The article considers how drug researchers use ecological and ethnographic data to support their claims that inner-city drug subcultures are a response to ghetto-specific conditions and raises problems associated with using such data to uphold those assertions. It examines how the majority drug problem is framed by a separate research literature that accounts for the causes of experimental and social use in the middle class by using a normative model and describes dysfunctional drug use among majority youth in terms of individual differences, as opposed to aggregate conditions. This compartmentalization of minority and majority drug problems extends beyond the etiological literature to the literature on drug epidemics; hence, trends in minority and majority drug use also receive separate treatment. The article discusses how understanding the minority drug problem might be improved if the normative model applied to majority drug users were also applied to minority drug users in the inner city and policy implications of that suggested course of action. Notes, references