The night the madness ended, Matthew McFarland had decided that he needed just a little more crack to carry him through until morning. He had plenty of heroin in the small suburban condo he shared with his mother and his fiancee, Amy, but he wanted cocaine, which required a quick trip to the nearby village of Ford Heights. "No," said Amy when he asked her to drive. They were in their bedroom, where he did drugs out of view of his mother, who knew but couldn't stand to watch. McFarland was surprised by Amy's response. So was she. For a long time, she had driven him everywhere he wanted, to Chicago's West Side to buy drugs, to Ford Heights to sell them, to all-night parties in abandoned buildings known as bandos, to the hospital when he had a cocaine-induced seizure that resembled a heart attack. Lately, though, Amy had been in an online support group talking to strangers who, like her, were emotionally entangled with addicts, and she'd been thinking about life, hers and his. So no, not this time, she said, with a touch of fear. McFarland turned to his buddy Danny, who was visiting. "Let's roll." It was December 2015, and the night was cold, so he slipped a tattered leather trench coat over a white undershirt and the black jeans that he wore with a belt to keep them from falling down. He was gaunt and unshaven, the veins in his arms collapsed by years of needles. In Danny's words, he looked like a guy you'd throw a quarter at. Soon, he was riding in his mother's black VW Jetta, Danny at the wheel, counting cash as they passed the lawns and split-level houses of Lynwood. They took a right on Glenwood Dyer Road, then drove on past the Warsaw Inn, the Lynwood Roller Rink and the open fields that make this stretch of Chicago's south suburbs feel isolated from the vast, busy, steel-and-concrete city. Along Lincoln Highway, close to their destination, McFarland sensed the thump of his heart. "Mission F'ing Impossible," he called the drug run from Lynwood to Ford Heights. He'd made it countless times, so often that he knew he couldn't always outwit the cops who prowled the territory on the lookout for drugs. As a precaution, before leaving home he and Danny had gone through the routine check of patting their pockets: no knives, no guns. Nothing illegal on them if they got popped on the way in. Aware that they might, they'd tucked their empty crack pipes in the car's air-conditioning vents, hoping the cops wouldn't think to look there. Since they hadn't brought any heroin, they had no need to hide it in its usual travel spot, next to the car battery, where the odor of hot oil could mask its smell from drug-sniffing dogs. In the dark, the two men turned onto a side street in a neighborhood of big trees, weedy vacant lots and rotting houses with boarded windows. They spotted a Cook County sheriff's car parked outside Peace Baptist Church. "F--- , Danny," he remembers saying. Or maybe it was Danny who cursed. On a few small details, but only a few, their memories of the night diverge. At a small yellow house in a cul-de-sac, McFarland hopped out. He knocked on the back door. The trade was quick. "Careful, man," he remembers the supplier telling him. "It's hot out there." He darted back into the car, put a rock into a crack pipe, lit it, took a hit, felt his heart pound. And as fast as a hit, the cops came. They were in front of the Jetta, and behind it, on the left and on the right, car lights blazing, voices loud. He'd barely had time to open his car door and toss four green plastic baggies of crack on the ground when there he was in the dirt, boots on his back, guns pointed at his head. The moment he'd been waiting for. For the previous three years, as he blew through $220,000 of his mother's retirement money trying to keep himself in drugs and out of trouble, McFarland had thought of life as a waiting game. He waited for the fatal bullet. He waited for the final overdose. He waited for the ugly end that so many people he knew had met. Nothing shocked him anymore, except that, at the age of 43, he wasn't dead. "The game's over," one of the officers said to him that night, after Danny was let go and he was loaded, handcuffed, into the backseat of an unmarked Cook County sheriff's department car. That's how he remembers it, anyway. He remembers, too, how he looked at the officer and began to weep. "I didn't mean I was going to hurt you," the officer said. "That's not what I'm crying about," McFarland answered, and then, with the feeling of a great weight lifted, he said, "Thank you, thank you." Matthew McFarland has ridden the wave of drug dependency from beginning to end twice. The former drug addict and ex-convict now helps others through the Safer Foundation, helping others in difficult situations find jobs. