PETER HITCHENS: Am I the only one who fears the effect drug abuse may have had on Harry?

You can hardly go ten minutes in Britain these days without being told by some defeatist police chief or greedy lobbyist for legal drugs that there is a ‘war on drugs’ and that it has ‘failed’.

If the British Ingrowing Toenail Support Association or the Retired Lighthouse Keepers’ League publish a vague two-page document calling for the legalization of cannabis, the BBC will call it a “report” and place it at the top of their newsletters.

Conversely, if a serious academic study says that marijuana use is increasingly correlated with incurable mental illness, most of the British media will bury or ignore the story.

The argument is always the same. Decades of harsh and cruel prohibition have failed to stop the use of illegal drugs. So let’s legalize them. Millions of people—I know a few and they seem smart and alert—buy this nonsense.

And this could be why the most startling revelations in Prince Harry’s goofy book have had so little impact. So let me suggest that they are more important than most people seem to think they are.

By his own account, one of the close heirs to the throne of a major law-ruled country has been violating that country’s drug laws since he was in school. If he has stopped doing it, he doesn’t say so. He certainly was still smoking marijuana two and a half years ago by his own account.

This is a person who has had, for much of his life, fairly strict police protection. Didn’t the officers in charge of her security, who surely must have been aware of where she was going, what she was doing, and who she was with, knew?

There is very little doubt that various members of the Royal Family, courtiers, Palace servants, and high-ranking members of the Armed Forces must also have been aware of this. Did you think it didn’t matter?

Can we be expected to believe that the elite school Harry attended didn’t know either?

Remember that possession of marijuana, under the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971, carries a maximum prison sentence of five years and an unlimited fine. If he had violated any other part of the criminal law, would he have been immune from the attentions of the police? If so, it would be disgusting.

The monarchy is a source of laws and honors. The royal signature turns pieces of parchment into the law of the land.

The royal crown is on the cap insignia of all police officers and hangs above the judges’ bench in each courtroom. I might add that each prison is also ‘Her Majesty hers’ hers and is adorned with the Royal Arms.

The Crown is the law, and the law is the Crown, and it is the law that makes Charles king and makes Harry more important than most of the young men in the realm.

And yet, Spare to the Throne gleefully boasts, in a publication that can’t blame anyone else, about its long career of deliberate and conscious lawbreaking.

I suppose there must have been harangues and pleas from the parents. It is all too easy to imagine the future King Charles, who escaped the drug frenzy of his generation through a unique upbringing, bewildered and miserable by the stupidity of his son. As the Majesty of him will have discovered, he is almost alone. Harry knows full well from his posh circle of friends that the police wouldn’t touch him even if he was a normal teenager. They unofficially decriminalized marijuana many years ago, without bothering to consult Parliament.

Many of the super-rich parents whose children Harry mixed with at Eton used drugs, or still do, and have no difficulty allowing their children to do the same.

But it goes beyond that. It’s not just that Harry’s rampant breaking of the law undermines the institution of which he is inevitably a part. What about the effect of his drug abuse on himself and on society as a whole?

We have all read and perhaps laughed at his account of the time he ended up having conversations with a garbage can and a toilet after taking ‘magic mushrooms’. But it’s not very funny, in those families where a young member has become irreversibly mentally ill after marijuana use.

For them, the onset of wild rages, persecution mania, educational failure, character transformation, and then delusions are anything but fun.

Neither are the powerful, life-changing antipsychotics these ruined children need to take for the rest of their days.

In many cases, these young people used the drug in the hopelessly mistaken belief that it is ‘soft’, a view held by many opinion formers. This belief destroys lives.

We should be just as appalled by marijuana use as we are by heroin or cocaine. Could it be that Harry’s erratic, angry and suspicious behaviour, his personality change between his days at Sandhurst and now, are connected to his drug use?

If this country had a proper Establishment, there would be more angst over this part of their revelations. But I fear that his actions, and the general suave reaction to them, show that we are no longer old enough to be a monarchy, or anything else.

Ian MacDonald, in his extraordinary examination of The Beatles, Revolution In The Head, thought the foundations cracked in 1969, with the song Come Together.

MacDonald said: “Whether received enthusiastically in college and underground circles, Come Together is the key song of the turn of the decade, isolating a pivotal moment when the next generation of the free world rejected the established wisdom, knowledge and behavior of a drug-inspired relativism that has since undermined the intellectual foundations of Western culture.

It is terribly true. The shared rite of the rolled joint passed from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth was the unholy communion of the post-1960s generation. His unholy trinity, likewise, was sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

As the late Queen Elizabeth continued to reign with a head full of notions of duty, service, family, patience, and tolerance, her subjects, and later her own family, were seduced into an entirely different world.

It was a revolution in the head that separated effort from reward and dissolved the old idea that pleasure should be deferred until duty is done, in a cloud of cloyingly sweet smoke.

No one needed to storm Buckingham Palace, break down its doors, break its windows, or drag the monarch to the dungeon or guillotine.

The smell of marijuana in the royal halls heralded a great revolt that has left an aging king perched on a rickety throne from which he cannot even rule his own youngest son.