UFC light heavyweight champ Jon Jones admittted to Fox Sports 1 he used cocaine while partying during training for his Jan. 3 championship bout but denied he's a recreational drug user.
"I'm not here to make excuses for what happened. I did it," Jones said in the interview. "Basically at a party, and I think a coward would sit here and come up with this elaborate reason or try to blame something. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to blame my friends. I'm not going to blame pressure or stress or anything. What I will say is I messed up. It wasn't a mistake. I can't call it a mistake because I consciously did it."
Jones, 27, said he experimented with drugs and discovered cocaine in college. He explained why he checked out of rehab after 24 hours earlier this month.
"Me going to rehab ... it was like a collective decision between myself and some of my business partners. They thought it would be good," Jones said. "I told them right away, 'I don't have a drug problem; I just got caught.' They said, 'Jon, we don't know if you have a drug problem or not and, listen, how about you go to rehab and let them decide on how healthy you are or not.'"
At the recovery facility, three doctors evaluated Jones and recommended he leave the inpatient program and get outpatient care instead, Jones asserted.
"I don't know how the process works. I feel like I've been getting kind of chewed out for the program they put me on. When I went to rehab, I was willing to stay there as long as needed to be there," Jones said.
He called the whole situation "embarrassing."
"I had to explain to so many people that I'm not a cocaine addict by any means or not even a frequent user," he said. "I just made a really dumb decision and got caught with my pants down in this whole situation. No excuse for it. I can just apologize."
UFC fined Jones $25,000 for failing a drug test after he beat Daniel Cormier at UFC 182.
