There's an old saying from my younger years: When the load gets tough, the tough get loaded.
Granted, even older retired folks have pressures in daily life to deal with, even the kind of pressure that may cause one to seek a mildly altered state of mind. It seems a lot of my fellow Boomers are once more taking that to heart; marijuana use is apparently spiking in this first post-World War II generation.
Senior citizens are at a record high for getting high. For Fiorella Terenzi, it’s been…not cool, man.
The 64-year-old astrophysicist started to notice wafts of marijuana coming into her home from a nearby unit in her Miami-area high rise. Her neighbors, a married couple in their 70s, told her it was medical marijuana used in small amounts.
Terenzi wasn’t buying it. She set out to stop the fumes.
To argue her case, she held a piece of toilet paper by the crack in their front door to test the skunky draft and found it strong enough to make the tissue “wave like a flag.” She placed multiple calls to police but said officers were reluctant to knock on the couple’s door late at night. She had intense conversations with the neighbors that felt straight out of high school.
“It was actually always that kind of smirk,” Terenzi said. “Like, ‘Oh, come on. If you’re stoned, it’s cool.’”
Well, as a Boomer myself, who lived through what we might call the Cheech & Chong years, that smirk was always a thing, sure as one can say, "Mellow out, man." But whatever the reason, pot use among Boomers is increasing. The most recent solid numbers seem to be from 2022:
Baby Boomers’ use and misuse of some substances may surprise you.
- Marijuana Use—Past-year marijuana use increased significantly between 2021 and 2022 among most age groups, including some Baby Boomers, jumping from 2.8 million to 4 million among people aged 60 to 64 and from 3.8 million to 4.7 million in the 65 and older age group.
Now, there are a couple of reasons why this may be happening.
First, pot is legal in a lot of places where it wasn't back in the Boomers' heyday. 24 states have legalized recreational marijuana, although it's still prohibited at the federal level. This eliminates much of the legal risk factor; an aging Boomer no longer has to fear going to jail if caught with what we used to call a "dime bag."
Second, marijuana does have some analgesic effect, and let me tell you, with age often comes things like lower back pain. Still, aspirin would seem to be the preferable solution here.
Reasons notwithstanding, it seems some Boomers are downright rebellious about the whole thing.
Many senior pot smokers are loud and proud. San Antonio grandmother Sandra Bomar, 63, who goes by “Stoner Granny” online, posts pot memes on Facebook to her like-minded community. One recent item features a doctor in a white coat and the line, “In my professional opinion, you should smoke a fatty.”
The cannabis industry is seizing on the shift with targeted brands such as “Senior Moments.” A Cannabis Media Council campaign shows an elderly couple in slinky sleepwear, grinning next to the words: “Can cannabis help a senior in the sack? Good news, Tiger!”
It's not just Boomers partaking in the Electric Lettuce, either; use is growing in other demographics, as my friend and colleague Becky Noble recently informed us.
As always, though, any personal right to swing one's fist ends at someone else's nose. (No, I'm not implying there is any right to smoke weed.) If you live in a Manhattan high rise, or in any other multi-family housing unit, there's always the chance to annoy a neighbor. But that seems the smaller part of the issue. While it's not clear that marijuana is more dangerous to one's health than alcohol, and believe me, I've seen the ravages that alcoholism can wreak, that's not necessarily a reason to suddenly rely on any kind of drug like this to get one through the day. That's the real concern here; are these Boomers, or anyone else for that matter, becoming too reliant?
With the increasing availability of legal weed, this is something we may well see more of. So, if you see an aging Boomer in a convenience store late at night, buying up all the Twinkies and potato chips in the place, now you know why. Personally, I'll stick with whiskey.
This seems appropriate.
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