Biological and psychological theories tend to emphasize individualistic factors, although the researchers who propose them usually indicate that broader factors are at work. For instance, two psychologists associated with 'he "problem-behavior proneness" line of thinking incorporate the environment or, to be more specific, the "perceived environmental system"—especially parents and friends—into their model.

However, their focus is on the characteristics of the individual..

In contrast, sociologists tend to make broader, structural factors the focus of their theories. For the sociologist, the most crucial factor to be examined is not the characteristics of the individual, but the situations, social relations, or social structures in which the individual is or has been located.

More specifically, it is the individual located within specific structures..

Four partially overlapping sociological theories have been proposed to help explain drug use:

social learning;

social control;

subculture;

selective interaction/socialization.

In the 1930s, sociologist Robert K. Merton generated what came to be referred to as the anomie theory of deviant behavior, that deviant behavior—drug use included—occurs when the avenues to material success are blocked off. The theory has been applied to drug use and abuse, but never successfully..

Devastating critiques have attacked anomie theory and its application to drug use and abuse. In fact, to some researchers, it is so completely irrelevant to an understanding of the etiology, or causality, of drug use that it is something of an embarrassment. Thus I will not discuss it as a relevant contemporary theory of drug use.

At the same time, however, it is regarded as something of a "classic" theory, and the original article that spelled it out (in which, drug addiction and alcoholism were only mentioned in passing) is probably the single most cited article in the entire sociological literature..

Anomie theory, as Merton developed it, argued that in a competitive, materialistic, achievement-oriented society, in which success is extolled as attainable for all members but where success is, in fact, attainable to only a relative few, individuals who do not succeed must devise "deviant" or disapproved adaptations to deal with their failure..

Those who have given up on achieving society's materialistic goals, whether by approved or disapproved means, become retreatists. "In this category fall some of the adaptive activities of psychoticsm, autists, pariahs, outcasts, vagrants, vagabonds, tramps, chronic drunkards, and drug addicts". An extension of this theory holds that the person who is most likely to become a drug addict is someone who has attempted to use both legal (or legitimate) and illegal (or illegitimate) means to achieve success, and has failed at both.

The addict is a "double failure," and has "retreated" into the undemanding world of addiction..

Anomie theory has long been regarded as fanciful, generated in the almost total absence of knowledge of the world of drug use and addiction. The model addict that predominates in this theory is that of the Chinese opium addict, puffing on his pipe in a dreamy, somnolent slumber. In fact, the world of the addict is anything but undemanding.

It is a brutal, abrasive world requiring extreme skill and maximum effort to survive..

Moreover, it is not the poorest members of poor communities — the most clear - cut "failures" — who turn to heroin, but those who are a rung above them financially and occupationally. Anomie theory seems to explain no significant feature of drug use, abuse, or addiction.

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