TV Cook Nigella Lawson Barred from U.S. for Admitting She Did Cocaine; Barack Obama Still President

Plumptious TV cook Nigella Lawson was
unceremoniously booted
from a flight to the U.S. this week. Why? The Daily
Mail (which is, let’s be clear, not the most reliable of news
sources) is reporting that the
domestic goddess was denied a seat on a plane because of her
admission during an unrelated court case in the U.K. last year that
she had done cocaine seven times and smoked some weed.

Technically, U.S. law declares foreigners who have committed
drug offenses “inadmissible” to the country, even if—as in Lawson’s
case—they never faced any legal proceedings at home or abroad.

Lawson isn’t
the first person to be barred at the border for old,
otherwise unremarkable drug confessions. But getting back into the
U.S. will be time-consuming and/or expensive for the host of the
American food game show, The Taste.

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland
Security told
the Daily Mail: 

In general, an alien found inadmissible will need a waiver of
inadmissibility….Depending on the basis of their refusal they may
be eligible to apply in advance of travel for a temporary waiver of
inadmissibility. The waiver application process can be lengthy.

Lawson’s take on her drug use at the
time seems quite sensible:

While insisting she had never been an addict or habitual user of
drugs, she confirmed she had taken cocaine. 

She said she needed the drugs to cope with the death of her
first husband, John Diamond, and the ‘intimate terrorism’ of her
second, [Charles] Saatchi.

The TV cook also described how she ‘smoked the odd joint’ of
cannabis in the last year of her marriage to Mr Saatchi to make ‘an
intolerable situation tolerable’.

But she maintained that she was now drug-free, telling the jury:
‘I did not and do not have a drug problem, I had a life problem. I
decided to address that.’

It also sounds
pretty familiar: 

I had grown tired of trying to untangle a mess that wasn’t of my
making. I had learned not to care. I blew a few smoke rings,
remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a
little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though….

Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d be headed: the final, fatal
role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn’t been
about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by
then anyway. I got just the opposite effect, something that could
push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could
flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my
memory.

Only slightly related: You should really bake
Nigella’s chocolate
Guinness cake.