For more than three decades, William Cope Moyers has been focused on recovery. In his 20s and early 30s, Moyers, eldest child of Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary and national TV news commentator, struggled with addictions to alcohol and crack cocaine. He detailed those dark days, along with his recovery journey, in “Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption,” his 2006 New York Times bestselling memoir.
Today, in his role as vice president of public affairs and community relations for Hazelden Betty Ford, Moyers, 65, is a nationally known voice of recovery advocacy. He regularly travels around the country, speaking to audiences who are inspired by his story.
It would seem that Moyers has his recovery locked down, but in reality, for several years, starting in 2013, he struggled with an addiction to opioid-based pain medication that had been prescribed to him following dental surgery. In his new memoir, “Broken Open: What Painkillers Taught Me About Life and Recovery” (Hazelden Publishing), Moyers decided to come clean about his struggle — and about his decision to use the opioid agonist Suboxone to reduce his cravings.
Moyers, who lives in St. Paul, now sees this as just one step in his long, ongoing recovery journey, but it took him a long time to come to terms with that decision. Moyers believes that he is not alone: He says that many other Baby Boomers who grew up in the recovery movement have now developed painkiller addictions. He wants to share his latest story to show others that they aren’t alone.
“I’ve been doing this kind of work for 35 years in one way, shape or form,” Moyers said. “Helping other people helps me. I wrote this book because we need to talk about these issues and what happens decades later.”
Recently, I spoke with Moyers about his history in the recovery community, his family and career, and his decision to come clean about his more recent struggles with addiction. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
MinnPost: I’ve always known you as an outspoken recovery advocate, and yet you detail in this book what was really happening, that for many of the years we’ve known each other, you were struggling with addiction. That surprised me.
William Cope Moyers: Yeah. I was struggling in an unusual way. I was struggling with sobriety as I understood it: What I wasn’t struggling with was my recovery. Somebody asked me, ‘William, what did you think about living a double life?’ I was taken aback by that. To me, I wasn’t living a double life. I was living another chapter of my life.
Yeah, there were huge, jagged pieces that had come apart. Not just my struggle with pain meds, but other parts of my life. And I couldn’t understand it, because that wasn’t what I expected. I still loved my recovery. I didn’t make a sharp right turn and go to the crack house. I didn’t go to the bar. I loved being a recovering person. But I had this inability to get off the damn pain meds of my own free will or through my faith or through my 12-step program.
And I was like, “What? Wait a minute. How does that work?” Everything I knew about sobriety I knew through my four treatments over five years — which were all abstinence-based 12-step-oriented — including two at Hazelden. It wasn’t like I turned my back on the 12 steps, or my higher power, or the recovery community, it was just that I could not figure out how this was happening and why it wasn’t like anything else that had happened. I didn’t think I was living a double life. I had a lot of secrecy, because I was filled with shame, I was baffled and I didn’t know how to explain it. I did not know how to explain it.
MP: Did you see what was happening as an addiction? When I read the book, it seems like you acknowledged that it was an addiction.
WCM: Oh, yeah. Because there was the incident, and my journals are paramount in my ability to inform that in real time, when I took a plus-one. That’s a big moment. Because the directions on the bottle say what they say for a reason. But then I took a plus-one.
MP: You could justify that the meds were prescribed for pain, and you were doing that, but then you took more than you were instructed to take, so that was a problem?
WCM: I liked them. And I liked them because they were clean, they were easy and they took the edge off of the sharp parts of my life, which have always been my M.O., you know. I reinvented myself when I came here.
MP: You definitely did, and that was your identity as this person who’s been successfully in recovery for many years. So what made you think, eventually, “I’ve got to write a book about this?”
WCM: Because I’ve always been a public advocate, and my story is my vocation. And my vocation is my story. I’m not an accountant. I’m not a journalist. I’m not a dentist. I’m not a chef. I’m a public advocate for Hazelden Betty Ford. And if I’m going to lead with my story, I need to make sure that my story is authentic and relevant and current. So that’s why I wrote the book.
MP: So you were this public advocate, projecting one image while at the same time actually having something else going on.
WCM: Sure. But I often would say to audiences, “I had a little run-in with pain meds.” I often said that, and nobody bit on that. And what would’ve happened if somebody bit on that, and said, “What happened, William?” or, “How are you doing?” Nobody ever did because I looked fine. I sounded good. I still functioned. I was still out there. And that was so different from anything I had ever experienced with substances. In the past, I always disappeared.