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune) A boy grows up He loved the colors of the pills. Yellow, black, purple, blue. "Like candy," he recalls. Matt was 9 years old when he began sneaking the colorful pills from his father, a pharmaceutical salesman and alcoholic who illicitly sold his free drug samples. His dad also had another business, growing marijuana, illegally, in a greenhouse in the south suburb of Harvey. At 13, Matt took to stealing his grandfather's Valium. At 16, his Uncle Jimmy, a Vietnam veteran, introduced him to IV heroin and cocaine. He loved the surge of power from the coke, the glow of peace that came with heroin. He remembers learning the skills that would eventually become as rote as walking: how to put the powder in the spoon then add water; how to rip a bit of cotton from a cigarette filter, roll it into a tiny ball and place it in the liquid; how to heat the mixture with a cigarette lighter. His uncle, who was one of his best friends, told him his prominent veins were perfect for the needle. As he progressed through his teens, Matt was surrounded by addicts, charming and self-destructive people who seemed to have what he thought he wanted. One was a well-known aunt with famous drug-using friends. He came to equate success with getting high. "This is what you do when you're important," he thought. His mother was different. A product of Chicago's Irish-Catholic South Side — "a goody two-shoes," she says — Beverly McFarland wasn't much of a drinker, didn't do drugs. Soon after high school, she got a job as a legal secretary then worked for years at the law office of Dan Houlihan, a prominent attorney and later a state representative, who had married one of her cousins. Bev loved both her sons, but worried more about her younger boy, Matt. She saw that his intelligence, though indisputable, was unfocused, and it hurt to see how his father ignored him. Matt was the underdog, and, maybe because she'd always lived in the shadow of an older sister, she had a soft spot for underdogs.

When Matt was 10, his parents divorced, and afterward, a doctor told his mother he suffered from feelings of abandonment. She vowed to stick with him no matter what. After he dropped out of high school, she contacted friends to help him get jobs. When he lost one job, she'd find him another. If he needed money, she gave it and didn't ask why, though she suspected. She forced him into rehab. When it didn't work, she went with him again, and again, and again, until she couldn't bear it anymore. It depressed her to be the only single mother in the support groups. She took him to one doctor and then another. He was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and treated with amphetamines, one more addictive drug added to the others. Gradually, the worry she felt for her son turned to terror for herself. She heard a story about an elderly couple shot by a grandson when they refused him drug money, and she shuddered. To keep Matt away from her and her older son, who lived with her, and also to help him evade police who were looking for him on various drug charges, she would pay his rent in a cheap motel. Afraid of his visits, she sometimes turned off the lights at night. She disabled the doorbell. She remembers sitting inside, shaking, while he banged on the door. "Why are you watching a little black-and-white TV?" friends would ask. The answer, which she was likely to keep to herself, was that it was something Matt wouldn't steal. It was the loneliest kind of fear: to be afraid of a son you loved. But she had another fear, equally compelling: that this son she loved would be trapped in a cage called a prison cell. "I never stopped loving him," she says. "It would have been so easy if I didn't." So when he was arrested on drug charges, she would pay the bond money, the bail money, the lawyer, the towing fee, watching, helpless, as his life spun into darkness. Mad Max "Man," McFarland remembers thinking when he discovered life around 76th Street and Union Avenue on Chicago's South Side, "this is a drug paradise." He was in his 20s then. With his white skin and reddish-blond hair, he was an oddity in the African-American neighborhood, but he learned that as