A LIFE IN FREE FALL, A COMMUNITY IN DENIAL

Joe Ortman's Drug Use Got So Bad, It Even Alarmed A Street Dealer.
But No One Around Him Saw The Danger

When Joe Ortman began using heroin, the only person who seemed to
understand the danger ahead was a dope dealer.

Ortman was a wire-thin white boy from Naperville, but he was nervy
enough to buy drugs inside Chicago's forbidding Stateway Gardens
housing project. He'd even hang out after getting high, charming the
gang-bangers with his playful personality until one finally gave him
an exasperated scolding.

"Y'all coming up here every day!" he said. "You need to get off this stuff."

Ortman didn't hear many warnings like that back in the suburbs. His
parents didn't know what he was doing and his friends thought he
could handle it. Nobody saw him sinking until his hand was flailing
above the waves.

That's how a heroin addiction often plays out in communities far
removed from the drug-ravaged streets of Chicago. Within shimmering
edge cities and prosperous villages, the drug's threat can be so
unthinkable that budding habits remain undetected, minimized or ignored.

"I think it's such a dread disease and there's such a stigma attached
to it, people just want it to go away," says Lea Minalga of Hearts of
Hope, a Kane County support group that has served hundreds of addicts
and their families. "It's almost like there's blood running in the
streets and no one sees it."

Heroin thrives on invisibility. Ortman's addiction burned for more
than a year before those close to him realized he had a problem. Even
then, they didn't understand how bad it could be. They didn't think
the worst could happen.

Ortman grew up in a cramped Bolingbrook neighborhood of squat,
vinyl-sided townhouses. It was a rough corner of Will County:
Childhood friend Jim Gull recalls that by the time they reached
middle school, some kids were bragging about their supposed gang membership.

In 1996, Colleen and Larry Ortman sought a fresh start by moving
their son and daughter a few miles north to the wide streets and lush
lawns of Naperville. The city is lauded as one of America's best
places to raise children, but Ortman, who suffered from attention
deficit disorder and Tourette's syndrome, never fit into its culture
of star athletes and academic strivers.

Quietly ashamed of his struggles at Naperville Central High School,
he made a group of friends who found camaraderie in marijuana. It was
a freewheeling crew, but Ortman seemed driven to be the wildest one
of all, the guy who said the most outrageous things, cut the most
classes and consumed the most drugs.

"After smoking however much, I'd be fine," classmate Luke Salvesen
recalls. "He always wanted to go one more. He'd buy a bag and say,
'Let's smoke this whole thing.' "

In 2000, when Ortman decided to drop out at the end of his junior
year, his guidance counselor went along with the idea. She hoped a
spell in the real world would motivate him to finish high school, but
it didn't happen. He earned his GED and settled into a string of
dead-end restaurant jobs.

He continued to see his old friends, turning them on to the latest
underground hip-hop, joining them in woolly philosophical debates,
cracking them up with profane jokes. He also amazed them with his
ability to ingest massive amounts of drugs while appearing as sober
as a minister.

That trait helped to hide his use from his parents, and it explained
why, in mid-2002, none of his pals got too worried when he began to
snort heroin.

"I just pretty much thought of it as another drug," says classmate
Gina Payne. "There was coke, heroin, pot, mushrooms, Ecstasy. There
were all these drugs you could do, and at one point, you were going to try it."

Together with two acquaintances on the fringe of his social circle,
he made increasingly frequent dope runs to the city. They started at
the drive-through drug corners off the Eisenhower Expressway, but
soon pursued a rumor of higher-quality heroin to gang-controlled
public housing buildings on the South Side.

Ortman loved it. A fanatical collector of gangsta rap, he had entered
a world he had only imagined through the raw lyrics of Crucial
Conflict and Jah Rista. Returning from the projects, he would crow to
his pals, "We went to the P's!"

Ortman's cavalier attitude toward risk and his deteriorating behavior
unnerved his old friends, but they mostly kept their silence. Harping
on his heroin use, especially when many of them were doing drugs too,
seemed disrespectful.

"There was a mentality that, I can't tell someone what to do with his
life," says Erica Peterson, who met Ortman after high school and
became one of his closest friends. "Besides, friends don't judge each
other that much, especially when they're younger. I was his friend. I
wasn't his boss."

