At one point in Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, there’s a story about his 2021 stay at a swanky five-star rehab facility in Switzerland, where he was housed in a villa with a breathtaking view of Lake Geneva and assigned a personal butler and gourmet chef. “The kind of luxurious place where you were guaranteed to not meet anybody else,” is how he described the super-private treatment center.
It was hardly the actor’s first attempt at recovery. Before landing in the Alps, he’d been in and out of some 15 different high-end programs for issues with alcohol and prescription drug abuse. There was the luxe detox compound in Malibu where he spent a month in 2001; the therapeutic “trauma camp” in Florida he visited sometime after 2004; the rustic lodge in Sun Valley, Utah, where, in 2011, he practiced yoga and engaged in equine therapy and occasionally encountered a moose strolling the grounds (“No, really, there were moose there; I wasn’t hallucinating”).
By some estimates, Perry spent about $9 million on rehab treatments over the years, not including the $350,000 he dropped on the private jet he hired to shuttle him to and from the facility in Switzerland. But the Lake Geneva program was different. It introduced Perry to a new, experimental form of addiction-recovery therapy that promised remarkable results. Every day, German-speaking nurses would usher him into a darkened room, sit him down for an hour, blindfold him, put headphones over his ears and inject into his arm an IV drip filled with a supposed miracle cure.
“As I lay there in the pitch-dark, listening to Bon Iver, I would disassociate, see things,” Perry wrote of the experience in that 2022 memoir. “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.” Before long, the disassociation turned inward, until his very existence in time and space seemed to blur into a haze. “It all became about ego, and the death of ego,” he went on. “I often thought that I was dying during that hour. Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die.”
The infusion treatment he was receiving in that room in Switzerland turned out to be ketamine, the very narcotic that in October would end up killing him.
Today, Perry’s death remains something of a mystery. Not the specific events that led up to it; those have been thoroughly investigated by a multi-agency criminal task force led by the Los Angeles Police Department. We know, for instance, that after Perry’s first doses in Switzerland, he continued receiving infusions once he returned to L.A., visiting some of the ketamine clinics that had sprung up following promising studies suggesting that the powerful hallucinogenic could be effective in treating depression and anxiety as well as addiction.
We know that after the L.A. clinics refused his requests to up his dosage, Perry began self-administering the drug at home, without medical supervision. We know that he developed such a voracious appetite for ketamine, he began purchasing vast quantities on the black market, spending upward of $67,000 a month. We know that on Oct. 28, 2023, he took too much of it, passed out in a hot tub at his home in Pacific Palisades and drowned. And we know that five people who helped him procure and use the drug — two shady doctors; an aspiring movie producer turned rehab coach who allegedly moonlighted as a dealer; Perry’s 59-year-old live-in assistant; and a woman known as “The Ketamine Queen,” accused of running a North Hollywood stash house — have been arrested and charged in connection to his overdose.
What we still don’t know, though, what’s almost impossible to fathom, is why it happened.
You’d think that if anybody possessed the resources and support system necessary to battle addiction, it would be this guy, a beloved 54-year-old superstar with a reported $120 million in the bank. Perry could afford the very best — certainly the most expensive — treatment services in the world. He had money to send himself wherever he needed to go to get whatever sort of therapy was necessary. And there was certainly no shortage of people he might have called on for help, comrades he’d known and worked with for years, who cared about his well-being and would have done just about anything for him. This, after all, was an actor who for a decade shared his life with a tight-knit group of co-stars on one of the most popular shows in TV history — you know, the one called Friends.
As it turned out, however, none of that mattered. On the contrary, Perry’s fame and fortune may well have been his undoing. His celebrity and money drew a crowd of opportunistic enablers — including the five whom the LAPD and the feds arrested after his death — who encouraged his drug habits in ways true friends never should. His infinite resources allowed him unlimited opportunity for excess and insulated him from the consequences of his behaviors, except, unfortunately for him, for the horrific toll the drugs took on his health. He endured emphysema, diabetes, chronic pancreatic fibrosis and coronary artery disease — not to mention a series of abdominal surgeries after his 2018 colon rupture that left him carrying a colostomy bag for nine months. Also, there was the time in 2021, just before shooting the Friends reunion, when his top teeth fell out.
Add to all of the above the unique burdens of a Hollywood career — the demands from agents and network and studio chiefs to deliver on schedules that leave little time for healing — and it’s easy to see why so many experts say being rich and famous is more of a hindrance to sobriety than it is a help. It’s also easy to see why so many Hollywood stars succumb to substance abuse, going back decades. Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse — the casualties are strewn all over the Walk of Fame. Indeed, when it comes to treating the disease of addiction, celebrity could almost be considered a co-morbidity.
