No family in the land is safe from the Drugs menace. Even Prince Charles now has his worries about his sons, given that the young man said to be one of Prince William's role models, Tom Parker Bowles, is alleged to be a dabbler in cocaine.

Prince Charles has every reason to be anxious. Many people become users because they mix with those who are already involved with drugs.

Tom Parker Bowles is said to have admitted using an illegal substance. He might now steer clear of drugs for the rest of his life. But then again, he might not.

He belongs to a trendy world in which, we have been told this week, cocaine is widely available and frequently snorted at parties.

This is not the world of council flats in tower blocks, where deprivation and hopelessness tend to be blamed for the alienation which leads so many people to turn to drugs.

These are posh people with lots of cash and all the prospects in the world. We can only assume that they use their drugs to fuel their fast-lane lifestyle and relieve the boredom of lives which are essentially as empty as those of the council-estate kids who block out their misery with heroin.

The malaise is spread throughout society. So many members of the young generation, at every social level, seem to be on the run from reality. It affects those who have nothing, those who have everything (at least in material terms), and those who seem initially to be set on an orthodox path in life with a good career ahead of them.

Anita Gair fell into that last catagory. At 17 she was studying animal care and was described by college staff as a "conscientious and caring student". Then on a night out at a club she took an Ecstasy pill - just one, and believed to be her first. Now she's dead, and her distraught parents are left wondering where on earth they went wrong.

There's every likelihood that the answer to that is that they didn't go wrong at all. Like so many other parents, they lost their daughter to the reckless madness that is sweeping through her generation. Some lose their children because they die, others because they withdraw from them into the world of drugs, or steal from them and abuse them so abominably that they are finally left with no choice but to reject them.

What's the answer? I don't know. I doubt if Prince Charles is any the wiser. Mr and Mrs Gair will be trying to make some sort of sense of it for the sake of their sanity as they nurse their broken hearts, and failing. And I'd be willing to wager a few bob that even Britain's official "Drugs Czar" Keith Hellawell, although he might have plenty of well-informed theories, doesn't have the answer to it either.

Pour more millions into the burgeoning detox and rehabilitation sector, which gobbles up cash from Council social services at the rate of £500 or more a week for every user who is sent to a residential centre in the hope that this will be the time they'll finally stay clean? Introduce draconian prison sentences for all drugs dealers, even if the reason they are dealing is because they too have an addiction that needs to be fed?

Maybe. But at the end of the day the evil world of drugs needs to be defeated by the young people themselves. Somehow they have to be helped to find hope and purpose so that a life dominated by illegal substances which will enslave their minds, ruin their bodies and put them at serious risk of an early death is an option they find easy to reject.

The nightmare is that they might already be too far gone on their way down the helter-skelter, dragging us all towards chaos behind them.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.