Juice Wrld’s family has spoken out in the wake of his death, confirming the drug addiction issues he’d spoken about in his music.
The ‘Lucid Dreams’ performer, real name Jarad Higgins, died early Sunday after suffering seizures and going into cardiac arrest during a search of his and his entourage’s luggage by law enforcement at Chicago’s Midway Airport. He had just turned 21.
“Addiction knows no boundaries and its impact goes way beyond the person fighting it,” his mother, Carmella Wallace, said Thursday in a statement to TMZ. “Jarad was a son, brother, grandson, friend and so much more to so many people who wanted more than anything to see him defeat addiction.”
“We hope the conversations he started in his music and his legacy will help others win their battles, as that is what he wanted more than anything,” she added.
His aunt Karen Wallace had previously remembered him, talking to the Chicago Tribune, as a “good kid” and “always very warm, very respectful, very attentive.”
Juice Wrld’s private jet was inbound from Los Angeles when it arrived in Chicago. The police search turned up 41 “vacuum-sealed” bags of weed, six bottles of prescription codeine cough syrup, three guns and ammunition, law enforcement sources told the Tribune.
At the airport, the hip-hop artist’s girlfriend told officers that he had taken Percocet, a painkiller, and “had a drug problem.”
He talked about the nature of drug addiction, reflecting on the 2017 death of rapper Lil Peep, in a 2018 interview with Atlanta’s HOT 107.9 radio.
“It’ll make you think, like ... ‘I don’t want that to happen to me.’ But at the same time you’re already addicted. Your body is screaming for that. ... I found that when people do drugs it separates their head from their body even more. It separates their soul from their body even more. ‘Cause your mind could be telling you ... ‘hell no,’ but your body is dependent,” Juice Wrld said.
“It can tear you apart.”
In the interview, he admitted drinking the codeine and Xanax-fueled cocktail lean, a.k.a. purple drank, when he was in sixth grade and taking Percocet for the first time when he was 14.
He also called music his “therapy sessions.”
The performer’s cause of death remains uncertain pending toxicology results after a Monday autopsy. He was to have performed this coming weekend at the Rolling Loud festival in Los Angeles.
