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Concerned friends, associates and former employees of Chris Brown have opened up to Billboard magazine in what appears to be a public plea for him to address his severe drug addiction.

“He’s dancing with death,” one current associate of Brown tells the magazine in the extensive feature. Citing numerous unnamed sources, the piece goes on to reveal that Brown has not treated his bipolar disorder for at least a year, and has used hard drugs consistently for the past two years.

The piece begins:

On a Monday morning around this time in 2016, Chris Brown woke up and sparked a blunt. He had fallen asleep on a bright red sectional sofa in the living room of his $4.35 million mansion in Tarzana, an affluent area of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. It’s where he would pass out most evenings. Lately, says a former employee who was accustomed to scenes like this, Brown had trouble sleeping in his master bedroom upstairs and would instead watch sci-fi movies all through the night. Empty Styrofoam cups littered the table, a sign that Brown — who hadn’t been taking his medication for the bipolar II condition he had been diagnosed with in 2014 — had likely also been sipping lean (a mixture of promethazine/codeine syrup and a soft drink), his comedown of choice after a coke or Molly binge. Brown scrolled through Instagram, hunting for clues about the status of his ex, the 28-year-old model Karrueche Tran. Whom was she with last night, and where? Who was commenting on her most recent photos?

Brown’s bodyguards, according to the article, describe having to “stay up late to check Brown’s pulse” a year ago.

His “downward spiral” is said to have started after he assaulted Rihanna in 2009. After a subsequent unsuccessful rehab stint, Breezy eventually got sober for 15 months…until April 2015, when he relapsed following a breakup with Karrueche Tran. (Last month, Tran was granted a domestic-violence restraining order against Brown following alleged death threats.)

According to others in Brown’s camp – many who reportedly couldn’t speak due to “nondisclosure agreements or fear of Brown’s retaliation” – Brown is now mostly estranged from his mother, (whom they say cares for Brown’s daughter Royalty when he has custody), and nearly all his friends and staff.

They say his current inner circle is mostly members of the Bloods street gang.

“You can talk to any drug addict or chemically imbalanced person – it doesn’t just go away,” says a former friend. “It’s something you have to work on. You have to change your lifestyle. And he’s not doing the things he needs to do to get well, so he’s never going to be well. The kid is going to hit rock bottom.”

Read the entire piece at Billboard.com.

PHOTO: Chris Brown Instagram

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