Comments: I remember the “Greatest Generation” drank, constantly. They also chain smoked.
The generation after them I think is called “The Quiet Generation” — they seemed more abstemious.
My fellow Boomers, many of them picked up the drug habit and never stopped. But the drug habit isn’t just any particular drug, it’s the idea that you have to self-medicate constantly. And many do. I can think of at least a couple cases where peers just dropped dead in their ’50′s from excessive “self medication.” I don’t believe that heroin was the cause (but I know some of those, too.) But it may well have been decades of alcohol, MJ, pain pills, meth, and cocaine abuse.
I am going to guess that many of these deaths involve people either in young or later middle age who really don’t have anything to do in their lives. That’s the sad truth for a lot of people, even if they have kids, once the kids grow up and leave. However, you might be right that many of these people have a nearer connection to obtaining various types of drugs that keeps the Quiet Ones alive.
* I was watching a documentary recently about the death of the actor Heath Ledger. The main drugs found in his system were anti-anxiety drugs and painkillers. Doctors these days don’t like to give out drugs like Valium because they have the potential for addiction. However, a medical expert on the documentary pointed out that it was very unlikely someone could actually die from overdosing on doctor-perscribed sedatives like Valium. What killed Ledger was probably an overdose of high power pain killers (of a type usually only given to cancer patients) which he somehow acquired illegally. Interestingly pain killers not only help to dull physical pain, but they can also help to dull psychological pain, since the two types of pain are closely connected from a neurological perspective.
* The deep trough in the early ’70s is interesting. I was born in ’76. That was the era where drugs weren’t quite so cool (perhaps “Just Say No” was more effective than lefties give Nancy credit for) and when sex was honest to God deadly, with AIDS deaths peaking ca. 1987-1993. I pretty much assume that every other male celebrity who died during that time frame died from AIDS. AIDs definitely contributed at least a little to the spike in the ’50s.
People born in the early to mid-70s were flooded with propaganda discouraging us from drugs and unsafe sex, as well as the fitness boom. We had seat belts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, and never had to go to war.
Social media seems to be weakening the effect of old school anti-drug propaganda, though. People seem to take a rather casual attitude towards drug and alcohol abuse these days, and are quite happy to brag about it on Facebook and elsewhere. The legalization of pot in several states is one consequence of that.
