The Trojan Horse of Addiction with William C. Moyers

**Dr. Drew** (0:10)
Hey, everybody, welcome to The Dr. Drew Podcast. Appreciate you being here. I appreciate the support of the people that support us, including our guest when they promote their books. Today's guest is no exception as William Moyers. He has a new book, first book, which I do suggest you get also is called Broken. It's his memoir. That was his first book, but there's some new, well, Life Gets Lived, and he gets chronicled. Gonna hear now in a new book called Broken Open. His journey into the 19 years since Broken, which is really interesting to me. Of course, William Moyers, the VP of Public Affairs for Hazelton Betty Ford Foundation. He has been a leader and a champion in the recovering community for a long time. There's always a lot for he and I to talk about. So William, thank you for being here.

**William Moyers** (0:53)
Oh, Drew, thanks for having me. Thank you for letting me carry this message to your audience.

**Dr. Drew** (0:59)
So let's start with, I guess we should start with Broken so you can sketch what's in Broken and then let's get on into Broken Open, which will be available in September, by the way.

**William Moyers** (1:08)
Yeah, so I wrote Broken in 2005, 2006 It was my first book, a memoir. You know how hard it is to write books. But I had a journalism background and so I wrote my book that was really a story about addiction and redemption, which is typically what most addiction memoirs are, right?
You go down and then you go up and you live happily ever after. But I wrote that book and it was very popular. It was the New York Times Best Seller and it really chronicled what it was like to grow up in a family of means and prominence. My father, the journalist Bill Moyers, he and my mother still living, 70 years married, all that stuff. And yet I had a brain that was susceptible to substances. I smoked marijuana as a teenager in the 70s and 15 years later, I'm living in a crack house and dying in a crack house in Harlem. That was that story, Drew. Basically, what happens when addiction takes over, I was very fortunate, I had access to treatment, not once, twice, not three times, four times, I had to go to treatment over five years. And then I recovered in 1994 and got a job two years later at Hazel and became a public advocate and used my story to carry the message. You know, that's where you and I had first met when you were doing your journalism back then, and you had me on a couple of times. And I carried the message and I was pretty good at it. And it was a happy forever story until the rest of life.

**Dr. Drew** (2:40)
Until it was, until life comes at you. Well, let me let you before you go into the next chapters, so to speak, a couple of things I want to drill on. One was you said you had four treatments across five years. Are you aware, per John Kelly at Harvard, that that is the average for a severe alcoholic to get one year of sobriety?

**William Moyers** (2:59)
Yes. And John actually is a real influencer in our field of addiction treatment and recovery. He actually recently lectured at Hazel and Betty Ford and gave the commencement at our graduate school. So John's spot on and I feel like I'm right in the range of averages, four times, and I got it, you know?

**Dr. Drew** (3:16)
Yeah. I always tell people to just stick with it, you know? I mean, if you did two years of continuous treatment, well, okay, you might be able to supplant, you know, do better than average or even a year of continuous treatment, but most people don't do that.

**William Moyers** (3:30)
Well, and the other thing about it is, you know, because addiction ravages not just the individual, but the family, when it comes time to get well, people who are sick want to get well that first time, and their families want to get well and be done with it, but it doesn't happen that way any more than it happens with other chronic illnesses.

**Dr. Drew** (3:47)
Yes. There's actually a name for it. It's called the flight to health.

**William Moyers** (3:51)
Yes.

**Dr. Drew** (3:53)
And as physicians were guilty of it, as family members were guilty of it, and I've been in both positions as family and physician. And even when you're aware of it, you watch it. You're like, oh man, it's still happening. I can't make it not happen.