He admits taking cocaine ‘a few times’ from the age of 17
IN the book, the Duke of Sussex admits that he took cocaine as a teenager and blames it on an adolescent rebellion.
He claimed that he was offered the Class A drug during a hunting weekend when he was 17, and on a few other occasions.
Harry also recounted smoking cannabis at Eton, and said he had continued to smoke the drug at Nottingham Cottage, the home he moved into with wife Meghan in the grounds of Kensington Palace.
And he described hallucinating after taking magic mushrooms in California. In the memoir Spare, Harry admitted he had lied about his cocaine use when confronted about it at the time of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.
He said he was ushered into a small office and asked bluntly if he had taken the drug.
The unnamed member of the Royal Household said a journalist had claimed to have a photograph of the young prince taking cocaine.
Harry denied the claim immediately, and told the official to deny it to the journalist.
But in his memoir, he admitted that he had been taking cocaine at that time.
He said the experience was not ‘fun’, and had not affected him in the same way it appeared to affect his friends. But it had made him ‘feel different’, he said, adding: ‘That was my main goal.
‘To feel. To be different. I was a 17- year- old willing to try almost anything that would upset the established order.’
Harry said he had later realised that taking cocaine was not worth the risk of discovery, as public exposure would have ruined the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Harry has previously described using drink and drugs to mask the pain he felt over the death of his mother, Princess Diana.
In Spare, he described how he and some of his Eton classmates smoked cannabis in secret in a top-floor bathroom.
They blew the smoke out of the toilet window while Harry’s protection officers from Thames Valley Police patrolled outside, he said. And he smoked a whole bag of marijuana in one night on a trip to South Africa, he wrote.
In 2002, a worried Prince Charles sent Harry to Featherstone Lodge, a drug rehabilitation clinic in Peckham, south London, after he admitted to smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol.
But Harry claimed the move was a ploy by one of his father’s spin doctors to boost Charles’ image.
He said it was a deliberate bid to paint Charles as an overwhelmed parent struggling to cope with his child’s drug abuse, rather than an unfaithful husband.
Harry said his cannabis use continued in 2015 when he and Meghan moved into Nottingham Cottage, in the grounds of Kensington Palace.
He said he would smoke a marijuana joint after dinner, adding that he tried to ensure the smoke did not drift into the garden of his neighbour, the Duke of Kent.
Psychedelic drugs had helped him escape into ‘ another world’, he said, and he described getting drunk on tequila and taking magic mushrooms with friends in California, in January 2016.
He recounted how he experienced hallucinations, believing a bathroom bin was staring at him and grew a head, the Telegraph reported.
Then aged 31, he said he pleaded with the moon for something in his life to change.
It didn’t make me feel particularly happy... but it did make me feel different, and that was my main goal