long as you had a few dollars in your pocket, you fit in. "You could buy acceptance with 20 bucks," he says, "and what I felt was true friendship." Later, he would realize that friendships built on drugs are unreliable. Later, he would see how his actions irrevocably hurt his mother, his brother, their life as a family. But not yet. "I had no sensitivity towards impacts or consequences, especially as they related to other people," he says. "I thought it's my life and I'm just hurting myself, if anybody at all." In the neighborhood, he earned a nickname: Mad Max. "I was the guy who kept drinking after the party was over," he says. "I was the guy who didn't want to go home." "Those drugs mean more to you than your next breath of air. They come before eating, before sex, before employment." — Matthew McFarland It wasn't fun, not really, being trapped in the endless loop of mental obsession and physical compulsion, and later, too, he would come to understand the disease called addiction. But all he knew in the neighborhood of 76th and Union was that he needed heroin to calm him down from the coke and coke to lift him up after heroin. To the mix, he added benzodiazepine and alcohol. Even other users found his prodigious habits hard to bear, so he went in search of homeless people, squalid buildings, wherever he wouldn't be turned away. By 2003, his older brother had moved out of their mother's home and established a prosperous, stable life, and his mother had let him move back in. He had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, a life-threatening liver disease sometimes associated with drug use. "He had no place to live, no money," Bev says. "Where was he going to go?" He was home the morning she left for her first day at a new job, as a secretary at the Illinois attorney general's office in Chicago. She came back that evening to discover her Lynwood condo ravaged by fire. She fainted. "The whole world was telling me it's Matt's fault," she says, but she didn't want to believe it. She had been raised to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Only years later did she learn that Matt had nodded off on heroin with a cigarette in his mouth. After the fire, McFarland and his mother went to live with her brother, Uncle Jimmy, the Vietnam vet, in the village of Steger, a few miles south. "The drugs were running crazy there," McFarland says. Every weekday his mother made the long trip into Chicago for her job. Every day, often with his uncle, he got high. That was the routine, until March 13, 2005. He came back to the house late that night, expecting to meet his drug dealer and buy some heroin. The dealer had just left. McFarland, who had been smoking crack incessantly for weeks, took another hit off his pipe, walked to a nearby Shell station and called the dealer on a pay phone. "Man, I just missed you," he told the dealer. "You've got to come back to Steger." "It's 3 in the morning," the dealer said. "You're going to have to make it to Chicago Heights." From the pay phone, McFarland glanced toward a man who had just stepped out of a minivan. "I'll be right there," he told the dealer. He stole the van. What happened next made the local news. "Officers fire shots in high-speed chase," said the headline in a south suburban newspaper. McFarland remembers the helicopters whirring overhead and the gunpowder stench of bullets bouncing off the stolen van as he sped along Illinois 394 and Interstate 80. Unable to shake his pursuers, he raced back toward the Shell station, thinking in his drug-warped way that he'd return the van, tell the owner sorry, give him a couple of hundred bucks, end of story. By the time he was taken to Will County's jail, he says, he was so sick on drugs that he could barely walk. He eventually made it to the dayroom to call his mother for the $25,000 that would get him out. "When can you come get me?" he asked. They both remember the silence that followed, and how his mother finally said something she'd never said. "I'm not coming to get you." He had endangered lives this time. He had stolen from someone besides her. She was done. He sat in jail for three months before she relented. Finally out on bond, which his mother paid from the fire insurance money, he got high every day, until he was sentenced to four years in prison. After a short stint in Stateville Correctional Center, he transferred to Sheridan Correctional Center, a prison 70 miles west of Chicago dedicated to helping inmates with addictions.

