Days after Philip Seymour Hoffman tragically lost his life to an apparent heroin overdose; Cher’s son opens up about his own battle with drugs.

“I started with drugs around the same time that we all did, around 11,” says musician and artist Elijah Blue Allman, whose father is Greg Allman, co-founder of The Allman Brothers Band.

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“I mean it’s just what you did, it’s just what everybody did.”

But Elijah is grateful for everything he went through. In fact, he believes it’s the reason he’s alive today.

“I [was] just looking to escape all the things in my past and that’s when you turn to those kind of drugs, you know heroin opiates,” the 37-year-old shares.

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“[Heroin] kind of saved me … If I didn’t have that at that point, I don’t know what I would have done … You may jump off a bridge. If you can only go through that time period and live through it and then get help.”

He did, however, have many scary close calls when it came to overdosing.

“I always kind of kept it a little bit safe, but you never can do that. Even though you think that in your mind, of course the wrong things can happen,” he admits to Entertainment Tonight in a new interview.

“The wrong combination of things can happen and you can just slip into the abyss. I knew it was wrong and I knew that I was very unsatisfied with life at that point.”

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Luckily for Elijah, he’s lived to tell his tale – and 2014 marks his sixth year of sobriety.

He currently resides in Beverly Hills with girlfriend Marieangela King, a.k.a. Queenie, of the band King. The pair got engaged in November.

By Chantal Waldholz / @blondieewood

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