What killed boomers in '60s kills them now

An analysis by Scripps Howard News Service of death records for more than 304,000 boomers who died in 2003 shows the legacies of early and lingering drug use, a tendency toward depression at all stages of life and a stubborn determination not to "act their age."

All of those problems contribute to more deaths from drugs, suicides and accidents than seen in previous aging generations.

Most of the nearly 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 are still alive and will be for many years. By one Census Bureau projection, in 2050 as many as 780,000 members of the generation that said "never trust anyone over 30" will be at least 100 years old.

Nobody beats the Reaper

But no one, not even members of a generation with a lifelong bent for defying convention, can beat death. Boomers are now dying at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day. The Census Bureau estimates that nearly 21 million will die in the next 25 years.

In the mid-1990s, with the first boomer occupying the White House, the chronic diseases of aging — cancer, heart disease and the new scourge of human immunodeficiency virus — edged out violent death as leading contributors to the demise of boomers as the first wave reached their 40s. Yet the Scripps analysis found that some causes of death once thought to be restricted to the young persist among boomers into a more advanced age.

Scripps used a database of death-certificate records maintained by the National Center of Health Statistics to analyze the causes and nature of death for boomers who died in 2003, the most recent year for which complete records were available. The causes of death for earlier and later generations were also studied.

The analysis found that 24 percent of the boomers who died in 2003 did not die of natural causes, and more than one in 10 died from accidents.

"The boomers are carrying forward into old age some risky behaviors that they've been living with and dying from since they were young adults," said Dr. Dan Blazer, a Duke University professor of psychiatry and behavioral science specializing in geriatrics.

"It's a bit of a myth that boomers have all figured out how to live a quality and great life. Many of them have problems that earlier generations just didn't bring to old age."

Boomer men accounted for two-thirds of the accidental deaths, 64 percent of drug-related deaths and three-quarters of suicides among their generation.

According to the Scripps study, boomers accounted for about half of all people nationwide who died of drug-related causes in 2003. That is far out of proportion to their 26 percent of the population. Of the 28,758 drug deaths that year, 13,901 were boomers. Those numbers do not include impaired driving or other accidental causes indirectly related to drug use.

The study found that, by far, most of those dying are white men in their mid- to late 40s. Nearly 70 percent suffered accidental overdoses. California, where 10 percent of all boomers live, accounted for 15 percent of the drug deaths, followed by Florida and Texas.

Dr. Bruce Henricks, Mutual of Omaha insurance company medical director, said the fact that boomers account for one out of every two drug fatalities — and that such a dramatic rate has until now gone largely unnoticed — provides even more evidence that the problem of substance abuse by aging Americans is occurring largely under the nation's radar screen.

Because drug-related deaths often are underreported, Henricks said the true number could be larger. One certainty, he and other researchers say, is that the boomer drug toll will continue to climb.

According to studies, 1.7 million Americans older than 50 were addicted to drugs in 1999. By 2020, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates, that number will soar to 4.4 million.

The suicide problem

The 11,667 boomer deaths classified as suicides in 2003 represented more than a third of the national total, and experts in the field note that the suicide rates have been above the national average at all stages of life since boomers were in their teens.

Although the focus has been on youth suicides, "from a public health perspective, suicide is a greater problem for older Americans, who have consistently higher rates, and aging baby boomers could double those late-life rates in the next 25 years," said Jerry Reed, executive director of the Suicide Prevention Action Network, a Washington advocacy group.

Blazer, of Duke, said many boomers have risk factors that typically make people more likely to attempt suicide.

"Since adolescence, they've been drinking and using more drugs than previous generations. They're less likely to have strong religious beliefs, more isolated, twice the divorce rate of the generation before them, and still facing money and work issues they thought would be behind them in their 60s. This is not going to be an easy period for boomers as they age."

local angle

In Arizona, 385 baby boomers died from drugs in 2003; 293 committed suicide, 191 died from alcohol and 882 were killed in accidents.

Only 10 states have more baby boomers who died of these causes.