Hunter Biden Talks Crack, Family, and the Owl That Saved His Life

I didn’t know what to expect when I met Hunter Biden . Would he have the Secret Service with him? Would he be cold? Would he be an asshole?

Biden, who is in recovery, was coming on my podcast , Dopey: On the Dark Comedy of Drug Addiction . He is exactly the kind of person I like to have on the show. When I started it in 2016 with my friend Chris O’Connor, our plan was to create a podcast all around the worst things we had ever done in active addiction. Chris wound up relapsing and tragically dying from a fentanyl overdose in 2018. I kept the show going, still focused on the insanity of addiction and ways that we can overcome it.

A few weeks ago, I flew to Los Angeles for the interview with Hunter Biden, and we met in a studio in Santa Monica, near where he lives. Biden casually arrived through the sunny back door. He was alone, came in smiling, and gave me a big, warm hug — not a weird, manipulative hug, which can be prevalent in the recovery community. It turned out we had mutual friends, and he knew about my podcast and how we were basically a for-addict-by-addict operation. He was happy to be there, and he fit right in.

I wanted Biden to come on the show because I know he was a drug addict like the other Dopes in the Dopey Nation. His exploits as a crack addict were legendary, his fall was well known and epic. The only difference between his story and our listeners’ stories was that their fathers hadn’t been president, and they haven’t been on the cover of the New York Post more than, as he puts it, “more than anyone else in history.” There is scrutiny, and there is Hunter Biden-level scrutiny. People struggling with addiction often feel the weight of the world on them. In Biden’s case, it kind of was on him. Pictures of him, naked and high, were plastered on TV screens around the world. His father’s political enemies used his problems with crack to try and erode trust in the Biden administration. His addiction or sobriety became connected to the state of our nation. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

How did he get sober? What is it like to have the bar on his recovery set so high? The answers to these questions are very important to our community of addicts and alcoholics, both in and out of recovery.

During the interview, Biden and I covered a lot of ground. There was the basic Recovery 101 stuff, the immense trauma he suffered from losing his mother and sister in a horrific car accident when he was three years old. How his addiction began, and how the death in 2015 of his brother Beau, just 46, pushed him over the edge into crack addiction. And maybe most importantly we spoke of how meeting his now-wife Melissa set him on his current path of over seven years in recovery. We also covered some of his craziest moments using drugs; my favorite being the story of when he moved his crack dealer, whom he called Bicycles, into his apartment, and what it was like when his father, who was then the Vice President of the United States, arrived by presidential motorcade and met Bicycles face to face.