Hunter Biden new memoir details him 'buying crack cocaine on streets of DC and binging on vodka'

Joe Biden’s son Hunter has written about how he would buy crack cocaine on the streets of DC and binge on vodka most mornings while his father was vice president, in a new memoir that offers a frank account of his drug addiction.

Hunter Biden, the president’s second son, has opened up for the first time about his decades-long struggle with alcohol and drugs and how his father helped him on his path to sobriety.

The 51-year-old tells how his first drink was a glass of champagne aged eight, leading to a lifetime of abusing drink and then hard drugs.

“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles,” Hunter, whose mother was Mr Biden's late first wife Neilia, writes in the prologue to “Beautiful Things,” according to excerpts in the New York Times.

“I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig,” he writes in the autobiography.

“In the last five years alone, my marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59 (£43)-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.”

The situation became so bad he even let a homeless addict he bought crack from move in with him.

He tells how he was in and out of rehab in his 20s and relapsed after seven years, effectively ending his lucrative lobbying career. Hunter returned to rehab in his 40s, before relapsing again in 2016 after his older brother Beau died of cancer.

His father, who was then US Vice President under Barack Obama, arrived at his home and said, “I know you’re not fine, Hunter. You need help.”

Hunter recalls: “He grabbed me, swung me around and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time. He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got — and believe me, from there they would get much, much worse.”

Private videos and emails from Hunter’s laptop were leaked to the press last year, when Mr Biden was campaigning for the 2020 election.

Hunter insists he is now sober, and credits new wife Melissa Cohen and their young son for his sobriety.