Sometimes, Love Is No Match for Addiction

The recent suicide of Hugh O’Connor, only child of the actor Carroll O’Connor, is yet another reminder that a family’s best intentions are a poor match for the bullying grip of drug addiction on a soul bent on destroying itself.

Rare, I’d wager, is the American family that has escaped the scourge of drugs. My clan is certainly on the list of those whose lives have been scarred by addiction. Over the painful and frightening and anguished years, we have tried interventions and advice and loans and love. And about the only thing we can say with a great deal of certainty--and sadness--is that the person who symbolically self-immolates does more than go up in smoke. Along the way, he or she singes anyone who has ever loved or cared or tried to help.

Sometimes, families have been burned so often they learn ways to wall themselves off from further pain. They withdraw, they stop trying to repair the rifts, they go on with their lives and let the addict go it alone. Other times, as seems to be the case with O’Connor, families inject themselves into the destruction derbies taking place in the heads of the drug addicts they love. Often, as in this tragic case, they do so in vain.

On March 28, after 16 years of drug addiction, 32-year-old Hugh O’Connor killed himself in his Pacific Palisades home.

Later, his 71-year-old father publicly pinned blame for the suicide on Harry Thomas Perzigian, the man O’Connor claims sold drugs to his son. (Perzigian, 39, has been charged with possession of cocaine for sale and is expected to be arraigned today in West Los Angeles. O’Connor’s press agent says the actor plans to attend the hearing.)

“These dealers,” O’Connor said the day his son died, “they kill people. They make a living giving people the means to kill themselves. He has been as responsible for Hugh’s death as anyone on Earth.”

What parent wouldn’t want to lash out that way? There’s got to be a reason a cherished child--a father and husband himself--would put a bullet in his head.

And yet in our hearts, can we really believe a dealer was responsible for the suicide of Hugh O’Connor?

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Many of us who have had loved ones wrecked by drugs can name the people we’d like to see charged as accomplices in the devastation of our families.

It’s a pointless exercise.

So is the self-torture that goes with wondering what you could or should have done.

I remember a desperate time, reaching out for help and ending up at a 12-step meeting for families of addicts. We sat there, four of us, listening to the tragically comic stories about how people finally came to understand that their intimates were addicts.

One man spoke of his lover--with the secret cocaine habit--who complained all the time about the bugs in their bed and the bites on his skin.

“He spent all day scratching, and I spent all day washing all the linen and scrubbing down the walls,” he told us. “Then it finally dawned on me after a few weeks. If we had such a bug infestation, how come he was the only one getting bitten?”

Finally, in frustration, we piped up: “We’re here to figure out how to get the person we love off drugs.”

They looked at us with a combination of pity and understanding.

“Can’t help you with that one,” they said.

How right they were.

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Experts say drug addicts are at much higher risk for suicide than others. Still, says Dr. Manijeh Nikakhtar, a psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at UCLA who runs an outpatient program in Beverly Hills for suicidal patients, most people who are suicidal are only reluctantly so. They simply see no other way to end the pain.

Nikakhtar says most drug addicts are self-medicators--that is, they turn to drugs to relieve problems like depression or anxiety. The drugs end up exacerbating the underlying troubles, and what may have started as an easily treatable emotional disorder balloons into a unconquerable depression. That’s when suicide becomes the only apparent out.

Indeed, O’Connor told reporters that what pushed his son over the edge was that he could not bear the prospect of another trip to drug rehabilitation.

“My son Hugh, a beautiful boy and a good actor . . . has been an addict to various drugs and substances for about 16 years,” O’Connor said in his grief. “On and off he has fought it very gamely, very courageously. He went to three different drug rehabilitation places and could not face going into another one for perhaps six months or a year.”

That is the pity.

It is a measure of the lies drugs tell that a young man with a wife, a child--and a father willing to take heroic measures to save his beautiful boy--would trade mere months of treatment for an eternity of nothing at all.