Hunter Biden’s crack cocaine addiction was so severe that he became estranged from his children and their famous father, despite multiple attempts to help him, he recalled.
Things were so bad that he lived in dingy hotel rooms on two beaches with a sleazy entourage and spent nights roaming homeless camps looking for drugs.
It got so bad that he left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware and never got it back, but at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign, an employee handed over the personal information on the hard drive, including lewd images and videos, to former President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They were later made public in the House of Representatives by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
“I am … an alcoholic and a drug addict,” Hunter Biden wrote in the foreword to “Beautiful Things,” his 2021 memoir, which he wrote after four years of extreme substance abuse. In a USA Today op-ed last December, Biden, 54, accused “partisan, vile factions of the public of weaponizing my addiction.”
Biden now describes himself as a recovering addict, but his lawyers say there was a time in 2018 when he wasn’t an addict, when he bought a Colt .38 Special revolver on Oct. 12 and checked “no” on a federal gun control form that asked, “Are you an unlawful user of, or an addict to, marijuana, sedatives, stimulants, narcotics, or other controlled substances?”
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On Monday, the president’s son goes on trial in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, on charges of making false statements on paper. If convicted, Hunter Biden faces up to 25 years in prison. The trial hinges on whether Biden was legally addicted to drugs when he bought the gun, and what definition of that term is acceptable to the judge and jury.
more:Hunter Biden: I fought to get sober. The political weaponization of my addiction hurts me more than I do.
Substance abuse experts, and the law itself, appear divided on whether Biden was truly an addict when he bought the revolver in 2018 and about the changing meaning of addiction.
The trial comes as Biden, who has never held elected office or contested election, is once again at the center of a key presidential campaign and as a months-long effort by Republicans to impeach President Joe Biden has failed in the House of Representatives.
Repeated rehabilitation
In the fall of 2018, Hunter Biden returned to the East Coast after months of desperate drug abuse in California. Sometime that summer, his uncle, James Biden, got him out of his hotel room and into a rehab center, then moved him to a sobriety coach in the hills above Los Angeles.
“It was all wonderful – the beauty, the peace, the support – until the relapse,” he wrote in Beautiful Things. “The lesson learned after that spring and summer of unrelenting debauchery was that there were no lessons to be learned.”
But it was during one of those sober periods that Hunter Biden purchased a handgun and answered federal paperwork honestly, his lawyers said.
“At issue here is Mr. Biden’s understanding of the issue,” Biden’s lawyer, Abe Lowell, wrote in a recent letter to the court. “Someone like Mr. Biden, who completed an 11-day rehabilitation program and has since been living with sober peers, would have been confident that he was not a present tense user or addict.”
Biden’s legal team has not disclosed when or where the 11-day rehab trip took place, but has stressed that it resulted in Biden reasonably believing he was sober.
“Treatment experience” rather than “treatment success”
Some addiction experts aren’t so sure.
“The 11 days are a treatment experience, not a successful treatment,” said Kevin McEnany, a former Phoenix House executive who has worked with people with substance use disorders for 30 years.
“While it may be technically great in a court of law, it’s not accurate in the addiction treatment world,” he added.
“Even if he was 11 days sober, I would still counsel him, ‘Hey, you’re going to have serious health issues for the rest of your life,'” McEneaney said. “I wouldn’t expect him to be drug-addicted.”
“You could argue that you’re not currently addicted to any substance,” Maia Salavitz, author of several books on addiction, said of Biden’s stance. “I don’t think that’s honest at this stage. The problem is that the legal concept of addiction is outdated.”
Is addiction in the eye of the beholder?
“There used to be this idea that, ‘once you’re addicted, you’re addicted for life,'” says Peter Probet, CEO of Odyssey House, a drug treatment center in New York City. “It’s this old idea that once you’re addicted, you’re addicted for life. That’s not necessarily true.”
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And even when they’re not using drugs, the stigma of addiction persists, leading to discrimination in employment, professional qualifications and romantic relationships. “I stopped using drugs when I was 18 but I’ve been labelled as an addict for the rest of my life,” McEneaney says.
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If there is no complete agreement among experts about when and for how long a person remains an “addict,” then neither is there any agreement in the law.
Biden is accused of violating a law written in the present tense that makes it illegal for an “unlawful user or addict” of drugs to possess a firearm.
But federal prosecutors want to define Biden’s drug addiction under a much broader Treasury Department definition that considers someone to be “currently unlawfully using a controlled substance” if there is a “pattern of use or possession that reasonably covers the present,” including failed drug tests in the past year.
Biden’s lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika to withhold the Treasury Department’s definition of harmful from the jury. Her proposed jury instructions, released Saturday, avoid a definition of addiction. Both sides have until Monday morning to challenge her instructions.
Here today, gone tomorrow
Jurors will likely see plenty of evidence of the high-profile defendants’ cocaine use, including inconvenient dating evidence.
Special counsel David Weiss of the Justice Department obtained reams of evidence about Biden’s drug use from his memoir and iCloud computer backups.
The exhibits include a message from Oct. 13, 2018, the day after the gun purchase, in which Biden allegedly wrote he was “waiting for a drug dealer named Mookie,” and another from Oct. 14 in which Biden said he was “asleep in my car smoking crack cocaine.”
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Legally, whether Biden had been drinking may depend on his mental state on the day he purchased the handgun. His lawyers have said he never loaded or used the gun. On October 23, Biden’s then-girlfriend, Hallie Biden, removed a handgun from his car and threw it in a trash can outside a convenience store in Delaware. The gun was retrieved by a man collecting cans and later recovered by police.
“No treatment can cure you unless you absolutely commit to it,” Biden wrote in “Beautiful Things.” “The Big Book of Substance Abuse, written by Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, makes it clear: ‘Half measures are no good.'”
“At this point in my life, I was half-writing a book,” Biden said of the 2018 incident.
From “Where’s the Hunter” to public life
In the end, what Biden found most effective wasn’t AA, nor therapies involving the psychoactive substance ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, a hallucinogen extracted from the secretions of a Sonoran Desert toad, or the antidepressant ketamine.
According to Biden’s book, after four hellish years, in May 2019 he became obsessed with Melissa Cohen, a South African woman who shared the same eyes as his late brother Beau. She confiscated his electronic devices, flushed his drugs and kept his toxic entourage at bay.
Biden says after struggling with drug addiction for years, he got sober in seven days and found a new wife.
After being hounded by Trump and his allies and his privacy destroyed by the leaking of his laptop, Biden is once again a public figure. While Trump yelled “Where’s Hunter?” at a 2020 reelection rally, the president’s son is often seen at his father’s side and at White House events.
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More challenges remain. In addition to the federal firearms trial, Hunter Biden faces federal charges in California for paying $1.4 million in back taxes. He has since paid the tax to the government. Both the firearms and tax charges stem from the collapse of a plea deal between Biden and federal prosecutors last summer. The tax trial is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on September 5, just before a scheduled debate between Joe Biden and Trump.
Hunter Biden is also embroiled in a multimillion-dollar child support dispute with his ex-wife, Kathleen Buehl, who is scheduled to testify for the prosecution in his gun trial.
Biden sometimes uses the term when talking about recovery moments from addiction, but he has not written in those terms about his own recovery.
“He doesn’t see himself through a 12-step lens. He attributes his recovery to falling in love,” author Saravitz says. “That’s a valid way to recover.”
