Picture books and Drugs

Today's interesting information need was by a student writing a research paper on the drugs in children's literature. The patron had already read Go Ask Alice, which was the teen read, and was now looking for a picture book that was a story and not a children's reference on how drugs affect the family. At first I found books dealing with alcoholism:

• Daddy Doesn't Have to Be a Giant Anymore by Thomas Jane Resh
• My Dad Loves Me, My Dad has a Disease by Claudia Black
• Think of Wind by Catherine Mercury

but the patron responded that she needed a book on drugs. (Honestly, the request was for "drugs", which is what I searched on, and last I checked alcohol is a drug, but whatever. I can be snarky here. At work, I sweetly responded, hard drugs?) A look on Good Reads brought up Latawnya the Naughty Horse Two (either horrible or hilarious, depending on your take of the author's writing skill) and so I took a look at amazon and found:

• My Big Sister Takes Drugs by Judith Vigna
• The House that Crack Built by Clark Taylor
• An Elephant in the Living Room by Jill Hastings

I then searched for those titles in WorldCat to see what the subject headings are for it: (su= "Drug abuse") and (su= "Juvenile fiction.") The only problem is, searching this way opens the search to teen and children's fiction and my patron only wants picture books. Still, it is a handy way to get an exhaustive search. In the end, we found a book titled Bird by Zetta Elliott. I honestly have no idea how we stumbled across it (probably on amazon), because in WorldCat it is listed under the subject heading "Drug abuse -- Fiction." and "Drug abuse -- Juvenile poetry."