Substance abuse prevention and intervention strategies are often based on epidemiological data that report drug, alcohol, and cigarette use within the conventional classification distributions of Black and White. These categories are problematic in that there could be considerable variance in substance use within racial/ethnic categories. The current study sought to investigate trends in alcohol, drug, and cigarette use among a sample of Haitian youth residing in Miami-Dade County, FL, in order to offer a contextualized analysis of drug use among individuals across socioethnic lines. Results are presented from two studies: the Haitian Youth Gang Study and the Haitian Adolescents Lifestyles and HIV Study, both of which used snowball community-based samples involving 296 and 300 Haitian youths, respectively. The studies examined the sociocultural contexts in which Haitian youth were living in Miami-Dade, including issues regarding drug use. Results indicate that while drug use risk-taking is relatively low among Haitian youth in Miami-Dade, drug use seem to be increasing as Haitian youth increasingly adopt North American patterns of risk-taking. Overall, Haitian youth demonstrated a general naivete about drug use, only displaying familiarity with alcohol and cigarettes. The findings have implications for prevention efforts, which should take a very different approach among this relatively drug-naïve population. Tables, references