The Guardian

Don’t blame an increase in drug scares among older people on the 1960s | Tom Chivers

More over-45s are arriving at hospital with drug-related mental health issues, but there’s a myriad of reasons why
‘As cuts to mental health services bite, it could be that people find it harder to access secondary and tertiary care, which might help them before they reached crisis point, and so end up in A&E when they have nowhere else to go.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there, and all that. The baby boomer generation – that of Woodstock and the Isle of Wight festival and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the generation inspired by On The Road and Naked Lunch – was always famous for its liberal attitude to drug-taking, among many other things.

Now, it seems, that lifestyle may have caught up with them. According to, there has been an 85% increase in hospital admissions for “drug-related mental and behavioural disorders” among the over-45s in the last 10 years.

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