Prince Harry’s a stoner. Or at least he once was.
The Duke of Sussex tells all in his new book Spare and in revealing interviews conducted by 60 Minutes and ITV.
Harry, whose father is now King Charles, admits to using marijuana, cocaine and magic mushrooms during his wild teenaged years.
He began smoking pot and drinking at 16 in and around Kensington Palace in London and his family’s Highgrove country estate in western England four years after his mother Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
As his father feared, Harry was taking other drugs as well.
While Harry writes that coke “wasn’t very fun, and it didn’t make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective, to feel, to be different,” mushrooms opened new doors of perception for him:
“We spotted a huge box of black diamond mushroom chocolates. Someone behind me said they were for everybody. Help yourself, boys. My mate and I grabbed several, gobbled them and washed them down with tequila.
“Beside the toilet was a round silver bin, the kind with a foot pedal to open the lid. I stared at the bin. It stared back. Then it became… a head. I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth. A huge open grin. Now the loo became a head too. The bowl was its gaping maw, the hinges of the seat were its piercing silver eyes. It said, ‘Aaah.'”
By this point, he’d earned the nickname “Hash Harry” among his stoner friends.
According to News of the World in 2002, “Harry experimented with marijuana over a two-month period at Highgrove, in a rundown shed at a nearby pub and at private parties held by friends… Charles was alerted to his son’s behavior by a Highgrove member of staff. He confronted the young prince and took him to a drug rehabilitation center in south London, where he spent a day talking with addicts.”
Harry was 17 when he visited the Phoenix House facility in London.
Sunday People described how it went:
“Prince Harry broke down in tears when he was sent to a rehab clinic by his father after smoking cannabis. The carefree prince was stunned when an aide of Charles introduced him to trembling junkies whose lives had been wrecked after starting with just one ‘harmless’ marijuana cigarette. The shocked youngster wept at one point as clinic patients described how they had gone down the slippery slope from a sneaky drag on a joint – just like Harry was doing with his chums – to horrendous heroin addiction.”
Still, Harry insisted “that the drug was harmless and his friends smoked it with no ill-effects.”
In the ITV interview with Tom Bradby, Harry said it’s “important to acknowledge” his drug-taking, which later included ayahuasca.
About psychedelics, the Prince told Cooper: “I would never recommend people to do this recreationally, but doing it with the right people – if you’re suffering from loss, grief or trauma – then these things have a way of working as a medicine. For me, they cleared the windshield – the misery of loss. They cleared away the idea I had in my head that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her when in fact all she wanted was for me to be happy.”
Following the crash that took his mother’s life, Harry “resorted to drinking heavily to numb the feeling,” he explained. “And I would, you know, resort to drugs as well.”
It’s unclear whether Harry and Meghan, who now live in California, currently consume cannabis or any other plant medicines. (Full Story)