Matthew Perry’s Final Days: Ketamine Doctor Reveals Obsession and Blame

He was the Friend everyone wished they had – the one with the looks, the smarts and above all the sense of humour. 

Yet at Matthew Perry’s core there existed an aching loneliness – one that could only be assuaged, albeit temporarily, with alcohol and drugs. 

‘I had had all that the outside had to offer,’ he wrote in his 2022 memoir. ‘Julia Roberts is my girlfriend. It doesn’t matter, you have to drink. I just bought my dream house – it looks out across the whole city! Can’t enjoy that without a drug dealer. 

‘I’m making a million dollars a week. I win, right? Would you like to drink? Why yes, I would. Thank you very much.’ 

Then he went on, ‘I am one of the luckiest men on the planet. And boy did I have fun. They just weren’t the answer.’

That memoir was entitled Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing – and the ‘Big Terrible Thing’ that constantly shadowed him until his untimely and shocking death at the age of 54 on October 28, 2023 was addiction. 

After his body was found in the jacuzzi of his Los Angeles home, the coroner eventually ruled that the anaesthetic drug ketamine was the primary cause of his death – a drug that was being used to treat his depression, but which he was later found to have been horribly abusing in his final days.

A new ITV documentary entitled Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy explores the events leading up to his death and, in particular, the doctors who preyed upon his addiction issues by illegally supplying him with the drug. 

‘It’s the most egregious level of exploitation,’ says Dr David Feifel, a neuroscientist and leading expert in ketamine therapy who features in the programme. ‘It’s totally unjustifiable.’

Investigators claimed Matthew received 27 injections of ketamine in his final three days, which, says Dr Feifel, ‘would be more than a year’s worth to the average patient’. 

Even more troubling is how Matthew came to be in a hot tub while under the influence. As the founder of California’s Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute – one of the first clinics to legally introduce ketamine infusion therapy to treat patients with depression and PTSD – Dr Feifel insists that, ‘we monitor all the patients on CCTV because they’re not in full control of their mental or motor faculties. Being next to a body of water was a recipe for disaster.’

Yet perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the hour-long film is the callousness of the physicians who supplied the actor with the drug, Dr Salvador Plasencia and Dr Mark Chavez. 

Not only did Plasencia rather grubbily administer an injection to the star in a parking lot, but after allegedly selling Matthew 20 vials of ketamine for $55,000 (around £41,000) – a single vial cost Chavez $12 (£9) – Plasencia wrote to his colleague, ‘I wonder how much this moron will pay.’

Dr Feifel is scathing about this. ‘You’re prescribing drugs that are potentially dangerous in a reckless way, just to enrich yourself. In addition to that, you’re exploiting the vulnerability of someone who’s suffering and is so desperate to end that suffering. I can’t think of a worse configuration of misbehaviour.’

Matthew was very open not only about the many treatments he sought for his addiction issues, but also about the emptiness he felt inside. The film features him reading from his memoir and he poignantly says, ‘I figured being famous would fill that great hole that was endlessly growing inside of me.’

It was an emptiness that had taken seed from a young age. Growing up in Canada, Matthew was just a year old when his parents divorced. 

His mother, Suzanne, eventually became press secretary to Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, while his father John Bennett Perry was an actor and model who found fame as the Old Spice guy in the 1970s commercials. ‘I saw his face more often on TV or in magazines than I did in reality,’ Matthew wrote.

From the age of five, he would be put on a plane by his mum to fly alone from Montreal to LA to visit his dad. ‘I realised I was too young to be alone and this was all completely terrifying,’ he wrote in his memoir. 

At 14 he tried alcohol for the first time and later, after drinking an entire bottle of wine, he remembered looking to the skies and feeling ‘better than I ever had in my entire life. I thought to myself, “This is probably what normal people feel like all the time.”’

Following his father into acting, aged 24 Matthew landed the role of Chandler Bing in a new sitcom called Friends. The phenomenal success of the show, which ran for ten seasons, was to change his life completely.

Yet his underlying insecurities, far from receding, were brought to the fore. In one telling excerpt from his memoir he notes, ‘You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season. When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol. When I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s a lot of pills.’

Jennifer Aniston later recalled that she and her Friends co-stars – Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow – had little idea how to handle his addictions. ‘We weren’t equipped to deal with it,’ she said tearfully.

After injuring himself in a jet-ski accident in 1996 while filming the movie Fools Rush In, Matthew was given painkillers which, the documentary suggests, may have sent him even further down the addiction path.

He spent more than $9million (around £7million) on various ways to get clean. Eventually he alighted on ketamine infusion therapy. 

It was developed in the 1960s and, says Dr Feifel, at lower doses ‘this drug seems to have remarkable properties for treating mental illness’.

‘The idea behind that is it kind of kickstarts the psychological changes that can have that therapeutic effect.’ Or as Matthew himself more colourfully put it, it felt ‘like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel’.

Plasencia not only illegally provided ketamine, but also taught Kenneth Iwamasa, Matthew’s live-in assistant, how to inject it. Iwamasa had no medical training and the drug, says Dr Feifel, should only have been administered in a medically controlled environment.

Also involved with procuring ketamine for Matthew was Hollywood director Erik Fleming, whose connections led him to Jasveen Sangha – a woman alleged by prosecutors to be a drug dealer known as the ‘Ketamine Queen’.

On Matthew’s last day, he told Iwamasa to get his hot tub ready and inject him with a dose of ketamine. According to the assistant, Matthew’s last words were, ‘Shoot me up with a big one.’ After running some errands, Iwamasa returned to find him face down in the water.

Five people were charged in connection with Matthew’s death. Chavez, Iwamasa and Fleming all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine last year, while Plasencia pleaded guilty last month to four similar charges. They are all awaiting sentencing, with Plasencia facing up to 40 years in prison.

Jasveen Sangha, who is accused of supplying the dose that ultimately killed Matthew, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is due to stand trial next month. 

Her lawyer Mark Geragos – who initially represented Michael Jackson in his 2003 molestation case – said: ‘This theory that the so-called fatal dose is somehow linked to my client is absolute garbage.’

But Dr Feifel is unequivocal about the doctors’ culpability. ‘You’ve been given this honour of being a physician and you’re abusing that trust,’ he says. ‘Despicable is the only way to describe it.’

• Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy, Monday, August 18, 9pm, ITV1