To read three stories of recovery, go here.

Shawn blames the drugs for a lot: dropping out of college, his more than 50 arrests, and coming thisclose to gunning down his family. But hand on a stack of Bibles, may lightning strike him dead, that was, honest-to-God, a pterodactyl that he and his buddy saw flying down Mount Hope Avenue.

"My eyes were as big as my headlights, and I looked at him and he looked at me and we both said, 'Did you see that?'" he says. "Its wingspan was crazy, and as it slowly flapped its wings, I felt the pressure. The pressure was so loud, when it passed the car you couldn't hear anything: WHOOSH!"

Put it on a lifetime love of monster movies and Bradbury-esque sci-fi. And, maybe, the blotter acid the guys did right before.

"It was crazy, but in the moment I was torn between which one was crazier: what we just saw or the fact that we both saw it," Shawn says. "We validated each other. So, of course, that was a reason to go get high even more. So we pulled over, went by the water, smoked some weed and drank some brew."

In some ways, the history of drugs is the history of humankind. Drugs come in and go out of fashion, often gaining popularity within a certain culture and then spreading. Rochester's drug history is particularly interesting, steeped in the patent medicine era.

"Rochester was a very big city actually for the manufacture and sale of some of these elixir kinds of things that people would sell out of the trunks of wagons and cars and stuff like that," says John Klofas, a criminal justice professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "They all, at one point in time, had substances in them that subsequently got illegalized."

A crucial point to understand about the drug scene in Rochester today is that the suburban and city markets are connected, from the suburbanites who head to the city to buy their drugs, to the upper-level dealers who supply city street sellers, but live elsewhere.

"They may live out in the towns, the villages," says Lt. Joe Morabito, commanding officer of the Greater Rochester Area Narcotics Enforcement Team. "We've had that happen quite a bit, where the main targets, they've earned enough money, now they can live somewhere else. They've moved up. And they've done it through the drug business."

Metro Rochester's drug menu includes marijuana, powdered and crack cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy - those are the big ones. Marijuana, by far, is the most popular.

Is it fair to lump marijuana in with harder drugs?

"They're all illegal at this point, except for the possession for personal use stuff," Klofas says. "And the markets for marijuana have been associated with a fair amount of violence, particularly in the city."

New York State has decriminalized marijuana to some extent, making possession of a small amount for personal use more or less the equivalent of a traffic fine, Klofas says.

Drug markets have traditionally been divided along racial and geographic boundaries. In Rochester, heroin markets have been concentrated in the heavily Hispanic community off North Clinton, for example, and marijuana markets in the Scio Street area. But the structure is changing. Market demand and profit potential are driving cross-pollination, Morabito says.

"Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy - we're starting to see them in areas we didn't see them in before," he says.

The crossover is facilitated by dealers who make new connections in jail, Morabito says.

The main pipeline for getting cocaine and heroin into metro Rochester is most likely New York City, Morabito says. Atlanta and Texas are also suppliers, and Morabito has worked cases with California connections. Much of the marijuana originates out West, he says, and ecstasy often comes from across the Canadian border.

Who's selling? The street-slingers are predominantly African-American males, ages 15 to 19, selling in their own neighborhoods to young men from those same neighborhoods.

"I think they see it as an easy way to make some money," Klofas says, "a way to further their criminal careers, to get in further with the group of guys they hang around with."

The young men tend to grow up with drug activity all around them: in their homes, schools, and neighborhoods.

"You've got generations coming up: 'Here's how we make our money,'" Morabito says. "It's literally their job and how they survive."

The street-corner dealers make about $30,000 a year, Klofas says, but their careers are usually short-lived. It's a dangerous lifestyle, obviously, with a high risk of arrest, injury, or death.

"They aren't the ones making the real huge money," Klofas says. "That happens at higher levels in the markets - middle man and up."

The dealers like to sell where there's a store nearby so they can grab something to eat, Morabito says. And it's convenient for customers, who can do their drug and grocery shopping together, maybe adding a cigar that they can hollow out for pot to the shopping list.

