CHICAGO -- Justin Pearlman was settling into his latest rehab, a $95-a-day treatment center in Pennsylvania, when the Tribune reached him for an interview about his struggle with heroin addiction.
It was 2007, and Pearlman was part of a wave of young people in suburban Chicago who had fallen under the spell of a drug that had become so pure and accessible it had lost its traditional sense of menace. But its effects remained as unforgiving as ever: Pearlman described a chaotic existence of arrests, overdoses and fruitless trips to rehab.
“I definitely believe in a power that’s greater than myself,” he said. “So many people have died from one use. Why wasn’t it me?”
