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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Opinion: By Royal Appointment, Therapeutic Counsellors To The House Of Windsor Mick Hume The Times Monday 14 Jan 2002 The Prince of Wales has been praised for doing "what any responsible father would do" by making the wayward Prince Harry visit a drugs rehabilitation clinic to see the effects of addiction. In truth, if every middle-class parent whose child had drunk some cider and smoked a little cannabis did the same as Prince Charles, there would be little room left in rehab for the recovering heroin addicts at whom the Hooray Harrys and Harriets are supposed to gawp. Sunday's papers were full of mock-horror "Harry's drug shame" stories, with "Prince sent to clinic" headlines that made it sound as if he had been booked in for a full course of electric shocks rather than a two-hour voyeur's tour. But bored rich kids experimenting with cannabis is about as shocking as the revelation that working-class footballers with cash and time on their hands can sometimes be found in a bar. Prince Harry has apparently been discovered drinking under-age, smoking dope and otherwise misbehaving in his local, the Rattlebone Inn, and at home at Highgrove. He is also reported to have got blotto in a club on the Costa del Sol, taunted girls and chucked bottles around in the posh resort of Rock, Cornwall, and vomited behind various hedges. One young woman who encountered Harry's princely charms is quoted in a tabloid observing: "He is one of the most revolting people I've ever met." Which one would have thought made him fairly typical of the affluent young "Trustafarian" crowd. Much more interesting than Harry's boringly boorish behaviour has been the reaction to it. "This was a serious matter which was resolved within the family," said a spokesman for the Prince of Wales. Well, yes, if the Royal Family now includes the staff and attendees at the Phoenix House rehabilitation clinic. "Responsible parenting" might once have meant dealing with your child's everyday problems. Today it also seems to involve handing them over to outside experts of one sort or another. Apparently even the Royal Family no longer trusts itself (or Harry's school, Eton, traditional rehab centre of the upper classes) to sort things out without inviting the intervention of the therapeutic State. Worse, since the News of the World got a whiff of last summer's royal dope smoking, it has been turned into a moral message for the rest of us. Tony Blair and an army of experts have agreed that teenagers' sneaking a drink or a puff are a serious social problem, and that Prince Charles was absolutely right to call in the professionals. Alcohol Concern suggests that Prince Harry's experience shows the crying need for "facilities" for "teenagers who find themselves in a spot of bother", to "provide them with the sort of help they need to change course". If they intend re-educating every teen who fits into that sweeping category, the Dome itself will not be a big enough rehab clinic to hold them. The overreaction to this silly royal story can only reinforce the depressing influence of the addiction industry, with its message that one alcopop or puff of dope can lead to dependency on harder drinks and drugs. Sunday's reports were full of dark references to the "slippery slope", and they weren't talking about the ski run at Klosters. It seems that, kings or commoners, we are all now looked upon as potential addicts who cannot be trusted unsupervised to eat, drink, go shopping or have sex without risking the onset of some dangerous dependency. Perhaps Harry himself will now start lecturing youngsters about the dangers of drink and drugs, alongside reformed footballers such as Tony Adams and Paul Merson. Some traditionalists have complained about Adams and Merson being sent around schools as cut-out role models, in preference to more straitlaced players. But repentant sinners are the preferred preachers of the new therapeutic religion. Much has changed since the teenage Charles scandalously tried to buy a cherry brandy in a pub. Still, the Duke of Edinburgh can comfort himself that some aristocratic traditions remain intact, to judge by stories of Prince William swearing at photographers whilst out hunting and Prince Harry calling a French pub manager a "f frog". Possibly more worrying for the royals is the argument of one leading chemical dependency expert; that trying to scare Harry away from drugs would not work if he had a "genetically inherited" tendency towards addiction. We ordinary mortals might laugh off such deterministic nonsense. But the Royal Family survives by championing the hereditary principle. Perhaps those who live by the genes can perish by the genes.
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