U.S. group want to know details about Prince Harry’s visa

An American group called The Heritage Foundation is calling for the U.S. government to release details about Prince Harry’s visa to see if he admitted to drug use prior to receiving it.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that was created in 1973 that took a prominent position in creating policies during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s.

Harry openly admits drug use in ‘Spare’ memoir

The Heritage Foundation is battling with Washington to get details of Prince Harry’s visa application released to the public. No details have been released out of respect for the Duke of Sussex’s privacy.

“Visa records are confidential under Section 222(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA); therefore, we cannot discuss the details of individual visa cases,” a U.S. State Department spokesman said.

“This request is in the public interest in light of the potential revocation of Prince Harry’s visa for illicit substance use and further questions regarding the Prince’s drug use and whether he was properly vetted before entering the United States,” said Mike Howell, the director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which seeks to spot questions of accountability in Washington.

The foundation’s interest in Prince Harry’s visa application came after the prince revealed his past drug use in his recent memoir ‘Spare’. In the book, he opened up about his family life as a royal and his time as a young person, including his experimentation with drugs while visiting friends in the United States.

Harry explains that he first tried cocaine when he was 17 years old, but says that he found marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms to be most useful in helping him come to terms with his past trauma.

In his recent live interview with Dr. Gabor Maté earlier this month, Harry also explained how taking the psychedelic drink known as ayahuasca brought him a “sense of relaxation, release, comfort, a lightness that I managed to hold on to for a period of time.”

Does it matter if Prince Harry disclosed past drug use on his visa application?

Some experts say that admitting to past drug use can be used as grounds to reject someone’s visa application.

“An admission of drug use is usually grounds for inadmissibility,” Neama Rahmani said, who is a former federal prosecutor.

“That means Prince Harry’s visa should have been denied or revoked because he admitted to using cocaine, mushrooms and other drugs,” he added.

Meanwhile, other lawyers, such as James Leonard, who represented Joe Giudice from ‘The Real Housewives of New Jersey’ for his immigration case, say otherwise.

“Absent any criminal charge related to drugs or alcohol or any finding by a judicial authority that Prince Harry is a habitual drug user, which he clearly is not, I don’t see any issue with the disclosures in his memoir regarding recreational experimentation with drugs,” Leonard said.

“You’ve got to give them something that would trigger it, and revealing it in a book, that you experimented with drugs when you were a young man, I don’t think gets you there,” he added.