For the recovering university students in the study, alcohol or other drug use has an array of meanings, which is an indication of the important role such use has played in the lives of these adolescents and young adults. Some of these meanings are negative. Alcohol/other drug use are viewed by the students as a poor coping technique and as having disrupted their lives in several ways. Yet, even with their strong current commitments to recovery, they did not view their past use in entirely negative terms. The findings reinforce the importance for prevention/intervention of conceptualizing risk taking within a developmental contextual framework, and also of recognizing that successful recovery does not necessarily require viewing all aspects of the user life as negative. Prior research has shown that the majority of adolescents have experimented with alcohol/other drugs by the time they graduate from high school. Some of this research has countered widely held beliefs that adolescents are unable to evaluate risks associated with their behaviors. The research question which is the focus of this study centers around recovering students’ retrospective perceptions of their alcohol and other drug use in terms of: (1) the perceived functions of use; (2) positive and negative aspects of use; (3) perceptions of use in relation to development; and in general, (4) the ways in which the perceptions of these recovering students about alcohol/other drug use differ from those of experimenting students in previous studies. Interviews were conducted with 12 students in recovery from alcohol/other drug dependency, all currently participating in a university-based recovery program. References