The record, this time, is epidemiological. In his column for The Free Press, Arthur Brooks cites a 2024 analysis — built on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — that tracked disease and drug trends among older Americans between 2012 and 2022.
The numbers are specific. Among adults over 55, gonorrhea cases increased fivefold over that decade. Chlamydia tripled. Syphilis surged by a factor of seven. The analysis, produced by researchers at the University of Southern California using CDC figures, identifies baby boomers as the fastest-growing demographic group for these infections.
The pattern extends beyond sex. Boomers are also, per the data Brooks cites, the fastest-growing demographic of cannabis users in the country, with usage climbing 46 percent between 2021 and 2023. Both trends, Brooks writes, have continued since.
Context matters here, and Brooks supplies it. Boomers are catching up, not overtaking. Adults 18 to 25 are still more than three times as likely as boomers to have used marijuana in the past month. By Brooks's own analysis of CDC data, Gen Z reports chlamydia infections at a rate 58 times higher than boomers. The oldsters, in his words, are not more debauched than the youngsters — they are simply closing a gap that once looked unbridgeable.
Say it plainly: this is a generation, not a scandal. The boomers came of age promising a sexual revolution and, six decades later, appear to be finishing what they started, later in life than anyone expected and with consequences the CDC can now measure. What is true does not need an adjective, and the trend line speaks for itself without one.
The deeper story here is about incentives and institutions — in this case, the informal institution of a generational identity. Boomers built their self-image on liberation from the constraints their own parents observed. That identity, per this data, did not retire when they did. The habits that once read as youthful rebellion now show up in public-health statistics, because bodies age even when self-conceptions don't.
There is a trade-off in every era's permissiveness, and it tends to arrive on a delay. The Gen X and millennial reflex — mocking boomers for STD rates while ignoring that Gen Z's own numbers dwarf theirs — mistakes a generational lag for a generational virtue. Follow the incentive, not the punchline: a culture that treats personal restraint as an old-fashioned inconvenience will eventually produce these numbers in every cohort, just on a staggered schedule. The boomers got there first this time. They will not be the last.
