Illicit substance use would appear to be a fruitful arena in which to use sociology to provide us with the insights needed to understand a vast and changing panorama.

In very recent history, illicit drug use has engaged most of our youths, at least some of the time, and substantial segments of the adult population. The issue to be discussed here is whether sociology has contributed to our understanding of substance use, particularly the illicit substances proscribed by society.

It is necessary to specify precisely what is meant by a sociology of drug abuse. Although we will refer to the “licit” substances, our main task is to review what sociology has to contribute to our understanding of the use of a range of illicit substances.

These include a veritable pharmacopeia of substances: narcotics of various types; marijuana and hashish; cocaine; methaqualone; methadone; inhalants; PCP; and illicitly used prescription drugs, including a wide array of tranquilizers, barbiturates, amphetamines, and similar compounds.

Most of our discussion, however, will focus on heroin and marijuana because much more is currently known about the users of these substances. Not only is there a vast array of substances people use, there is also a very marked selectivity as to who uses which kinds of substances.

When LSD was being used by middle-class, college-age youths it was almost unknown in ghetto communities, where the drug users preferred heroin and marijuana. Patterns of drug use are generally not random; that is, the rates will vary sometimes by social class, other times by ethnicity, and almost always by age, since most illicit drug use is concentrated among adolescents and younger adults.

Any effort at explanation must note that the use of different substances varies across population groups. Further, usage patterns appear to go through various changes, partly because substances may become unavailable but also because trends abound in drug-using cultures as in other aspects of society. Except for marijuana and alcohol, the rates of sustained use of most other substances are rare events. This creates an additional problem, that of obtaining sufficient subjects for detailed investigations in most research strategies.

The variability just described, in choice of substances used and the different segments of society using them, raises a fundamental issue-- one that is not often confronted. That is, whether drug use is a phenomenon that can be directly explained or whether it is an epiphenomenon, an encrustation on a more basic set of behaviors.

One way this is often expressed is whether heroin use causes crime or vice versa or if marijuana use leads to the “hang loose” pattern associated with heavy users (Suchman 1968). There are indeed efforts to describe more elaborate patterns of behavior that cluster with the use of particular substances, that is, lifestyles or typologies, but the implications of this perspective are not often clearly drawn (Nurco and Lerner 1974).

The theoretical significance of this distinction is, of course, that what one is endeavoring to understand shifts radically. If one views heroin or LSD or marijuana as the focus for understanding, as an unalloyed dependent variable, then explanations take on one form.

This assumption explains the focus on the primary group, particularly the role of friendship networks and attendant processes. On the other hand, if heroin use attracts individuals who are already on the path to systematic deviance and social disengagement, explanations take another form.

The classic thesis of Lindesmith (1947) serves to illustrate this dilemma. He established as a condition for a theory of narcotic use that it must not be idiosyncratic, nor limited to particular cultures or groups.

But the use of opiates in very diverse settings involves not only individuals who are immersed in very different social systems, it even involves different forms of opiate use and generally engages individuals of different ages. The diversity that is implicit in this must lead, then, to a theory that is able to abstract social-structural commonalities in very different systems (perhaps insurmountable at this point in time) or one that reduces to an explanation that is primarily focused on properties of the substance.

In Lindesmith’s case, this becomes the phenomenon of withdrawal and the perception of users that they can only relieve their symptoms by engaging in the use of the drug. This latter explanation cannot be considered a sociological one, irrespective of any merits it may have. The issue noted earlier, whether heroin use causes criminal behavior, takes on very different meanings, depending on whether heroin is viewed as a discrete behavior that can be isolated from other aspects of a person’s life history or is instead simply an attribute of the patterned behavior of individuals (NIDA 1976).

Another question is whether it is possible to integrate all substance use into a single theory. Just as we noted that even a particular substance may be, from one point of view, an epiphenomenon, the wide array of substances that are used also presents problems for anyone who would attempt to include them in a single theoretical framework.

SOME SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

The sociological theories that are most often cited are derived from formulations that were designed to provide insight into delinquency and criminal behavior. We review them in some detail because they illuminate the sociological questions that may be raised. They also direct us to the questions that remain to be answered.

