Drug use has long been a topic relatively neglected by the social sciences in France. This article aims both to trace the development of sociological knowledge on the subject of addiction, using youth drug use as a starting point, and to summarize the key findings emerging from this research. While young people were the focus of much of the concern regarding drugs in political circles and the media, and were the subject of the earliest sociological studies, they lost this central place in social science research—which was primarily ethnological at the time—until the late 1990s, in favor of populations identified as drug addicts. Young people have once again become a specific subject of analysis since the 2000s, thanks to the development of quantitative surveys representative of the adolescent population. These changes occurred in response to evolving perceptions of young drug users, but also because sociologists adopted methods and tools previously used by epidemiologists. The results of these surveys and the use of quantitative sociology have helped influence public policy and introduce a different, more detached, and less moralizing perspective on young people’s addictive behaviors. [author’s abstract]