Harry Hamlin recalled the time he was pressured to take PCP when he was in jail in the ‘70s.
“I have never had ketamine but … in jail I was forced to smoke PCP,” Hamlin, 74, shared on the Friday, December 5, episode of his and wife Lisa Rinna’s “Let’s Not Talk About the Husband” podcast.
Hamlin’s confession earned a shocked reaction from Rinna, 62, who questioned what he meant by “forced” since “PCP is intense.” Hamlin explained that he was arrested in 1970 after he was given “25 pills” and “a 25th of an ounce of grass” (which is another name for marijuana) by one of his fraternity brothers who allegedly tasked him with delivering the pills, which ended up being speed, to another chapter when he was headed home to Los Angeles. The pot was his payment for doing the favor.
“It was exam season and I was at Berkley. And my upperclassmen in the fraternity house I was living in came to me before I was going down to L.A. for Thanksgiving, which is around exam time,” he recalled. “Aad he said, ‘Take these pills down to another house at USC. They need these for their exams’ So I take them down and they didn’t want the pills. So I had to take it back.”
Rinna quipped, “What do you mean they didn’t want them? Who doesn’t want speed?”
Hamlin claimed that he didn’t know why the pills were rejected. After being unsuccessful, Hamlin repacked them in his “guitar case” to take back to school in Northern California. Rinna then asked if Hamlin traveled with the drugs by plane and he admitted that was the case.
“Do you think that was very smart?” she asked, to which he replied, “Obviously not because I ended up in jail.”
After getting caught with marijuana, which was illegal at the time, Hamlin went to court and initially accepted a plea deal with a slap on the wrist. But there was an issue with the arrangement as Hamlin’s lawyer and judge weren’t present for the final hearing. Hamlin was ultimately sentenced to 18-days in county jail that was served on the weekends.
“On the very first weekend that I went, this gets quite complicated,” he explained. “The warden of the jail’s brother was an actor in the acting school at Berkeley. He was playing Cyrano de Bergerac at the time and I was a member of the drama department.”
Due to his connection to the warden’s brother, Hamlin’s lawyer arranged for them to meet the warden for hamburgers before Hamlin reported to jail.
“I sit down with the warden and my lawyer and we all have a cheeseburger together,” he recalled. “And the warden says, ‘Listen, when you get there, don’t worry about anything. I’ll make sure that you’re OK.’”
When it was time for Hamlin to report, he was placed in a holding cell with a young man in preppy clothes who was “crying his eyes out.” Hamlin confessed he took “pity” on the guy and asked him what was wrong. The young man claimed he was arrested after police found LSD in his car. Hamlin felt a connection to the other man and asked the prison guards if he could be in the same cell as him. They agreed to Hamlin’s request and he ended up being put in a “felony cell.” Shortly after that, the young man was released on bail and Hamlin remained in the cell with the “felons.”
“As the kid was being let out, they were all sitting around in a circle in front of a portable television smoking a joint, passing a joint around,” he claimed. “I thought, ‘That’s reality weird, I’m in jail and they’re passing a joint around? That’s really bizarre’ But you couldn’t smell any pot.”
The next day, Hamlin woke up and went to breakfast where one inmate offered him a joint. Hamlin refused multiple times but the inmate persistently insisted for him to “have some of this” which ended up being PCP.
“Somebody had brought in a little sack of rolling tobacco that was soaked in PCP … so they were smoking it and there was no odor. But they were high as kites,” he said. “I was so stoned because the guy forced me to take three or four hits of it and I was completely messed up after I had that. And that’s my PCP story. “
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