(CNN) Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 contender and former Vice President Joe Biden, opened up about his struggle with addiction in a new interview released Monday, saying he did so in part to get ahead of future stories which could impact his father.

"Look, everybody faces pain," Hunter Biden told The New Yorker's Adam Entous. "Everybody has trauma. There's addiction in every family. I was in that darkness. I was in that tunnel -- it's a never-ending tunnel. You don't get rid of it. You figure out how to deal with it."

In an extensive and deeply personal interview with The New Yorker, Hunter Biden, 49, details his abuse of alcohol and drugs, which included first using cocaine while in college at Georgetown.

The youngest Biden son, whose older brother, Beau , died after a battle with brain cancer in 2015, has been in and out of rehab several times. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine.

During one stretch where Hunter Biden was drinking heavily, he said, his father came to his Washington apartment unannounced to check in on him, saying, " 'I need you. What do we have to do?' "

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