Getting higher: drug use among the middle-aged

"Soaring numbers of over-40s are taking heroin, using cannabis and binge drinking"

Daily Mail, 27 February 2014

A lot of people probably won't need statistics to tell them that young people tend to take illegal drugs more than older people.

About one in six 16-24 year-olds admit to having taken illegal drugs in the last year. Beyond the age of 35, between 2% and 6% admit to doing so.

The Mail highlighted this week however that a growing number people over 40 are joining the club. The evidence suggests this is right.

But the growth the Mail chose to visualise wasn't the rise in over-40s taking illicit drugs, but the rise in over-40s in drug treatment in England.

The figures in the graph are just numbers of people, but even as a proportion there's been a rise. The proportion of over-40s in drug treatment has gone up from 0.13% to 0.24%.

Even so, this doesn't necessarily show that a growing number of over-40s are taking illicit drugs, and the treatment figures themselves include a small number of people in treatment for prescription drugs and people who don't misuse. Differing numbers of people in treatment could be explained by a range of factors, such as greater awareness of the services that are there, or differences in how the services are targeted.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales can show this, albeit imperfectly. It's a survey which asks people whether they've taken illicit drugs in the last year. It can be difficult to draw truthful responses about illegal activity, so people complete this part of the survey in private.

There's evidence from this that illicit drug use is indeed rising among middle-aged people, although more slowly. In 2005, 3% of 45-54 year-olds and 1.5% of 55-59 year-olds admitted to using illegal drugs in the previous year. By 2012, those rose to 3.5% and 2% respectively.

If we were to imagine all drug users as a group, 7% of all illicit drug users over aged 45-59 in 2005. By 2012, 13% of all drug users fell into this age group.

But this misses out a group that the drug treatment figures include: people aged 60 and over. The Crime Survey doesn't have a measure for these people, but we'd still expect there to be some use among this age group.

A recent study, published in the Age and Ageing journal, tries to account for this, at least in part. It found that since 1993, the use of some illicit drugs (specifically cannabis, amphetamine, cocaine and LSD) has "increased rapidly in mid- and late-life".

The numbers are still small: for cannabis (the most commonly-used illegal drug) about 0.4% of people aged 65 years and over admitted to using it in the previous year.

Even this study admits there's a lot we still don't know about how much illegal drugs are used by the older generation.