According to Kevin Smith, writing about his experiences with Mewes' addictions in the multi-part story "Me and My Shadow," Mewes' eventual slide into drug dependency was foreshadowed by a tragic family history. As Smith put it, Mewes was "Born the son of a heroin abuser, [and] spent most of his childhood raised by an aunt while his Mother fed her jones or spent years in jail."
Despite this home situation, Mewes was essentially living straight-edge when Smith first came to know of him, growing up with a few years' age gap between them in the small town of Highlands, New Jersey. When Mewes was in high school, according to Smith, he was known for advocating a lifestyle so clean that it was downright quaint — free of booze, narcotics, and even romance.
Things can change pretty quickly when you're a teenager, though, and when the time came to shoot Clerks, Mewes had morphed into an enthusiastic drinker and pot smoker, chasing girls and good times with profane aplomb. He was, according to Smith at least, essentially playing himself in the movie — Smith's directorial debut, and the friends' first collaboration as Jay and Silent Bob.
But while all the beers and bud and pontificating upon snoochie-boochies was, on-screen at least, often funny as hell, the real-life Mewes was on a path that threatened to derail his whole life and career in the years to come.
