Most of the information on drug epidemiology is derived from studies of identified addicts in treatment or prison. An earlier investigation (1970) indicated that questions probing heroin use in a community sample can yield useful data with important epidemiological pay-offs. The present investigation is designed to explore with more detail (1) the utilization of major drugs of abuse; (2) to confirm the observations concerning ethnic and class patterns that deviate from the usual wisdom; (3) to test a series of hypotheses on the influences shaping adolescent experimentation with drugs. The design includes a survey of 883 residents (with over-sampling of British West Indians) in the Bedford-Stuyvesant/Fort Greene area in Brooklyn, New York, a high drug use area with important cultural-ethnic mixes. An additional sample of 284 mothers with adolescent children, and 403 adolescents within the same households aged 13-17, were also interviewed. Quotas were estimated to provide approximately equal numbers of white, black and British West Indian families in this phase.