These analyses are based on the Children in the Community Project's longitudinal cohort of children who have been assessed since early childhood. Families were originally sampled in 1975 when the children were ages 1 to 10 and the families were living in one of two upstate New York counties. The families were recontacted for interviews in 1983 and again in 1985-86. Eighty-five percent of the original 976 families were located, and nearly 80 percent were reinterviewed in one or both of the followup interviews. The study examined four domains of early childhood risk factors in relationship to drug use, externalizing, and internalizing behavior as assessed by maternal report on the Child Behavior Checklist. The domains included were the larger social context, family attributes, parent-child relationship, and biological risk. The procedures used provided a statistical comparison of the partial or direct effects of risk factors on various outcome variables. The findings were consistent in part with a common causal model for both drug use and delinquency. A deviant family environment, peer environment, and school environment did not differentially predict drug use and delinquency. Regarding the family environment, parental sociopathy predicted both drug use and delinquency. These findings confirm previous studies that indicate children whose parents exhibit deviant behavior are at increased risk for both drug use and delinquency. 4 tables and 48 references