Drug treatment facility named after Rep. Peña’s son

EDINBURG — In state Rep. Aaron Peña’s darkest days, he found hope in the idea he could help others avoid his son’s fate.

Peña used to sit in the cemetery for hours in the months following the death of his son, 16-year-old John Austin Peña, who died of a drug overdose 10 years ago Wednesday. But Peña said the despair he felt made him want to bring purpose to his son’s death, a personal crusade that began when Peña first sought office in 2002 on an anti-drug platform and culminated Tuesday when a Hidalgo County substance abuse treatment facility was named after John.

“I do believe that (the John Austin Peña Memorial Center) lights a candle for people struggling with addiction. It certainly has in me,” Peña said before county commissioners dedicated the facility Tuesday to John. “It’s given me purpose and taken me out of the darkness.”

Peña secured state funding for the $3 million substance abuse facility in 2007, fulfilling a campaign pledge to fight drugs in his border county and help people deal with drug addiction in their families. The county slowly responded to the legislative appropriation — taking a year to submit an 18-page plan for how it planned to use the funds — before a groundbreaking last March on the 12,000-square-foot treatment facility. Located on 6.3 acres of county-donated land off Doolittle Road in north Edinburg, the center will provide substance abuse treatment services on an outpatient basis to up to 150 adolescents when it opens this fall.

The county will maintain the facility while offering the space to a substance abuse treatment provider that accepts all methods of payment. The facility could eventually expand into a residential treatment facility with dormitories that offer primary care services to allow for a comprehensive recovery.

And now it will be named after John Peña, who was described in the resolution approved by commissioners as a “bright, spirited, cheerful young man” who is also remembered by a scholarship awarded in his name to a member of the Texas Association of Addiction Professionals who is pursuing a college degree.

Precinct 1 Commissioner Joel Quintanilla, who proposed naming the treatment facility after John, said Peña’s tireless work to secure the state funding makes his son an appropriate choice for the honor.

“(Aaron Peña) experienced the loss of drug addiction firsthand so he knows how it feels,” Quintanilla said. “He knows we need to do everything we can to give our children whatever help they need.”

Hidalgo County’s first publicly owned drug treatment facility will offer a “candle of hope” for families struggling with addictions, said Peña, who still gets calls to this day from Rio Grande Valley parents asking for assistance in locating a drug rehabilitation program for a loved one. Only a handful of facilities are available in the Valley and are often out of the price range of its impoverished families.

About 8 percent of the state’s adolescents have an alcohol or substance abuse program, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. But in Hidalgo County, where easy access to drugs is a concern, up to 30 percent of youth report struggling with substance abuse problems.

Peña said it’s appropriate that the first state-constructed drug treatment facility is based in the Valley, where easy access to drugs from Mexico make area youth particularly vulnerable.

“People will struggle for addiction the rest of their life, but they’ll have a beginning and a refuge” at the John Austin Peña Memorial Center, located less than a mile from where John is buried, said Peña, who flew from Austin to receive the county’s proclamation with his wife, Monica, and daughter, Adrienne Peña-Garza. “Ten years marks the turning of a chapter and the beginning of something really good.”

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Jared Janes covers Hidalgo County government, Edinburg and legislative assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4424.