Mike Tyson just admitted to using drugs during his boxing career to deal with pain.
While appearing on Tuesday’s episode of the “Katie Miller Podcast,” the heavyweight champion said he briefly took the powerful painkiller fentanyl while competing in the late 1990s.
“It was a painkiller, and I used to use it to patch up my toe,” Tyson said of substance, which is a synthetic opioid that is estimated to be 50 times more potent than heroin.
Comparing the effects and the withdrawal symptoms of both drugs, the boxer said, “It was like heroin. Once it wears off and you take the Band-Aid off, you start withdrawing, throwing up, just like if you were on heroin.”
Tyson revealed that he used the substance “quite a few times” and only stopped after learning that it could have ended his high-level boxing career.
“It was illegal if it [was] caught in my bloodstream,” he told Miller. “It was a narcotic, my friend told me. It was brand new. I told my friend, ‘Could I use this?’”
“No one ever heard of it,” Tyson remembered. “Then he looks at me and says, ‘Mike, that’s a narcotic. You couldn’t use.’ I didn’t know that.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved fentanyl for pain management when prescribed by medical professionals, but the drug has seen a surge of illicit use in recent years as a cheaper, stronger alternative to heroin or other popular pills like Oxycontin and Percocet.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that over 48,000 people died from synthetic opioid overdoses, mainly caused by fentanyl.
During his interview with Miller, Tyson wondered why the Drug Enforcement Administration currently classifies cannabis as more risky than something as strong and unsafe as fentanyl.
The DEA categorizes cannabis as a Schedule I substance, meaning that it “has a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use.” Fentanyl falls under Schedule II, defining it as a drug with “legitimate medical use” under the supervision of a licensed medical professional.
Tyson has been a strong advocate for medical cannabis and told the podcast host he was on a “mission to give cannabis justice” by hopefully rescheduling the drug with the eventual goal of federal legalization.