HUNTER BIDEN, THE son of former US vice president Joe Biden, has revealed personal details of his history with drug addiction with the New Yorker, saying the stories would otherwise emerge during his father’s presidential campaign. 

Joe Biden, the current frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has repeatedly faced family tragedy during his decades in public office.

“Through weeks of conversations, [Hunter Biden] became increasingly open about his setbacks, aware that many of the stories that he told me would otherwise emerge, likely in a distorted form, in Breitbart or on ‘Hannity’,” the article said. 

The article outlined that Biden wanted to “protect his father from a trickle of disclosures, and to share a personal narrative that he sees no reason to hide”.

“Look, everybody faces pain,” Biden 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.”

In the New Yorker article, Biden admits that his battle with drugs dates back to the early nineties.

“When he was a student at Georgetown, in the early nineties, he took up smoking Marlboro Red cigarettes, and occasionally used cocaine,” the article said.

Biden also revealed that he was once held at gunpoint while trying to buy crack cocaine while he was staying in Los Angeles for about a week in 2016. 

Soon after his arrival in Los Angeles, Biden asked a homeless man in Pershing Square where he could buy crack, the article said. 

“Hunter said that the man took him to a nearby homeless encampment, where, in a narrow passageway between tents, someone put a gun to his head before realizing that he was a buyer. He returned to buy more crack a few times that week,” it said.

Biden said that he “needed a way to forget”, according to the piece.

“He returned to buy more crack a few times that week,” the article continues in a section detailing a period of drug use and tumult in Biden’s life.

Biden was only occasionally in the public eye during his father’s time as vice president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.

Joe Biden (76) leads in polling among the two-dozen candidates running for the Democratic nomination to face US President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Shortly after first winning election to the Senate in 1972, Biden lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash that also left Hunter and his brother Beau Biden badly injured.

Beau became a rising star in the Democratic party but succumbed to cancer in 2015, an event that derailed Biden’s expected bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Includes reporting by - © AFP 2019