Californians age 40 and older are dying of drug overdoses at double the rate recorded in 1990, a little-noticed trend that upends the notion of hard-core drug use as primarily a young person's peril.
Indeed, overdoses among baby boomers are driving an overall increase in drug deaths so dramatic that soon they may surpass automobile accidents as the state's leading cause of nonnatural deaths.
In 2003, the latest year for which the state has figures, a record 3,691 drug users died, up 73% since 1990. The total surpassed deaths from firearms, homicides and AIDS.
Remarkably, the rate of deadly overdoses among younger users over that period has slightly declined, while the rate among those 40 and older has jumped from 8.6 to 17.3 per hundred thousand people.
The change has caught many prevention programs, which tend to be geared toward young people, off guard. Several drug abuse prevention officials and other experts said there was virtually no strategy in place to address the risk of overdose among older users.
"We have seen a massive, long-term trend toward more middle-age drug abuse that is leading to an unprecedented number of deaths," said Michael Males, a sociology researcher at UC Santa Cruz. But "no one is doing anything about it. It has gotten almost no attention at the state, federal or local level."
Because the problem has been recognized only recently, it is difficult to say what is behind the generational split.
Some experts suggest, however, that California is merely reflecting a national trend in which Americans increasingly are using illicit drugs long past the days of youthful resilience. According to the U.S. Substance and Mental Health Services Administration, more than a third of drug users today are older than 35, compared with 12% in 1979.
"Baby boomers are the first generation that is facing a drug and overdose epidemic in their middle age," said John Newmeyer, epidemiologist and drug researcher at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics in San Francisco. "They started using drugs recreationally or regularly over 20 years ago, and they aren't really slowing down."
To a degree, it seems overdoses are following the same generation through time. In California, the age at which someone was most likely to die from a drug overdose in 1970 was 22; by 1985, it was 32; and today it is 43, according to calculations by Males, based on state health data.
