Friend details Karo’s dependency
Karo’s had some problems with an addiction to pain medicine due to an injury he sustained a few years ago,…
Karo’s had some problems with an addiction to pain medicine due to an injury he sustained a few years ago, began Melanson, who essentially began training under Karo Parisyan years ago while under the guidance of grappling legend Gokor Chivichyan in L.A., only to evolve to a point with his own grappling where he eventually became the teacher. Then when he started having these anxiety problems, it didn’t seem like the anxiety pills were helping him. The only thing that was helping him was the pain medication that he had been taking for his injuries. That’s when he just started down that slope.
It’s just one of those situations where you have two guys that sit down to have a drink, and you have one guy that can go home and he’s fine, and the other guy has to go out and get wasted every single time because he’s an alcoholic. I think that maybe with the pills, that Karo is the second guy. Maybe he’s the guy that can’t take them here and there, or can’t use them effectively. It’s really hard on him.
According to Neil, Karo had a plan to do things the right way this time around. A plan that, for so many reasons that could be extremely difficult for a person that hasn’t suffered from one form of addiction or another to understand, just didn’t seem to work out the way he had thought it would. That huge invisible monster that is chemical dependency had a plan of it’s own for the tormented Judo specialist that never seemed to take a backwards step during his years spent inside of the UFC’s Octagon fencing.
He came out and saw me recently for a couple of days, and I still thought he had a little ways to go, but he looked, probably the best I’ve seen him in a year, explained Melanson. I was really optimistic about this fight. I was like, ‘This guy is back with it. He seems like he has a really good chance here’. Then I got caught up training Randy [Couture] during that time and he couldn’t make it out. He didn’t make it out to Greg Jackson’s either. I talked to his camp and they said that he was kind of hit or miss. If he showed up he looked pretty good, but for the most part he wouldn’t show up. So he’s had some problems.
He told me that he was on pain medicine, but he wanted to get off. He had a plan and he was working his way to get off of it. About a month ago he was taking about half the amount that he usually does and he was pretty optimistic. He was really trying to push it. He was going through some withdrawals and he would try to push it as hard as he could to get off the stuff. He really had a plan to be off three weeks prior to the fight and he really wanted to clean up. He really wanted to do this right. It was really important to him and his family. I hadn’t spoken to him for just a little bit, and I guess he tried, but he couldn’t.