Balding, Wrinkled, and Stoned

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But why did those baby boomers stay aboard the drug carousel when so many millions more climbed off? And what exactly have 40 years of experimental pharmacology done to them? It would not have been possible--much less ethical--to recruit subjects when the 1960s drug circus got started, send them off for four decades of substance abuse and bring them back for study. But now that the ad hoc longitudinal experiment those aging boomers have been conducting on themselves is reaching its endgame, addiction experts are pouncing on what the doctors and psychiatrists treating the abusers are learning. What they uncover may help not only the surviving victims of the early drug years but younger users as well.

Of all the drugs the boomers have used, perhaps the four most notorious have been marijuana, hallucinogens, cocaine and heroin. Researchers have devoted enormous effort to studying those drugs' long-term effects. The results have been decidedly mixed.

MARIJUANA The so-called demon weed turned out to be a lot less devilish than advertised. The popular image of the goofy, smoky slacker notwithstanding, a 2003 study in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society found that even among regular users, there is no proof that pot causes irreversible cognitive damage. Memory does get cloudy, and learning new information does get harder, but those effects fade if the user does kick the habit. The drug may also diminish libido and fertility. (So much for its promised free-love properties.) And as with any intoxicating chemical, pot use can become chronic and compulsive, crowding out room for much else. "If you came to our adolescent program and saw the 16-year-old kids whose lives have become unmanageable as a result of pot use, you'd understand it's addictive," says psychologist Peter Provet, president of Odyssey House. "But a lot of people who use pot don't become addicts."

Scientists haven't settled on whether repeated chestfuls of unfiltered marijuana smoke increase the risk of pulmonary disease and cancers of the mouth, throat and lungs. Although a recent study out of UCLA says no, practitioners in the field disagree. "There's certainly strong if not definitive evidence that long-term smokers take in a lot of particulates and carcinogens," says Dr. Robert Raicht, medical director of Odyssey House.

HALLUCINOGENS Things are trickier when it comes to LSD and its hallucinogenic kin, but reports suggest that most '60s trips ended relatively benignly. The most rigorous studies of hallucinogens have been conducted not on boomers, who used the drugs intermittently and furtively, but on Native American populations for whom consumption of the hallucinogen peyote is part of their cultural and religious fabric. In November researchers from the McLean psychiatric hospital outside Boston released a five-year study that found no cognitive or psychological problems among Native American regular users, some of whom even performed better on psychological tests than those with minimal substance use. It's certainly too much to say that every peyote user emerges undamaged by the drug, and the lead researcher on the study, Dr. John Halpern, takes care to stress that his findings apply only to the Native American groups he studied.

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