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CNN Live At Daybreak

Prince Harry Tours Rehab Center

Aired January 14, 2002 - 06:37   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
COSTELLO: Let's move onto London now. Prince Charles' youngest son is the talk of the town, so to speak and the buzz is all about reports of Prince Harry's drinking and his marijuana use. CNN's Diana Muriel joins us live from near a pub that the underage Harry reportedly visited.

DIANA MURIEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right Carol, I'm standing outside the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston, a village about 10 miles away from Prince Charles' country estate Highgrove in Gloucestershire, and it was here last summer that Prince Harry is understood to have smoked cannabis in an outhouse at the back of the pub.

This under the influence of some older friends, again, boys from around the district here, who had also been drinking with the young prince in the pub. Now Harry was at that time aged only 16 years old. You can go into a pub age 16, but you can't buy a drink. Now Harry was also understood to have smoked pot at private parties in the district and to have hosted his own parties at Highgrove, although it's clear that he did not smoke cannabis himself there.

Some of his friends did, and it was the staff at Highgrove who alerted Prince Charles to the distinctive smell of cannabis in the house. Prince Charles spent a lot of last summer away from Highgrove, which was unusual. He tries to spend the summer vacation with his son, but he has a lot of official engagements and Prince Harry's older brother, Prince William, was away traveling abroad on his gap year between school and university.

Now, Prince Charles had a meeting with Harry who confessed, who admitted immediately what he'd been doing, admitted to smoking cannabis, but he also admitted to excessive drinking and it's that problem that is a strong concern because Harry's drinking habits are quite intimate from a local district here. He not only drank at this pub where he was eventually banned, and that ban remains in force here, even though the pub is under new management - new management which took over in October.

They've maintained the ban against Prince Harry coming here, but he drinks in some of the local pubs in the district, and it's quite well known that the young prince can drink to excess on occasion - Carol.

COSTELLO: What's the drinking age in Britain? MURIEL: Well, you can buy alcohol aged 18, but you can go into a pub younger than that, under the age of 16 at the discretion of the landlord, and at 16 you can go into a pub and have a drink bought for you by an older adult. So Harry really shouldn't have been buying drinks at the bar himself.

We understand that his drink of choice was beer and lager, and that on occasion he was very drunk here. At one point, the reason why he was banned from this pub was he became so drunk he became abusive to a member of the staff here, and was then asked to leave and told not to come back.

The cultural drinking amongst Harry and his peers is quite strong. These are very wealthy, rather aristocratic teenagers who live in the neighboring district. They go to sporting events like polo events and hunt bulls and they are quite used to drinking at quite a young age, and Harry, it seems, had fallen into this rather bad company in the absence of his father and elder brother that summer - Carol.

COSTELLO: So this was quite serious. This just wasn't, you know, a lark by a teenager.

MURIEL: That's right. It is quite serious, and the way Prince Charles has handled it is being noted in the press here in Britain. He was very calm in his meeting with Harry, we understand. He asked Harry whether he really thought these were the sorts of people he should be hanging out with, whether this is the sort of behavior he should have been engaging in given his age and given his status. And he spoke to Prince William at length about the problem. It was Prince William who suggested to Harry that he should go and visit a drug rehabilitation center in south London, a center, in fact, which his father is a patron of.

We understand that Harry went there late summer, spent a day there - half a day there, and he looked - met some of the recovering addicts who had been on cocaine and heroine. He heard some of their experiences and he saw a de-tox program going through its process and he was apparently very moved by that experience and came back a very chastened young man. It seems pretty clear that the drug taking, the cannabis experimentation, was just that. It was a young man just experimenting with recreational drugs. It wasn't serious, but the drinking problem has been going on for rather longer, and perhaps it's a bigger problem - Carol.

COSTELLO: OK. Well we wish him well. Thank you very much. Diana Muriel reporting live for us from Britain this morning.

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