Cocaine and speedball users: differences in psychopathology

Affective distress and related symptoms associated with co-injected cocaine and opioid ("speedball") use are incompletely explored, and the extent to which they diverge from problems shown by cocaine abusers who do not prefer opioids is unknown. This investigation compared groups of speedball and non-speedball cocaine users on global measures of depression and anxiety and modal groupings of personality characteristics measured by the MMPI. Compared to men who use cocaine without opioids, compulsive speedball users evidenced significantly greater problems with depression, trait anxiety, and related symptomatology, and were more uniformly characterized by modal profiles reflecting severe psychopathology and maladjustment. These results agree with descriptions of severe pathology associated with speedball use.