PRINCE'S DRINKING, DRUG USE GIVE PRESS A FIELD DAY

LONDON (Reuters) - Revelations that Prince Charles's 17-year-old son,
Harry, has not only drunk heavily at parties but also smoked cannabis threw
Britain's press into a frenzy Sunday.

The mass circulation News of the World said Prince Harry, whose mother
Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997, had confessed to his father
that he had smoked cannabis several times and drunk to excess at parties.

The fact that such habits make him much like many British teenagers -- not
least the sons of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw -- did not put newspapers off the scent of a royal scandal.

Tabloid and broadsheet papers alike splashed accounts of what was said to
have occurred at Charles's Highgrove country estate and a nearby pub across
their front pages.

Harry, third in line to the British throne after his father and older
brother William, was 16 at the time.

He was promptly sent by his father to see a rehabilitation clinic in south
London to show him how alcohol and drugs affected people's lives, the News
of the World reported under the banner headline "Harry's Drugs Shame."

A spokesman for Prince Charles declined to confirm details of the report,
saying only: "This is a serious matter which was resolved within the family
and is now in the past and closed."

Blair Sympathetic

Prime Minister Tony Blair -- whose own teenage son Euan was reprimanded by
police for being drunk in London's entertainment district in July 2000 --
said the royal family had handled the situation "absolutely right."

"They have done it in a very responsible and, as you would expect, a very
sensitive way for their child," he said on BBC television. "It is a very
difficult situation...Well, I know this myself."

One of Blair's ministers, Jack Straw, then the home secretary (interior
minister), had to take his 17-year-old son William to the police four years
ago after he was caught selling drugs to an undercover newspaper reporter.

Bill Puddicombe, head of the charity that runs the clinic Harry visited,
said the prince had spent most of his time talking to recovering heroin and
cocaine addicts.

"He sat in groups with people. They explained to him what sort of
experiences they'd been through, what a misery their life had been as a
result of the drugs they had been taking," he told BBC television.

The story was hardly the beginning Queen Elizabeth would have wanted to the
jubilee year marking the 50th anniversary of her accession to the throne.

Last year the queen's youngest son Edward angered the family when his
television company ignored an agreement not to harass Prince William at
university.

Edward's wife, Sophie Wessex, who ran a public relations company, also fell
foul of the establishment last year when she was caught by a journalist
disguised as an Arab sheikh making disparaging remarks about politicians
and the royal family.

Harry, a student at the exclusive Eton College school, was just 12 when his
mother was killed a year after divorcing Charles. His brother William, 19,
is studying at St. Andrews University in Scotland.