Accused heroin dealer Robert Vineberg says he could have saved Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Bad habit ... the heroin found in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment is said to have represented a week’s supply. Source: AP

I DIDN’T kill him — and I could’ve saved him, insists Philip Seymour Hoffman’s accused heroin dealer, breaking his silence for the first time since the actor’s death.

“He was my friend,” jazz musician and admitted junkie Robert Vineberg told The New York Post in an exclusive jailhouse interview.

“I could’ve saved him,” Vineberg said, wearing a grey prison jumpsuit and hunching pensively at a red table in a visiting area at Rikers Island jail.

“If I knew he was in town, I would’ve said, ‘Hey, let’s make an AA meeting.’ If I was with him, it wouldn’t have happened. Not under my guard.”

Vineberg, 57, said he had known the 46-year-old Capotestar for about a year.

Bad habit ... the heroin found in Philip Seymour Hoffman’s apartment is said to have represented a week’s supply.

Hoffman injected, Vine­berg said, while he only snorted.

Vineberg denied he had sold the 73 bags of heroin found in Hoffman’s Greenwich Village apartment. When asked if he had ever sold Hoffman drugs, he ­declined to answer.

“When we got together, we talked about books. And art. He was a normal guy. You wouldn’t know he was an Oscar winner.”

“He loved his kids. I offer my condolences to his family.”

Drug trade ... a table with packaging materials for distribution of heroin is located in a Bronx apartment during a police raid of the location. The actor’s death has drawn attention to NYC’s drug trade.

Vineberg said he was “devastated” by Hoffman’s death and described the star’s final, four-month struggle against drugs.

He claims he last saw Hoffman – high – in ­October.

The two were at Vineberg’s apartment – where some 300 bags of heroin were seized in a raid last week after an informant told cops he had witnessed Hoffman scoring there.

Hoffman then went on a 28-day rehab stint, followed by a trip to Atlanta to shoot the upcoming Hunger Gamesmovie.

Marketing ... a sheet of logos allegedly used to stamp packets of heroin.

Their last contact came in December over email and text, Vineberg says.

Hoffman’s phone number was found on Vineberg’s mobile phone and two others recovered from the apartment, police sources say.

“He left me a voicemail in December saying, ‘I’m clean,’ ” Vineberg recalled.

Vineberg, who himself managed to stay clean for a week at a time between relapses, was also abstaining.

Saying goodbye ... Andrew Upton (L) and Cate Blanchett attend the funeral service for actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

“We’d text back and forth, ‘Oh, I got one day on you!’ ‘No I’ve got one day on you,’ ” Vineberg recalled.

But sometime around the end of the year, the men lost touch and relapsed, he said.

“When you’re clean for that long of a time, your body can’t take as much,” Vineberg said of Hoffman’s final plunge off the wagon. “Your body doesn’t have the tolerance.

“He was using needles. He was a hard-core addict.”

Vineberg is convinced that Hoffman’s habit was 10 bags a day.

“How much was he found with? Seventy bags. You do the math ... That’s a one-week supply,” he said.

Law-enforcement sourc­es backed that estimate, with one noting, “It was a very bad habit.”

Read more at the New York Post.

Family and friends attend a private funeral on Friday for actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of an apparent overdose at the age of 46. Sarah Toms reports.