Carmela Wallace was in good spirits when she picked up the phone. Kind and somewhat soft spoken, she sounded strong and like she was on the other side of the most tragic event of her life. In the two years and two months since losing her son Juice WRLD to a drug overdose, she’s learned a thing or two about resilience. Now spearheading the Live Free 999 nonprofit, Wallace has dedicated her life to raising awareness around addiction and mental health in an attempt to carry on Juice WRLD’s legacy.
Juice WRLD (real name Jarad Higgins) had just turned 21 when he suffered a fatal seizure, but he’d already made a profound impact on his fans. From 2018’s Goodbye & Good Riddance to 2019’s Death Race For Love, his music was intensely personal and often explored themes of drug addiction, struggles with mental health and relationship woes.
The U.S. Drug Epidemic Is An Ongoing Crisis & Hip Hop Is One Of Its Many Victims
His relatability made him a god among teens, almost like a modern-day Apollo. But inside, he was wrestling with demons who were gunning for his soul. Wallace had no idea how much he was struggling until she heard his music, something that completely caught her off guard. But looking back, it made sense.
“He started in high school, and I know when his behavior started to change,” she explains to HipHopDX in a recent interview. “Now that you look back in hindsight, I can pinpoint when the differences started in his behavior. I would think something was different with him, but I couldn’t quite put my hand on it. It wasn’t the weed, it wasn’t the smell. That makes that one even more challenging, because a kid could pop a pill, parents won’t even know. But it’s just the little things in the personality. When you think about it, that tells the story. But when I started hearing him sing about it, oh it was scary. It was frightening.”
Wallace, a single mother who always had a close relationship with her son, would ask Juice WRLD, “Is this true?” And while he was always honest with her, his addiction would tell him certain dosages were OK to take.
“It was true,” she says. “So when I dealt with him, I confronted him based on what he said [in his music]. I was pretty direct with him. He did share it with me, but it was just getting the help part. He thought he had it. He thought he could control to the point where he would tell me, ‘This amount of dosage is fine,’ and we would have this debate. ‘You’re not a doctor. You’re medicating yourself.’ I didn’t even know when he was getting the information from, to say that this amount was OK. That’s scary, too.”
Live Free 999 aims to educate and hopefully destigmatize both addiction and mental health issues. As explained on its website, the organization’s mission is to “bolster organizations providing positive mental health treatments and alternatives to drug use” through financial grants and partnerships. But she understands there’s a long way to go.
“I think it shows a weakness,” she says of the ongoing stigma. “People may see it that way. Something that you’re not in control of, something that … and you have to humble yourself to ask for help, as well. I think it just depends on the situation. Some people, it may be a trust issue. Some people, they’re not comfortable sharing like that. So I think it’s a myriad of issues, why that stigma is attached to it. But I think if you could do it where you don’t have to identify yourself, I think that just makes it a lot easier for somebody to come forward.”
Live Free 999 is currently working on an initiative for Mental Health Awareness month, which kicks off in May. Although Wallace couldn’t say too much about it, she did reveal it will revolve around “normalizing the conversation around mental health” and people telling their personal stories. That alone is harder than it may sound. Often times, addicts find it impossible to open up and ask for help, something Juice WRLD found difficult to do.
“A lot of people think that they’re the only ones going through what they’re going through and we know that’s not the case,” she says. “So it’s just a way that somebody could you even look at someone’s story that they shared, and it might be similar, they could relate to it and see that, ‘Hey, if they overcame it, I could overcome it. I’m not alone.’ And I think that’s a trick of the enemy to have people feel like they’re the only ones going through, nobody understands, and it causes them to go within themselves instead of sharing that they need help.”
Tragically, it was too late for Juice WRLD. Toxicology reports revealed he died after ingesting toxic levels of the powerful painkillers oxycodone and codeine. Wallace tried her best to talk to him, but it wasn’t enough.
“We talked about mental health and addiction as he got older,” she says. “But that in itself didn’t really help his situation. It helped him talking about it, but it didn’t help him like I would have wanted it to. Because I would share advice about talking to his therapist that he had in high school or getting help and just dealing with the addiction. And Jarad had a way of knowing how to say what you wanted to hear.
“So of course, I’m going to be very optimistic, but I always challenged him on those things about getting help. He didn’t hide it from me. But ultimately it’s up to that individual to make a decision that they’re going to take that step. You could say it and say it and say it, but they have to hit that point where they look up and realize, ‘Where am I? How did I get here?'”
Juice WRLD also became famous in a very short amount of time. He essentially went from being a high school student to international superstar, which is a lot of pressure to put on a young man. When asked what she thought he was trying to escape with drugs, Wallace says pointblank, “I think they’re hurting. I don’t understand it because it’s so different, but it’s like the anxiety. They have a lot of pressure now, and I think social media does not help you.”