The formulation of Merton’s essay on “Social Structure and Anomie” (1957, pp. 131-160) is probably the most frequently cited theory. The key feature, and perhaps the primary reason for the theory’s attractiveness, is that it is an effort to specify how features of the social structure that are external to the individual actors produce observable patterns of behavior (Stinchcombe 1975, pp. 11-33).

As with any effort at sociological explanation, it does not endeavor to account for all varieties of idiosyncratic responses. The theoretical objective is to understand different rates of behavior that are observed in socially important entities such as sex, class, and ethnic groups.

In his well-known formulation, Merton posits two systems: culturally prescribed goals for achievement, and institutionally organized modes for achieving these goals. The feature of this formulation that concerns us is that despite the abundant citation of this theory (Cole 1975), it illustrates another of Merton’s observations made elsewhere, namely, that there is a disjunction between theory and empirical research (1957, pp. 131-160).

While there are efforts to use at least portions of the theory (as in Jessor 1979 and Jessor et al. 1968), the basic formulation is incompatible with most research strategies. One does not generally observe institutional norms but obtains individual perceptions of these norms, except where legal norms are invoked (Waldorf and Daily 1975).

Nor does one readily obtain information on institutional access; one infers them, in most instances, from respondents’ reports. While these may reflect larger cultural and structural facts, as Merton and Jessor suggest, it is not altogether clear that one can trace individual perceptions to larger systems except as they appear to be consistent with the assumptions of the theory.

For example, lower class adolescents may often see schools as hostile and irrelevant environments for them. One may interpret this as reflecting a reality that blocks a significant route for the achievement of culturally prescribed success goals. However, this is not an unambiguous interpretation.

It is equally plausible to view the same information as a response to much more limited spheres--such as cognitive ability or a response to family and peer groups--that socialize lower class youths in ways that are incongruent with the demands of educational or occupational systems. We do not argue for this latter interpretation, nor is it an “unsociological” one.

But it illustrates how the same information may be variously interpreted and embedded at different levels of abstraction. The linkages between theory and fact are simply ambiguous without other information, which is often not available.

The derivations from Merton’s theory, however, are also troublesome. Merton views drug use (and he appears to have heroin addicts in mind) as a sort of “retreatism,” in which individuals eschew culturally prescribed goals for achievement and are barred from or reject access to the goals that facilitate success.

The rejection of both goals and means encompasses not only drug addicts, but alcoholics, psychotics, outcasts, and vagabonds. The use of opiates, which are depressants, is consistent with the theme that addicts have little incentive to participate in the activities of the day-to-day world, both its cultural prescriptions and the institutionally approved routes for achievement.

Unfortunately, the facts that have accumulated on addicts, most of them subsequent to the formulation of the theory (1949), are not easily reconciled with the retreatist theme (Lukoff 1972; Lukoff and Brook 1974; Waldorf and Daily 1975). Life is almost frenetic for addicts. In order to survive they must keep out of the way of the police, raise the considerable funds they require, and keep abreast of where drugs might be obtained.

An extension of Merton’s formulation is the theory of Cloward and Ohlin (1960). with its focus on the structure of opportunities. They posit a more elaborate organization or criminal activity, in which youngsters who are recruited into crime achieve some of the culturally prescribed rewards associated with achievement.

But those who have failed in both the conventional route and the criminal one are double failures and prime candidates for drug use. The significance of this formulation is that it also locates heroin use among the structures that are external to the individual.

It appears to comport with the fact that minority youths, who are assumed, to have little access to mobility in the ranks of organized crime, have higher rates of drug use than do lower class white youths, who presumably have such access.

It is difficult to document the distribution of various forms of organized crime, or the recruitment of youngsters into these circles, except in illustrative or anecdotal ways (White 1943). The body of findings we will review later suggests that addicts are derived from the same matrix found in nonaddicted delinquents and that there is little to distinguish them from nonusers. And although addicts generally commit fewer violent crimes than nonaddicted criminals, they must be quite good at various forms of hustling and criminal activity in order to survive (Lukoff 1972; Preble and Miller 1977; NIDA 1976).

