1. It quieted a fear I had carried since I was a kid sounds less stupid than, I was stupid and could get away with it.
2. Does anyone fully believe his usage of past tense?
Deep down, I have a certain empathy regarding drug addicts (alcoholics fall into this classification as well I thing) who by any other measure would be everyday people. Maybe applying my own brand of logic steers me wrong here, but it seems that most common people who wind up like this start out using the shi* for pain relief, be it physical or emotional. And as is almost always the case, people doing it for these purposes end up trashed, stuck there, or eventually dead. I can't imagine anyone setting out to purposefully transform themselves into a drug addict. There is always some sort of underlying problem at the root of it all with some exceptions. The rich kid syndrome, for example... who starts out just doing it for fun and has no other limits or controls would be one of those exceptions, and likely where Hunter Biden falls if I had to take a wild guess. By all accounts made public, HB appears to be almost as big of a crooked, criminal piece of shi* as his father, and you can't trust him any further than you could throw him.
