Heroin and oxycontin belong to a class of drugs called opiates. Lovefraud recently received a letter from a reader that raised the issue of heroin addiction in sociopaths:
For nearly two years after my relationship with him ended, I was on the web researching heroin addiction because I assumed this was where all of his abusive behavior came from, but I stumbled upon information on sociopaths, and realized that he fits every trait”¦I know substance abuse behavior can mimic sociopathic behavior, but it is clear that the man I was in a relationship with is a sociopath, and was able to use his addiction as an explanation and excuse to further manipulate the many people who offered help to him”¦ The man I dated definitely went beyond the regular lying and stealing that takes place and went far into the realm of sadism- taking great joy in manipulation and emotional devastation of others. He was breaking into cars and taking great risks to his physical safety as a child/young man, well before his drug use started. It makes sense to me that people who are sociopaths and do not have a conscience would be more likely to become heroin addicts, as seeing others being hurt by their behavior would not be a deterrent. Whereas someone with a conscience would feel just as good when they take the heroin, they would be more likely to think about its effects on others, and stop the behavior.
I trained in three public urban hospitals where the prevalence of opiate addiction was so high that I treated countless numbers of these patients and encountered them on a daily basis. That nearly all were sociopaths was an inescapable reality. It did not seem possible that all these people were sociopaths prior to becoming addicted, so I have long believed that heroin especially makes people into sociopaths.
My beliefs have been confirmed by a number of scientific studies. One particularly thorough study was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1998 (Vol. 107.p 412-422) entitled, A Typology of Antisociality in Methadone Patients by Dr. Arthur I. Alterman and colleagues of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
These researchers studied 252 men in methadone maintenance programs. Their average age was 40. The researchers looked extensively into the backgrounds and histories of the subjects and had them complete a number of personality tests. They also interviewed them using Robert Hare’s PCL-R.
The study identified 6 groups of subjects, each with a unique psychological profile. 72 percent of the sample were sociopaths. That means that only 28 percent were not significantly antisocial. The researchers believed that in perhaps 17 percent of the sample the sociopathy was due to the addiction. The take home message though was that 55 percent were highly psychopathic as measured by the PCL-R. About a quarter of the total sample were married and we can assume the rest had relationships of some sort.
Government statistics indicate there may be as many as 2 million opiate addicts in the US. There are only 650 methadone maintenance programs in the US with an estimated 120,000 clients. These clients are likely similar to those of the reported study, but it is reasonable to believe that non-sociopaths are over represented in treatment programs, so the 28 percent figure may be an over-estimate with regard to the total addict population.
One of the most interesting findings of the above study was that Machiavellianism was high in the 55 percent of methadone clients who were sociopaths. Machiavellianism was measured by the 20-item MACH-IV which measures egocentricity, a lack of concern with conventional morality, and interpersonal manipulativeness. These symptoms would predict a great deal of distress in the spouses and romantic partners of the subjects- not to mention the children born to these parents.
The results of the study raise other important points I have made on this blog. First, among the very antisocial and manipulative opiate addicts there were a range of PCL-R scores. This means that you should not be concerned with trying to decide if the person who is hurting and manipulating you meets some magical cut-off score. Instead look at the list of traits Donna has posted and see if the description more or less fits.
Also, childhood and teen problems cannot always be identified in people who are very psychopathic. Things happen in late adolescence and early adulthood that change people. Furthermore, just because we can’t prove a given person had antisocial tendencies early in life, doesn’t mean they weren’t there. The other implication of this is that at-risk young people require careful, loving, hands-on parenting even if they seem OK. Addiction may be an event that tips at-risk individuals into the realm of psychopathy.
The brain opiate systems are central to love and attachment in humans. This fact may account for the propensity for sociopaths to use heroin. It may also be that opiate drugs specifically poison a person’s ability to love, making him/her egocentric, grandiose and manipulative.
