Prince Harry Snorted Supplement Used by Bodybuilders to Fuel His Partying

Prince Harry found a legal loophole to keep partying while serving in the military.

The detail comes from journalist Charlotte Griffiths, who wrote about her unlikely friendship with the prince in a first-person essay the Daily Mail published on Wednesday, July 8. Griffiths, who met Harry, 41, at a Hampshire shooting weekend in December 2011, recalled that later that night, the two “chatted about nightclubs, and the difficulties of dovetailing his apparent love of all-night parties with a career in the military,” she wrote.

The royal’s decade-long military career included two deployments to Afghanistan, first as a forward air controller and later as an Apache helicopter copilot and gunner, before leaving the military in 2015.

Harry, who chronicled his youthful enthusiasm for recreational drugs in his memoir Spare, opened up “with uncharacteristic seriousness” about why he’d had to change his habits, per the article. He told Griffiths he was “unable to indulge in narcotics these days, due to the risk of random Army drug tests,” according to the essay.

But Harry had found a workaround. “While others might take cocaine at the clubs, bars and parties he went to, he told me he now took something called creatine,” Griffiths wrote.

She explained what that meant: “It’s a perfectly legal food supplement which is normally mixed with water and drunk by bodybuilders looking for that extra something.”

Harry, however, wasn’t using it the conventional way. “When inhaled in powder form, Harry explained, the stuff provides a burst of energy that keeps one dancing till dawn,” Griffiths recalled — though she was quick to add a caveat of her own: “I have no idea if he’s correct, so please don’t try this at home.”

Griffiths noted that creatine has since become far more popular as a wellness trend than it was back in 2011. “These days creatine has gone mainstream,” she wrote. “Lots of women I know, myself included, drink the Holland and Barrett version to improve cognitive function now that our 40s have kicked in. How times have changed.”

As In Touch previously reported, earlier this week, Harry lost his years-long privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.