Mike Tyson: I was a drug addict

Mike Tyson has admitted to using illegal substances for a large part of his boxing career but he got away with it by cheating drugs tests.

The former heavyweight champion used a fake penis to hide any trace of the drugs he was using from testers.

Tyson shot to fame as a youngster when he won the world title at the age of just 20.

In his autobiography, Undisputed Truth, he admitted to being a regular drug user from an early age.

“I was a full-blown cokehead,” Tyson said while revealing he first took cocaine when he was 11.

“The history of war is the history of drugs. Every great general and warrior from the beginning of time was high.”

He was eventually caught in 2000 after testing positive for marijuana and fined $200,000.

But he avoided detection for most of his career because he was able to game the system.

Tyson explained in his book that he would often take drugs before a fight and then fill a fake penis with someone else’s urine to escape detection.

One of his entourage would carry it, which he called his “whizzer”, then hand it to Tyson after the fight.

The former heavyweight champion claimed to have taken cocaine before his 2004 defeat to Danny Williams and also said he had take the drugs during his famous press conference brawl with Lennox Lewis in 2002.

He gave it all up in 2009, though and turned to a vegan diet to clean up his health.

He told Oprah Winfrey in 2013: “Well my life is different today because I have stability in my life. I’m not on drugs. I’m not out on the streets or in clubs and everything in my life that I do now is structured around the development of my life and my family.

“I lost weight. I dropped over 100lbs and I just felt like changing my life, doing something different and I became a vegan.

“Becoming a vegan gave me another opportunity to live a healthy life. I was so congested from all the drugs and bad cocaine, I could hardly breathe. High blood pressure, almost dying, arthritis and once I became a vegan all that stuff diminished.”

The 53-year-old is currently on the comeback trail and has been posting videos showing his ferocious power and speed.