To start building a customer base, dealers have to be accepted into a known drug market, Morabito says, because if a dealer is in there taking customers away, that's big trouble. Quite often, he says, the street sellers are members of a gang or a group of friends, so if new dealers have a connection to that group - cousin, friend of a friend - their chances of acceptance are much greater.

Street dealers may not carry drugs, money, or weapons on them, Morabito says, in case they get stopped by police. They'll stash everything nearby - in the siding of a house, under a car, in a potato-chip bag - for quick access.

"We're very aggressive in stopping the kids on the street corners and gathering intelligence and shagging them along and keeping them off the street corner," Morabito says. "So they've adapted to that by not necessarily keeping it on them."

New York State law does not prohibit loitering or vagrancy, Klofas says, so there is no law keeping young people from simply hanging out on the corner.

"They [the police] do not have a legal foundation for most of that behavior," he says. "Most cities do not aggressively shoo people off corners as they do in Rochester."

Arrests can be made for loitering for the purpose of buying or selling drugs, Klofas says, but there has to be evidence to prove that's why someone's there.

The street sellers get their supply from anyone they can, Morabito says, but in some areas they report to a mid-level supplier. The middle men will supply anyone - including a variety of different gangs, without regard to loyalty or rivalries.

"It might be a person that supplies two or three houses and a street corner," Morabito says. "He'll go through and collect from them during the course of the day."

No one starts out as a mid- or upper-level dealer or supplier, Morabito says.

"You start out slinging on the corner or working in a drug house, selling," he says.

Upper-level dealers supply much larger amounts of drugs, but to a smaller customer base: supplying six to 10 customers a day, typically.

"They don't want to expose themselves to too many people," Morabito says.

Harvey is a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict. When he was using, hesold marijuana and harder drugs to feed his own habit. He was raided twice: once by police and once by rival drug dealers who broke into his apartment. They were wearing ski masks and brandishing guns.

"Everybody knew that we had a lot of traffic, sold a lot of weed, made a lot of money," he says. "There were a lot of people that we took business from. We'd sell the same thing, but we'd sell it cheaper or you'd get more."

A typical drug house might have a couple of pieces of furniture, and a TV with a game system and maybe some DVD's. Dealers might sell through a slot in the window or a slot in the door. Often, they'll break into an abandoned house and turn it into a drug house, with people outside directing traffic until the house is established.

A 2001 study by the Strategic Approaches to Community Safety Initiative, a research project that focused on Rochester homicides, found that drug houses commonly had 50 to 100 customers each, and brought in around $1,000 a night. The "hot" houses brought in $4,000 to $5,000 nightly.

"The guys we talked to said that the demand for drugs is such that you can open up one drug house next to another drug house, and you have a harder time getting drugs than you do getting customers," says Klofas, who participated in the study.

Most of the drug houses specialize in one product. Sellers locate their houses in rundown neighborhoods because there is often a ready supply of customers, and they feel that the residents in those neighborhoods are less likely to oppose their presence and to call the police.

Newly opened houses often have the best quality drugs. That and promotional deals - like two-for-one specials - help build a customer base, especially with white, suburban customers who account for large volumes of business.

Police and other sources usually estimate the number of drug houses in the City of Rochester at 300, but Morabito says that's deceptive. It's not the same 300 houses operating continuously.

"We're pretty good at identifying the houses that are selling and quickly addressing them," Morabito says. "The problem you have is, if you shut down this house, within a day they're trying to establish a new house very close to that one."

Robberies of drug houses by rival drug dealers - and the violence associated with that - is a major and underreported problem, Morabito says.

"I know your house is rolling, so I go there and steal the money and drugs," he says. "If I steal your drugs and sell them, that's 100 percent profit. It's hard for you to call the police and say, 'Hey, my drugs and money and weapons were stolen.'"

Marijuana houses are the most profitable, Klofas says, and incur the most home-invasion robberies as a result.

There are, of course, drug houses operating in the suburbs, too, but Morabito says that's a difficult number to pin down. The suburban houses usually have fewer customers than city houses and therefore attract less attention, he says.

