The principal objective of this research was to ascertain which of these two competing models--recreational or therapeutic--was the most accurate in explaining the illicit prescription drug use careers of practicing pharmacists. Structured personal interviews were used to examine the individual life histories of a group of pharmacists, all of whom had previously been in treatment and were now in recovery for the past illicit abuse of prescription drugs. Individuals were accessed through a “snowball” sampling technique. Although there were clearly two different modes of entry into drug abuse for the recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators, these two groups of offenders were not mutually exclusive categories. A number of cognitive and behavioral themes were identified as common to almost all respondents, regardless of how they initially began their illicit drug abuse careers. The existence of these common themes suggests that pharmacy-specific occupational contingencies played a central role in the onset and progression of the illicit use of prescription medicines. Pharmacists would steal prescription medicines to treat their own physical ailments. The vast majority of both the recreational abusers and therapeutic self-medicators claimed that they had never been warned about the dangers of drug addiction. In every case, the occasional abuse of prescription drugs eventually gave way to an advanced addictive state that was marked by an enormous intake of drugs, unmistakable habituation, and the constant threat of physical withdrawal. There was strong support for the conceptual claim that there is a patterned organization to both deviants and deviance. The lines are blurred between the concepts of crime and deviance, since the individuals were routinely violating both norms and laws. A single category of criminal-deviant action within a single category of criminal-deviant actors could begin and progress under different behavioral and motivational pretenses. The data suggest that divergent criminal-deviant career trajectories eventually converge to produce similar behavioral and motivational manifestations in mature offenders. 1 table, 45 references