Evaluate the space before settling on Drupal -- if your friend has experience, it should make the evaluation that much easier. There are a number of high quality CMS systems available, and just being familiar with one isn't a sufficient reason to use it.

You may even find that a CMS doesn't provide much for you beyond what you can get with a nice framework in your language of choice, evaluate these before settling on the defaults at hand.

I've written some code in Drupal, and while it has many strengths, its level of abstraction away from just writing simple PHP code in my mind doesn't really differentiate it from a framework... and in the framework space, there are some nicer options available to you.