Matthew Perry died from “acute effects of ketamine”
The Los Angeles Medical Examiner's Office has revealed that Friends star Matthew Perry had "high levels of ketamine" in his blood
Aux News Matthew Perry
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office has released its report on the death of actor Matthew Perry today, revealing that the Friends star died of “acute effects of ketamine,” with drowning, coronary artery disease, and the effects of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid use disorder, all listed as contributing factors. Perry’s death has been ruled accidental.
According to Variety, Perry was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy, reportedly for treatment of depression and anxiety. Per the Medical Examiner’s report, “At the high levels of ketamine found in his postmortem blood specimens, the main lethal effects would be from both cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression.”
Perry was open, for many years, about his struggles with drug use; it was, among other things, a major subject of discussion in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing. He died on October 29 of this year, after being found, unresponsive, in a pool, reportedly at his Los Angeles home.
Perry’s death has been greeted with widespread outpourings of sympathy and support, both for his work as an actor, and for his kind personality and efforts to help others struggling with addiction. In 2011, he spoke before Congress, urging them to fund drug courts, which present alternate forms of rehabilitation to people convicted of drug abuses; he also founded Perry House, an addiction recovery facility focused on helping people with alcoholism. He had previously been acknowledged by the White House for his work in helping people struggling with addiction, and described it in interviews as being more satisfying than accolades he’d received for his work as an actor or performer. Back in November, just a week after his death, the National Philanthropic Trust established a Matthew Perry Foundation, designed to help people struggling with drug use and addiction.
62 Comments
This is just sad in so many ways. No comedy here, just tragedy.
Yes. Just awful, especially when you consider how many people assumed (not entirely without cause or precedent) that he had relapsed. Instead, he was apparently just a damaged guy trying hard to stay on an even keel and to stay alive.
Well, you know… tragedy + time etc. Oh I’m sure a decade from now we’ll all laaaaugh and laaaugh (assuming we’re not all dead by then ourselves)* for the record no I am not being serious. Well, except for maybe that last bit…
I notice that a certain Justin Bieber poster here is way in favor of opening up personal information involuntarily.
I suppose he feels that because he’d been open with his excrement porn fetish on Jezebel (check his posting history), that everyone else is subject to having their lives opened for his amusement?
It’s incredibly obvious it’s your alt account.
What episode of Bojack Horseman was this?
Someone with a more medical background can help me understand, but my understanding here is essentially his heart/cardio system wasn’t healthy enough (probably from his years of alcohol/drug abuse) to do that kind of treatment, which led to him having some type of cardiac event while in the pool which led to him drowning.
You’re supposed to essentially be microdosing ketamine in that type of treatment. Doesn’t seem like you would have “high levels”.
That’s my understanding of the treatment, been reading about it some lately. I would think whoever the doctor was administering would know the proper levels though that may not be the best assumption in cases like this
One of the other articles mentions that enough time had passed between his last infusion and his death that it shouldn’t have been in his system at all, so he was taking something outside of the regular treatment.
Yes. This is what worries about ketamine therapy becoming so popular, especially in regards to people who struggle with addiction. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that, because it’s “legal” you can use a shit ton of ketamine, the same way you can smoke or eat a ton of weed gummies, and you’ll be fine. Ketamine therapy can work wonders but there’s a reason you’re supposed to take it under a doctor or nurse’s supervision in a clinical setting.
Yeah I am shocked it would be given to someone with such a long track record of addiction to prescription drugs in particular. It just seems like a recipe for disaster any decent doctor would recognize.I don’t like that these details have been released to the public but I do hope they help people realize that ketamine, though incredibly promising as a treatment for mental health issues, can be addictive.
It’s a weirdly popular drug among comedians because it treats depression. Neal Brennan has talked extensively about it, so has Whitey Cummings, and so did Matthew Perry. It either works for them, or they absolutely don’t like it. There seems to be no in-between.
Well, if you have a bad k-hole experience, you’re not going to want to repeat it. Hearing about that in college made me too scared to ever try ketamine recreationally. If an actual doctor wanted to pursue micro dose treatment, I would be open to it, but you’re supervised in case you do start to have a bad experience and they can talk/comfort you out of it.
