Matthew Perry Wrote About Ketamine Use in His Memoir

On Friday, it was revealed that Matthew Perry died from “the acute effects of ketamine.”

Perry opened up about his history with ketamine in his memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”

In the 2022 book, Matthew spoke about getting ketamine therapy at a Swiss rehab clinic during the COVID pandemic “to ease pain and help with depression.”

He wrote, “Ketamine felt like a giant exhale. They’d bring me into a room, sit me down, put headphones on me so I would listen to music, blindfold me, and put an IV in.”

According to Perry, the IV had a “smidge” of Ativan and a drip of ketamine per hour. After a ketamine therapy session, he felt like “a f**king pincushion.”

He shared, “As I lay there in the pitch dark, listening to Bon Iver, I would disassociate, see things — I’d been in therapy for so long that I wasn’t even freaked out by this. Oh, there’s a horse over there? Fine — might as well be ... As the music played and K ran through me, it all became about ego, and the death of ego.”

Perry emphasized, “And 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*t because it was something different, and anything different is good.”

Matthew described the experience as “being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel,” insisting, “the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me.”

In Perry’s toxicology report, Los Angeles County Medical Examiner revealed that Perry was receiving ketamine-infusion therapy, and that he had a treatment a week and a half before he died, but pointed out his death "could not be from that infusion therapy, since ketamine's half-life is 3 to 4 hours, or less.”

The report explained that the ketamine probably caused Perry to become unconscious, leading to him drowning in his jacuzzi.

The report stated, “At the high levels of ketamine found in his postmortem blood specimens, the main lethal effects would be from both cardiovascular over stimulation and respiratory depression.”