Brett Favre Says He Almost Wanted To Kill Himself Over Painkiller Addiction

Brett Favre is best remembered for his fantastic performances in 1997’s Super Bowl wins as well as becoming the MVP three consecutive times. After the NFL Hall of Famer invited Dr. Phil to his podcast “Bolling With Favre,” he revealed that while he was being best in the game, he also had to fight off his demons.

Favre said that he first started taking painkillers after he got injured in 1994 while playing, and that’s when the addiction quickly manifested. He tried to stay on a healthy dosage, but the pain was too much.

At first, he tried to deal with the pain by taking only two pills per day. After he started to complain more and more, his teammates got prescriptions for painkillers only to give to him. He started taking so many pills “to a point where I was basically taking in 2 days, a month’s prescription, which is crazy.”

He told Dr. Phil and his audience that after he had suffered a seizure as a consequence of abusing painkillers, he had no choice but to accept the fact that he had grown addicted to painkillers.

The player was so encapsulated by the pills that their spill didn’t break even after more than 75 days of rehab, and he didn’t stop with the painkillers until his groundbreaking performance in the 1997 Super Bowl. He revealed that the moment of truth came after he was at this lowest:

I said it’s one of two things — I die, or I flush these pills down the toilet. I sat by the toilet for two hours. Eventually, I dumped the pills in the toilet, flushed them and I almost wanted to kill myself because of doing that. I could not believe that I’ve actually done that and I was so mad at myself because now what was I gonna do?

After he spent the next few months completely ridding himself of the painkillers, the addiction subsided slowly. Brett’s story is a testament to the fact that going sober is easy, staying sober is hard.