As of 1995, 45% of all American females, ages 15-24, were using some form of contraception. The contraceptive of choice for this age group was "the Pill", at 23.1%, with condom usage following at 13.9%.

(Source: U. S. National Center for Health Statistics, special tabulations from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition] Washington, DC, 1999, p. 80.)

"Not only has birth control torn apart traditional notions of family life, but it has taken a personal toll on young women..., who learn the hard way that when sex is readily available, people have a hard time making romantic commitments. The philosopher Allan Bloom noted this phenomenon more than a decade ago in his book Love and Friendship. 'There is an appalling matter-of-factness in public speech about sex today,' he wrote. 'On television schoolchildren tell us about how they will now use condoms in their contacts-I was about to say adventures, but that would be overstating their significance.'"

(Source: Kathryn Jean Lopez, "How Birth Control Changed America-For the Worse," Crisis, vol. 19, no. 3 [March 2001] p. 14-15.)

In the decades since the American cultural catastrophe we call the Sixties, public officials and educators have recovered sufficient sanity to take a reasonably firm use against experimentation with drugs. Unfortunately, the lunacy of the Sixties lingers in public policies and educational curricula which implicitly signal to young people that premarital experimentation with sex is quite acceptable-so long as they have been properly catechized in the use of contraceptives. The schizophrenia in such public policies stands exposed in a new study recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health by researchers at the University of California and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For, in this study of substance use and of "sexual risk-taking," the evidence clearly indicates a linkage between teens' propensity to use illegal drugs and their willingness to fornicate.

In parsing data collected from clinical and community samples of adolescents, the California and Nebraska scholars found that "youth identified with substance problems are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors during adolescence and to continue risky sexual behavior to the extent that substance problems persist." The phase "risky sexual behavior," it should be acknowledged, is contaminated with the contraceptives-make-everything-all-right fallacy. The data are clear enough, however: regardless of whether or not they use contraceptives, the kids playing around with sex are the ones most likely to be playing around with drugs. The same wild impulses are at work in both cases. "Adolescents treated for substance problems," acknowledge the researchers, "evidenced an early onset of sexual activity [and] more sexual partners." Further, "concurrent alcohol and drug use as well as dependence symptoms each independently predicted both the number of sexual partners and the frequency of sex with casual acquaintances at the 6-year follow-up." Not surprisingly, among teens abusing drugs, the researchers found a "greater prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)" than among peers not involved with drugs.

Helping teens avoid self-destructive behaviors may require something more consistent than warning them against the evils of drugs while passing out the contraceptives.

(Source: Susan F. Tapert et al., "Adolescent Substance Use and Sexual Risk-Taking Behavior," Journal of Adolescent Health 28[2001]: 181-189.)