Kurt Angle Reveals He Used To Spend $7,000 Per Month On Painkillers

Kurt Angle’s battles with substance abuse are well known, with the Olympic Gold medalist picking up the nickname ‘Perc Angle’ due to his reliance on prescription medication.

During a chat with The True Geordie, Angle revealed how much he was using during the height of his addiction, saying the following:

“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 said.

Angle continued, revealing how he could get hold of enough medication to satisfy his addiction:

"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," Angle said.

As to how much he spent per month Angle estimates a number in the thousands, "$7,000 a month, but remember, I was making a lot of money [laughs], so the money wasn’t really an issue," Angle said.

H/T: Fightful