Ex-girlfriend of Juice Wrld reveals he would take up to three Percocet pills a day

The ex-girlfriend of rapper Juice Wrld claims he would take up to three potent Percocet pills a day and mix the drugs with a cough syrup concoction called lean before their relationship fell apart when she tried to help him get clean, she reveals in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com.

Juice Wrld, real name Jarad Higgins, had a fatal ‘opioid overdose’ after taking ‘several Percocet pills’ to hide them from cops, who searched luggage from his private jet, and found guns and 70lbs of marijuana at Chicago’s Midway Airport on Sunday. 

His ex-girlfriend Alexia Smith, 21, told DailyMail.com she knew what Higgins had died from before the reports came out, as she witnessed the rapper’s heavy drug use daily while they dated in 2018. 

In the exclusive interview, Smith, from Livonia, Michigan, detailed her relationship with Higgins, his struggles with depression and how she was forced to walk away after their relationship turned violent and left her with bruises when Higgins went through withdrawal.

Breaking down in tears, Smith said: ‘Seven days away from me, he ended up in the hospital. When he was away from me for seven days, he ended up hospitalized from collapsing on stage. One year away from me, and he’s dead.’ 

Smith and Higgins met at the start of Higgins’ career, introduced through a mutual friend in Chicago in early 2018, and quickly began dating before breaking up around October 2018 due to arguments and fights that turned physical. 

But the start of their relationship was a whirlwind romance with Smith flying out to Higgins in Los Angeles where he was taking meetings with various music labels that wanted to sign him. 

Within days of arriving in LA, Smith claims she saw the drug-heavy world Higgins was being brought into, saying ‘someone from a label gave him morphine and cocaine’ on the third day she was visiting. 

Smith said: ‘He didn’t do the coke but the point was, in the beginning, labels were fighting over him so bad they would have given him anything.’

Soon drugs became at the ready for the rising star. 

Smith said Higgins struggled with his mental health and was depressed, explaining that’s why he turned to drugs – mainly Percocet and lean – a mixture of codeine cough syrup and soda. 

Eventually Higgins tried to hide his Percocet use from Smith, as she urged him to get clean, but said at most, she believed he took up to three of the painkillers at a dose of 30mg at a time. ‘[That’s] already a lot but the problem was he was drinking lean on top of it,’ she said.

Rapper Future was a big influence in Higgins’ lean consumption, even telling the superstar musician last year his music inspired him to try the addictive drink when he was still a teen. 

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Future said he was shocked and was ‘really bothered’ by the confession, adding: ‘I was like ”Oh s**t. What the f**k have I done?” How many other sixth-graders did I influence to drink lean?’ 

Smith said Higgins’ depression stemmed from a variety of factors, including previous heartbreak, the feeling that no one understood him and not knowing who his real friends were.  

Smith provided DailyMail.com images posted to Higgins’ Finsta, a secret Instagram account, showing how he often posted about being depressed and used vices to help him get by. 

Two photos from April 2018 are screen shots of articles about depression, with one headline reading: ‘How can you beat depression without having friends and family to support you? Is it possible?’ 

Higgins captioned it the post: ‘Question of the century… no answer.’

Another article reads: ‘You can’t fight depression alone.’   

On March 2018, he posted a photo of a pink sunset on a beach, writing: ‘I can’t help the way I want to.. I suck.’

Smith blames Higgins’ mental illness for him relying heavily on drugs, saying: ‘Even when he had every reason to be happy, he still wasn’t and obviously that’s mental illness.

‘If you have family, girlfriend, money, you have the job that you want but you’re still unhappy at that point, your brain isn’t working properly and you need professional help.

‘And he said that, he would tell me, ”I need help, I need help. I’m telling people I need help and nobody believes me.”’ 

While she knew Higgins was consuming drugs, Smith said she wasn’t aware of how much he was taking and mixing, admitting: ‘I didn’t tell him to stop right away because I didn’t realize how bad it was and I was doing it with him.’

Smith said she eventually became addicted to lean too, but only realized when she tried to quit, suffering withdrawal symptoms. When she got clean, she pleaded with Higgins to quit too. 

Smith said: ‘Me and his mom were the only ones telling him to stop because everyone else was doing drugs too.’ 

And it wasn’t just lean and Percocet that Higgins used. Smith said there was marijuana, Xanax, Ecstasy, morphine and coke brought around him.  

‘People just gave him things all the time,’ Smith said. 

‘But I remember on the tour bus, we got into one of our biggest fights ever because he was drinking a bunch of lean like normal, but then someone gave him a Tesla pill which is one of the strongest Ecstasy pills ever. 

‘He said he was going to go to the bathroom and snort it. I freaked out. That’s strong enough for four people… I stopped him and told him no. I don’t know what the f**k would have happened. He probably would have taken it.’  

The breaking point for Smith came when Higgins was performing shortly after their friend XXXTentacion was murdered in June of 2018. The rapper frequently rapped about his fondness of Xanax. 

While on stage performing his song Legends, which pays tribute to XXXTentacion and Lil Peep, who accidentally overdosed after taking a Xanax pill that actually contained fentanyl, fans began throwing pills on stage to Higgins. 

Smith said: ‘It was really messed up. Someone took 20 fake Xanax and threw it at him on stage. 

‘He was up there singing about Peep and X, and someone just throws him pills the same exact way Peep died. I realized it was a problem. I realized it wasn’t okay. 

‘He never took Xanax again after that. That’s when he decided to get completely clean, but he couldn’t.’

Smith admits that there were other problems in their relationship, saying Higgins was making her promises but would get so high that he wouldn’t remember what he had said. 

She was tired of living out of suitcases and hotels, begging Higgins to set up a home base so she could have an address. 

But things escalated while Higgins was trying to get clean. 

Smith said: ‘When you get [clean], it physically hurts and messes you up mentally. 

‘We started to get physical with each other and then he would just relapse because he couldn’t deal with how much it hurt. His body was in pain.

‘My mom just always raised me that once its gets to that point it’s over with. And I told him that and he agreed.’  

In a now deleted video Smith made at the time of their breakup, she went into detail about their violent fights, admitting she also got physical with Higgins.  

She said in the YouTube video: ‘It was both ways, I admit it. I’d like to make it clear that Jarad never beat me, he never put a fist to my body, but he has definitely picked me off the ground slamming me into the wall and squeezing me so tight that I had bruises all over my arms.

‘He shoved me into a bathtub where I hit my head on the wall when we were fighting on the tour bus it was to the point that his friends had to pull him off of me and I ended up with the bruise and cuts.’

The two officially called it off around October 2018, but Smith said they kept in contact for months afterwards. 

She added: ‘It’s not that we didn’t love each other, it just wasn’t healthy anymore.’ 

Smith said she believes that Higgins didn’t want to be addicted at the time of his death, saying: ‘He didn’t want to be on drugs anymore when he died. That’s the heartbreaking part.’  

‘He was a drug addict with no one to tell him no and if he was told no, like by me or Ally [his current girlfriend], he would just do it behind our backs. 

‘Addiction is a hard thing for anyone. Your mind says stop but your body says more. ‘ 

Smith added: ‘I’m angry more than anything. It’s wrong to point fingers but that’s how I feel. I’m mad at everyone around him.

‘Even if he did swallow the pills to hide it from the Feds, why wouldn’t someone tell him to flush them? Why wouldn’t someone else, take some? Why was he the one taking all of them?

‘I don’t know what the f**k happened in the past year, but obviously something changed, with the people.’