Considering how often Friends still airs in syndication and continues to keep Matthew Perry’s Chandler Bing around as a daily presence, it can be easy to forget that it’s been around 16 months since the actor died of an accidental drowning caused by the acute effects of ketamine. Since that time, the majority of his former co-stars have shared tributes and praise, while a new streaming documentary is looking deeper into the lead-up and shocking causal factors that resulted in his death.
Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy, Available now with a Peacock subscription as one of this week’s streaming highlights, is an hourlong retrospective that is less of a career celebration and more of a cautionary tale about substance abuse, and the ways affluent celebrities can unwittingly influence negative and potentially deadly behavior within their inner circles. In Perry’s case, it came down to a personal assistant he’d reportedly trusted for years, as well as the doctors supplying the ketamine in such high amounts.
It was revealed in the doc that Perry was given upwards of 27 ketamine injections across the three days that preceded his death. And U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada appears quite often as a talking-head, pointing the finger at the eventually convicted physicans — Drs. Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez — as well as Perry's longtime live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa. In his words:
Dr. Placencia was very clear in text messages and other messages in saying the he saw this as an opportunity to make a lot of money in a short amount of time. And he allegedly did just that. He sets the prices, which were exorbitant. And the indictment contains evidence that he sold, over about a month, 20 vials of ketamine to Mr. Perry in exchange for $55,000. . . . They even talked about the fact that this wasn’t the right way to administer ketamine, yet this was a golden opportunity to make money. And at one point, Dr. Placencia writes to Dr. Chavez ‘I wonder how much this moron will pay.’
Saying that the medical professionals responsible "should have known much better," Estrada stated that there were plenty of warning signs and red flags along the way that should have been avoided in the first place, but that someone also should have stepped in after the problems became worse.
In the aftermath of Perry's death and the ensuing investigation, charges were filed against not just Placencia and Chavez, but also Iwamasa, TV director Erik Fleming, and another drug dealer. The case also drew national attention to the so-called "Ketamine Queen," Jasveen Sangha.
For many, Matthew Perry will always be more than just a TV comedy actor, just like he'd wanted. And here's hoping that his struggles will serve to help others to find help in their own lives before things go too far.
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