Not surprisingly, boomers aged 50 to 64 have lower rates of drug use overall than their younger contemporaries; they also use less of each individual drug. Alcohol and marijuana were the most commonly used drugs among all age groups (alcohol use was so high among boomers, 67 percent, that it dwarfed the differences among other drugs, and we opted to remove it from the chart above). For baby boomers, the next in line was prescription pain relievers, with 2.52 percent saying they’d used one for non-prescription purposes at least once in the previous year. Still, a smaller percentage of boomers used pain relievers than any other group over the age of 13.2 Respondents aged 50 to 64 also reported much lower use of hallucinogens, tranquilizers and stimulants (like amphetamines or Ritalin) than younger respondents.

So the use of some drugs may be less common among boomers than other age groups, but it’s still surprisingly frequent for users in the 50 and over crowd. Boomers who’d used cocaine reported using it on twice as many days in the previous year as 35- to 49-year-olds (36 days versus 15) and more than quadruple the number of days as any other age group. The median pot-smoking boomer got high 52 days in a year, more often than 35- to 49-year-olds (48 days) but less often than 30- to 34-year-olds (72 days).3 For all age groups over 21, including the boomers, the reported median use among drinkers was the same: 52 days. (It’s hard not to notice the potential reporting errors here; do people default to saying they drink alcohol about once a week? Are boomers more comfortable reporting their drug use than younger respondents?)