His Uncle Jimmy came to visit and told him he was lucky for the chance to get clean, and he did. He moved from the top bunk in his narrow cell to the coveted bottom bunk, where he used toothpaste to glue a little calendar on the metal slats overhead. He X'd out the days, the weeks, the months. His mother sent him a greeting card every day, just as she'd done for her brother Jim when he was in Vietnam. In return, he sent her his prison certificates of achievement — Role Model of the Week, House Elder — always with a note saying he was sorry. A dozen years later, telling this part of his story, he cries. A few good years He felt worthless. After his release from Sheridan on parole, he had moved back into his mother's Lynwood condo, rebuilt after the fire. Uncle Jimmy had died while he was in prison, of an overdose. His relationship with his brother was long extinct. At night, he slept in a bed overlooked by the achievement certificates his mother had framed and hung on his bedroom wall. One day, determined not to rely on his mother to find him a job, he walked into Haymarket Center, a substance abuse treatment program in Chicago, and said he thought he could help. He began as a detox specialist, doing intakes on the 3-11 p.m. shift, grateful for a purpose and $7.50 an hour. He moved on to the Safer Foundation, where he found jobs for people who had been in prison. He was good at his work, a salesman, like his dad, funny, talkative, restless, relentless. In 2010, he was offered a position running an employment program at Housing Options for the Mentally Ill in Evanston. When the agency gave him a credit card, the first he'd ever had, he was practically giddy with pride and disbelief. Him, with an office, an AmEx gold card, a future. "I wanted to be something," he says, "'cause I never was. Maybe make my family proud." Life was so good that he stopped going to 12-step meetings, stopped calling his sponsor, stopped praying. When life took another hard turn, he says, "I didn't have any tools in my tool box." Three events in that period converged into a crisis. One: He was taking treatments for hepatitis C, and the medicinal drugs, which he injected into a leg, made him vomit and his hair fall out. Two: He lost track of his young daughter, whom he helped support and saw regularly, after the girl's mother, with whom he says he had a single sexual encounter, relapsed and vanished from his life for a while. Three: His father died. Convinced that he was on the verge of nervous collapse, he visited a doctor. The doctor prescribed Xanax, a fast-acting benzodiazepine used to calm panic and anxiety; it can also cause paranoia and thoughts of suicide and is particularly dangerous for people with a history of drug abuse. He knew Xanax was a bad idea. He says he told the doctor so. But with a familiar craving, in what he calls a "conscious but not rational" decision, he walked over to Walgreens, filled the prescription and immediately took two pills. He remembers swallowing, and how the jolt of elation was followed almost instantly by the weight of doom. "Before I got to the register," he says, "I thought, 'Oh, man, you've really f---ed up now." He downed the whole bottle before he was out of the store, went back to his car, took out his phone, which contained numbers he hadn't used in almost eight years, and called his dealer. 'Nothing except more drugs' People who have known McFarland for a long time feel as if they've known two Matts. There's the sober, charming, disarming Matt. And there's Matt on drugs. It's a trick of the addicted mind, McFarland says, not to fully register the difference. Maybe, he says, it's like aging, how as you get old you carry an idea of your appearance that doesn't take into account how you've changed and how others now see you. After that day in the Walgreens, he became Matt on drugs again. Cocaine, heroin, benzodiazepine mostly, sometimes morphine, OxyContin, ecstasy, Dilaudid. He discovered a black market in cancer pain medicines. Buy, sell, use. The West Side was his new territory, and one of his routines looked like this: 3 a.m. He'd be driving along the Eisenhower Expressway in his red Pontiac Solstice, a drop-top two-seater, and he'd call his new friend Ray. "I'm getting close," he'd say. He'd pull up outside Ray's house, dart up the worn porch steps and the indoor stairs, hand Ray $500, or $1,000, then do drugs while Ray hopped on his bicycle and went in search of benzodiazepine, maybe a few bags of heroin. For security, Ray stashed the drugs down the front of his pants. Ray was small and sweet-faced, nearly two decades older than McFarland. They had met in a bando, also known as a bandominium, short for an abandoned house where drug users gather. "He got me high," says Ray, who was touched by the generosity. He took to calling Matt "my brother." ("Ray" is his street name, and he's one of several of McFarland's friends who agreed to talk to the Tribune on the record. But he, like some others in the story, live among dangerous people, and struggle with staying clean and out of trouble. In those cases, the Tribune is not fully identifying them.) McFarland regarded Ray as one of the few people he could trust and relied on him for small buys. For bigger ones, he went to the big dealers, figuring that unless he sold drugs, he wouldn't have the money to use. Every 30 days or so, he'd hand over $5,000 for a quarter kilo of heroin, use some and sell the rest in Ford Heights. In Ford Heights, he bought crack to sell on the West Side. He exchanged the red Pontiac for a more practical black Hyundai with tinted windows. Buy, sell, use. Overdose. Have a seizure. Go to the hospital. Get arrested. Get out of jail. Repeat. "You can't take a sober breath," he says, trying to explain the endless chase, "because if you do, you're in seizures — and because you'd have to feel the reality of the horror you've built. Those drugs mean more to you than your next breath of air. They come before eating, before sex, before employment. You no longer worry about your reputation, your family's reputation — nothing except more drugs." The cycle was interminable, the cash flow hard to manage. At one point, McFarland says, he found himself in debt to the Four Corner Hustlers street gang for $20,000. "I need to pay these people back or they'll kill me, and you," he told his mother. She gave him the money.