Despite their failure to explain drug use, the theories of Merton and of Cloward and Ohlin continue to be influential. The problems in specifying universal norms, or reasonably coherent structures that allocate individuals along different paths, are not unique to these formulations.

But they are the major efforts that have as their goals the identification of socially structured alternatives within which individuals presumably act out their lives and shape the options available to them (Stinchcombe 1975).

While contingent and subcultural patterns may contribute to different modes of expression, they still attempt to specify the broad outlines that direct persons’ lives. Much research on drug use would appear to examine derivative themes that are useful for organizing much of our knowledge.

We make no effort to review all of the research in this brief paper, only that portion that directs us to alternative structural sources for understanding drug use and deviance.

SOCIAL LOCATION

Most investigations, even those that are descriptive or primarily epidemiological, without any clear theoretical agenda, generally examine substance use rates by age, sex, social class, and race/ethnicity (Abelson et al. 1977; Johnston et al. 1979; O’Donnell et al. 1976).

Social class and race/ethnicity serve as surrogates for socially significant structural parameters. Where patterned differences emerge, they appear to reflect the different propensities these groups have for drug experimentation.

The theoretical issue, at first glance, is to comprehend how social location affects individuals located differentially within society. But illicit substance use is very volatile, even over relatively short historical epochs.

Currently, heroin use is concentrated in black and Hispanic communities, which appears to suggest that both lower socioeconomic status and belonging to disadvantaged minorities provide important clues to the attraction of heroin use.

However, at the turn of the century, opiate use, in various forms, was found primarily in white, middle-class females as a result of therapeutic use (Ball 1970; Ball and Bates 1970; Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs 1973).

In Britain, heroin users roughly match the class distribution of the larger society, and blacks are underrepresented (Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs 1973).

A closer examination of heroin use in ghetto communities in the United States reveals a more complex relationship of stratification to heroin use. Vaillant (1966b) contrasted Lexington addicts against their own communities and observed they were better educated than their comparable age-mates in the same tracts.

In a survey of an urban ghetto community, it was found that reported heroin use was associated with higher socioeconomic status, although this, as we will see, was a spurious relationship (Lukoff and Brook 1974; Lukoff 1977).

Thus, heroin users are not necessarily drawn from the most impoverished segments of the communities, where use is currently concentrated (Nurco 1979; Robins 1975a). Nor, as their education and intelligence suggest, are they necessarily those who should appear to be doomed to the margins of society (Ball and Bates 1970).

Only when contrasted against the larger society do socioeconomic status and lower education appear to be related to heroin use. This, however, appears to be the wrong way to examine the information. Instead, the relevant contrast would appear to be to examine heroin users against the backdrop of their own communities.

Then the picture shifts substantially. Because heroin use is a relatively rare event, most general population surveys report too few users for reliable estimates. Thus, caution is necessary in interpreting trends.

In a study of selective service registrants, O’Donnell and his colleagues (1976), when examining reported narcotic use by cohorts, showed that there was a decline among blacks in the later cohort, with an accompanying increase among whites.

In a survey of blacks in Harlem, Brunswick and Boyle (1979) examined rates by cohorts and observed a decline in initiation into heroin use among younger members of their panel.

Although it bears repeating that caution should be used, such trends do suggest how ephemeral heroin or other narcotic use might be in historic perspective, and that the clues to its use might be elsewhere than in the simple matter of gross contrasts by class or race observable in any one epoch.

The dynamic nature of drug use trends is even clearer for marijuana. When Becker (1963) investigated marijuana use two decades ago, it was largely confined to inner city blacks and jazz musicians. Currently, marijuana competes with alcohol as the most popular drug, especially among the young (Jessor and Jessor 1977; Johnston et al. 1978; Kandel 1978a).

Jessor and Jessor (1978), in reviewing marijuana trends, observe that there is a declining significance of such factors as “urbanicity,” race, and socioeconomic status.

