The studies reported in this volume have examined the following factors possibly related to alcohol and drug use among American Indian youth: associations with drug-using peers, deviance, lack of family closeness and family sanctions against drug use, age when experiencing the first drunk, school maladjustment, positive attitudes toward alcohol use, the risk of dropping out of school, father absent from the home, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and lack of strong identification with religion. Aspects of emotional distress had such low correlations with drug use that they were eliminated from further analyses. This left a number of risk factors directly related to the chances that a youth would use alcohol or drugs. Having two or three of the risk factors, regardless of their characteristics, increased considerably the chances of an Indian youth's getting drunk or using marijuana, but increased the chances of using other drugs only moderately. With each increase in the number of risk factors above two or three, the chances of heavy drug use increased greatly. Among youth with five or more risk factors, less than 2 percent remained entirely drug free. This article divides the risk factors into two broad categories for the purpose of preventing drug use by Indian youth: community characteristics that create an environment conducive to the promotion of drug use, and personal and social characteristics that increase the risk for individual Indian youth to use drugs. In order to reduce the demand for drugs, it will be necessary to attack the problem on both levels. 2 figures and 2 references