Swollen Members' Mad Child Comes Clean on Pill Addiction

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Mad Child isn't rapping about some imagined street life on Swollen Members' long-awaited new album, 'Armed to the Teeth.' Over the past decade, the Vancouver rapper went from topping charts and recording with Nelly Furtado to getting hooked on Percocet and Oxycontin, inviting police surveillance because of his Hell's Angels associations and jeopardizing a career that had made Swollen Members Canada's biggest-selling and most award-winning hip-hop group.

Now the west coast rap crew, which also includes MC Prevail, DJ/producer Rob the Viking and new addition, singer/rapper Tre Nyce, are revealing all the down-and-out details. No song on 'Armed to the Teeth' outlines his ordeal more thoroughly and honestly than 'My Life,' where he name-checks the pills, the quantity, how his family and friends reacted, cigarette burns from falling asleep smoking, leaving rehab early and overall screwing up his life.

"Welcome to my world," Mad laughs, before spilling to Spinner. Clean for about five months now, he recalls how in 2006 he began popping prescription pills but didn't have a clue it would turn into a $500-a-day problem.

"We were still recording and doing shows and I would party every chance I got, but it was just turning into a full-time thing -- I'd do five or six Percocets a night. I had no idea until the point where I was doing 20 of them a day that I was taking synthetic heroin. Someone was like, 'You know you're taking heroin, right?' I'm like, 'What are you talking about? These are Percocets.'

"I had no idea how dark and gnarly things were gonna get when I started doing Oxycontin," he continues, "and I built my tolerance for that until I was doing 20 80 [mgs] a day, which is like doing 340 Percocets a day. The last two years I was basically a zombie."

So why go public now, to the point of including the specifics in their official record label bio? "We wanted to make sure that it didn't seem like a plea for sympathy," says Prevail. "It wasn't the intention. When Mad was asking us, 'Do you think it's a good idea that I divulge this much information and be so forthcoming about everything that's happened?' we obviously agreed. But we wanted to make sure that we did it in a way that was really telling his plight and the situation he was in.

"We didn't want people to feel sorry for the group and that we were looking for a shoulder to cry on or some sort of handout with the album dropping. I was proud of him for being able to talk about it so openly because I know it was a very impactful experience in his life. Obviously, it changed Rob and my life as well, the dynamics of the relationship and the group, and everyone was under a lot of strain in certain periods of Mad going through all that stuff, so it was nice to actually see it down on paper."

Despite the drama, Swollen Members managed to record a hard-hitting, street-wise hip-hop album -- featuring cameos from Talib Kwelli, Tech N9ne and Everlast -- that stands up to the group's earlier work, particularly their more underground-oriented records, 1999's 'Balance' and 2001's 'Bad Dreams.' It's actually a miracle 'Armed to the Teeth' didn't turn out one big mess, considering the state Mad Child was in.

"I put Prev and Rob's life on hold for three years because I was useless," Mad admits. "Thank God, we still had a studio in my house in Kelowna [BC] that I bought. They would come up and stay for a month or two at a time. They'd work on music and I'd come up and record verses here and there. So we did still make this album while I was stoned, but it took way longer."

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