Prince Harry may have gone public with his drug taking in his best-selling memoir, but his U.S. visa application will remain private, a judge has decided.
U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols on Monday knocked back a lawsuit from the Heritage Foundation trying to force the government to release the exiled royal’s application to check if there was any mention of drug use.
The conservative think tank—notoriously behind the infamous Project 2025 blueprint for right-wing governing—questioned whether Harry was properly vetted after “widespread and continuous” media coverage of his professed use of illegal substances.
In his 2023 book, Spare, the Duke of Sussex revealed that he experimented with cocaine, marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms.
But Judge Nichols ruled “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records. Like any foreign national, the duke has a legitimate privacy interest in his immigration status.”
He acknowledged that Harry revealed “intimate details” of his life in the book with “numerous instances” of his drug taking and that he was a public figure.
But he added that public interest in the prince’s move to America was “outweighed by the duke’s privacy interest.”
Visa applications to the U.S. ask about past and current drug use and admissions can routinely mean they will be rejected.
