Chad Sabora was wrapping up his harrowing account of heroin addiction and recovery when he left a November forum at the Northbrook Public Library with a curious final remark:
"People used to call me a junkie and I hated it," he said. "I wear that with pride today."
Sabora was once a Cook County prosecutor with a fiancee, a house in the suburbs and a furious, covert habit. Narcotic pain pills led him to heroin, and after months of increasingly reckless use, Chicago police caught him with five packets of the drug in his car.
His career swiftly ended. His life almost followed. What on earth was there to be proud about?
To understand, travel to St. Louis, where Sabora, 36, is mounting an intense campaign against the drug that nearly destroyed him. Since emerging from a rehab in southern Illinois 17 months ago, he has spoken at rallies and schools, given numerous interviews and even conducted a cautionary YouTube tour of dope spots around the Gateway City.
He's one of the few veterans of heroin abuse comfortable with publicly acknowledging his past. By doing so, he says, he hopes to follow the example set by the gay rights movement — erasing stigma by refusing to stay silent.
"The only way people are ever accepted is to put it in society's face," he said. "Over time people understand. We should be able to admit it."
Sabora grew up in Skokie with parents who understood better than most the dangerous potential of narcotics. His mother was a homemaker-turned-lawyer who worked for the Cook County state's attorney's office. His father was a drug user who got clean in the late 1960s and became a counselor and executive at the Gateway Foundation, one of the largest addiction treatment centers in Illinois.
Yet even they didn't fully recognize their son's teenage substance abuse. Sabora said that shortly after he graduated from Niles North High School in 1994, he and some friends began making pilgrimages to the drug bazaars on Chicago's West Side to sample cocaine, ecstasy and heroin.
It seemed like fun back then, a way for suburban kids to get a taste of big-city danger. Sabora was once arrested for disorderly conduct and his father, who knew well the sort of thing that went down on the West Side, chewed him out. Yet once authorities dropped the charges, Sabora and his father never discussed the subject again.
Sabora left street drugs alone for a few years, focusing on his studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but he was already primed to seek deliverance in chemicals. Law school insomnia led him to abuse sleeping pills. When both his parents died from cancer the mid-2000s, the best salve for his grief came from anti-anxiety medication and narcotic painkillers.
Year after year his clandestine habit grew, even as he started his legal career working child support cases for the Cook County state's attorney's office. But then the psychiatrist who had been writing his prescriptions cut him off, he said, and he was too embarrassed to get help.
Instead, as the excruciating symptoms of withdrawal kicked in, he made a fateful decision.
"I didn't even think about it," he said. "I knew where to get (heroin). I went down there and I got it. Chicago and Pulaski. I pulled up and it was exactly the same thing as when I was 18. I knew how to call them over, the nod to give. That's when it started."
Read more:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...cutor-20130103_1_chad-sabora-heroin-drug-user
Pretty sure this is the first time I have seen suboxone advertisements.
"People used to call me a junkie and I hated it," he said. "I wear that with pride today."
Sabora was once a Cook County prosecutor with a fiancee, a house in the suburbs and a furious, covert habit. Narcotic pain pills led him to heroin, and after months of increasingly reckless use, Chicago police caught him with five packets of the drug in his car.
His career swiftly ended. His life almost followed. What on earth was there to be proud about?
To understand, travel to St. Louis, where Sabora, 36, is mounting an intense campaign against the drug that nearly destroyed him. Since emerging from a rehab in southern Illinois 17 months ago, he has spoken at rallies and schools, given numerous interviews and even conducted a cautionary YouTube tour of dope spots around the Gateway City.
He's one of the few veterans of heroin abuse comfortable with publicly acknowledging his past. By doing so, he says, he hopes to follow the example set by the gay rights movement — erasing stigma by refusing to stay silent.
"The only way people are ever accepted is to put it in society's face," he said. "Over time people understand. We should be able to admit it."
Sabora grew up in Skokie with parents who understood better than most the dangerous potential of narcotics. His mother was a homemaker-turned-lawyer who worked for the Cook County state's attorney's office. His father was a drug user who got clean in the late 1960s and became a counselor and executive at the Gateway Foundation, one of the largest addiction treatment centers in Illinois.
Yet even they didn't fully recognize their son's teenage substance abuse. Sabora said that shortly after he graduated from Niles North High School in 1994, he and some friends began making pilgrimages to the drug bazaars on Chicago's West Side to sample cocaine, ecstasy and heroin.
It seemed like fun back then, a way for suburban kids to get a taste of big-city danger. Sabora was once arrested for disorderly conduct and his father, who knew well the sort of thing that went down on the West Side, chewed him out. Yet once authorities dropped the charges, Sabora and his father never discussed the subject again.
Sabora left street drugs alone for a few years, focusing on his studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, but he was already primed to seek deliverance in chemicals. Law school insomnia led him to abuse sleeping pills. When both his parents died from cancer the mid-2000s, the best salve for his grief came from anti-anxiety medication and narcotic painkillers.
Year after year his clandestine habit grew, even as he started his legal career working child support cases for the Cook County state's attorney's office. But then the psychiatrist who had been writing his prescriptions cut him off, he said, and he was too embarrassed to get help.
Instead, as the excruciating symptoms of withdrawal kicked in, he made a fateful decision.
"I didn't even think about it," he said. "I knew where to get (heroin). I went down there and I got it. Chicago and Pulaski. I pulled up and it was exactly the same thing as when I was 18. I knew how to call them over, the nod to give. That's when it started."
Read more:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...cutor-20130103_1_chad-sabora-heroin-drug-user
Pretty sure this is the first time I have seen suboxone advertisements.