It seems like this may have been discretionary usage. From the AP:
People close to Perry told investigators that he was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy, an experimental treatment used to treat depression and anxiety. But the coroner said the levels of ketamine in Perry’s body were in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery, and that his last treatment 1 1/2 weeks earlier wouldn’t explain those levels. The drug is typically metabolized in a matter of hours.https://apnews.com/article/matthew-perry-death-cause-054e67f7495845804f801c57a1ae2522
So its more likely he thought the sessions were going well enough or whatever, thought he could do more on his own, and started taking it on his own. One of those “I felt better with it then, I bet I could feel even better if I could take it when I wanted it” broken addict logic.
As more doctors weigh in – it’s more like a normal person would have been able to absorb the therapeutic levels of ketamine, but with his trashed body – heart/vascular, kidneys, lungs, pancreas – his body couldn’t process the drug correctly anymore. He may not have died if he were not in a hot tub but he just slipped under the water.His memoir details all the brutal surgeries he went through. His entire torso was covered in deep scars. It’s all just beyond sad.
He wrote extensively in his memoir about being prescribed ketamine to ease the effects of depression and addiction. He really wasn’t a fan of it – he said the after-effects were like “a bad hangover.” But it worked. And it works for a lot of people.
He should not have been in the hot tub. They say don’t even go in a hot tub if you have taken Tylenol PM.This was not a relapse. His cumulative chronic diseases (mostly COPD and heart disease) and even a therapeutic level would have slowed his breathing. All it took was nodding off.
I assumed it was something heart-related, since he’d damaged himself for so many years thanks to his addiction.
That’s always the worst; someone dies when they’re trying to get straight.
Poor guy, sounds like he was self-medicating. I’ve only heard of ketamine infusions in a medical setting where one can be safely monitored. A real tragedy, and I hope this story is presented in the proper context. Ketamine therapy has done wonders for many depression sufferers, but like any treatment, it can be misused.
Thank you. It’s not some “Special K” club-kid street drug anymore. Though many will use anything to get high.It is used so effectively for many people and I hope all this hype and misreporting will not cause harm or shame to those who use this medical therapy by making it more difficult for them to access. Matthew Perry would have hated that outcome.
Please, think of the real victims here, the people investing in ketamine therapy clinics across the nation
Ketamine therapy is even being pushed on the official Department Veteran’s Affairs dot-gov webpage. A highly addictive controlled substance being push by medical professionals to a disadvantaged patient population just feels like the opioid crisis all over again.
Ketamine for medicinal use is done in controlled settings and in low doses. Heroine is also a medical drug. I don’t think we should deny cancer patients palliative care because someone somewhere might misuse it.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned King Tesla has been pushing Ketamine as a depression treatment for years now.
See, his problem is that he’s not taking a high enough dosage. I’m thinking he should be upping his dose to 2-4kg per day. Keep in mind I’m not a doctor, but then again, neither is he.
Am I alone in feeling like it’s kinda weird that it’s become standard to release the autopsy results of famous people? Why is that anyone’s business besides the family and (maybe) the authorities? I don’t know that there’s really an argument that this sort of info lands anywhere close to being public interest.
I was thinking this myself. I can’t think of a good reason why the public needs to know. If the family wants to release a statement, that’s fine, but I don’t think the public is owed anything.
I can’t blame people for being curious either, but that’s a separate thing.
Legally, the public is entitled to information their taxes paid for.
That’s not a sufficient explanation. Lots of government work is kept from the public. Sometimes, a civilian can file a records request (using FOIA at the federal level and similar state laws for state government agencies), but the agencies are then allowed to say no. Other records are automatically protected, and the agencies don’t even need to reply (nuclear weapons, for example). There’s already plenty of legal architecture to block records releases, and it would be easy to categorize coroner’s reports with other kinds of sensitive or secret info.
Where did you get that idea? By that logic the NSA and CIA would have no secrets.
Okay, obviously national security is the sole exception.
…except it’s not, at all. Your taxes pay for Medicare but that doesn’t mean you get to access old people’s medical records.You seem to have just made up a legal principle that straight up does not exist. The closest thing is the Freedom of Information act, which has all sorts of limitations and exceptions. I think it only applies to federal agencies too. Not the local police or coroner. I might be wrong though.
Different jurisdictions have different laws, but generally speaking public records are (as the name suggests) available to the public. In a lot of jurisdictions (including California) autopsies are public records.
Not all government data is a public record, some stuff is designated non-public. But the stuff that is, is available on request to anyone.
