He was the face of addiction recovery. Then he got hooked on opioids.

Viewers of "Dopesick," a 2021 TV miniseries drama about the damage wrought by opioid addiction, may recall that even the well-meaning small-town doctor who prescribed OxyContin to his patients without realizing its dangers eventually gets hooked himself.

If there's anyone harder than that doctor to imagine succumbing to opioids' addictive powers it might be William Cope Moyers, a "public face" of addiction and recovery.

Moyers, who is 65 and lives in St. Paul, is a vice president at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the nationally known treatment organization based in Center City, Minn. (He's also the son of longtime journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers.) He gives public talks, is contacted often by people seeking help with their dependency and has written books on the subject.

Best known is 2007′s bestselling "Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption," an account of his alcohol and cocaine addiction. The book follows his several recovery attempts before eventually achieving sobriety in 1994.

So nobody, including Moyers, expected him to get addicted to a new substance almost 20 years later.

How that addiction happened and how he overcame it is the subject of his new book, "Broken Open: What Painkillers Taught Me About Life and Recovery." He tells about being prescribed Percocet when undergoing a series of grueling dental procedures. The pills relieved his pain — and more.

"I could feel the pain evaporate, picturing tender wisps rising above my body to dissipate like smoke in the air of the dim room," Moyers writes. "I felt easy, warm, content, happy, complete. I was smiling again. I may even have whispered out loud, 'Life is good.'"

Moyers talked to the Star Tribune about his journey, including why people should not feel shame about "relapsing" and why a drug that eliminates cravings should not be stigmatized in the recovery community. (His comments have been edited for length and clarity.)

Deciding to get personal

The St. Paul Downtown Rotary Club invited me to come and speak [in 1997, 10 years before the first book came out], because I was a Rotarian and they wanted to talk about alcoholism in the workplace. As I was speaking, I looked over that ballroom, and I was losing my audience. They were all falling asleep on me.

I realized in that moment that if I was going to salvage my very first public talk, I'd better get personal. And it was on that day that I decided that I would tell my story.

Those people did not know that I was recovering alcoholic and an addict. And when I told them that story, I woke them up. I was like, "Oh, that's how you carry the message. That's how you smash stigma. That's how you promote treatment and recovery, by telling your story." That's how I became a public face for the organization.

Addiction is always lurking

I was aware that I have an illness that is "cunning, baffling and powerful," as we call it. And I also know it's an illness that's patient. It waits.

But I had no desire to go back to the crack house. I had no desire to take a drink. I love my recovery. I owe my whole existence to it, and I've been pursuing recovery for more than half of my life. Why would I want to turn my back on that? So I had a healthy respect for the illness. I didn't fear it because I can't live my life in fear, but I knew from hearing other people's stories that, you know, it's always lurking.

Why an alcoholic was prescribed pain meds

I was seen as a solid member of the recovery community; I had decades of recovery. I'm a public advocate. I work for Hazelden. I should have been more careful, but honestly, I was suffering [with pain from the dental procedure]. The epidemic was fueled by dentists and doctors who didn't realize the power of oxycodone or Percocet or tramadol. And candidly, the doctors who knew me and were working on me, not only did they know who I was, but several of them were also experts on recovery with a personal perspective. So I'm not going to find any fault with them any more than I'm going to find any fault with me.

Opioids took the edge off

I liked them because they took care of the pain. But I also liked them because they took the edge off. I had no desire to escape reality by going to the crack house. I had no desire to take a drink because I knew that my history with alcohol was not good. But the pain meds were clean. They were easy. They were legal.

I'd had a pretty rocky period in there where my marriage fell apart. I became a single dad of three busy children. I had a 60-hour-a-week job. I had a lot of stuff going on. And they worked in terms of just taking the edge off the sharpness of my life.

Opioids are 'a different beast'

One of the "truisms" in the recovery community is "a drug is a drug is a drug." It doesn't matter when it comes to our relationship with addictive substances, a drug is a drug is a drug.

That's not true. Opiates are drug of a different beast. They play on the mind in a way that's very different than any other thing I'd ever experienced. You crave them beyond anything you can imagine. And it's why so many people that develop dependency end up scoring heroin on the street or taking a pill that they don't know what's in it. And that's why there's so many deaths.

An anti-craving drug worked

Suboxone was like a magic bullet. I was like "Oh, OK, I'm done, yeah." Now I know that in my own addiction and in my own recovery, that there's more to it than just taking a pill or medication, that there are other aspects of my illness that I need to address, which is why I had a basket of resources.

I had the medication, yes, but I also had my faith. I had [the 12] steps. I had a lot of what I call recovery capital and those things were just as important as the medication. It's just that the medication was important because it allowed me to clear my head, literally and figuratively.

Standard recovery practices fell short

Opiates are different, especially for this addict and alcoholic. I was sort of fascinated by that dynamic within, which was like, "Well, why can't I just do this the way I did it with crack cocaine and alcohol? Shame on me. Why can't I go to my step meeting and get the answer?"

It was baffling to me because I had decades of sobriety at that point. And yet, I'm just as addicted as anybody else would be. And it's like, "Wait a minute. What's going on here?" I would share that in meetings, and people would be like, "Well, you've just got to get on your knees and pray hard," or "You've got to go to more meetings" or "You've got to go for a walk around the lake." And I was like, "Man, I've been doing that, and it's not working."

It was also why I had so much shame around it. Because I was like, "Come on, man, what's wrong with you? Why can't you pull out of this dive, like you've pulled out of dives before?"

The unfair stigma of 'relapse'

Relapse has been terribly stigmatized. It's such a shaming term because it suggests failure. If you relapse, you are expected to start over again. And I was like, "Start over again? I'm not going to start over again."

We don't tell women with breast cancer who've had five years of remission, that when the disease of breast cancer comes back that, "Well, darn, that was a waste of time." So I couldn't call it a relapse because that's not what it was to me.

Permission to be human

The book as I've written it is my story, as a man in long-term recovery who had this experience and what it means to me. I hope it gives people permission to understand that they, too, are not only human, but that they, too, can have a return to use and not throw everything away, not give up, not be cloaked in shame. That's the messages of the book.