His Highness's Highness
Prince Harry has used his share of illegal drugs
Recent revelations about Prince Harry’s drug use have caused a stir in the media. They came to light thanks to a new memoir by the royal outcast entitled Spare, which was just published yesterday.
Among the illegal drugs which the Duke of Sussex has admitted to using are:
• cannabis
• cocaine
• psilocybin mushrooms
• ayahuasca
He’s also imbibed quite a bit of liquor over the years.
The weed and the coke use started when Prince Harry was still a minor and a student at the ritzy Eton school. He sparked up as a teenager in the garden of Kensington Palace, the official home of the royal family.
Not long thereafter, during a visit to “someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend,” he recalled, the young prince—then 17—was “offered a line [of cocaine].” He took up the offer. The drug “didn’t make me particularly happy,” he recalled, “but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal.” Although he insists that his first line of blow didn’t get him high, he did admit that he’s “done a few more since.”
After his mother Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997, he turned to “drinking heavily” to cope with the pain of loss. Harry remained in mental turmoil for years as he tried to process his mother’s premature death. Eventually, he says, he was able to move on from the sorrow with some help from psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca.
In a recent TV interview with the Vanderbilt heir and former CIA intern Anderson Cooper, Cooper asked Prince Harry how the shrooms and ayahuasca impacted him. “They cleared [away] the misery of loss,” Harry replied. “These things have a way of working as a medicine,” he said. But he was careful to include a disclaimer, and told Cooper that “I would never recommend people to do this recreationally.”
And yet, it’s pretty clear that His Highness doesn’t take his own advice, because he has also used these substances for fun. For example, he recalled an occasion in which he got quite a giggle from a particularly strong mix of chocolate, psilocybin, and tequila.
Harry had been spending some time in California (where he now lives), and his friend Courtney Cox, the celebrity actress known for her role in Friends, offered to let him crash at her chic California home (a beachfront mansion in Malibu) while she traveled on business. When she returned, instead of kicking Harry out, they threw a big party.
It started with tequila (multiple rounds). When a drunken Harry saw actor Will Arnett—who he identified not by name but instead as the voice for Batman in The LEGO Movie—stroll past to the house fridge for a soda, he noticed that, along with soda, there was a large box of chocolates inside. But they were not ordinary chocolates. They’d been made with psilocybin mushrooms.
Harry “grabbed several, gobbled them, [and] washed them down with tequila,” in his own words. At one point in the ensuing trip, Harry made his way to a restroom where, he says, the trash can and shortly thereafter the toilet both grew monstrous faces. The toilet, he recalls, had a “gaping maw” and “piercing silver eyes” and “said, ‘Aaah.’”
Giggling on his way out of the bathroom, the inebriated royal decided to help himself to some more tequila and encouraged a buddy of his to check out the monsters in the bathroom.
Even in recent years, the prince has continued to smoke weed. Before he got kicked out of the royal family, he remembers evenings spent in Kensington Palace. “After dinner,” he says, “I’d smoke a joint, making sure that the smoke didn’t reach the garden of my neighbour, the Duke of Kent.”
Ok…who cares?
So some rich guy likes to party and has done ayahuasca—so what?
If that’s what you’re thinking right now, I don’t blame you. That’s definitely among the many thoughts that crossed my mind when I came across all of this. On one level, which drugs Prince Harry uses or how he feels when he takes them is really not relevant or worth dwelling upon.
But there are other ways to look at this, which are perhaps a bit less nihilistic. Many have framed Prince Harry’s drug use as an endorsement of the medical use of “psychedelics.” And that should be no surprise, given the enormous amount of money (and time, and emotions, and reputations) invested in the emerging legal market for these drugs.
But I see something else entirely in Harry’s admissions. The importance of his stories comes not from what they say about any particular substance, but from what they say about drug use in general.
And what is that?
Harry’s admissions of drug use have garnered such rabid attention because they reveal something that many of us have suspected all along: that even the most powerful among us like to get super f*cking high sometimes. If we can manage to step away from the various drugisms that are bound to spring from this, Harry’s actions are worth appreciating if only because they shed light on drug use among the elite.
This, in turn, is important because it is yet another point in the argument for an entirely new approach to drugs, socially and politically. Prince Harry is the epitome of privilege, and his enthusiasm for illegal substances reveals just how absurd the whole idea of drug prohibition is to start with.
Or, to put it another way, it reveals the true purpose of drug prohibition. Drug prohibition is not really about eradicating the use of dangerous drugs, despite its own insistence. The true purpose of drug prohibition—its realpolitik, if you will—is the management of the lower classes and those segments of society that pose a threat to the elite. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, multiple direct quotations from top government officials verify that this is the primary motive for drug prohibition. That someone like Prince Harry can smoke weed, snort coke, and trip out on shroom chocolates with absolutely zero consequences is simply further testament to the fact.
Harry said that his drug use is “important to acknowledge.” And I must say, I agree, even if I also think that his toilet trip report and the media’s treatment of it are all a bit corny.