Is opn, it was common for the s I was in a relationship with to sell or trade his take home methadone on the street. He had no guilt over doing this even when his family was spending a lot of money to purchase the methadone program for him. The methadone clinics just take educated guesses on when and if they can trust each individual to take their methadone home or not. But they don’t usually know if a person is a sociopath or not, and oftentimes the most skilled manipulators are the ones who seem the most trustworthy when they are the least. I am so sorry to hear of your loss.
It is so uplifting to share with good people who have had some of the same experiences and as I was reading over the last few posts, being helped towards healing from this strange journey after being hurt so badly. Thank you to all of you.
I watched my husband disappear into crack addiction and I watched him become a monster, a sociopath. The man he was on drugs, was not the man he was clean and sober. Crack, Cocaine, Heroin, Ocycodones, and even seeminly innocent anti depressants, for a bipolar, can trigger a mania that never ends. They get addicted to how it feels, or the lack of feeling, and how it easy it is when they’re high, how easy everything feels…and how little they have to care…as
if they ever cared that much in the first place. The drug can drown out the last voice within them, and it can shrivel and detroy the last shred of humanity left in them…and then they are indeed sociopaths; bereft of all that was ever human about them. The thing that’s hard to understand for the person who has to watch this happen; is that the monster they are becoming is glad to see that human part of themselves die. The first time I realized what was happening to him was the moment I saw delight in his eyes to see my suffering. To see how I suffered while watching this part of him die gave him pleasure. There was something so fundamentally evil in his eyes. A person can be made a sociopath by drugs, yes. I have seen it. I can tell you this much though, it was fear that sent him there. It was his own humanity and frailty and the fear of this that sent him into addiciton in the first place. The drugs dulled his pain, they quieted his fears, they silenced his conscience. Little by little, all the frailty that he feared within himself was destroyed in the rage of the drug, a rage and madness that passed, in his mind, for courage, power, confidence, charisma, and creativity. He believed that the crack made him powerful and successful because it took away all the fear and all the things about himself that he considered weak. He killed off everything about himself that he believed stood in his way, in much the same way he would eventually try to destroy me.
Yes, it is possible for drugs to destroy a human being and leave a sociopath in its place. I have seen it happen with my own eyes. Crack alters the brain chemistry of its users and if
they use long enough, the changes are permanent. The man I fell in love with, married and built a life with; that man is dead, he no longer exists and the man he became has been ordered by a judge to stay away from me for the rest of my natural life.
I wish I had some advice that could be useful to anyone. I’m still trying to get my arms around it and its been over a year since I fled from him. Its a funny thing to have to come to terms with, that someone can die on the inside and yet still be walking around like some kind of wraith. Someone you love just dies and disappears and becomes someone else completely. Like body snatchers. Of course, even knowing all this, its still awfully hard to put all the sociopathic behaviors under that umbrella. Evil is evil, whether its drug induced or comes straight from the pit of that person’s empty soul.
DEar Jennifer,
I am so sorry that you had to experience such a horrible situation, and stand powerless to obseerve something you could not change. I felt the same way about my P-son, though he did not use drugs, but to see him destroy what I thought was a wonderful person (himself) and then delight in destroying others as well.
Yes, the dead walk among us like a bad horror flick. My condolences to you. (((hugs))) and my prayers for your healing.
I wonder if it applies to cocaine addiction as well. I married someone who had “tendencies” towards sociopathy-(impulsiveness, explosive temper) that I would say were not full blown. When we met, he seemed to have a large capacity for compassion. But after a few years of becoming addicted to cocaine, he became a full blown sociopath. In addition, after many years of recovery and getting his life back together, he met a woman in a drug treatment clinic where he was working as a counselor (she was his patient). He “fell in love”, convinced her to leave her husband and marry him- I don’t think she ever really loved him- she was addicted to barbiturates- a methadone addict. I think she thought she had found her way to a legal stash of drugs, but he actually expected her to recover, Well, she pretty much destroyed his life- he made a really stupid decision and is paying for it by being in prison for a decent chunk of time. I think he is a sociopath that got manipulated by an even better sociopath.
Allure:
I wondered the same thing about cocaine.
