CHARLES'S RESPONSE TO USE OF DRUGS BY SON IS PRAISED

LONDON -- Prince Charles sent his son Harry to a drug clinic in August to
meet recovering addicts after learning that he was drinking and smoking
marijuana, and experts today praised his action as responsible parenting --
not a phrase commonly applied to the ruling Windsor family.

Charles discovered that Harry, then 16, had been using the drug at private
parties and at Charles's Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire. Harry had
also been drinking at a nearby country pub last summer while his father was
away in London on royal duties and his brother, William, 19, was out of the
country on his gap year before university.

It was the first time that Harry, whose mother, Diana, the Princess of
Wales, was killed in a Paris auto crash in 1997, had been alone at home
from Eton, his boarding school in Buckinghamshire.

A member of the royal staff reportedly alerted Prince Charles after
smelling marijuana at a Highgrove teenage party, and friends confirmed that
the youth had been a regular and sometimes boisterous drinker at the
Rattlebone Inn in Wiltshire. Charles discussed the matter with his son and
came up with the suggested trip to the center, of which he is a patron.

"What Prince Charles has done is what any responsible father should do --
what I had to do with my own son -- and I believe he's done it
brilliantly," said Robert Lefever of the Promis Recovery Center.

Bill Puddicombe, the chief executive of the Phoenix House Treatment Service
for Drug Dependency, the charity that runs Featherstone Lodge, the center
in South London that the young prince visited, commended Charles for
letting his son see the consequences of drug use.

"He met some people in recovery -- heroin and cocaine addicts mostly -- and
heard their life stories, complete with harrowing details," Mr. Puddicombe
said of Harry's visit. "He was relaxed and friendly with the residents, and
they responded warmly. Most people here thought this was responsible
parenting."

A spokesman for St. James's Palace confirmed the report of Harry's trip to
the clinic after the Sunday tabloid News of the World devoted seven pages
of coverage to the story under the headline "Harry's Drug Shame." The
spokesman said, "This was a serious matter which was resolved within the
family and is now in the past and closed."

But it was not the shamefulness of the episode so much as the positive
action that Charles took that gained notice today in newspapers that are
more accustomed to commenting on the affairs, divorces and parental lapses
in a family generally treated in the press as a dysfunctional one. The
Observer managed to embrace both aspects in an editorial complimenting
Charles for acting "exactly the opposite" from the way that his own remote
father, Prince Philip, might have.

Palace sources were quoted as stressing that Harry had never drunk or
smoked at Eton, which bans both. They said that his weekend passes had been
restricted and that over the Christmas holiday he was told to spend the
entire break with his father and brother.

Stories of drinking and drug-taking have dogged the circle of privileged
friends of the two princes, who are second and third in line to the British
throne. Last summer Nicholas Knatchbull, one of Prince Charles's
godchildren and William's mentor at Eton, received treatment at a drug
rehabilitation center after being arrested a year earlier for carrying drugs.

Tom Parker Bowles, son of Camilla Parker Bowles, Prince Charles's
companion, was exposed as a cocaine user two years ago and told to stay
away from Harry and William until he had changed his habits. His cousin
Emma Parker Bowles and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, a party-pages celebrity and
daughter of close friends of Prince Charles, also made publicized entries
into detoxification clinics.

Statistics indicate that British teenagers are more likely than other
European youths to have taken drugs and indulged in binge drinking, the
Edinburgh-based Alcohol and Health Research Center reported last February.
More than 30 percent of the 15- and 16-year-olds questioned said they had
regularly smoked marijuana and been drunk more than 20 times in the last year.

"One of the problems we have in Britain is that drug taking has now become
so commonplace that it is widely regarded as socially acceptable," the
report's author, Dr. Martin Plant, said at the time.

Prince Charles himself drew attention with an underage drinking incident,
but it pointed up his innocence rather than any guilt.

When he was 14, he entered a pub with friends on a school sailing trip to
the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. Surprised at being asked what he would have,
he blurted out the only drink he had ever heard of.

It was cherry brandy, and Charles has told friends that four decades on,
the two words still make him wince.