PRINCE'S DRUG USE BIG NEWS IN BRITAIN

Harry Visits Ex-Addicts After Summer Incidents

LONDON -- Anyone who glanced at a British newspaper Sunday immediately knew
there was "Something About Harry."

A red-cheeked Prince Harry, youngest son of Prince Charles and the late
Princess Diana, was in newspapers across the country after it was confirmed
that the third person in line for the crown had experimented with marijuana
and had drank alcohol during the past year. Harry is 17; the legal drinking
age in Britain is 18.

The Eton College student confessed to his father that he had even smoked
marijuana at a party in the Prince of Wales' country home, a place called
Highgrove in the British County of Gloucestershire. Harry also reportedly
indulged in weed in a shed behind a pub called the Rattlebone Inn, not far
from Highgrove.

He admitted he drank at the pub and was allowed to keep drinking after the
pub's legal closing hours.

The royal palace said Harry and Charles spent Sunday at Highgrove before
Harry returned to Eton.

"We acknowledge that on several occasions last summer, Prince Harry
experimented with cannabis," a spokesman said.

Royal officials also confirmed that Charles' response had been to arrange
for a family friend to take Harry on a tour of Featherstone Lodge, a drug
rehabilitation center south of London, where a former heroin user guided the
prince through conversations with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
The rehab patients reportedly told the prince that drug and alcohol users
often can't distinguish when they cross the line between experimentation and
addiction.

News reports indicated that Charles' approach worked: Harry is said to have
shunned drugs since his rehab tour in August.