It’s been six months since “Friends” actor Matthew Perry was discovered dead from a ketamine overdose. Now, the Los Angeles Police Department is launching a joint criminal investigation with the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) to determine how the actor had so much of the drug in his system.
Perry was discovered dead at his home, in a hot tub, at the age of 54 on October 28, 2023. The sitcom star was determined to have died from an overdose. “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,” the report said, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Contributing factors to the cause of death included drowning and buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid addiction.
Perry had been vocal about his struggle for sobriety. He published a tell-all memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” one year prior to his death. The book went into detail about Perry’s excessive drug use over the years.
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He also discussed using ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties, in the book. These experimental treatments are often used to assist with depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, chronic pain, and other mental health struggles. “I often thought that I was dying during that hour. Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this sh** because it was something different, and anything different is good,” Perry wrote.
The “Friends” star said the treatments made him feel like he was “hit in the head with a giant happy shovel.” He also claimed to get a hangover from the ketamine infusions, saying the aftermath of treatment often “outweighed the shovel.”
The “Friends” star had been undergoing ketamine infusion therapy before he died, the outlet noted. Despite Perry having a ketamine session just over a week before his death, the autopsy said this particular visit was not responsible for the overdose because “the ketamine in his system at death could not be from that infusion therapy since ketamine’s half-life is three to four hours or less.”
Source: Daily Wire
