Hard Drug Usage Doesn’t Always End in Youth: Some Dabble After 50

When you think of cocaine users, you probably don’t picture people in their 50s and 60s, married and retired with families. But according to a new study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, people who occasionally use drugs like cocaine, amphetamines and opiates over the course of their lives are more common than you might suspect.

Forget strung-out drug addicts; the most common drug pattern is illicit drug use at lower levels. Thats right, there are more “dabblers” than addicts, and age doesn’t stop them.

Dr Stefan Kertesz, lead author of the study, says they followed more than 4,300 people from four cities recruited between the ages of 18 to 30 in 1985, and tracked them and their drug use for almost 20 years. What they discovered didn’t come as a big surprise to Kertesz: that some middle-aged baby boomers don’t necessarily stop using drugs they did when they were young, still dabbling in everything from pot to cocaine.

“I wasn’t at all surprised that we had a lot of people who use hard drugs at a lower level,” he said. “The question we’re trying to answer is: What are the likely health outcomes for those people?”

Kertesz says he found that those who continued to use hard drugs in their 50s were five times for likely to die earlier than those didn’t, and not necessarily from drug overdoses, but from being “high-risk people”.

Cindy (last name withheld), a 60-year-old from Boston, says she and her husband still use cocaine every now and then, but insists she is not addicted to the drug. “I don’t have this addictive thing where I have to go out and get it,” she says. “I do it very sporadically. A gram of coke will last two months.”  She says she has tried pot in high school, but didn’t like it, and hasn’t tried amphetamines or other hard drugs.

“I’m a total scaredy-cat,” she says. “I would never do anything else. I guess I don’t consider coke a hard drug. I know there are people who do it and can’t stop but I believe they have an addictive personality. I don’t think I have an addictive personality. Although I do have a little shopping addiction. I love to shop.”

Her doctor informed her it was fine as long as she wasn’t doing it every weekend, but drug addiction specialists disagree. Just because you aren’t addicted, doesn’t mean there aren’t risks involved, like strokes, seizures or even death. The toxicity of the drug is still there, whether you’re constantly searching for your next fix or just dabbling in the risky behavior once a month.

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