Bottles of alcohol in a state liquor store in Salt Lake City. (AP)

Experts on alcohol abuse have found one demographic group that’s drinking at an alarming rate. Not teenagers. Not college-age people. It’s baby boomers.




She also suggested young people raised in relatively affluent times are more likely to adopt a “slow life strategy” in which they postpone many of the activities that a previous generation would have adopted at an early age. “You’re sort of cocooned where you don’t have to make that transition to adulthood so quickly,” she said.

Nationally, alcohol consumption presents a complicated picture. Overall, drinking is relatively flat, according to Aaron White, senior scientific adviser at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). But if young people aren’t drinking as much as they used to, that means some other cohort is drinking more heavily.

That’s where the boomers make their (tipsy?) entrance.

There are generational trends in alcohol consumption, and one that’s been known for half a century is that baby boomers tend to like alcohol more than the “silent generation” that preceded them. As the silents move on to their reward, and as the boomers (the cohort of people born between 1946 and 1964) age, the boomers make up a greater portion of the 65-plus age bracket tracked by researchers who study alcohol consumption.

Researchers see a steady rise in alcohol use and binge drinking — as well as what’s known as Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), an umbrella term for mild, moderate and severe abuse of alcohol —  in the 65-plus demographic. Between 2005 and 2014, the percentage of older Americans who reported engaging in past-month binge drinking (defined as women consuming four or more drinks in about two hours, and men consuming five or more) increased from 12.5 percent to 14.9 percent, according to the NIAAA. The increase in drinking among older Americans is most pronounced among people with greater levels of education and income, and among women.


“We know that if you drink the same amount of alcohol as you get older you're going to have increasing problems with side effects from that alcohol,” Blazer said. “The baby boomers are carrying a heavier load of alcohol use than the people who are currently in the Silent Generation.”


“Compliance with the current Dietary Guidelines is relatively poor,” Brewer said.


All of this would seem ripe for a public health campaign focused on informing the public about the risks of excessive drinking. But Blazer said alcohol so far has been “given a pass,” compared with tobacco and other drugs.



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