MP: Probably lots of people have a prescription or another substance that they are using every day but they don’t necessarily think of it as an addiction.
WCM: Well, here’s the thing: part of what I wrangled with was, “Moyers, how are you going to explain this? What’s the difference between struggling with pain meds and struggling with tobacco?” I never smoked cigarettes, and a lot of people in recovery do. And we at Hazelden still don’t ban smoking on our campuses, and most treatment centers don’t. I thought, “What is the difference between nicotine and opioids for somebody like me who had never used either and considered himself to be a sober person?”
And then there is this other part, which is this God box I had, which is filled with all my medallions. It was made for me by a psych nurse, who heard me speak in the late ‘90s. It has all of these AA-isms on it. I put my dozens of medallions in there. A white chip for the first time I ever stopped drinking. A white chip for the second time I stopped drinking. I had four of those white chips. A one-year medallion. A three-year medallion. I had zillions of medallions. I thought, “Wait a minute. Do I have to throw these all out?”
MP: You mean when you started using pain meds?
WCM: When I had my recurrence of use. I don’t call it a relapse. I call it a recurrence of use. I didn’t relapse on the substances that had led me to recovery. I had a recurrence of use of a substance. Am I parsing it? For me, no. When I went to the Mayo Clinic after I revealed this whole thing on the stage at the Betty Ford Center — the conclusions of the Mayo doctors was that, “He is in continuous remission from his dependence on cocaine and alcohol.” I thought, “Oh. That’s a very interesting phrase: ‘Continuous remission.’” And yet I’ve had this recurrence of use.
I wrote this book because I needed to explain those things. I’m a Baby Boomer. I was born in 1959. A lot of us Boomers came of age in recovery. And now we’re graying out and we’re getting hips replaced and we’re losing our spouses and we’re retiring and we’re dealing with all this stuff called “older age.” And with that comes these kinds of challenges, and I figured, “I’ve got to write a book about this because I’m one of them.” And there’s a lot of people like me. There are a lot of people like me, been sober for decades, all the sudden they have this issue.
MP: How did you decide how to tell your story?
WCM: I first sold this book to Penguin Random House in 2018. People had been saying for years, “You should write a follow-up to ‘Broken.’” Some of those people who were saying that were saying that because they knew the rest of my story, before the pain meds. And some were saying after I had disclosed the pain meds. At first, I wasn’t ready to write a book. Then finally I started down that path. I turned the book in a year later, and Penguin Random House sent it back and said, “That’s good. This is terrible. You need to do this. You need to do that.”
And then the pandemic hit, and I never could finish it.
MP: But you’d gotten a payment already.
WCM: A big payment. I sold the book for a lot of money. And I owed them that money back. And I didn’t have it. I’d spent it. I’d paid taxes on it. I paid my agent on it. But finally, in 2021, I went back to Penguin Random house and said, “I need the book back. I need it back for a couple of reasons. First, the book you want is not the book I can write. Two, I have a different perspective now.” And we also have a new CEO at Hazelden, Dr. Joseph Lee, and the way he was talking resonated with some of the experiences I had on my journey. So I sold the book to Hazelden for nothing.
MP: To me, it’s such a balance you’re striking here. You’re writing about what you’re going through, and then about your struggles with your employer and then this book is being published by your employer.
WCM: Isn’t that beautiful? Because you know what? Dr. Lee is right. We are an evolving organization and we will always hang the 12 Steps on the wall. Of course we will. They’re a good pathway to recovery. But we recognize that there are many pathways to recovery, including the use of FDA-approved medication.
So this book sort of fits. Even as we celebrate our 75th anniversary, we’ve got to look forward to the next 75 years, and what that suggests is we need to be innovative in the same way that we were innovative back in 2011 when Dr. Seppala, who was our chief medical officer, instituted our opioid-dependent treatment, COR-12. I remember when that was rolled out, and I thought, “Ha. Ha. Good. OK. Fine. That’s for those people.” And then, who’da thunk it? Here I would come along with all the recovery capital I had, all the love of 12-Step recovery and the platform I had at Hazelden, my life as a recovering person, and yet all of those things were not enough to get me back on track. I needed that same medication.
MinnPost: Isn’t it a core debate among people in recovery that taking a medication like Suboxone every day for the rest of your life is actually another kind of addiction?
WCM: When I first revealed onstage at the Betty Ford Center what had happened to me with pain meds, I thought, “This is fantastic. It’ll be great!”, but it actually blew up in my face. There was a lot of recoil on the part of some of my colleagues, including some suggestion that until I was sober again I shouldn’t speak for the organization.