“For somebody’s persona, that’s not even the person. I think they have those challenges that just make it so much harder for them. With Jarad, I think the music industry was a lot for him, even though he loved it. I think it gave him anxiety. I think that might have been where his stemmed. But he would still also tell me, ‘Mom, I’m fine.’ Because I would always check, ‘Are you doing OK? Do you like what you’re doing still?’ Just to check and of course, ‘Mom, I’m fine. I’m fine.'”
Juice Wrld's Mother Issues Statement On His Death & Addiction Struggles
As Wallace’s grief journey continues, she’s doing her best to navigate each day in a way that honors her son, but she understands it’s OK to have a bad day. Unlike some mothers, she still has his music, videos, photos and performances to remind her just how special her son is. His second posthumous album, Fighting Demons, arrived in December 2021 and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, proving just how loved he still is by his fanbase. A new video for “Cigarettes” was released just minutes before Wallace spoke to DX and has since racked up over three million YouTube views.
“It makes me so proud of him,” she says of his recent accomplishments. “It really does, it does. And the fact that he cared enough to share and be so vulnerable and that he really wanted to help people and to be so young, it’s just … I’m proud of him. And I’m glad he knew I was proud of him. When I would tell him that, I had no idea how he was impacting people. But I was just proud that he was working hard and he was living his dream.”
If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction and/or mental health, visit Live Free 999 here or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255.
all the porn online 12 13 year olds do it. government should protect everyone from pirated porn so our children can become straight headed men and women. 5 years clean myself. it just fucks you up you want a healthy relationships but you are a perv instead rather than a gentleman.
Yeah when I was young, we had to jerk off to Sears catalog underwear or bathing suit sections. If you know you know…
I used to be one of those who, while sympathetic, would look down on those who’d ‘allowed’ themselves to become addicted to alcohol and illicit drugs. …
Emotional and/or psychological trauma from unhindered toxic abuse, sexual or otherwise, usually results in a helpless child’s brain improperly developing. If allowed to continue for a prolonged period, it can act as a starting point into a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines. It’s like a form of non-physical-impact brain damage.
The lasting mental pain is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
that is true it is sad.
Though I have not been personally affected by the addiction/overdose crisis, I have suffered enough unrelenting ACE-related hyper-anxiety to have known and enjoyed the euphoric release upon consuming alcohol and/or THC.
Furthermore, I can see the needlessly heartless politics involved with this most serious social issue: Just government talk about increasing funding to make proper treatment available to low- and no-income addicts, however much it would alleviate their great suffering, generates firm opposition by the general socially and fiscally conservative electorate.
The preconceived erroneous notion that addicts are simply weak-willed and/or have committed a moral crime is, fortunately, gradually dying. Also, we now know that pharmaceutical corporations intentionally pushed their very addictive and profitable opiates — I call it the real moral crime — for which they got off relatively lightly, considering the resulting immense suffering and overdose death numbers.
I have found that, in this world, a large number of people, however precious their souls, can tragically be consciously or subconsciously considered disposable by others — especially government bean-counters — because they are debilitatedly addicted to drugs. Then those people may begin perceiving themselves as worthless and consume their addictive substances more haphazardly. Although the cruel devaluation of them as human beings is basically based on their self-medicating, it still reminds me of the subconscious devaluation of the daily civilian lives lost (a.k.a. “casualties”) in protractedly devastating civil war zones and sieges. At some point, they can end up receiving just a meagre couple column inches in the First World’s daily news.
@frank sterle
Man shut yo dumb ass up!
feel very sad for this woman with the talented son who went down the wrong road –
Fuck this drug addict pop singer. He had nothing to do with hiphop. He only tried to ruin it.
Definitely. This kid glorified being a emo and drug addict. Very little of his music deserved accolades or commiseration. Amy Whinehouse was a tortured soul. She had talent and misery. Juice was a gimmick. He was nothing more than a kid who needed better parenting, instead of allowing his younger self to act grown.
lots of people liked his music and he clearly had talent. whether or not he used it right is a different matter. he was a bright boy who became obsessed with music making 5-10 songs a day. probably he did one emo-type song it took off and that sent him on a bad road with all the industry people egging him on to take more drugs and be more reckless, etc.
@sober life
Exactly! He was a drug addict surrounded by enablers who didn’t care about anything but his popularity and his next hit. His mother was one too. Why would you let your 19 years old son tell you how much of a drug was ok?!!! She just wanted that check to keep coming! Watch that HBO special. His whole crew was a bunch of losers who wanted to hang on. The life of a 19 year old kid. Tragic
Fuck you. You need to stop sayin shit. You don’t no nothing. You got nothing better to do than insult a dead rapper. Thats why you have a small dick.
Man yall mother fuckers don’t know juice. I met the guy. He was an alright guy. Just because he did drugs doesn’t mean he was bad. And fuck you dam haters. Yall just troll to troll. And thats why you get no bitches.