Although McFarland wasn't a major dealer, he was big enough, he says, that the major dealers recognized him as a good customer and investment, especially after he burnished his street cred by paying off the $20,000. He likens it to playing the tables in Vegas: "You've got great credit, they roll out the red carpet." In his case, the red carpet included an armed 19-year-old named Nuke who was assigned to travel with him as protection. His buddy Danny was often along for the ride. Despair McFarland met Danny in a detox unit at Cook County Jail in 2014. When they got out, Danny, who lived with his parents in Indiana, in a nice house with a pool, called and said, "Let's get together." Danny was seven years younger than McFarland, tattooed, bigger, tougher. If someone stole their drugs, he was the guy who delivered the beating. He was also the guy who tucked McFarland's glasses back on his nose when he nodded off on heroin. When McFarland was so despairing he talked of suicide, Danny talked him down. "I love him," Danny says. "I'd die for him." McFarland and Danny became partners in a new venture, selling Indiana guns to West Side gang leaders and selling West Side drugs in Indiana. McFarland had never thought of himself as "a gun guy," but he was willing to do whatever it took to keep himself in drugs. Day by day he felt himself sucked into a hole he couldn't escape, its only saving grace the camaraderie of people like Danny and Ray, friends who would accept him at his worst. Meanwhile, his old friendships unraveled. In Evanston, he had been living with a woman he'd known for many years. It had been a "great relationship," she said in the request for an order of protection that she eventually got against him. But after he relapsed, he started demanding money, failing to come home, shooting up in the apartment. As their relationship devolved, he grew angry and threatening, and she grew scared. "She did the right thing," he says now of her decision to go to court to keep him away. Once again, his mother, unable to bear the idea of her child living on the streets, took him in. "You look back," she says, "and you think maybe if I was tough in the beginning, this wouldn't have happened. But I'd do it again. I did what I had to do as a mother." In that period, his relationship with Amy Tran, a colleague at his Evanston job, grew deeper. Amy had grown up in a small Ohio town, the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. She found him charismatic, and he was moved that this smart, attractive woman who was studying for a master's degree seemed genuinely interested in him, a guy with a GED, a criminal record and a drug problem. "Being the good alcoholic addict that I am," he says of their involvement, "I took a hostage with me." Shortly after McFarland left his Evanston job, Amy left hers. When he returned to live at his mother's, she joined him. She didn't do drugs, and when Matt relapsed, she didn't understand how fast and far he would fall. "It's so gradual," she says. "But not." She tolerated the bedside table cluttered with crack pipes, a heroin spoon, a scale, syringes, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. She watched as he developed abscesses on his inner arms from jabbing at his muscles when the veins would no longer take a needle. She drove him to West Side drug houses, where, as the sober person in the room, she was annoyed by the lethargy of heroin users, exasperated by the constant conversation about drugs. She learned to administer Narcan, a medicine that reverses an opioid overdose. "Some of it," she says, "was thinking I was helping." McFarland wasn't violent, according to her and others, but they were in a violent world, and it horrified her. In the bandos, people were sometimes beaten. Pimps peddled women who depended on the pimps for drugs. McFarland told her stories of certain dirty cops who would rather steal a small-time dealer's heroin or money than haul him off to jail. Still, she stayed. She grew distant from old friends. After going home to her parents in Ohio for a few months, she came back. "I can't quite explain it," she says. She started looking for help. Both of them use words like "horrible" and "horrifying" and "nightmare" to describe that time, but they couldn't figure a way out. And then came the cold December night when Matt and Danny set off in search of $100 worth of crack. The Judge Judge Ramon Ocasio III opened the file and saw the mug shot of a man who had recently been arrested in Ford Heights. "Fierce," he thought, inspecting