Timbaland Says His OxyContin Addiction Nearly Killed Him

Stopping breathing in his sleep was one of the clearest signs that Timbaland’s pill addiction had moved far past getting high. Looking back on that period during a recent B High ATL conversation, the producer said his then-wife once witnessed him stop breathing while he slept. Timbaland never considered himself suicidal at the time, but he now sees the danger differently. “I ain’t never think about suicide, but then I said, you know what? I was committing suicide every day,” he said.

The reflection came while Timbaland was discussing Chris Cornell and some of the personal trouble he was carrying during his own addiction. His marriage was unraveling at the time, while pills had become part of how he dealt with what was happening around him. Looking back, he described the OxyContin use as slowly killing himself and credited God with getting him through a period that could easily have ended differently.

The severity of his addiction is something Timbaland has spoken about before. During a 2023 appearance on Club Shay Shay, he said his prescription drug use began with Vicodin before eventually escalating to roughly 160 milligrams of OxyContin per day. At that level, Timbaland said nearly everyone he knew who had done the same was dead. He also recalled having an out-of-body experience in which he saw himself lying in bed.

Prescription painkillers originally entered his life while he was dealing with lingering nerve pain from being shot as a teenager. By his 30s, what began as pain management had become a serious dependency. Timbaland has since acknowledged that the drugs affected more than his health. He later said his work suffered during that period and that some of the records he considers his strongest were made while sober.

Getting off the pills eventually required changing more than the prescription. Timbaland has credited his children with giving him a reason to stop and has said Jay-Z and Drake were among the people who confronted him when his behavior was slipping. Years removed from it, he no longer talks about the addiction as something he simply survived, but something he conquered.