Timbaland is opening up about one of the darkest moments in his life, revealing how his addiction to OxyContin got so bad he would stop breathing in his sleep. In a recent B High ATL chat, the legendary producer looked back on that period and spoke about the danger of his prescription drug use and how close he came to losing his life.
One of the most obvious warning signs came when Timbaland's ex-wife witnessed him stop breathing while asleep. He said he never thought of himself as suicidal then but looks back on his behavior now in a much different light. "I was just destroying myself, day after day, with the drugs," he said, talking about his addiction.
The conversation also touched on Chris Cornell and Timbaland's personal struggles during his own battle with addiction. His marriage was falling apart, and pills were part of how he coped with everything going on around him. In retrospect, his use of OxyContin was slowly killing him, and he credited God for helping him through a period that could have ended very differently.
Timbaland has spoken in the past about how deep his prescription drug use went. During a 2023 appearance on Club Shay Shay, he detailed his reliance on Vicodin before escalating to around 160 milligrams of OxyContin a day. He said almost everyone he knew who went that way was dead at that level. He also recalled what he described as an out-of-body experience with himself lying in bed.
Timbaland's first experience with prescription painkillers came when he was dealing with lingering nerve pain after being shot as a teenager. By his 30s, it was obvious that what had started as an attempt to manage pain had become a serious dependency. Timbaland has admitted that his addiction affected his work at the time, but he has also said that some of the records he considers his best came after he got sober.
Timbaland has said his kids were a reason he stopped, and he was confronted by Jay-Z and Drake when they saw his behavior start to slip. Years removed from that chapter, Timbaland no longer calls the experience something he just survived. He looks back on it as something he survived, a chapter in his life that he eventually beat, a time when things got bad, when his drug use got worse and came with serious consequences to his life.
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