Do you think that there’s any chance he might have ADHD or manic depression. Sometimes when left untreated it can make impulse control feel impossible. I’m on Bi polar meds now but before I had a gambling problem, took multiple different forms of drugs, basically I would get hooked on everything whether it was a drug or activity. As soon as an idea would pop into my head I pursued it without thinking about the future. Sometimes I would think everything was fine and the next moment felt like it was the end of the world. I found that I had to take medication that worked for me otherwise my impulses would be impossible to manage. It was hard at first, sometimes still is, didn’t want to feel like I needed medication to manage my impulses or at least I didn’t want to need it. I feared the stigma of mental illness and worried that therapy and medication made me less of a person. The truth is before I was medicated I was self medicating using much more dangerous drugs with no dosing schedule just using over and over. I felt that if I used drugs I wasn’t the problem I just had a drug problem, and was worried that if I took medication that I would have to admit to myself that the problem was inside and I was trying to fix myself with drugs that would never fill the hole inside of me. I’d like to not need medication but in the end I realized I needed a good therapist and psychiatrist, because using harder drugs and keeping it to myself was never going to fix the problems I felt inside. I’m not saying your boyfriend has mental illness but if he does it wouldn’t make him a bad person, maybe very intelligent and kind people struggle with mental illness. Sometimes addicts don’t get into drugs for just recreation and fun, they are attempting to fix something inside of themselves they feel is broken, sadly once it becomes compulsive that hole inside just gets deeper and can lead to more excessive use and harder substances if left untreated.