family Health, was actually removed, in 1986, because of parents’ objections to explicit photos, Adler says.

Adler says the books are intended to inform readers about the dangers of drugs and that she personally examined the Busted books before purchasing them last fall. “I tried to purchase books that would present drugs in probably the most negative aspect possible,” Adler says.

Kelly, who applauds DARE and other drug education efforts in the schools, disagrees that the Busted series succeeds in scaring children from drugs. “What was in these books was how to make some of these drugs, how to smuggle the drugs. So what is the purpose of that?”

While Kelly says the Busted series could be used as reference books for an in-class assignment or as library books at the high school level, the series shouldn’t be available for younger grades, she says. “Our grandson came home and all of a sudden [he was talking about] sex education and drug education.”