We all knew former Carolina Panthers former first-round draft pick Jason Peter was pretty messed up, but his new autobiography "Hero of the Underground" (due out in July, $24.95) describes in detail just how Peter ended up in drug rehab six or seven times following his football career here.

   Peter claims (as he's told us before) he used to take 80 pain and sleeping pills in a day to get through the pain his body was feeling.

  "All I knew was how much better life looked when you saw it through the haze of opiates," Peter writes in the book. 

   He went on to pen this:

   "I wasn’t afraid of death. How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin . . . after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live---to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief. Toward the end, I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my f------ brains out. I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun. And then all of my problems would be solved."

   Peter said he's blown most of the $6.5 million Carolina paid him by purchasing drugs and prostitutes.

   In his book, Peter takes full blame for his problems.

   Here is one excerpt from the book about his departure from the Panthers after doctors determined he could not be cleared medically following a seventh operation on his neck and back. At the time, Peter met with coach George Seifert and soon-to-be GM Marty Hurney about the end of his career.

   Wrote Peter: "I knew what this was. This was the Death Blow. I approached the office slowly and silently. I felt like a man stepping up to the gas chamber. I closed the door behind me and was ushered into a chair. Everyone sat in silence. I took in the office, the polished mahogany desk, the pictures of the trainer's family ... (Hurney and Seifert) were men who knew and loved sports. They knew what they were about to say to me was one of the cruelest things you could say to an athlete. I had the sudden, confusing urge to laugh, or to get up and run out of the office, pretend that this wasn't happening. But, crushed by circumstance, I just sat there and did my best to smile. 

Seifert said: "You know, I've coached men who have damaged themselves so badly playing this game (and) that they can't even hold their children anymore. They pushed it too far, and once your body reaches a certain point ... well, there's just no coming back. Do you understand what I'm telling you, Jason?''

Peter said: "Yes, sir.''

Seifert said: "The bottom line is this: We can't clear you to play anymore. The doctor has told us that you're at risk for a major injury. I'm really terribly sorry.''

Peter said: "Yes, sir.''

The good news is maybe Peter is finally getting his life together after abusing his body for years. He claims he's been sober for four years. (And let's hope he remains that way). He reportedly lives in Lincoln, Neb., where he works as a radio host. He is now married.