Even sex differences are declining, although they appear to persist for heroin use. “At the level of the demographic environment then there has been a trend toward homogenization as far as variation in marijuana use is concerned” (Jessor and Jessor 1978, p. 341).

It is increasingly smoked in public settings; legal penalties in many places have been reduced; sanctions, where they exist, are often not invoked for possession of small quantities for personal use. Even when sanctions were punitive, marijuana use continued to increase in popularity, both for those who have ever tried it and among the proportion who use it with reasonable frequency.

Thus, normative systems are often only marginally effective, and they are subject to rapid change as the larger community begins to accommodate the persistent and pervasive use of the substance.

If most of the usual indicators of social location show declining significance, one persistent feature of marijuana use continues to be important: The vast majority of users are young.

And increasingly, the age of onset of marijuana use appears to be declining (Abelson et al. 1977; Johnston et al. 1979). Because of the relatively short time in which marijuana use has become popular, it is possible that current youthful and young adult users will continue to use it as they become older.

The same persistent relationship to age is present among heroin users. Almost all users start when young, at least in the United States experience (Brunswick and Boyle 1979; Lukoff 1972; Nurco 1979; Robins 1975a).

As cohorts of adults advance in age, the largest proportion who were addicted abandon heroin use. Winick (1964) estimates the typical duration of addiction to be just over eight years. Although older addicts exist, the heroin-using population is still weighted toward those who are relatively young.

Thus, the one unambiguous association with drug use, one that appears to persist, at least in Western cultures, is the relationship of drug use to youthfulness (Braucht et al. 1973).

Most of those who experiment with illicit drugs are young; those who become addicted, where there is information, decrease or cease drug use with advancing age.

Structural variables such as social class and race/ethnicity are much more ambiguously related to drug use, as our review of trends suggests. We exclude the misuse of medically prescribed drugs because they would appear to present very different configurations.
   

SOCIALIZATION

The identification of social norms assumes that behavior is transmitted to actors who, depending on circumstances, tend to adhere to appropriate beliefs and concomitant behaviors.

This explains the emphasis on socialization in the research literature, although sometimes only the “end product,” the beliefs themselves, is identified and assumed to have been somehow transmitted (Jessor et al. 1968; Merton 1957).

The search for antecedents of personality, rooted in family childrearing practices, overlaps with the effort to identify how cultural values and norms are communicated to the young (Brook et al. 1977a,b, 1978; Lukoff 1977). But socialization is not limited to the family.

Other agencies of social control also contribute, sometimes with perspectives that are at variance with those of the family. The most heavily investigated area has been the impact of peer groups (Becker 1963; Braucht et al. 1973; Feldman 1968) and the attendant mechanisms that shape the choice of friends and influence the accommodation to the behaviors and values of peers. This raises two theoretical issues.

The first is the identification of the countervailing forces that influence the decline of parental legitimacy, as well as of other agencies that promote conventional behavior. The second issue is the way in which adolescents develop a peer culture with alternate value systems and goals (Becker 1963; Feldman 1968; O’Donnell et al. 1976; Whyte 1943).

There is one thing, however, which is not altogether congruent with the above statement. The literature on family socialization of adolescents has two foci, and many variations within each.

First, there is a focus on the models family members provide for the use of drugs, tobacco, alcohol, or even medically prescribed, mood-altering drugs (Brook et al. 1977a, 1978; Kandel et al. 1978). Here, the assumption is that children will emulate their parents’ use regardless of the choice of substance. From this perspective, although substances may change, there should be a continuity across generations.

The findings are generally consistent with this assumption, although less powerful than one might expect. This may be an artifact because rates of reported use by family members whether obtained from adolescents or from parents are generally very low compared to the rates of usage of illicit drugs by adolescents.

Alcohol, of course, differs in this respect from illicit substances (Braucht et al. 1973). The direct modeling of parents’ behaviors is unlikely to explain a great deal of the usage by younger individuals where rates of use decline rapidly after the mid-twenties (Abelson et al. 1977).

The other focus is the examination of various forms of childrearing as well as the quality of the parent-child relationship, i.e., whether there is warmth and affection between them.

