Future Announces D.A.R.E. Donation, Mourns Friend With ‘Lost My Dog’ Video

Future shared a new music video for “Lost My Dog,” a single from his seventeenth mixtape, aptly titled Mixtape Pluto, which was released in September. The song and video are dedicated to the memory of a close friend of Future’s who died of a fentanyl overdose. The rapper has announced that he is donating funds via his Freewishes Foundation to D.A.R.E.’s anti-drug educational programs. Sony Music, the parent label to Epic and Future’s own imprint, Freebandz, to which he is signed, has agreed to make a donation as well. Via a press release, Future is also encouraging fans make their own contributions by visiting dare.org/donate.

The meditative song highlights Future’s confessional over sparse production. “Lookin’ at his texts, he was battlin’ with depression/I should’ve seen the signs as soon as I received the message,” he says. “Started to take advantage of these pills when he drill/I wanna tell him ‘Stop,’ but it help him when he kill/Livin’ in the hills, but I can still feel the sadness.”

Directed by Henri Alexander Levy, the greyscale video includes somber scenes of Future performing in a room lit with dozens of candles. Those intimate shots are interspersed with clips of a dog’s shadow, what appears to be drugs freebasing in a spoon over a flame, a woman in the shovel of a bulldozer, and vintage landscapes and catastrophes.

According to the CDC and DEA, synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths in the US have steadily and dramatically increased since 1999, going from under 20,000 deaths a year to over 107,000 in 2022. The CDC reports that in 2023, drug overdose deaths decreased year over year for the first time since 2018, and deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl reduced slightly from 76,226 to 74,702.

 D.A.R.E., or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, was launched in 1983 at the height of social messaging that young people should “just say no” to drugs. Though, as NPR reports, several studies from the 1990s and early 2000s have found D.A.R.E. ineffective in reducing drug use, the organization rebranded with new curricula in 2009 and now includes specific lessons around fentanyl use. 

While Future’s works, like the legendary mixtape Dirty Sprite and album DS2, have described his own drug use, most notably lean, he’s also expressed regrets about it. In 2019, he told Rolling Stone that upon learning late rapper Juice Wrld tried lean at a young age as a Future fan, that it “really bothered me.”

“When he told me that, I was like ‘Oh shit. What the fuck have I done?’” he said. “I wasn’t aware of that influence, but now I’m aware of how much it influenced. It’s like, this shit really fucked me up for a minute. It’s all I could think about. Like, ‘Damn, what have I done? What have I done to other people? What I did to myself?’” Future’s 2020 album, High Off Life, also showed him considering a new path. “I’ve been tryna fight my demons, I’ve been tryna fight my cup,” he raps on “Accepting My Flaws.” 

Future’s Mixtape Pluto landed at No. 16 on Rolling Stone’s list of the best hip-hop albums last year. Future and Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You—replete with the Kendrick Lamar-assisted “Like That” that sparked the still-enduring Great Rap War—was named Rolling Stone’s seventh best album of 2024. It also earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album at the upcoming ceremony. “Like That” earned two nominations as well. His single with Metro Boomin, “We Still Don’t Trust You,” earned a Best Melodic Rap Performance nomination.