As for what happened to your ex — well karma’s a boomerang, n’est ce pas?
Yes, surely.
For Allure: crack is cocaine, a cooked down purer version in a way that is inhaled rather than consumed. Crack is extremely addictive, much more so than powder cocaine. its also consumed as ‘freebase’ made famous by Richard Pryor you might recall. Equally addictive as heroin, cyrstal meth, ect.
For someone who has never done drugs, I feel I know far too much about them. But then the best defense is to educate yourself.
Thank you for your hugs Oxdrover. I’ve read parts of your story in your posts and my heart goes out to you too. I think the hardest part of all of this is looking at this person and seeing a human being, and because we are human; loving, compassionate, decent, genuine…we make this natural assumption that the person standing in front of us must also be human. How does one distinguish between those whose bodies are inhabited by the alien, the body snatcher, and whose bodies contain a human soul? Its a paradox I still haven’t mastered. For now I am shy of everyone until the hurt heals enough that I might be more detached in my discernment. In the meantime, I imagine that he is dead because that idea gives me closure, it shuts down the endless questions in my head, it closes any door that might lead backward, and its about the only thing that keeps me from looking over my shoulder every five seconds.
I cannot imagine the pain of one’s own child being such a person….how does one seperate from one’s own flesh and blood. Its seems inconceivable and the pain of it must be terrible. I am so sorry.
Dear Jennifer,
QUOTE: “How does one separate from one’s own flesh and blood?”
ANSWER: The same way you separate from the “love of your life” and “your soul mate” husband/wife/lover—it is painful, but I don’t think any more painful than any tremendous loss. It IS a tremendous loss that burns your soul, but also the loss of anyone you love to “the living dead” is a tremendous loss that burns your soul.
I read Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book “man’s Search for Meaning” about his take on pain and loss from his years in the Nazi concentration camps where he lost EVERYTHING but his life. After reading his book, I started to realize that pain is pain is pain. My pain is NO worse than yours, his pain is NO worse than mine, our pain is NO worse than anyone else’s and no one else’s pain is worse than ours, in ALL cases, as he said, it FILLS OUR ENTIRE BEING.
But we can STILL FIND MEANING in ourselves and meaning in the pain we have gone through….and I think one of the keys is to GO THROUGH it, not around, not under, not over, but THROUGH the fire of the pain, and emerge like the Phoenix bird, better than before, from THE ASHES OF OUR PAIN. ((hugs))) and prayers for everyone here at LF.
Dear all,
As I read more the pain seems to sear deeper still, I froze with fresh dread when I saw the link to opiate addiction and wham identification a complete sick recognition that his addiction to opiates,, his no.1 excuse, his alibi for the lies, betrayal, madness there it all is. I still am reeling trying so hard to absorb this latest piece in the insane jigsaw. I wanted to believe that drugs were the problem yet the inner voice always pleaded with me to look beyond and I would not listen.
He now parades as ‘clean’ has the system totally fooled and recently contact with my son has been suspended whilst his lies and destruction continue. The pain of now losing brief contact with my boy, the certain knowledge that he will stop at nothing to destroy me and I am labelled hostile neurotic and abusive. Yet the system allows a child to be parented by
an addict with bipolar diagnosis,his lengthy criminal record,
multiple relationships involving domestic violence.
I now have to prepare for a legal fight when I know the outcome will be in his favour.Family and friends and my counsellor advise me to walk away now before my health goes further downhill.How can I walk away when this evil man has my son.and yet my last contact with our son I felt that he was advising me to let go.- he also let me know that dad spoils him, dad is friendly with new neighbour a young single woman with children, he commented that I should enjoy what I can. My daughter interprets his comments in a negative way she and others believe that he is telling me this to hurt me that like his father he has no capacity to empathise, even that now christmas and his birthday gifts are given I am not required at present.
That is my torment that no matter how much love I gave them both I am now out of the picture and they thrive. I am so very tired. I am also so grateful that I have found my way to LF I will continue to learn and please God to heal I thank you all for your wisdom and humanity. Much love.