Prince Harry reveals “fundamental” drug use
Prince Harry has opened up about his recreational drug use in a livestream chat with trauma expert Dr Gabor Maté.
During the session, the Duke of Sussex revealed to Dr Maté that he has turned to drugs to help him deal with - and overcome - the traumas of his past, and how it all began as a recreational activity for the 38-year-old.
“It was the cleaning of the windscreen,” he explained, “the removal of life’s filters - these layers of filters - it removed it all for me and brought me a sense of relaxation, relief, comfort, a lightness that I managed to hold back for a period of time.
“I started doing it recreationally and then started to realise how good it was for me.
“I would say it is one of the fundamental parts of my life that changed me and helped me deal with the traumas and the pains of the past. They’re unlocking so much of what we’ve suppressed.”
This is not the first time Harry has admitted to his drug usage, having opened up about his cocaine abuse in his controversial memoir, Spare. In the book, he made reference to tabloid stories from his teenage years at boarding school, and dubbed his father - King Charles - a “harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child”.
Despite Buckingham Palace denying claims about Harry’s drug use at the time, he confessed in Spare that “of course” he was “doing cocaine around this time”, and that he was “at someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend” when he was offered the drug for the first time.
“I’d been offered a line,” he later admitted, “and I’d done a few more since.”
And while he decided that drug use wasn’t “much fun”, and that cocaine didn’t “make [him] particularly happy”, it helped him achieve his goal of feeling different.
In his memoir, Harry also made note of the time he tried magic mushrooms during a party at actress Courteney Cox’s house, after discovering a box full of “black diamond mushroom chocolates.”
“My mate and I grabbed several, gobbled them, washed them down with tequila,” he said, before going on to recall his drug-induced hallucinations - namely, a bin transforming into a head.
“I stepped on the pedal and the head opened its mouth,” Harry described, “a huge open grin.”
However, Harry’s story didn’t exactly line up with Courtney’s account, with the 58-year-old denying his story in the wake of the memoirs release, telling Variety, “I’m not saying there were mushrooms! I definitely wasn’t passing them out.”
Whether or not the story is entirely factually accurate, the Duke of Sussex credits his experience with substances as the thing that helped him see the world, and his life, for what they were, writing in Spare that “under the influence of these substances I was able to let go of rigid preconcepts, to see that there was another world beyond my heavily filtered senses.
“A world that was equally real and doubly beautiful.”
Images: Getty