Queen Victoria and Sherlock Holmes were (famously) on coke. I think that it was first banned in the UK in 1920. Unsurprisingly, some US states had banned it nearly twenty years earlier. It was in the original formulation of Coca Cola and had plain medicinal uses. Captain RF Scott even took pills of it on his fatal expedition. Giving it to soldiers and manual workers to pep up their performance didn't help its reputation and, like anything that is banned outright, it possessed, for some, a glamour, which creates a black market, met by unregulated street gangs. From there, its reputation is always going to face south.

Now it seems to be in fashion with our great celebrities (some of whom fight like tarts and pimps on street pavements) and then go off, like Charles 'Gentleman' Saatchi, and conduct a public smear campaign against a woman who (and not just out of something called chivalry), probably doesn't really deserve it anyway. It seems to have become the modern equivalent of male homosexuality - when it was illegal it was still practised and, as long as it was, in the best English way, kept quiet, everyone pretended that it just did not exist. But let the cat out of the bag, and there are falling angels everywhere. Probably, just like alcohol and tobacco, if you overdo cocaine, you become a cropper but the Amer-Indians are still drinking their (allegedly) therapeutic coca tea, after a few thousand years and legally selling it to tourists. Tobacco has recently been demonized but alcohol will hang on in there for a indefinite time because most people would still say that the world needs it - and at least one pleasant buzz should be left to us.

Poor Nigella. I have always liked her: lovely-looking and a kind-seeming sort of girl. The cooking and the books and the drugs are a side-show.

Charles Saatchi should be horse-whipped on the steps of his club.

Last edited by Dudley Clarke (2013-12-22 04:47:48)

Meanwhile, the aides are saying to the Daily Mail that Nigella binged on junk food and was like a "Duracel bunny" one minute and a zombie the next. This is a hatchet job, they're likely working for Saatchi all along.

Agreed. And it seems Nigella has had a far worse time of it than him, although he's the instigator of the fiasco and she's an innocent party.