These studies generally indicate that parental rules are related to adolescent drug use (Brook et al. 1977a, 1978). More proscriptive orientations are associated with lower rates of drug use. In addition, adolescents who report positively on their parents also tend to have lower rates of involvement with illicit substances (Gerstein 1976).

This is an important research direction that has its own utility. From the perspective laid out at the beginning of this paper, however, these are intervening processes. Since the purpose of this paper is to identify aspects of the social structure that ultimately affect adolescents and young adults, it is necessary to recast the issue in order to attempt to understand what it is about the social structure that may result in variations in the form of socialization.

Although not ordinarily viewed in the context of socialization, age of onset of drug use serves as a surrogate index for an important dimension of socialization, namely, the unfettering of the bonds of social control.

Early onset reflects the premature segmentalizing, or insulation, of youthful activities from the normative system of the adult community. Those who start young are more likely to persist in substance use and other forms of deviance and to resist the blandishments of treatment (Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs 1973; Lukoff 1972; NIDA 1976).

Referring to narcotics users, Nurco (1979, p. 321) states, “The earlier the onset of deviant behaviors, the more malignant the process invoked and the more ominous the prognosis. . . . The younger the age of onset the more intense and committed the addictive career.”

The early onset of drug use and other forms of deviance means that individuals are less likely to complete school, to have a history of sustained employment, or to engage in other adolescent or young adult activities that facilitate passage to adult status. In this sense, their socialization is truncated, and they are less prepared to assume the requirements of adult roles of their communities.

They are only marginally connected to the adult worlds of their respective communities. Adolescent lifestyles, congregating with peers, avoiding employment 207 and family relationships may persist until the person is quite advanced in age (Preble and Miller 1977).

Equally important is the fact that, as Robins (1979) has noted, any. form of deviance, particularly among the young, forecasts other forms of deviance, including alcohol consumption, school deportment, delinquency, and early sexual promiscuity.

There are several possible implications, but the one that concerns us here is that the roots of deviance are shared by many forms of problem behavior. The form that problem behavior takes, while it may in part reflect personal dispositions, is primarily a response to the encounters with other individuals, the peer cultures of adolescents and young adults.

The longitudinal reconstruction of substance use by Robins (1975a), from premilitary usage through Vietnam and after discharge, dramatically illustrated how easy access to heroin inflated use rates substantially.

Almost all soldiers in Vietnam would presumably have had easy access to heroin, but not all of them used it.

But those who scored high on preservice deviance were about four times as likely to initiate use as those who were low in deviance. These findings underscore that while proximal settings, where drugs are plentiful, markedly affect rates of use, earlier histories also exert a powerful influence.

The fact that among heroin users there is often a history of delinquency prior to the onset of use is consistent with these findings (Lukoff 1972; NIDA 1976). Despite the addictive potential of heroin, for some individuals involvement is only experimental or sporadic; others appear to cease use without the assistance of treatment or to accommodate the goals of treatment programs.

Although scarcely studied, the information that is available indicates that such individuals are less alienated or disengaged from family and work, and less intensively immersed in drugusing groups (Lukoff 1974; Robins 1979; Zinberg 1979). Because marijuana is a common recreational drug for so many persons, the factors involved in its use are more diverse than those for heroin use.

It appears necessary, for example, to distinguish between persons in a late-onset, sporadic-use group and persons in an early-onset, frequent-use (generally daily) group. For those in the first group, use is confined to specific social contexts in which it is simply a cultural trend, much like tastes in music or clothing (i.e., the use is governed by proximal variables reflecting aspects of the current social milieu).

In the second group, use can be predicted from antecedent variables, such as perceived or actual parental roles and the quality of familial relationships (Jessor and Jessor 1977; Jessor et al. 1968; Braucht et al. 1973; Brook et al. 1977a, 1978; Lukoff 1977).

As marijuana use moved from vanguard users who adopted the drug when it was still subject to heavy penalties, it appears to have also attracted individuals who, in varying degrees, were less likely to be engaged in subcultures that held perspectives divergent from those of the larger society.