This book is as much a part of my evolution as anything else I’ve experienced. I think I’ve been walking this walk for 35 years. I’m 65 years old. More than half of my life has been connected to this thing called addiction and this thing called recovery. And thank goodness I’ve stayed teachable. Because if not I’d be dead or I might have gone back to the crack house or I might have quit my job at Hazelden or I might not have written this book. But because even at my older age I can still be open to change, here I am. And I think this book reflects that evolution.
MP: So you feel like if you would’ve continued your trajectory of addiction to pain medication, it could’ve sent you down a really dangerous path?
WCM: I don’t know. They always talk about addiction being cunning, baffling and powerful. It’s also very patient. It waits. What would’ve happened to me? Who knows? I love my recovery. It’s who I am.
MP: It really defines who you are in so many ways, right?
WCM: I was a good newspaper journalist in the 1980s and in 1989, August the 5th, I’m living in a crack house in Harlem, New York. In 1989 I came out of that crack house and went into a psychiatric ward. And ever since then, 35 years now, there hasn’t been a single day I haven’t thought about my recovery, my journey, how lucky, blessed, fortunate I am that it worked out. With the pain meds, I knew I had a problem, but as soon as I found the solution, it turned out to be a prescription medication. I was like, “Whoa. Whoa. I don’t take meds for anything else except for a little heart issue.”
I think there’s something like 6,000 people a day turning 65 years old this year. I’m one of them. There’s a subset in there of people who found recovery at 18 or 20 or 30 and so we’re graying out and I don’t think the addiction-treatment industry is anywhere close to being prepared to deal with us as we deal with all those things we talked about, including surgeries.
I have been meeting a lot of people who were sober for decades and all of the sudden they retire and the next thing you know they’re playing golf. And the next thing you know they’re on the 19th hole. Or they’ve lost a spouse and all of the sudden that hole they had with the loss of a loved one they’re filling it with a couple of pills or an extra drink at 5:00. When I had my recurrence of use, I thought, “I’m still successful. I’m not a bum. I haven’t dropped out of life.” But I would probably be a statistical failure if somebody was to measure my success.
MP: Does it feel hard to have this part of your story out there?
WCM: It does feel hard to admit it, because one of my defects of character is I’m a perfectionist. I have two things that make me addicted: One is I have a brain that’s vulnerable to substances. I didn’t ask for it but I got it. It’s a genetic predisposition. I have to own up to it. The other thing I have is a hole in my soul. I want to always be good. So there’s other things in the book that talk about my flaws. One of the things is I had an affair. What a shock. When that happened to me back in 2005 I’d been sober for 11 years. What? Sober people don’t do that?
MP: I think plenty of sober people do that.
WCM: We’re human. I’m not excusing that, but that was unacceptable to me. But I did it. And my marriage fell apart. The woman I loved, I had to experience heartache like I had never known because I was sober. I felt it. I’ve always said the only thing more difficult than living life sober is living life drunk. Take away the drunk and life is hard for all of us, but God, I had an affair. My wife decided to leave us after three or four years of fighting hard. I was left to be a single dad of three kids. All of that took the varnish off of who I’d like to project. But I think that’s the point. That stuff happened.
MP: It sounds like in the last few years you’ve struggled with some health issues that come with aging, like your dental surgeries. Those are the kind of things that could send somebody who’s prone to addiction back to use.
MCM: Absolutely. I was really lucky. I had what I called an IRA: an Individual Recovery Account. We pay into Social Security, we have a pension, we have an IRA, not with the assumption that we’re never going to draw down on it. We have it because we are going to draw down on it someday. Well, guess what? For recovering people it’s important that we invest in our individual recovery accounts, because the day will come when we draw down on them, too. Here I am. I’ve drawn down on mine. I’m really fortunate I have a lot invested in there.
MP: So when you say “invested,” do you mean your friends in the recovery community?
WCM: Yeah. And all the things I do help people and my advocacy and my connecting up there and all the things that make me a person in recovery are part of what results in me having a pretty rich individual recovery account. So when I took the pain meds, when I stumbled morally, when I went through the heartache of a divorce I didn’t want, I drew down on it. I had a lot in there. I didn’t want to go back to the insanity of the past, but addiction is addiction: It’s hard to beat.
Andy Steiner
Andy Steiner is a Twin Cities-based writer and editor. Before becoming a full-time freelancer, she worked as senior editor at Utne Reader and editor of the Minnesota Women’s Press. Email her at asteiner@minnpost.com.
