The lessons learned are confusing ones; girls feel they have the right to get drunk and sleep around, but certain attitudes never change.

According to a sample group of 17-year-olds I spoke to, there is an enormous double standard between the sexes. Boys treat sex as being a sign of ‘laddishness’ and masculinity, they say; promiscuous behaviour on their part is an achievement.

Girls, on the other hand, are caught between a rock and a hard place.

‘Boys demand that they go further before they are ready; if they do, they’ll quickly be labelled as sluts, and gain a reputation as an easy target, so that drunk boys will seek them expecting that they’ll be easy to get off with,’ says one.

‘If they don’t, they’ll be labelled as frigid and become instantaneously unattractive; most boys won’t bother investing time and energy flirting with a girl if they think there is little prospect of pulling.’

‘Girls I know often get drunk and allow themselves to be touched up at bus stops or up against walls,’ says my daughter, Francesca.

Many of her classmates, she says, have been sleeping with their boyfriends since the age of 14 or 15.

Peer pressure has always been a persistent factor of teenage life. The stakes are higher now and teenagers, not surprisingly, have become even more competitive and paranoid. They may often find themselves in situations they are not equipped to deal with.

The internet personae that children create turn them into avatars - an online persona - in their own lives and diminish their empathy for each other. It becomes hard to tell what is real and what isn’t.

Notice anything? There is a very good chance that finding your thirteen year old daughter performing oral sex on a boy while he takes video with his cell phone will in some way involve alcohol and under-aged drinking. In fact most adolescent depredations involve liquid courage to one degree or another.

I'm not sure why narcotics and government restrictions are still an issue. We know four things with complete certainty--indiscriminate and uncontrolled use of narcotics creates enormous social problems, supply is the major factor in producing a "gin craze" or "crack epidemic", prohibition isn't good policy and finally, supply restriction by means of taxes, licensing and regulation does in fact work to mitigate the worst effects.

I think the argument is more fundamental than whether we should lower the drinking age, or have any drinking age at all (if you're old enough to drink at eighteen, why not sixteen? Why not fourteen? Why not twelve?).

Back in the twentieth century, libertarianism seemed so much more reasonable than it does not, probably because societal interference in the liberties of individuals was so much more pervasive, but as those restrictions were progressively removed, libertarianism seems to have gotten far more extreme. It certainly left me behind at some point.

I'm what I'll call an equilibriumist. I think don't think good policy seeks absolutism--total victory. Rather, good policy seeks simply to mitigate the worse effects of our individual choices, and maximize the best effects--a kind of social ecology.

The real problem with the extreme left or extreme right is how they screw up good policy.