Lisa Rinna’s Husband Harry Hamlin Says He Was ‘Forced to Smoke PCP’ in Jail

On Friday’s episode of Hamlin and his wife Lisa Rinna’s Let’s Not Talk About the Husband podcast, the 74-year-old actor recalled how he was allegedly “forced” to smoke phencyclidine (PCP), an illegal hallucinogenic street drug, when he was in jail in 1970.

“I have never had ketamine, but … in jail, I was forced to smoke PCP,” Hamlin said.

The L.A. Law alum noted how he was arrested in 1970 after being caught in possession of illegal drugs.

“[An] upperclassman had given me 25 pills and about a 25th of an ounce of grass, and that was my payment for taking these pills,” he recalled, telling Rinna that the “pills” were “speed” that they would take for exams.

“It was exam season, and I was at Berkley,” he continued. “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. And 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 them back.”

Hamlin said he wasn’t sure why the other fraternity didn’t want them, and decided to store the pills in his “guitar case” — despite traveling by plane back to college.

“Do you think that was very smart?” Rinna interjected, to which Hamlin admitted, “Obviously not because I ended up in jail.”

At the time, the Mayfair Witches star said he hadn’t thought there was anything to be concerned about regarding the pills. However, he also had the “tiny quantity of marijuana,” which was illegal at the time, and was subsequently arrested and sentenced to 18 days in county jail, which only had to be served on the weekends.

“On the very first weekend that I went, this gets quite complicated,” Hamlin told Rinna. “The warden of the jail, his 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.”

“I sit down with the warden, and my lawyer, and we all have a cheeseburger together,” he went on. “And the warden says, ‘Listen, when you get there, don’t worry about anything. I’ll make sure that you’re okay. This is a big mistake. It never should have happened. I’ll take care of you in jail. You’ve got to go, but I will make sure that your experience is really great.'”

On his first day, Hamlin said he was put into a holding cell with a young man wearing “preppy” clothing, who was “crying his eyes out.” The Making Love star noted that he took “pity” on the man, who allegedly told him he had been arrested after police found LSD in his car.

Hamlin said he felt so bad for his peer that he asked the guards to put them in the same cell, but they were both put into the young man’s cell — which was a “felony cell.” However, after the other man was bailed out early in the morning, Hamlin was left to share a cell with the other felons and “murderers.”

“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 told Rinna. “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.”

“And the fact that you’re in there because of pot,” Rinna chimed in.

According to Hamlin, the next morning at breakfast, a fellow inmate offered him what appeared to be a joint. Hamlin said he refused multiple times, but he claimed the man was adamant, so he ultimately agreed.

“He said, ‘Have some of this!'” Hamlin recalled, “So that’s how I was forced to have the PCP.”

“Somebody had brought in a little sack of rolling tobacco, and they had soaked it in PCP … so they were smoking it, and there was no odor. But they were high as kites,” he continued.

“I was so stoned because the guy forced me to take three or four hits of it, right?” Hamli said. “And I was completely messed up after I had that. So that’s my PCP story.”