Son Hunter Biden was on crack as Joe Biden launched White House bid

At the time Joe Biden was announcing his run for the presidency, his son was a crack addict who found himself at the end of a gun.

Joe Biden and his son Hunter in 2010. Picture: Getty Images

At the time Joe Biden was announcing his run for the presidency, his son Hunter was a crack addict who found himself at the end of a gun while trying to buy the drug in a homeless camp.

In a memoir to be released next week Hunter writes how his fate was transformed when a friend introduced him to Melissa Cohen, the South African filmmaker he married six days later.

Biden, 51, the younger son of the US president, became a target during the election campaign for his lucrative job on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company. In Beautiful Things, for which he was paid a rumoured seven-figure sum, he admits he obtained the role because of his surname.

Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Beau Biden in 2009. Picture: AFP

Burisma considered that the Biden name was “gold”, he writes. “To put it more bluntly, having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakeable f***-you to Putin,” he says.

But he insists: “The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and landed me in the heart of the decade’s biggest political fable is most remarkable for its epic banality.”

There is little in the book about his tangled business dealings. Biden does detail the breakdown of his first marriage after the death from cancer of his brother, Beau, and his subsequent relationship with Hallie, his widowed sister-in-law.

“Our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for love we both had lost,” he writes, according to excerpts in The New York Times.

“Its dissolution only deepened that tragedy.” Biden says he does not blame his drug problem on the car crash in which his mother and younger sister were killed in 1972: “That would be a cop-out.”

In the prologue he writes: “I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington DC. Guns have been put in my face.”

He says his father always stood by him and tried to help. After a gun scare in Los Angeles he returned to the family home in Delaware, where his father chased him down the driveway. “He grabbed me, swung me around and hugged me,” he writes. “He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time.”

The Times