Although concepts used in the many investigations reflect the general anarchy in a great deal of social research, one trend appears to persist, namely, that youthful onset of marijuana use is associated with a slackening of parental controls, early rebelliousness, and the presence of a wide array of behaviors incongruent with the expectations of the family, i.e., adult controls are markedly attenuated so that the 208 discontinuity between generations is exacerbated (Braucht et al. 1973; Jessor and Jessor 1977; Kandel 1978a).

GENERATIONAL DISJUNCTIONS

Drug use, at least for the committed user, is always more than simply a preference for a particular substance, or only a habituation that can be slaked by repeated use of the drug. It is immersed in a more coherent lifestyle pattern, one that involves values and goals and patterns of relationships.

It is, therefore, part of a process of the emergence of cultural systems that are innovative, at least by the standards of the communities from which drug users derive. Thus, the question implied earlier: How do variant lifestyles emerge in which drug use becomes a component element?

If the family and the other agencies of social control were consistently effective, there would be little illicit drug use because it has not been a major feature of adult lifestyles. Socialization implies some form of inculcation of basic adaptive strategies of younger people, an activity ordinarily consigned to the family, schools, churches.

But this process is never wholly successful and competition can come from other sources, the most common being agemates. There is evidence, however, that the mere association with others who use drugs, while a necessary feature of drug use, certainly during initiation, is not sufficient to explain drug use. Andrews and Kandel (1979) have demonstrated that there is a presocialization process in the sense that those who initiate use have already acquired the attitudes that facilitate drug use.

Jessor and Jessor (1977) note that while marijuana users almost always are associated with a network of users, there are also individuals who choose not to use drugs. Among those who have experimented with heroin and remain in close association with heroin users there are many who pull back.

Vaillant (1966b) who observed that heroin users were overrepresented by native-born offspring of migrant parents--not the children of migrants who had been brought up elsewhere before coming to urban areas--hypothesized that there was a cultural disparity between the generations that appeared to increase susceptibility to heroin use.

Lukoff and Brook (1974) observed that reported heroin users in a ghetto community were disproportionately derived from the higher socioeconomic groups within the community, but that this was a function of the higher socioeconomic standing of the native-born when compared to migrants.

The key element, then, was the migrant-native status, with the native-born overrepresented among the users of heroin. In the same investigation there was also a correspondence of viewpoints toward childrearing that accounted for the generational differences.

Migrants in all four ethnic groups, American black, black British West Indians, whites, and Puerto Ricans, subscribed to more proscriptive and controlling orientations toward children than did native-born members of those groups.

Although reported heroin use differed between the groups, the same consistent relationship appeared: families that were less proscriptive, even among migrants, reported higher rates of heroin use and closer contact with users of heroin. The socialization studies cited earily appear to be consistent with the above findings (Braucht et al. 1973; Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs 1973; Gerstein 1976).

Insofar as parental 209 ideologies are oriented toward greater control and monitoring of children, drug initiation appears to decline. At another extreme, when heroin users have been studied, generally retrospectively, there appears to be markedly disturbed family backgrounds in which the families of origin are often abusive or unable to monitor the activities of their children effectively (Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs 1973; Robins 1975a; Zinberg 1979).

Whether we speak of the markedly deviant lifestyle of the heroin addict or the more “laid back” patterns of the middle-class psychedelic user, both patterns can only evolve when youth cultures operate with relative freedom, in isolation from the agencies of social control.

This also presumes that the usual socialization mechanisms, including but not limited to the family, have declining legitimacy. There appear to be several possible causes for this situation. There is, first, the diversity of the urban social environment. Contrast this with individuals from rural backgrounds in which there are few competing cultural systems.

Thus, not only is the adherence to community norms more difficult, but there are attractive alternative systems that can be observed and to which one can often gain access.

There is also the increasing isolation of the family. It is not just that more families are headed by single parents, since this has not been unequivocally associated with heroin use (Lukoff and Brook 1974). It is more likely that the networks of family support systems are smaller, and, by the very nature of the urban environment, even when present, are less likely to affect young people.