Matthew McFarland. Fierce, and yet the man also struck him as a lost child. Ford Heights Police Department A 2015 booking mug shot of Matthew McFarland from the Ford Heights Police Department. A 2015 booking mug shot of Matthew McFarland from the Ford Heights Police Department. (Ford Heights Police Department) (Ford Heights Police Department) Ocasio was new to drug court, a "problem-solving" court within the Cook County system designed to help nonviolent criminals struggling with substance abuse. A self-described social justice Catholic, he was convinced that society had to stop trying to lock its way out of so many of its troubles. He'd seen how drug addiction infiltrates every kind of family, rich and poor, and he believed that the justice system worked best when it relied not only on the presumption of innocence but on "the presumption of mercy." He saw drug court as part of the solution. "How did he lose his way?" he wondered, looking at McFarland's photo. Soon afterward, McFarland appeared in Ocasio's courtroom in the suburb of Maywood, dressed in a beige Department of Corrections jumpsuit, haggard and emaciated, but sober. During his initial days in jail, he had been debilitated by drug withdrawal, most acutely from Xanax. This was what he feared more than jail itself, being deprived of drugs. He was wracked by hallucinations and seizures, vomiting so much that a garbage can was placed next to his bunk. Finally, when he felt a little better, he had called Amy. "We can't bond you out," she said. "I'm calling to tell you to let me stay," he replied. He told her to go into his closet, find the heroin in his shirt pockets and flush it. Then he went back to his jailhouse bunk and lay there wondering, "What the f--- am I going to do with my life?" That day in drug court he saw glimmers of an answer. Drug courts are different from ordinary court. They give nonviolent people who have been arrested for felony drug possession a choice: Get locked up or go through treatment and monitoring. Those who complete the program can walk free and have their conviction wiped away. Those who choose treatment but don't follow the rules go back to a judge for sentencing. It's a carrot and a stick.

What surprised McFarland in the courtroom that day was that everyone, including the prosecutor, seemed joined in a desire to help, not punish. "I could tell Matthew was an intelligent, articulate, able individual," Ocasio says. "If he could only figure out the monster known as a drug addiction, he could really contribute and give back to the community." But first, McFarland had more to do than beat addiction. After 43 days in Cook County Jail, he was released. He went home to Lynwood, slept in his own bed and the next day asked Danny to come over. "We gotta make these phone calls now," he told his friend. "We know too much." With Danny at his side, he called one of his drug-dealing contacts, a man of importance, to say he wanted out. "I'm dying," he told the man. "I know," the man said. "I'm asking you guys for permission to duck out. I'm done." Lying in his jailhouse bunk, he had tried to figure out how to work this impossible deal. He pitched his proposal now: Shortly before his arrest, he had paid $30,000, cash, for a big order of cocaine and heroin. He hadn't picked it up yet. He told the man to keep it all. And whatever he and Danny had known about the drug trade on the West Side? The names of the players, where the money was bagged, how the heroin was cut? He assured the man they didn't know it anymore. The man hung up. Danny had told him it would never work. A while later, the man called back. "OK," he said. "But if you're done, you're done forever." The presumption of mercy For the next year, he went to court once a month. He loved those days, getting up early, putting on a suit and tie, presenting himself for Judge Ocasio's approval. "He saw more in me than I saw in myself," McFarland says. Under drug court rules, he had spent 30 days at the Gateway Alcohol & Drug Treatment Centers in Lake Villa, north of Chicago, and he was proud to show the judge his rehab certificates. He liked the way the judge spoke to him. You're dressed very nicely today, Mr. McFarland. Thank you for respecting my court. How's your mother? How's Amy? How's your daughter? He was working hard to prove himself worthy of getting custody of his 8-year-old daughter, who was living on the South Side in foster care with a woman called Big Mama. During that year, in addition to seeing Ocasio once a month, McFarland met regularly with his