The latest report on drug abuse among middle-class youngsters, who are being targeted by heroin pushers, is certainly worrying. But it will hardly be news to most young people.

A few years ago I was talking to some parents who had not liked the idea of their daughter going to the suburban Bradford upper school allocated to her and had managed to secure a place for her at Ilkley Grammar, where she did well.

One day, when she was 16, she arranged a night out with friends in Bradford. Before she set off, her mother sat her down to have a serious talk about the drugs temptations she might encounter.

The daughter's impatient response? "Mother, if it was drugs I was after, I could get anything I wanted from the car park in the middle of Ilkley."

She knew what most other youngsters almost certainly knew: that the dealers had moved out of the back streets and inner-city areas and Council estates and were now seeking the rich pickings to be had from more upmarket suburbs and towns and villages.

It has taken less-streetwise adults a long time to catch up with the reality which has existed for some years. They have done so slowly and reluctantly as the evidence has grown - of neighbours' children undergoing desperate changes in personality and eventually being found to be hooked on heroin, perhaps then discovering the same devastating truth about their own children.

Now a Home Office report has put it on an official footing and predicted an "epidemic" of heroin use unless there is urgent action to prevent it. And former West Yorkshire chief constable Keith Hellawell, the Government's drugs supremo, has said that the first step is to recognise that there is a problem.

It might well be hard for some parents to accept that their child, with everything going for him or her, should be a likely victim of drug addiction. Isn't that something that happens to life's losers, the kids from grim backgrounds with no prospects and no hope? Don't they get involved with drugs to escape the desolation of their situation? Yes, maybe they do. But there are reasons why children with good prospects and plenty of hope try drugs too, not the least of which is the general dumbing-down of society.

A couple of generations ago, upward mobility was the general trend. People aspired to rise above humble beginnings, to be better-educated and more affluent than their parents. OK, so some of them became snobs. But at least they were striving to better themselves.

Then, about a generation ago, things started to go wrong. Youngsters from all backgrounds began to be dragged down by some of the people they mixed with. Instead of continuing the rising trend started by their parents, they began to sink. And the present generation is hastening that trend - with the very willing help of the drugs dealers who have worked ruthlessly to widen the market for the goods they peddle.

The result is a terrifying undermining of society as a generation faces having its motivation taken away. If the present trend continues, an increasing number of the people who could reasonably be expected to develop into the movers and shakers, the managers and decision-makers, the doctors, teachers, technicians and even law-enforcers of tomorrow, are going instead to become desperate heroin-users burgling their neighbours to buy the supplies they must have.

So what's to be done? First and obviously, every parent everywhere must face the possibility that their child could become a victim of drugs. However bright and positive they might be, they are under tremendous pressure both from their peers and from the pushers. Keith Hellawell is right to stress the need for education, and at an early age, to instil in youngsters an awareness of the evils they face and how temptation might present itself.

But that isn't enough. Either we then legalise the use of drugs and make them officially available, thereby taking away the profit incentive for the pushers to push and simultaneously pumping billions in treatment centres for addicts.

Or we take off the kid gloves and go into all-out war against this wicked trade: lifelong sentences in prisons with the toughest of regimes for anyone who deals in drugs, for whatever reason and in however small quantities.

The present well-meaning, under-funded, indecisive approach is getting us nowhere, except - as the Home Office report acknowledges - downhill fast.

Handy device that's a danger to me

It was encouraging to read that a businessman in the Midlands was fined £20 for eating a sandwich while he was driving his car. Maybe if the police have decided to clamp down on people who do distracting things while driving we might now see a few prosecutions for the use of mobile phones.

I say that with some feeling, having had to jump out of the way of a phone-using motorist only the other day. He came sweeping round a corner, phone in one hand and steering wheel in the other, to where I was crossing what a second earlier had been a clear road.

I threw myself back towards the pavement and he raced past me without giving me a glance. There was no way he could have stopped in time while keeping control of his car even if he had seen me - and I suspect that he hadn't, so engrossed was he in his conversation.

At the moment in-car phone use seems to be left to the common sense of individual motorists rather than the law. Trouble is, too many of them don't have enough.

Why honesty's the best policy for anyone in Clinton's position

There is growing speculation that when President Clinton makes his much-awaited TV-link appearance over his alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky, he might say something like this:

"Yup, I did it. But I told porkies about it because I wanted to protect my daughter Chelsea from the embarrassment and distress. Wouldn't any father?"

And his nation will forgive him and go back to enjoying the good life which has come their way during his presidency. A face-saving formula will have been reached. And perhaps a lesson will have been learned by other politicians everywhere. It's this: If you've done wrong in your personal life, own up and the chances are that you'll be forgiven as long as your professional life remains untainted by it.

If you tell fibs, for whatever reason, you'll only dig yourself into a hole. And when it comes to getting out of it, you might not be as lucky as Bill Clinton, who has the good fortune to be leading a gullible nation during a very affluent period when nobody wants anything to rock the boat.

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