William Cope Moyers knows the beguiling, deceptive, devastating nature of addiction. And he knows the redemption of treatment and long-term recovery.
This is what addiction looks like,” he said, pointing to himself.
“We are good people who need to be treated with compassion, not just punishment. We are good people; we just have a bad disease,” said Moyers to an audience at Minnesota State University Friday night.
Moyers said he had everything — financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually — while he was growing up.
Including loving parents and a famous father, Bill Moyers, a former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson and a journalist who has won 30 Emmys and two Pulitzers.
William C. Moyers, too, was a successful journalist, at CNN. But he privately struggled with an alcohol and drug addiction that had been with him since his high school days.
He received treatment three times but relapsed each time — and relapsed in a big way in 1994, when he was 35, and married with two small children.
His addiction was again taking over his life until, he said, he came to only one conclusion. “There was nothing left for me but to die.”
On a Sunday afternoon he told his wife he needed to run some errands. He bought rock cocaine from a streetcorner dealer and headed to an Atlanta crack house in the most dangerous part of the city. He stayed for four days — and nearly died — before two off-duty police officers hired by his father began pounding on the door, and eventually led him out to a van.
The episode is recounted in Moyers’ book, "Broken": "My father was sitting in the front passenger seat. Turning around to look at me, he saw a thirty-five-year-old crack addict who hadn't shaved, showered, or eaten in four days. A man who walked out on his wife and two young children and ditched his promising career at CNN. A broken shell of a man, a pale shadow of the human being he had raised to be honest, loving, responsible. His firstborn son.
“You're angry,” I said. I didn't know what else to say.
“That's hardly the word for it.” His voice was harsh and cold, like the rain outside. More silence. “There's nothing more I can do,' he said. “I'm finished.”
All these years later, he tells me that's where the conversation ended. But whether I imagined it or not, I heard him say something else.
“I hate you.”
And I remember looking in his eyes and speaking my deepest truth. “I hate me, too.”
Moyers has since that day been sober, after getting treatment at the Hazelden Foundation. For the past 11 years he has been with Hazelden, serving as its vice president of external affairs. He uses his personal stories of addiction and recovery to encourage others to seek help and to change policy and get better insurance coverage for treatment.
Moyers said he is proof that the disease of addiction does not discriminate. “And treatment shouldn’t discriminate, either.”
Moyers has received numerous honors including the highest award given by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence He and his family live in St. Paul.
He was invited by several local groups as part of Alcohol and Drug Recovery Month events in the community.
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