While Covering The State Capitol, He Was ‘Smoking Crack Daily.’

DENVER, CO – By Corey Hutchins for The Colorado Independent. In June, I shared a story about a KUSA 9News TV reporter in Denver who went on camera to talk about his personal struggle with mental health for the first time. Now, another journalist in Colorado is going public about his own demons and how he dealt with them. Vic Vela, a weekend host and reporter for Colorado Public Radio, sat down with Joe Hanel of the Colorado Health Institute for an episode of Hanel’s podcast, The Checkup. On the show, Vela opened up about a secret he kept from his colleagues in the press corps as he covered the Capitol just a few years ago when he was working for a network of community newspapers.

“I was really disguising myself and really putting up appearances … while I’m maintaining a daily drug habit— in my case it was cocaine,” Vela, 41, said on the podcast. “First powder cocaine, and then as things really got worse, then I started smoking crack. And that was not just a daily beast, it was an hourly beast that I had to feed.”

Here’s one exchange between Vela and Hanel, who worked together at the Statehouse in 2013. Hanel didn’t know at the time about Vela’s addiction as they covered marathon legislative hearings under the gold dome, but he said Vela did have a reputation of ghosting:

Vela: “When you’re a reporter with a drug habit like I was, yeah, I would disappear … I would just go sneak into my car and go out into an alley and get high because that’s what I had to do.”
Hanel: “And then come back and go to a press conference with the speaker of the House.”
Vela: “Yeah. No one knew. No one knew. I think everyone dismissed it as, you know, that’s just Vic, that’s just what he does. But — and then I would come in and tell a few jokes, you know, anything to take any sort of attention away from what was really happening.”

On the podcast, which seeks to put a spotlight on addiction and recovery, Vela refers to himself as a onetime functioning addict who could snort his fix and then put on a tie and interview the governor without anyone being the wiser. But “everything was not fine,” he said. “In reality my whole world was just crashing down around me. I was going bankrupt. In fact, I officially went bankrupt.” Cocaine, he said, is expensive.

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