Tony Bennett’s Cocaine Confession

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Music legend Tony Bennett has made a shocking confession – he was a cocaine junkie but courageously kicked the deadly habit on his own.

The 87-year-old “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” singer says he started smoking pot and using coke in the hippie ’60s, which also saw the heartbreaking murders of charismatic leaders President John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King Jr.

“Our country took a tragic turn – everybody got wasted,” he recalls.

When he started drugging, “I wasn’t doing a huge amount,” he says, but “people get addicted and everything changes for the worse.”

His habit nearly killed him when he suffered an overdose in the bathtub in 1979.

He was rescued by second wife Sandra Grant, mom of two of his four children. She revived him in the nick of time, he says.

But his real savior was the manager of controversial comic Lenny Bruce, who died at age 40 of an accidental morphine overdose in 1966.

“He told me [Bruce] sinned against his talent with his drug habit,” says Bennett, now wed to 40-years-younger school teacher Susan Crow. “THAT sentence changed my life.

“I’ve been given this gift. I know how to sing and perform. I’m sinning against this gift and I thought, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’”

Bennett says he “just stopped” doing drugs cold turkey, adding, “I had to because I thought I was going to lose everything.”