Brian Cuban: Author, Lawyer, Speaker, Addiction Recovery Advocate

We were thrilled to host Brian Cuban, the Dallas attorney, author and addiction recovery advocate, as our December 2024 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Brian came back a week after his novel The Body Brokers was published, and opened by saying he was here to talk about his journey, not the book. You can watch the full recording above.

Give it the hour if you are still telling everybody you are fine, if you are the spouse who has started counting and pretending not to, or if you came home sober and nobody has asked you a real question since. Brian spent twenty years as the first one, and he is exact about the other two, because his girlfriend is the one who found him and his brothers are the ones who took him to a psychiatric hospital.

What addiction looked like inside a working law practice

June 2006. The Mavericks were headed to the NBA Finals for the first time, his brother Mark owned the team, and Brian could get seats. He asked for two extra tickets for friends, and never gave them to friends.

I took those tickets and traded them to my cocaine dealer for a thousand dollars and blow.

That was his twentieth year in practice. What happens next involves a home improvement store, a drill and a set of electrical faceplates, and we will let him tell it.

The reason it belongs here is not the spectacle. He is blunt about the privilege he had, a billionaire brother and good insurance among it, and how little of it saved him. He used cocaine in the federal courthouse and the state courthouse, and once on the shoulder of a highway before a jury trial. He failed the bar three times, went to jail, and lost every client he had. Nobody put it together until he could no longer hide it, which is what most of our members recognize.

Why he traces the addiction back to childhood shame

The center of this talk is not the cocaine. It is a mile of sidewalk in Pittsburgh in 1976.

Brian was the middle of three boys, shy, heavy, and quick to take in anything said about him. Mark taught disco and handed down a pair of shiny gold bell bottoms. Brian wore them to school, and on the walk home the popular kids tore them off him in the street and left him to finish the mile in his underwear, stopped at two traffic lights while people looked and said nothing. He buried the shreds in a basement wastebasket, hoping that would bury the shame.

It did not, and the way he explains why is the most useful stretch of the hour. Out of it comes the idea he asks everyone to carry, that each of us is a continuum of snapshots strung into the shell of who we are. Snapshots of joy, of trauma, of arrest, of grief. The person next to you in the courtroom or on the compound is an accumulation you cannot see. Louis L. Reed told our group the same thing from the other side, about who gets to tell the story of a record. For people whose lives now get read through one docket, that is worth the hour on its own.

There is always a reason not to recover

By the summer of 2005 there was a .45 on his nightstand and he had decided his family would be better off without him. Easter weekend 2007 he surfaced from a two day blackout with Amanda standing over him. The next morning he walked into the office of the psychiatrist he had been lying to for years.

Why would you lie to your psychiatrist? Well, shame knows no hourly rate.

Then he turned down treatment, because he was too busy and had no clients, and turned down the 12-step meeting next door, because people were smoking outside and secondhand smoke will kill you. He could recite all of his reasons, and as a lawyer he had them better organized than most. He walked into the meeting anyway and sat down in the corner of the room, crying and sweating.

Many of our members first meet the rooms inside the Bureau of Prisons and the Residential Drug Abuse Program, then come home to find the program over and the shame still sitting there. If that is your gap, this hour sits well next to Tony Dominguez and Building A New Life After Prison. Brian closes on what he calls the two ask rule, a small thing any of us can do for someone who seems off, plus the one condition without which it is worth nothing. It takes him about a minute, and it is the only thing he asks of anybody watching.

About Brian Cuban

Brian Cuban is a Dallas based attorney, author and addiction recovery advocate, and the younger brother of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. He is a graduate of Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, which brought him back in 2020 to keynote the commencement he had been too ashamed to attend as a graduate. He has been in long-term recovery from alcohol, cocaine and bulimia since April of 2007, and he says in rooms full of lawyers that he is still in therapy and still on antidepressants. He wrote The Addicted Lawyer: Tales of the Bar, Booze, Blow, and Redemption.

This presentation was free, open to all, and held on Zoom on December 10, 2024. It is part of the Tuesday Night Speaker Series hosted by the White Collar Support Group, which meets every Monday evening on Zoom. Brian was our very first speaker in the series.