Joe Biden’s son Hunter has detailed the drug and alcohol addiction problems that played a role in the end of his marriage, his discharge from the Navy Reserve, and his absence from the 2020 campaign trail.
Divorced in 2017 after a 23-year marriage, Hunter Biden, 49, is the father of Naomi, 25, Finnegan, 19, and Maisy, 18. He recently married Melissa Cohen, 32, a South African divorcee, in secret just 10 days after he’d met her, marking the occasion with a “shalom” tattoo in Hebrew on the inside of his left bicep, to match one she has in the same spot.
Shortly afterwards, it emerged that he faced a paternity suit from a 28-year-old Arkansas woman. He denies ever having met her.
Speaking about his struggles in interviews with the New Yorker, the son of the former vice president said he began drinking socially and occasionally used cocaine at Georgetown University in the early 1990s.
He was once sold crack when trying to buy cocaine but didn’t have a pipe to smoke it from.
“I didn’t have a stem,” Biden said. “I didn’t have a pipe.” He used a cigarette, but said “it didn’t have much of an effect.”
In 2001, Biden commuted between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Delaware, for work. He would rent a room at the Army and Navy Club if he missed the last train because he was drinking.
“When I found myself making the decision to have another drink or get on a train, I knew I had a problem,” he said.
In 2003, his wife, Kathleen, whom he had married in 1993, told him he needed to get sober, asking him to stay drink and drug free for a month. “And I wouldn’t drink for thirty days, but, on day thirty-one, I’d be right back to it,” he said. Kathleen filed for divorce in December 2016.
Biden looked up rehab centers during a business trip in September 2003 and admitted himself to Crossroads Centre Antigua for a month. The day after he returned home, his brother Beau went with him to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Washington.
By his account, he was sober for seven years before drinking three bloody marys on a flight home from a business trip in Madrid in November 2010. His drinking continued until he returned to Crossroads Centre several months later.
Hunter Biden relapsed again in 2013 when he had shingles and was on painkillers and began drinking again when the prescription ran out.
He claims that in May 2013, on his first weekend of Navy Reserve duty, he stopped at a bar near the White House and, when outside asked two men who said they were from South Africa for a cigarette. Biden said as he was driving to Norfolk to report for Reserve duty, he felt “amped up” and then “incredibly exhausted.” His brother Beau drove from Delaware to a Norfolk hotel and “got me shipshape and drove me into the base.”
Biden was given a drug test on his first day and cocaine was detected. The former vice president’s son said he does not know how the drug got in his system and suggested the cigarette he was given outside the bar had been laced with the drug. He decided that his drug history meant and appeal against his instant dismissal would be futile and he was discharged from the Navy on Feb. 18, 2014.
In July 2014, he went to a clinic in Tijuana for a treatment using ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid derived from the roots of a West African shrub that is illegal in the U.S. He then went to Flagstaff, Arizona, where a practitioner of Vedic meditation advised him to meditate twice a day to help keep “his cravings for alcohol at bay.” In the fall, he enrolled in a twelve-step yoga retreat at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
Beau Biden died of brain cancer at age 46 on May 30, 2015. A week later, after the funeral, Hunter Biden told his wife he was thinking of running for public office. According to the New Yorker: “She pointed out that he had only recently been discharged from the Navy after testing positive for cocaine. They rode the rest of the way home in silence.”
Hunter and Kathleen had agreed in couples therapy during summer 2015 that he would move out of the house if he started drinking again. After one session he drank a bottle of vodka and moved out. During a trip to Norway later that month he drank a shot of liquor each night before bed, angering his wife.
Biden enrolled as an outpatient in the Charles O’Brien Center for Addiction Treatment at the University of Pennsylvania in July 2015. There he was given a drug to lessen his cravings and another to make him nauseated if he drank. He then enrolled as an inpatient program at Caron Treatment Centers. He began a program upon returning to Washington that required him to carry a Breathalyzer with a built-in camera.
During this period, he became close to Beau’s widow, Hallie, explaining: “We were sharing a very specific grief,” Hunter recalled. “I started to think of Hallie as the only person in my life who understood my loss.”
He practiced yoga daily until December 2015. For weeks he would only leave his apartment to buy bottles of Smirnoff vodka, he said. His father called him several times a day to check in. The vice president eventually showed up uninvited at his apartment. “I need you,” Biden says his father told him. “What do we have to do?”
Hunter Biden went back to Esalen Institute in February 2016 and enrolled in a rehab program run by the Kolmac Outpatient Recovery Center when he returned to Washington.
Outside Kolmac, he met a middle-aged homeless woman who went by the name Bicycles, because of the bike she took with her everywhere, and she stayed with him for several months.
He used cocaine a few months later when he was at a hotel night club in Monte Carlo and, he said, a stranger offered it to him in the bathroom. He told Kolmac about the relapse, but refused to take a drug test, citing his concern that it would be used against him and leaked to the press, and left the program.
In fall 2016, Biden was on his way to Grace Grove Lifestyle Center, a wellness retreat in Sedona, Arizona, when he forgot his wallet on the plane during a layover in Los Angeles. During his weeklong stay in Los Angeles, he says he asked a homeless man where he could buy crack. The man brought him to a homeless encampment, where someone put a gun to Biden’s head before realizing he wanted to buy drugs. Biden returned several times that week to buy crack.
He made his way to Arizona driving a rental car after not sleeping for days. An employee for the rental car company said he found a crack pipe and white powder residue in the car Biden returned.
Hallie Biden flew down to meet him at a resort spa called Mii Amo and they decided to become a couple. They began living together in Annapolis, Maryland August 2017 but split a few months later. “All we got was shit from everybody, all the time,” Hunter said. “It was really hard. And I realized that I’m not helping anybody by sticking around.” He moved to Los Angeles in early 2018.
News of the 2016 police report from the rental car incident broke on May 17, 2019, a day before Biden was scheduled to appear his father’s 2020 campaign launch. Biden skipped the event and has acknowledged that his presence on the campaign trail could damage his father’s presidential ambitions.
“The notion that I’m not standing next to him in Philadelphia, next to the Rocky statue, it’s heartbreaking for me. It’s killing me and it’s killing him. Dad says, ‘Be here.’ Mom says, ‘Be here.’ But at what cost?” Biden said.
His experiences, he said, were similar to those of many. “Look, everybody faces pain,” he said. “Everybody has trauma. There’s addiction in every family. I was in that darkness. I was in that tunnel—it’s a never-ending tunnel. You don’t get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it.”
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