Marital History of Narcotics Addicts

Abstract

About twice as many as expected of the male subjects never married. The more striking fact about the marital histories, however, is that both men and women had multiple marriages much more often than the base Kentucky population. Marriages were likely to end in divorce or separation. Subjects had only about two-thirds the number of children that would have been expected.

Data were collected on four kinds of deviant behavior in the spouses of subjects—narcotics use, alcoholism, prison record, and mental illness. The total number of deviant spouses and the number of user spouses were so much beyond chance expectancy as to establish that some selective factors must have been operating. Five hypotheses were suggested to account for the frequency of narcotics use and other deviance in spouses. Some support was found for all, but in each case the pattern for female subjects was found to differ from that for the males.

In general, male subjects showed a slight tendency to select users or otherwise deviant women as wives but a moderately strong tendency to make their wives deviant, especially in the form of narcotics use, after marriage. Female subjects showed a marked tendency to select user or otherwise deviant men as husbands; the non-deviants they married became deviant fairly often, but not users.

Male subjects had as many as two deviant wives in very few cases, and multiple marriages increased the probability of having a deviant wife only in proportion to the number of marriages. But women with a deviant husband tended to have more than one, and the men they married were much more likely to be deviant if it was a third or later marriage than if it was a first or second marriage for the woman.

With reference to narcotics use in the spouse, those male subjects who had such a wife differed little from those with no user wife. What difference existed seems to have been somewhat greater involvement in a deviant subculture for those with user wives. The female subjects with user husbands, on the other hand, differed markedly from those with no such husband, and the difference is clearly associated with greater involvement in the drug and criminal subcultures. Men involved in a deviant subculture were somewhat more likely than others to choose a deviant woman as wife, but their choice was clearly not restricted to such women, and many married non-deviants. But women involved in the same subculture chose deviant men as husbands so consistently as to suggest that their choice was largely restricted to these men.

The data clearly and consistently indicate that the transmission of narcotics use in marriage was from husband to wife much more often than from wife to husband. There is also a suggestion, but no more, that when transmission was from wife to husband this represented a conscious act of making the man an addict, for utilitarian reasons—though in these cases the man was clearly deviant before his use of narcotics and the use was but a short step further along a familiar road. When transmission was from husband to wife, the drugs were said to be given for illness or pain, with no suggestion of intended benefit for the giver.

This difference, however, may establish little more than the readiness of informants to attribute any evil to women who were unmistakably labelled as deviants. Perhaps the more interesting finding is that in most cases where both husband and wife were users, all subjects and other informants insisted that they became users independently, or refrained from assigning the responsibility to one of them. Addicts, more ready than most people to admit to disapproved actions, rarely admit to making an addict of another person.