The Life Course of Baby Boomers

Life course theory focuses attention on the impact of history, timing, and important transitions in life trajectories. In this chapter, the life course analysis of boomer drug users reveals that drug trajectories were not developmental. Instead, they were discontinuous, interrupted phases dependent on social context and situations that changed over time. The chapter provides a closer inspection of the turning points into and out of drug use phases to better understand the causes of problematic drug use and what resources are needed to control it. In contrast to law enforcement and treatment professionals, who view problematic drug use as a lack of self-control, research finds that informal social control mechanisms are more important for maintaining or regaining control over drug use. Life course theory predicts that missing critical transitions in life, such as graduating from high school, leads to fewer informal social controls. The stories in this chapter reveal the negative impact of juvenile incarceration, which did not help anyone become drug free, but instead plunged youths into a criminal culture and broke their social bonds to mainstream social networks and access to informal social control mechanisms.

The Culture of Control Expands

The primary agents of social control as the War on Drugs escalated were police, courts, jails, prisons, and drug treatment programs. This chapter discusses the social, historical, and economic forces behind the rise of the prison industrial complex and the recent pendulum swing from punishment to treatment, motived by the widespread acceptance of addiction as a disease and the unsustainable costs of mass incarceration. However, as treatment alternatives to jail became more popular, the criminal justice system incorporated treatment into its own administrative costs to maintain control. This led to the merging of the prison industrial complex with the treatment industrial complex—both with vested interest in perpetuating the War on Drugs. The analysis of treatment models suggests that while the social environment is recognized as an influential factor of problematic drug use, it is rarely addressed in treatment protocols, whose focus continues to be on changing the individual with little effort to change the structural barriers and situational context that led to problematic drug use and relapse.

Relationships

Relationships give meaning to life, but they also provide material and emotional support. The stories in this chapter reveal that drug users had few lasting relationships that provided meaning in their lives, and most were living in “relational poverty” at the time of the interview. Some recalled childhood trauma that still impacted them emotionally; others lost family members whom they loved, which pushed them into uncontrolled drug use and chaotic addiction, recovery, and relapse cycles. While drug use is known to impair relationships and destroy marriages, this was not always the case. While drug use led to the dissolution of marriage for some, for others, partner relationships provided strength navigating treatment programs and resisting intrusions from law enforcement. Many baby boomers started using drugs with friends and often relapsed with friends; however, some had friends who paid for treatment or provided employment or housing. When drug users are incarcerated, relationships suffer, and access to the resources needed for survival is limited when they are released. The findings in this chapter highlight the need for more social capital building by repairing relationships and linking people to new social networks through facilitating access to social roles in mainstream society.

The Historical and Social Context

Drug use and drug policy do not happen in a social vacuum. This chapter shows how the social and historical context shaped drug use patterns as a figurative war became literal one. Coming of age during the “peace and love” era of the 1960s, early baby boomers encountered an increasingly punitive drug policy as they aged in adulthood. Mass incarceration left many drug users with a criminal record and limited options for employment. The financial security needed for a stable family life became unattainable for many, and divorce rates increased, with no social safety net for single-parent homes. Working-class and middle-class jobs were replaced by low-paying service work. As fewer boomers could achieve the American Dream, the middle class was vanishing, and one drug epidemic was replaced by another in rapid succession. Law enforcement agencies were given more power over drug users, with minorities and the poor receiving the brunt of this aggressive infringement on their private lives.

Women Doing Drugs

Virtually all the women who used drugs into their adulthood had experienced rape, molestation, or abuse before they were adults. Ingrid was introduced to prostitution when she ran away from abusive foster parents. She never had a steady relationship, a conventional job, or a stable residence. The stories in this chapter illustrate the importance of social roles for women; yet, while social roles can be sources of strength, they can also be sources of stigma when women do not fulfill gendered roles to the standards of conventional society. Their multiple roles as mothers, partners, and friends were often in conflict, such as when partners were caught with drugs. Under threat of losing her children, Martha left her husband, a marijuana dealer, although he was a good husband and father, only to have her children taken away later due to her alcoholism, induced by loneliness. Women who had economic resources could afford the best treatment, but their road to recovery was through multiple relapses. Solutions that worked for the women included unconditional love, supportive housing, targeted treatment, and comprehensive social services. Mothers needed childcare services along with job training and employment. Aging women needed health care to address years of neglect.

Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to the narrative style used throughout the book with a glimpse of Ted, a baby boomer who used drugs and alcohol to address his pain. It also introduces the “maturing out” theory of drug use, which predicted that most people who used drugs would stop by age thirty-five. The generation born between 1945 and 1964, the baby boomers, did not follow previous patterns of maturing out of drugs. Instead, older adults who actively used illegal drugs increased in numbers and rates. Examining the historical and social context is critical for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of this phenomenon. Boeri uses engaging stories and thick descriptions to provide insight on socioeconomic influences that produced the War on Drugs and mass incarceration of drug users. This chapter includes Boeri’s standpoint position and a brief description of the methodology she used in her ethnographic study of older drug users, from which the stories in this book are drawn. It ends with a short description of the book’s organization and how the chapters are woven into a tapestry that depicts a suffering population in a devastated landscape.

Social Reconstruction and Social Recovery

This chapter discusses how political decisions made by baby boomers in powerful special interest groups destroyed the lives of those with less power. Guided by ignorance, fear, apathy, or a quest for power, baby boomers developed the systemic social structures of a drug war that left a bleak social landscape of desolate communities, broken families, and ruined lives. They transformed the American Dream into an American nightmare for many. They sucked the humanity out of medical, health, and social services that were created to relieve the suffering of vulnerable lives. The War on Drugs spread to become omnipresent in every facet of social life, corrupting the fabric of society and the social contract with authority. Not all baby boomers supported it, but their silence was interpreted as consent. This chapter argues that it is their war. It is their legacy. It is up to them to end the war and begin social reconstruction of a devastated society and social recovery for those who are hurting.

The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

The War on Drugs started when baby boomers entered young adulthood, and it escalated into the most intense and systemic punitive response to nonviolent criminals ever seen in modern history, fueling gang warfare and criminal activity. This decades-long drug war turned drug-experimenting adolescents and functional adult users into lifelong hard drug users and hardened criminals. It made an underclass of disenfranchised felons who could not vote and were often excluded from employment, housing, education, job training, or any possibility of supporting themselves legally for the rest of their lives. It intensified racial discrimination and devastated minority communities. Its mechanism was mass incarceration, a prison industrial complex funded by frightened taxpayers, but paradoxically increasing drug use and drug crime. It led to police corruption; unethical criminal justice practices, such as confidential informants and solitary confinement; and unjust laws, such as mandatory sentencing and “three strikes and you’re out.” The stories recounted in this chapter question the motivation behind the War on Drugs and stimulate reflection on how the lives of drug users might have been different if the money had been spent on mental health research instead of law enforcement or on social services instead of juvenile reformatories and jails.

Epilogue

The book ends with the climax of Harry’s story, written as a slice-of-life account in the first person—from a perspective only he can tell. Bringing readers to the present time, Boeri narrates a criminal investigation and a court case to illustrate in dramatic detail the continuing saga of the drug war, racial injustice, and mass incarceration.

Aging in Drug Use

Because of the War on Drugs, the number of prisoners age fifty-five and older more than doubled every ten years, making them the fastest growing age group of the prison population. Formerly incarcerated older adults who spent years subjected to poor living conditions in prison increase Medicaid and Medicare costs after they are released. Many of them were reaching the age of retirement, but most would receive a minimum Social Security payment due to years of unemployment, and few were eligible for Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Income. For those who lost family and friends over the years, through death, divorce, or rejection, their old age life was going to be hard. The accounts of aging drug users show that addiction was a debatable concept. Many believed that they had an addicted brain or that they had inherited addiction from their alcoholic parents. However, some baby boomer drug users learned to control their use through moderation or marijuana; others used methadone to help them control drug use legally as they aged.