You are not. I think that this new trend is really gross and it’s a definite lowering of the bar for the privacy of known artists. I mean, maybe if foul play were suspected or something, but this is just too much. Unless the family wanted it released for some reason, then these kinds of details are just none of our business. We shouldn’t be receiving a secondhand toxicology report for a dead man who almost certainly would be ashamed of it were he still alive to react.
Tax funded services are expected to be transparent. Your autopsy results will also be public record, but no one will care.
Perry was open about everything. He wrote a book about it. He would not have been ashamed about being a cautionary tale. And it wasn’t a secondhand report. The report is primary and public.
“New Trend”.
And yet here you are, reading the details of his death and then, ironically, commenting on it. lol
Tax funded services are expected to be transparent. Your autopsy results will also be public record, but no one will care.
Public access to autopsy results varies widely state by state. New Hampshire, for instance, requires next-of-kin approval.
Can we get yours soon?
As opposed to “Matt was an iddle bitty angel baby who just, you know, passed out in hot tub or something, so sad!” Yeah, and Whitney was just taking a bath, and Prince was just taking a nap.
Anyone’s autopsy is a matter of public record. I had a friend who died under weird circumstances and all I had to do was go fill out a form and they gave me a copy.
NOOO NOT THE POOR FAMOUS PEOPLE
I find it highly interesting. I don’t like obits that don’t list the cause of death. How a person dies helps us confront the many ways in which we all confront death and our own mortality. And it hasn’t “become standard”— it was always standard. It has become standard NOT to list a cause of death these days. I know this because my family has owned a daily newspaper for five generations and I have looked at obits going back to the 19th century. My own great grandfather’s obit said he died at age 36 from “an abscess on the hip”— IE- burst appendix. Quaint, eh? But information nonetheless. RIP.
My favorite place in VT has a huge old cemetery going back to the 1800s. The causes of death are on all the tombstones and they range from the tragic to the darkly funny.
Fair enough.
Hasn’t that always been the case? Marilyn Monroe died from a nembutal overdose. Elvis died from a heart attack. River Phoenix overdosed. Suzanne Somers died of cancer.Unless the person dies of natural causes/old age like Norman Lear isn’t naming cause of death standard?
It has always been the case, I just brought it up now for no reason in particular? A curiosity more than anything else.
When I say it’s “become standard”, I mean more that it seems like anecdotally there’s been an increase in the prevalence of news articles about why so-and-so died whereas before it seemed like while that information was publicly available, you’d have to dig a bit if you wanted it. Or maybe I’m just noticing it more now because who knows why.
I notice that a certain poster here is way in favor of opening up personal information involuntarily.
I suppose he feels that because he’d been open with his excrement porn fetish on Jezebel (check his posting history), that everyone else is subject to having their lives opened for his amusement?
Is the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office, so it’s a government agency whose work is paid for by taxpayers. Absent a really compelling reason, such work is usually public.I don’t think the medical examiner’s office only releases reports on famous people. I think it releases the results of its work as to all people, but you only read about it when it comes to famous people or people whose death was notable. It’s like police reports. As a general matter, they’re public. It’s not that the report from Jonathan Majors’ assault is public and Joe Smith’s is not. It’s that the newspaper has no particular reason to report on Joe Smith’s assault, unless it has some newsworthy feature.
It just strikes me as an odd thing for people to be curious about? And partially it also strikes me as odd because, as someone involved in the medical industry in both the lab and data analysis areas, it seems like it would be something that landed under HIPAA privacy laws. Granted, it’s not like the deceased has any great interest in keeping their records private any longer, but we aren’t even allowed to just hand out medical info to proven close family members without explicit permission. Obviously the deceased’s info isn’t covered, as that’s that we’re talking about, but still.
Autopsies are public info regardless of who the subject is.
Do NOT interpret what I am saying to be that anyone deserves a thing, but one does place all of those glowing “Matt was in a good place” obituaries in a different light now.
He was still treating his depression. Many people just “check in” with their friends via text, they don’t really see what is going on. We’re all guilty of it.He was living with a horrible disease and still desperately trying to manage his depression. Doesn’t change anything at all that I think or feel about his tragic death. It just makes me more sympathetic.
I told you young people, that K is some bad shit
Tell them the same about alcohol, cigarettes and vaping.
Could I be any more in the k hole
This poor man must have been in hell. RIP Matthew Perry.