Friendship Networks, Intimacy, and Illicit Drug Use in Young Adulthood: A Comparison of Two Competing Theories*

Theories of delinquency posit two opposing views on the social interactions of deviant individuals. Social control theory assumes that deviants have poor relationships with others. Cultural deviance theory assumes that deviant individuals are similar to nondeviants and have strong ties with members of their friendship networks. These theories have not been empirically tested for male and female users of illicit drugs. Descriptive and multivariate analyses are reported here for young adult men and women aged 28 to 29, who were asked about their same‐sex and opposite‐sex friends in general and three specific close friends. Few differences were found in the characteristics of friendship networks of illicit drug users and nonusers. Where differences were observed. the frequent users tended to have more intimate friendships than other young adults, which supports the cultural deviance perspective. Structural equation models predicting two latent components of intimacy, confiding and interacting, with the three closest friends and same‐sex and opposite‐sex friends indicate that, controlling for other determinants of intimacy with friends, illicit drug use retains a unique effect and predicts substantially higher levels of intimacy among males. The strong social ties of adult drug‐using males will make it more difficult to develop effective intervention strategies targeted toward individual users.