VELVET REVOLVER Singer Says Family Life Has Kept Him Off Drugs

The Associated Press is reporting that troubled VELVET REVOLVER frontman Scott Weiland says in the April issue of Esquire magazine that he's off drugs for good this time.

"Right now, for the first time in my life, I'm finally happy," the singer says. "I don't think anymore about getting high."

The father of two credits being sober for more than a year now to hitting bottom and seeing his second marriage crumble because of his addiction.

"The prospect of losing my wife and my children changed everything," Weiland says.

Reflecting on his countless stints in rehab, jail time on drug and probation violation charges and the havoc his drug battles wrought on his personal life and career, Weiland, 37, tells the magazine he had a "preoccupation with catching a buzz" since his early teens, when he began drinking hard liquor.

He tried cocaine in high school and moved on to heroin by the time he was 24 and touring with STONE TEMPLE PILOTS. Before long, he went from smoking heroin to taking it intravenously.

"Heroin made me feel safe. It was like the womb," he says.

Weiland credits heroin with helping him feel more confident musically as well. But the singer also sensed early on the drug would consume him.

"It's like your life becomes a friend dangling over the edge of a building," he says. "And that person is your former self."

Heroin became a must-have that would often lead the rocker to cruising sketchy neighborhoods in search of drug dealers regardless of what city he found himself in.

At one point, following his first drug arrest in 1995, Weiland holed up for a month in a L.A. hotel room next to Courtney Love.

"We shot drugs the whole time," Weiland says. "Most of the time she just walked around in panties. There was never anything that went on between us. ... Dope was the most important thing."

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