Hunter Biden blames Ambien for Joe's debate performance
Biden also talked extensively about his own drug use in the sit-down, including how he learned how to make his own crack. 'I know exactly what happened in that debate,' Biden said. 'He flew around the world. He's 81 years old. He's tired. They gave him Ambien to be able to sleep and he gets up on the stage and looks like a deer in the headlights.' The then president blamed his lousy June 27, 2024 performance on a cold, though had spent several days at Camp David resting up ahead of the Atlanta showdown with now President Donald Trump. It wasn't enough to quiet the calls for him to drop out.
The former first son remained bitter about what happened to his father, though told Callaghan he was able to remain sober the whole time. Biden said he was just over six years sober after spending about three years, after the 2015 death of his brother Beau, in the pits of addiction to alcohol and crack. 'This is like a PSA - if you want to completely, utterly [expletive] up your life,' Biden said, crack would do the job. 'The only difference between crack and cocaine is sodium bicarbonate and water and heat,' he explained. 'You can go to a your neighborhood convenience store and just get - anyway, I don't want to tell people how to make, how to make crack, but it literally is a mayonnaise jar of [class A drug] and baking soda.'
Biden said the high is extremely intense on crack. 'It's vastly, vastly different,' the recovering addict admitted. 'I feel really reluctant to kind of have some euphoric discussion, I know you're not asking me to do that, have some euphoric discussion about crack,' he continued, with Callaghan saying that he was not. 'I don't want to have the experience of some euphoric recall - that's how powerful crack is,' Biden admitted. The former first son said that crack had a dirty reputation but 'it's the exact opposite.' 'When you make crack, what you're doing is you're burning off all the impurities,' he explained.
Biden said his addiction in earnest started in 2016, when he left an alcohol recovery program over a row with staff and found his former dealer 'Bicycles' in a downtown Washington, D.C. park who sold him crack. 'Now there are periods where I would stop. I would try and get help or half try and get help or appease people in my life and say that I was getting help. And so I did a whole host of things to try and pull myself out of it. I did try,' he remembered.
'And people would come in and out of my web and try and help me, and my level of toxicity would drag them down until they would disappear. And then people that would come into my life that were nothing but blood sucking leeches that would literally saw vulnerability and latch on and drain me literally of everything that I had, from emotional well-being to my physical well-being to my bank account and that was the ebb and flow for almost three years until I met Melissa,' he continued, referencing his wife Melissa Cohen.
Cohen and Biden had a whirlwind romance in 2019, marrying shortly after they met, with the South African filmmaker helping him get sober. Prior to that, Biden recalled a particularly scary moment when he was found in a hotel swimming pool floating face down. 'Someone had given me something,' he recalled. 'And this person saved me and I woke up after about 12 hours where they just held me.'
'My whole point of this story is that this person put themselves at an enormous risk,' he continued, explaining that if he had overdosed and died, the individual could have been blamed. 'They saved my life for nothing other than to be human, because every single other person that was there, literally, they stole my shoes, they stole my clothes,' the former first son recalled.
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