And so his habit endured until September 2003, when a Naperville
police officer, hearing Ortman's car stereo thumping after midnight,
searched the vehicle, found a hypodermic needle and placed Ortman
under arrest. Ortman's stunned parents, who suspected his worst vice
was Ecstasy, swiftly put him into treatment.

Ortman, though, didn't seem to appreciate the gravity of his problem.
He continued to smoke pot and drink through months of rehab overseen
by the DuPage County drug court, which mandates treatment instead of
jail time for non-violent offenders.

His old friends were sometimes present during his lapses. Dining at
Applebee's one night, Salvesen watched nervously as Ortman ordered a
king-size beer.

"Is that gonna be cool?" Salvesen asked.

"Yeah, it's cool. I'm just gonna have the one," Ortman said.

Salvesen said nothing more. Ortman was a heroin addict, he reasoned,
not an alcoholic. His life was a mess. If a beer cheered him up, let
him have it.

Other friends, though, began to chastise Ortman about his partying,
and gradually, his attitude changed. When he arrived at Serenity
House in Addison, his third treatment program, he took his counseling
seriously and seemed to make progress.

But heroin has a well-deserved reputation as one of the hardest drugs
to kick. Running into a using buddy, catching sight of a needle,
traveling a road that leads to a dope spot--virtually anything can
trigger an overwhelming urge to recapture the old pleasure.

Dr. Gregory Teas, a medical director at Alexian Brothers Behavior
Health Hospital in Hoffman Estates, says it can take 12 months or
more to get past the worst of the cravings. Most don't make it: Nine
of 10 heroin users who aren't on methadone or other medications
relapse within a year.

In November 2004, just two weeks before the scheduled end of his stay
at Serenity House, Ortman was working his fast-food job when someone
came in and offered him a blow. He wavered, then accepted. He later
told his mother that as he held the drug in his hand, he could feel
his lust for it surging over his still-rickety defenses.

He immediately confessed his relapse but was expelled from Serenity
House and jailed for six weeks as court officials searched for a new
rehab center. In January 2005, he was sent to Bridge House in Waukegan.

He got along with counselors and fellow residents but griped to
friends about his frustrating job search. He told his mother he was
dreaming of using again but when he spoke to his sister Elizabeth, he
complained only of a cat that irritated his allergies.

"I'm so happy this is almost over," he said.

Two days later, on the frigid morning of Feb. 1, 2005, two Bridge
House residents doing a routine room check found Ortman lying in bed
fully dressed, a Ben Stiller DVD cued up on his television set.

They shook him. He wouldn't wake up. They called 911 but it was too
late: The kid who once seemed able to handle anything was dead of an
overdose at the age of 22.

Addicts are often at their greatest peril during rehab, when they
begin to lose their tolerance for the drug. Ortman's autopsy showed
that the amount in his system probably wouldn't have been fatal for
an active user.

What's more, Ortman, like many addicts, often worsened his odds by
mixing heroin with other substances. This time it had been cocaine.

"The cocaine itself causes the tightening of blood vessels both in
the heart and the brain," says Lake County Coroner Richard Keller,
whose office examined Ortman. "Having respiratory depression [from
heroin], not quite getting the oxygen you need into your bloodstream,
compounds the problem with the cocaine. You don't have the fuel you
need to keep operating."

News of Ortman's death crushed his pals. At his memorial service two
weeks later, some appeared on the verge of emotional collapse,
swearing to Colleen Ortman that they would never again stand by
silently as a friend self-destructed.

But as the months passed, the impact of his death seemed to fade for
some of his old friends. One, who has battled his own habit, still
thinks it's possible to use heroin in moderation.

"Everyone has their poison, if it's alcoholism, exercise, working,"
he says. "In excess, anything can be a problem . . . You have to
still think, just like anything else, it's not the drug, it's the person."

Drug counselors say that's a common view. The problem is that nobody
who tries heroin can know if he'll be able to walk away. From
Lockport to Barrington to Lake Forest, young people keep making the wrong bet.

"Nobody's immune," says Colleen Ortman. "No matter how good you think
your family is, no matter how much your home cost, nobody's immune.
Has that message gotten through? Obviously not. They're still dying."