Kurt Angle once again addresses his addiction problems.
The Olympic Hero was asked about this dark time in his life during a recent interview on the True Geordie Podcast. Angle reflected on his obsession with painkillers and how he couldn’t get through a day without them.
Yeah, I’m not proud of it. I’ll tell you this. This is something that the doctors don’t tell you. When I broke my neck the second time, the first time in WWE, I met a doctor, and he introduced me to painkillers. He said, ‘These things are the greatest things in the world, you’re gonna love them.’ So I started taking one every four to six hours. After a while, your body builds a tolerance, and one doesn’t cut it. Then you take two, then two leads to four, four leads to eight. Before I knew it, I was taking 65 extra-strength Vicodin a day. This was within a six-month period of time. I mean, we’re talking almost enough to kill a horse, it was that bad. My focus was not wrestling anymore. My focus was, when am I gonna get the drug next? I became a druggie. I became an addict right away. 65 extra-strength Vicodin a day. The reason why I was taking them was not because of the pain anymore. It was because I was going through withdrawal. So if I took 15 painkillers, a few hours later they would wear off, and I’d start having withdrawal again, so I was taking more all day. More and more all day long every single day.
Angle details how he went to multiple doctors, including in Mexico, to be able to obtain the amount of painkillers he wanted.
I was taking more, more, more. All I was doing was trying to hide the pain, physically and emotionally, and it got out of control. I’ll give you an example of what I was doing. I had 12 different doctors that were giving me 12 different scripts of medication. I had to set up a calendar because you couldn’t go to the same pharmacy, so you had to have 12 different doctors, go to 12 different pharmacies. So I had all these different pharmacies on my calendar, and then it still wasn’t enough, so I had to buy 500 of them illegally from Mexico. So I was buying 2,000 painkillers a month just to keep my addiction going.
The former world champion later reveals that he was spending up to $7,000 a month when his addiction was at its worst.
$7,000 a month, but remember, I was making a lot of money [laughs], so the money wasn’t really an issue.
On a recent edition of his Hall of Fame podcast Angle spoke about the Attitude Era and how it was all driven by promos. You can read about that here.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)