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Relationships of personal and job factors with employee substance use in a sample of municipal workers were assessed. Logistic regression results showed that personal and job domains each significantly predicted substance use at and away from work, although the best fit was provided by a model including both domains. The profile of the employee most likely to be a substance abuser was a young male with low self-esteem and an arrest history, who came from a family with substance abuse problems, and associated with substance-using peers. The drug-using employee was also likely to be estranged from work and to work under risky job conditions.

Theories of social categorization were used to generate hypotheses concerning the impact of drug involvement on the attitudes and knowledge structures that people use in making drug‐related judgments. Data indicated that greater drug exposure tended to foster more complex knowledge structures for drugs and drug users as revealed by subjects’ perceptions of drug users, tolerance for drug use, and perceptions of drug seriousness. Basically, high drug involvement in terms of personal alcohol use and associating with illicit drug users was related to greater individuation of drug user types. Therefore, high‐involved subjects, relative to low‐involved individuals, were better able to discriminate between different drug user subtypes and drug user subtypes were more important to high‐involved subjects when responding to drug‐related survey items.