Spare | Prince Harry’s drugs connection: ‘Late at night, when everyone was asleep, I would roll a joint’

Looks like the move to California was good for not just for Meghan, but Harry too. This time not for any royal reasons, but the fact that Cannabis were made legal in California for recreational use in 2016. The Duke of Sussex, 38, wrote that he smoked marijuana while he and his family were staying at US actor Tyler Perry’s house in Los Angeles in 2020, after they left Canada. In the memoir he wrote: “Late at night, with everyone asleep, I would walk the house, checking the doors and windows. Then I would sit on the balcony or the edge of the garden and roll a joint.”

In his memoir, Spare, Harry also reflects on sharing a ‘spliff’ with friends in his Eton days in a tiny washroom. He writes in the memoir, “I knew this was bad behaviour. I knew it was wrong. My mates knew too. We talked about it often, while stoned, how stupid we were to be wasting an Eton education.”

Harry also confessed to taking cocaine, ketamine and magic mushrooms, and described how he hallucinated that a bin was talking to him. He felt that the use of psychedelic drugs helped him deal with the grief and trauma he felt after the death of his mother, Lady Diana. He said using psychedelics when he got older ‘cleared away the idea’ that he needed be sad to prove he ‘missed’ his mother.

In the memoir, the Duke of Sussex also describes being dragged into the office of an unnamed member of the Royal Household staff during his grandmother the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 after a journalist asked the Palace about his drug-taking habits.

He revealed that he was offered a line of cocaine during a hunting weekend. Admitting that he lied to the Royal Household staff during his interrogation, Harry mentioned that taking cocaine wasn’t much fun and he did it partly to be different and because he was a seventeen-year-old willing to try almost anything that would upset the established order.

He wrote: ‘It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me feel particularly happy the way the others seemed to, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main goal. To feel. To be different.’

(With added inputs from agencies)