David Cross opened up to Playboy about his cocaine use at a White House Correspondents' Dinner, telling the magazine that he only snorted a small amount of the drug -- and did it more for the principle than the high.
"[I]t wasn’t even that much cocaine," the actor/comedian recalled of the 2009 incident, which has been, um, buzzed about in the rumor mill over the past few years.
Cross estimates that he was some 65 feet away from Obama when he hoovered up the go-go powder.
"It was literally the size of, I don’t know, a tick. It was a tiny granule of coke that I put on my wrist and said, 'Watch this. I need a witness.' And then I ducked under the table and did it. It wasn’t like I got high. The jolt was similar to licking an empty espresso cup."
According to Cross, "It was just about being able to say that I did it, that I did cocaine in the same room as the president," Cross said. "I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed of it."
Cross -- who's gearing up to reprise his role as Tobias Funke in the "Arrested Development" revival set first as a series for Netflix, then a theatrical movie -- has admitted to the incident in the past, though he hasn't previously addressed it in as much detail.
Cross attended the dinner as a guest of his girlfriend, actress Amber Tamblyn.
Cross's only regret from the incident, he told Playboy, was that Tamblyn got "in trouble by association.
"I was her date, her plus-one, and she got dragged through the mud because of what I did," Cross laments. "She had nothing to do with it. She didn’t know I was going to do it. And because of that she’ll never be invited to the White House again. That’s not cool."
Cross and Obama would seem to have a bit in common, aside from proximity at the Correspondents' Dinner; in his 1995 book "Dreams From My Father," the president admitted to using marijuana and cocaine, saying that he did "maybe a little blow."
