LONDON — In a saga of a man of wealth and privilege brought low in a cascade of horror, narcotics and headlines, Hans Rausing, one of Britain’s richest men, was given a suspended 10-month jail term on Wednesday after pleading guilty to “preventing the lawful and decent burial” of his wife, Eva, whose body was found in a state of advanced decomposition last month, hidden under a pile of clothing and garbage bags at their London home.

Judge Richard McGregor-Johnson told Mr. Rausing, an heir to the multibillion-dollar Tetra Pak drink packaging fortune, that his behavior was “an illustration of the utterly destructive effects of drug misuse.”

Mr. Rausing’s lawyer, Alexander Cameron, the brother of Prime Minister David Cameron, said his client acted “when, as Shakespeare would put it, the ‘balance of the mind was disturbed,’ ” unable to accept his wife’s death after he found her body in their luxurious house in Chelsea on May 7 — more than two months before her body was discovered by the police on July 9.

“He has no recollection of the next 10 or 12 hours,” Mr. Cameron said of the period immediately after Mr. Rausing found his wife’s body. “He did not move the body. He described her as looking quite restful. He felt quite unable to face up to the fact that she had died. Almost like a small child, he could not face up to telling anyone else that she had died.”