probation officer, submitted to frequent random drug tests and saw a therapist every week. He thrived on the discipline. "They're your cheerleaders, but they're also your big brother," he says. "They're the shoulder when you need it, and they're the enforcer when you need it." Through Medicaid, he started a new treatment for hepatitis C, one that was more effective than the old one and with fewer side effects. By the time he was done with drug court, he was cured. "There's an old joke," he told the assembly at his drug court graduation. He had tears in his eyes. "What do you get if you play a country record backward? You get your house back, you get your wife back, you get your life back." A while before that, with permission from the judge and his probation officer, he had called an old colleague at the Safer Foundation: Could he get a job back? A new life, a trip through the old one It's the last day of August 2017. An exuberant man in black slacks, a crisp blue Oxford shirt and a checked blue-and-purple tie stands in front of a dozen or so people. All of them have criminal records. "My name is Matthew McFarland," he says. "I'm going to self-disclose a little bit. I'm an ex-convict myself." He roams the floor with the fervor of a product pitchman, telling the people in the folding chairs that even though they have records, they can get jobs, career jobs with good benefits, in coveted fields like health care. The Safer Foundation is going to help. Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune Matthew McFarland, a former drug addict and ex-convict, receives a high-five from Jaquin Hundly from Metropolitan Family Services as they present at a job fair at the Safer Foundation on Aug. 31, 2017. McFarland is the director of Safer Demand Skills Collaborative for the foundation. Matthew McFarland, a former drug addict and ex-convict, receives a high-five from Jaquin Hundly from Metropolitan Family Services as they present at a job fair at the Safer Foundation on Aug. 31, 2017. McFarland is the director of Safer Demand Skills Collaborative for the foundation. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) Safer is a big Chicago not-for-profit agency dedicated to helping people stabilize after they're released from prison. McFarland returned to work there in a temporary position, then quickly rose to direct a department that steers clients into jobs. "He can make things happen," says David Gianfrancesco, a Safer executive who is watching McFarland work the room on this Thursday morning. One thing McFarland has helped to make happen is a new collaboration between Safer and the Cook County Circuit Court. People about to graduate from drug court and other problem-solving courts will be channeled into Safer, where they'll get help finding career jobs, a purpose and self-respect. "It's a gold mine of an opportunity," says Chief Judge Timothy Evans. And Matthew McFarland, who expected to be dead by now, is a director of that program too. He manages employees. He has a good salary and an office. He recently met Judge Evans, not as a criminal but as a spokesman for the new venture. "Two years ago my office was a jail cell," he says, with a laugh, as if he'll never quite believe his change of fortune. His new life is far removed from the old one, and he tries to keep it that way. But on this day, after his presentation, he agrees to do something he hasn't done in a long time — take a drive back through the West Side. "I wonder how did I ever make it out of here alive?" he says. He is rolling along Roosevelt Road. The farther west he drives, the bleaker it gets. It's a land of vanished factories and vacant lots where the drug trade is a major source of employment. He points out a BP gas station where it's easy to buy "nickel" bags of heroin. "People panhandling can only come up with $5," he explains. He drives on, into the neighborhood of K-Town. "Run directly and indirectly by the Mexican cartels," he says. He passes Raybon's gas station, the pumps now permanently closed, where Sisco, the guy who ran it, used to give him a little money, some food, a ride home, safety from whoever might be chasing him. At Hody's Hideout Grill, he finds Sisco in a back corner playing the slot machines with a woman on his lap. The two men talk for a while, recalling McFarland's drug days. Then Sisco, who has already sent several people to Safer via his old friend, reaches out and strokes McFarland's tie. "Look at this," he says. Other people in the diner greet McFarland warmly. "You made it," a woman says.