‘Mama June’ Shannon’s Daughter ‘Pumpkin’ Breaks Silence Over Her Mom’s Million-Dollar Drug Habit

In her new reality series, Mama June: Road to Redemption, “Mama June” Shannon revealed that in the years prior to going to rehab, she and her boyfriend Geno Doak spent around $1 million on “dope” during the height of her drug addiction. “I would say the last year of our addiction, probably a good $900,000,” she told Access Hollywood. “So much money was sent to our dope man.”

As Mama June dealt with addiction and her subsequent stay in rehab, her youngest daughter, Alana “Honey Boo Boo,” went to live with her older sister, Lauryn “Pumpkin” Shannon. In a new interview with TooFab, Lauryn reacted to the news that her mother blew such a large sum of money on drugs. “When I hear that price and I hear it from the media outlets where she tells her story … it is very hard to hear that because I didn’t know how bad things had really gotten,” Lauryn admitted.

“After I moved Alana out, I really tried to work on ourselves as a family, really tried to help mama, and then we kind of stepped back for a little while, so I didn’t see her, I didn’t put the kids around her,” she continued. “When we meet this time on the show, it had been a year since we had physically seen her. So that’s hard to hear. I mean it really is, knowing that — not trying to sound mean and not trying to sound money hungry — but to know that me and Josh were struggling trying to do everything we could to keep a roof over Alana’s and Ella’s head. It’s just like, but you were out here blowing a million dollars and you couldn’t help me?”

“I don’t think that she still fully understands the problems she left behind for me, because having to take care of Alana, I feel like she’s appreciative of it, but I feel like the way that she says she’s appreciative of it … I want it to be a little more sincere than that,” Lauryn said about her troubled mother. “It’s very tough because somebody who was supposed to be there and supposed to be supportive, it just doesn’t seem that way. I’ve done all these things and I’ve matured as a woman and now I gotta take the consequences and I wasn’t even the addict.”

“It’s not like, okay I just take care of Alana. Like, I have to go through my marriage problems, that caused problems there,” she added. “It basically caused a whole uproar in everybody’s lives, and it’s just like, she sees it, but she doesn’t see it.”

“She’s gotta prove a lot of things. She has to prove to me that she is truly sober. She has to prove to me that she’s not the person that even she was before the addiction, the one who lied about the little things,” Lauryn told TooFab. “For me too, she’s gonna have to let it take time. For so long we were on her time. We were on Geno’s addiction clock and things like that. Now, I want you guys to be on my time. I feel like it should be at my own pace.”

“We do need our space. We do need our time because her addiction didn’t happen overnight. Her falling into the drug habit didn’t happen overnight or her ruining the family, it didn’t happen overnight,” she continued. “These things take time and that’s just kind of what I need her to see. It’s very frustrating for me when she’s pushy, pushy, pushy, and it’s like, we were pushy, pushy, pushy when we wanted you to go to the first couple of rehabs and you didn’t go.”

Ultimately, Lauryn wants June to accept responsibility for what she has done and how she has hurt her family, especially Alana. “Seeing Alana cry in general over the Mama situation is very hard because I don’t want her to feel that pain,” Lauryn told TooFab. “I don’t want her to have to beg for her mom or dad’s attention. So, I think it’s good that Mama will be able to hear what we have to say and she has no choice. She can’t run this time. She has to sit down and she has to listen.” Read the full interview here ahead of the next episode of Mama June: Road to Redemption, which airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on WE tv.