'Friends' actor Matthew Perry died as a result of 'the acute effects of ketamine', the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office said Dec 15, 2023. Photo: AFP
Matthew Perry detailed his apparent discomfort with ketamine in his 2022 memoir – a fact that has resurfaced following a toxicology report which revealed his cause of death to be “the acute effects of ketamine.”
In Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing, the Friends star revealed he had undergone ketamine infusion therapy while at a rehab facility in Switzerland, reports Entertainment Tonight. But while he kept going back to those sessions, he said the after effects were “rough.”
“Ketamine was a very popular street drug in the 1980s,” wrote the five-time Emmy nominee, who was open about his lifelong battle with drug abuse and alcoholism. “There is a synthetic form of it now, and it’s used for two reasons: to ease pain and help with depression.”
Perry said “taking K is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel,” but that ketamine infusions often made him feel like he was “dying.”
“I thought, ‘This is what happens when you die,'” he wrote. “Yet I would continually sign up for this s– because it was something different, and anything different is good.”
However, “the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel,” Perry continued, eventually concluding that “ketamine was not for me.”
The 54-year-old actor was found floating face down in the hot tub at his Los Angeles home on Oct 28, after first responders answered a call for cardiac arrest.
His toxicology report, released on Dec 15, ultimately determined that Perry died from the “acute effects of ketamine,” with contributing factors including drowning, coronary artery disease, and the effects of buprenorphine – a drug used to help addicts ween themselves off opioids. His death was ruled an accident.
Leading up to his passing, Perry had reportedly been undergoing ketamine infusion therapy to treat anxiety and depression. However, the medical examiner ruled that the amount found in Perry’s system could not have been from that treatment, as his last-known session had been a week and a half before his death.
The ketamine found in his body “could not be from that infusion therapy, since ketamine’s half-life is three to four hours, or less,” the report said. The medical examiner could not determine the method in which Perry took the ketamine that caused lethal “cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression.”
Perry had reportedly been sober for 19 months prior to his death.
The medical examiner found no evidence of alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl or PCP in his system. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
