Healthy Aging: Body, Mind & Spirit

Are Baby Boomers the new addicts?

A rapidly-growing number of baby boomers and retirees are falling victim to America’s next great wave of addiction.

A report issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) warned that the aging of the baby-boom generation is leading to huge increases in levels of addiction among adults over 50—a fact that, SAMHSA says, will require double the availability of treatment services by 2020. And many of these people, having come of age in the drug-friendly culture of the 1960s and 1970s, have little hesitation about popping painkillers and other pills to deal with the physical and emotional stresses of aging.

“I call it ‘Pharmageddon,’” says Barbara Krantz, D.O., M.S., CEO and medical director of the Hanley Center, a nonprofit addiction treatment facility located in West Palm Beach, Fla. Hanley’s Center for Older Adult Recovery was the first treatment center to pioneer programs specifically designed to help elderly and baby boomer age adults recover from addiction. Their older-adult programs are always at full capacity, because so many older adults need treatment.

The prediction is that five million older adults will need treatment in 2020, twice the number requiring treatment in the year 2000.