The way to establish a relationship with a dealer is to get a reference - "Hey, Billy sent me" - or to be introduced by a known customer or seller, Morabito says. There is great distrust of new customers; sellers worry that they're undercover police officers or working as "rats" on behalf of police.

"At first, I buy for both of us," Morabito says. "Next time I pull up, you have the money in your hand and you buy from the guy. Then after a few times, I don't have to be with you; you're in."

The customers who come in to the city from the suburbs typically buy a lot of drugs, less frequently. "So they make up a small proportion of overall customers, but [dealers] make a fair amount of money from those," Klofas says.

Not all suburban users trek into the city to buy their drugs, of course. Many have their own networks of contacts and connections, Morabito says, or a group of users will pool their money and send one person out to buy drugs for the whole group.

Page used to live in Penfield and bought her drugs from a crack house in the city.

"There were some nice fancy cars coming by," she says, "some well-to-do people popping in and out. It could be your next-door neighbor in good old Pittsford and Penfield."

Klofas says that there isn't very good data available that tracks drug use among suburban adults, "although there's plenty of reason to think it's - particularly marijuana use - fairly widespread."

 The other harder drugs, it's much more difficult to tell," he says. "There are lots of individual stories of cocaine and heroin use that's done by people who live otherwise normal lives."

Marijuana is usually purchased in small plastic bags, in quantities ranging from $5 to $20. A pound of domestically grown marijuana will sell in the Rochester area for about $1,000. A pound of hydroponically grown marijuana costs about $3,000. It's more expensive because it has a higher THC content - the chemical that produces the high.

Cocaine can be bought in $10 or $20 stamp-sized bags. Thirty-one grams is a popular amount, as is a "deuce"- 62 grams - which sells for about $2,500 to $2,800. A kilo of cocaine in Rochester, depending on where it's bought, will cost $25,000 to $30,000. It is more profitable to break the kilo down into 62's or all the way down to $10 bags.

"What they do, too, is take a kilo of cocaine - that's broken down and mixed with cutting agents," Morabito says. "I can get that kilo and make it a kilo and a quarter. They'll take a dime bag and try to make it into two by mixing stuff with it."

Heroin is broken down into very small amounts.

"The tip of your pen is about what you get in a bag of heroin," Morabito says. "That's about $25 or $30."

Heroin is often sold in a bundle, which is about 10 of the smaller bags, and costs approximately $250 to $300. 

Ecstasy is usually sold by the pill - the "hit" - at $24 to $30. There are a lot of variables, however.

Shawn robbed garages to get money for drugs, going so far as to take orders from what he calls the "homeboy shopping network."

"The network ran from St. Paul to Winton. It's still in existence today," he says. "I found that out when I was walking and somebody called me from across the yard, 'Yo, lawnmower man! What you got good?'"

Addiction can fuel crimes like robbery, domestic disputes, and prostitution, but the connection between violence and drug use is a tricky one. Experts in the field disagree about the nature of the connection.

Morabito says the link is indisputable. There are disputes over money and territory, he says, and there's the collateral damage such as the innocent bystander getting shot on the street.

But Klofas says that law enforcement tends to classify as drug-related anything that has a connection to drugs, no matter how remote.

"If you look at homicide files, about 85 percent - if I remember the numbers correctly - had some mention of a connection to drugs in them," he says. "The most frequent ones were things like: ‘known serious drug user,' or ‘drug seller,' or ‘hangs around with people known to be involved with drugs.' It's almost like saying these offenses are water-related because these people drink water. Whether there's a causal relationship there is a totally different sort of question."

Klofas says the distinction is between taking drugs and the culture that tends to surround hard-core users and sellers. Drugs, particularly heavy indulgence or involvement with drugs, can draw people into a subculture in which guns, drugs, and violence all travel together, Klofas says. The farther into that subculture you go, he says, the more likely you are to find yourself engaged in or the victim of violence.

"There's a huge market for drugs," Klofas says. "And although there's a lot of violence associated with drugs, it can only be a fraction of the market. The market is much, much larger than that."