One does not often encounter an aunt, uncle, or cousin who can report to one’s parents, as happens in smaller communities or in rural areas. In addition, more of the activities formerly confined to the family are now performed elsewhere, from preschool through a longer and more extended schooling period where primary adult groups have minimal impact.

Larger social changes are difficult to link to various forms of youthful rebelIion. We can only note that it is in urban areas that traditional segregation norms began to lose hold. With the rejection of the adults who accommodated the restrictions imposed on blacks, the legitimacy of the conventional society of the ghettos also declined in significance.

Among middle-class, mainly white youths, the disparity between voiced values and reality attracted increasing attention, whether it was the civil rights struggle, or opposition to a war for which they could find no justification.

This often was translated by many young people into a rejection of the entire middle-class value system. With the declining legitimacy of the usual agents of social control, the possibility for innovation, always present among young people, appears to have escalated. It is in these contexts that drug use increased, from an activity engaged in by only a few, to one that has become, at least for marijuana, a normal part of the youth culture.

Parental ideologies toward children appear to be implicated. Several of the investigations cited earlier note that parental orientations toward childrearing appear to be consistently related to the initiation of drug use. The ideology of self-determination of children is another factor.

An outcome of urban sophistication, it is not so prevalent in small towns and rural communities, nor is it shared by migrants from more traditional cultures, though it is soon incorporated in the ideologies of their descendants.

This is often accompanied by a declining willingness to enforce controls and monitor the activities of children and is often accompanied by more extensive use of surrogate guardians. When the rewards, as perceived by the children, appear more exciting and challenging elsewhere, the options provided by the family appear to decline in influence.

And so a greater receptivity to encounters with peers would seem to be a consequence of the lessened “internalization” of norms and values derived from the family. We have only roughly sketched in some possible sources of the way in which youth cultures appear to have greater priority in the evolution of new values and behaviors, with illicit substance use an important component of these activities.

The form it takes, from the “hang loose” orientation described by Suchman, or the “hippie” culture of the 1960s, or the “cool cat” of the ghettos, depends on subcultural forms within the communities and the kinds of values and activities, often derived from the adult culture, but profoundly transformed in the process, that are available.

In this brief paper we cannot explore this area in detail, but it appears that the choice of adaptive styles, while at variance with the community’s system of values, is in important aspects a facet of that system.

CONCLUSION

In this paper we argue that the key social structural feature associated with drug use is found in the one unambiguous association, that of illicit substance use with young people. In fact, the evidence seems to point to a lowering of the age at which individuals commence the use of illicit substances (Abelson et al. 1977; Johnston et al. 1979).

Other structural features such as social class or ethnic group membership, while clearly associated with many aspects of drug use, when examined historically and even in the short period of the past few decades, are seen to be only ephemerally related.

It appears that the indigenous cultures are shaping forces, but they do not play a decisive role. What we have said appears to be true for the United States, and perhaps for western Europe, but it does not hold for narcotics use by medical practitioners or by Middle Eastern rural dwellers.

We also advance the view that it is less useful to speak of drug use alone, because those who are heavily invested in drug use are also part of more integrated lifestyles, different in the ghettos than on the campuses, but at variance with many aspects of conventional adult culture.

We suggest that marijuana in particular, since it is used by the majority of young people, may be peripheral for many.

But for those who start when young and use with reasonable frequency, the evidence is consistent with the theme that illicit substance use is not an isolatable phenomenon, but must be understood in a larger context.

And where there is information on who uses drugs there appears to be a process of disengagement from conventional values and norms that precedes initiation.

We suggest the sources of the rapid escalation of drug use are located in the forces that influence the declining legitimacy of conventional norms and values and agents of social control on the one hand, and in the structural forces that increase the opportunities for younger people to operate with greater freedom outside the confines of the usual control mechanisms.

In this sense, drug use and the attendant cultural prescriptions represent a process of social change.

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From N.I.D.A. Monograph 30 - Theories on Drug Abuse: Selected Contemporary Perspectives.  [Page for pdf download, which includes diagrams and reference list.]