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On April 27, when The Other Side opens its doors in Crystal Lake, a suburb in Chicago, it will look like many other bars. Bouncers will stop people at the entrance to check their IDs. There will be pool tables, televisions and sometimes live bands and disc jockeys that people can dance along to. However, when patrons visit, the strongest drink that a person can order is an energy drink.

The Other Side will be the first sober bar in the Midwest. While some people do not see the point of a sober bar, its idea came after a group of friends, many of whom struggled with addiction in the past, congregated in the wake of a death of a friend, 21 years old, who had died of a heroin addiction. Between all the members on the Board of Directors, they know about 100 people who died of overdoses over the past few years. They say that it can be particularly difficult to maintain recovery in the suburbs, where there are few options for sober fun other than the movie theaters and the bowling alleys. Bars are not an option, because the mechanisms for alcoholism and drug addiction are so similar.

"We're still young, and we want to hang out," Chris Reed, 22 and the President of the non-profit group behind the sober bar, the New Directions Addiction Recovery Center, said to the Arlington Heights Daily Herald. "You can't hang out with 40 people at your house."

The Other Side is not a for-profit enterprise. In fact, everyone involved in the project still keeps their day job, and the location for the bar was rehabilitated with the help of volunteers and friends. It will only be open four days a week as well, from Thursday to Sunday. All of the proceeds from the bar will go toward the funding of drug education and treatment initiatives in the community. According to NBC Chicago, the group is also behind a halfway house, which seeks to ease the transition for people fresh in recovery.

On the wall of the bar will be the faces of friends of people on the recovery board who were lost to addictions. Hopefully, they say, they will not have to add any more pictures.