Dopey Harry does his followers a disservice with drug talk

Harry has claimed using recreational drugs helped his mental health. Illustration: Johannes Leak.

I really don’t want to write about Prince Harry again, but bear with me – this matters. Let him mourn his mother, attack his family, damn the media and praise his wife; let him make his own mind up about the Coronation because it really doesn’t matter. Applaud his backing for therapy and military trauma victims; admire, if you will, his fine if costless speeches about the environment. But in his talk with the bizarre Dr Gabor Mate, he crossed a line many like me will find hard to forgive.

He was talking about having a troubled mind and “distorted self” as he grew up, caused not only by bereavement but “my environment and society”. Fine, we all have our private resentments.

But the line was crossed when he cheerfully described how he became the marvel of contentment he is now, speaking warmly of mind-altering drugs. Not only the hallucinogens which “cleaned the windscreen” of his mind – something Dr Mate is famously keen on – but a more workaday cannabis habit over many years from schooldays onwards. Cocaine he dismisses as merely social, but says: “Marijuana is different. That actually really did help me.”

Down slams the portcullis. Chucking out this specific carefree advocacy in a global forum is so irresponsible that even Harry should see it. To write candidly about recreational and illegal drugs in an autobiography is allowable, especially when the world’s media knew about it already. But to offer cannabis and hallucinogens as a rebalancing cure for mental troubles is not.

Prince Harry speaking to Dr Gabor Mate.

Think about it. There are schoolboys everywhere who feel troubled, distorted, confused and angry at their families or their lot. Sometimes it is mere adolescent turmoil, sometimes they really are neglected or poor.

It is not easy to emerge into manhood in a time of fast-changing, angry opinions, screenfuls of violence, porn and envy, and ominous predictions about the difficulty of finding a home and a living. Parents may be in conflict and teachers, also battered by change and daily difficulties, might not provide enough reassurance and hope. Your peer group may be full of boys swaggering with bravado and girls inaccessible or accusing. You may have as troubled a mind as Harry ever did. And you are offered drugs every day.

Not only do post-Sixties people talk of them as harmless fun, now here’s a prince saying they “actually really help": magic mushrooms clear the mental windscreen and cannabis does the rest. Wow! He must know! He’s famous, handsome, healthy, lives in a Californian mansion and earns millions of dollars from Netflix and publishers (without even doing the writing himself). He flies on private jets to polo matches but is admired for his environmentalism. He has a beautiful and adoring wife, two healthy little children and some dogs and chickens. Nobody can order him about any more.

Harry and Meghan pose for their Christmas card last year with Archie and Lilibet.

No wonder – despite media grinches like us – he has a following of envious admirers. And now he confides that the journey from feeling miserable and different like you to that happy manly freedom was assisted by weed – the same stuff you were offered on the school bus only yesterday.

Of course not every boy will see it that way, but enough will. We have always seen rock stars with a drug habit, but witnessed many of them either die or kick it and turn into country gents. Even they don’t usually prescribe cannabinoids as a positive cure for sadness and confusion. Some talk of fighting a painful battle. Others, like Sir Elton John, have the decency to admit they were plain horrible people for a long time (the C-word is how he puts it).

What Harry has done with these few lethally casual words is different. Rather than saying it was “good fun” or a regrettable lapse into a harmless weakness, he credited being a stoner with positively helping his mental health.

If that message drives even a few of his admirers towards it, some will do all right but others will end up not in a Montecito paradise but in dead trouble. Cannabis diminishes efficiency, attention and memory. It can produce paranoia and anxiety and the craving for more to alleviate it. It edges you towards criminality.

Stoned drivers are twice as likely to crash cars, sometimes killing people. Only one in ten regular users gets dependent to the point of suffering withdrawal but if you start in your mid-teens that proportion rises to one in six.

Prince Harry, then aged 20, in a notorious scene after clashing with a photographer after emerging from a Londo nightclub. He used hallucinogenic drugs during that period.

The risk of real psychosis is also clear – even without adding, like Harry, the obvious risk of hallucinogens. We have known for 30 years that frequent teenage users triple their risk of schizophrenia. That Swedish survey was disputed and the threefold risk is still, thank God, a small percentage.

But more recent work by researchers at King’s College London and the University of Bristol found evident changes in the brain of heavy users, particularly of the new, stronger strains.

Many of us know, in wide acquaintance, young adults visibly damaged, reduced or institutionalised by drug use which began with defiant recreational puffs. Not all suffer, but it’s a lottery. And, cool reader, just because you and your mates apparently survived is no excuse for smugness.

I might personally add that once you have lived alongside a naturally occurring psychosis and lost a son to it – with no drugs involved at all – the idea of anyone’s healthy, mixed-up kid gambling with their brain chemistry is horrifying. And the sight of a supposed mental health campaigner using a global platform to advocate it is downright repellent.

The Times