When I received the news last fall that Matthew Perry was found dead, it brought up old memories, but not because I was ever hooked on Friends. I never saw an entire episode, but I recall being nine years old, never having watched Saturday Night Live, but suddenly finding out that Christmas that someone who made my family laugh had died at the young age 33 years old. That man was Chris Farley.
To my surprise, it turned out, there was one last feature that had been shot before his sudden death called Almost Heroes. This starred Mr. Farley and Mr. Perry as two early 19th-century explorers attempting to beat Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Ocean. It became my first exposure to what adolescent comedy was made of and it brought me countless laughs and taught me some dirty humor. It wasn’t long before I knew that this incredibly funny actor had died of a drug overdose and not simply because of his large figure and poor eating habits, which is what I heard the day after his death from my older cousin. The younger Matthew Perry looked just as healthy as all the romantic drama heroes of that generation. When I was a child, I figured he would wind up doing more comedic and dramatic roles the same way Brendan Fraser did for decades.
As fate would have it, there was more than one similarity between Mr. Perry and Mr. Farley’s end. The opiates, inducing heroin, that killed Mr. Farley back in 1997 eventually contained the same ingredients that were used to create Oxycontin, which gave lots of physical pain relief, but ultimately led to mental instability, and in many cases more overdoses. I didn’t have any reason to be curious about these gray areas back then. All I needed to know at the time was that I could live a long healthy life if I didn’t smoke cigarettes or experiment with drugs that weren’t given to me by a doctor.
By the time Mr. Perry died at the age of 54, he was most remembered for his time on Friends. He had only made a few comedic films since Almost Heroes that I have not seen. He had, however, become an inspiration because he opened up about having suffered from alcoholism and opiate addiction and recently wrote a book about it hoping to help others. The best-selling book was titled Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing, and it can be bought at a local bookstore or on Amazon with the option of buying a French, Spanish, or German translation. The link can be found here:
I had just turned 35 and had been getting Ketamine infusions to treat bipolar depression for three years, recently having switched from one clinic to another. Like many others, my first instinct was that he had died from the drugs that he had originally been addicted to, like his Almost Heroes costar, many celebrities, and my own grandfather who was a psychiatrist with a morphine addiction. This hypothesis turned out to be true to an extent, except that the autopsy revealed that the dominant substance in Mr. Perry’s system was recreational Ketamine and that the cause of death was drowning, while the Ketamine served as the sedative that made him fall fast asleep. It also turned out that he had been getting Ketamine for medical purposes to treat his depression but that the last infusion he’d gotten from a legitimate clinic had been so long ago that it could not have contributed to him passing out in his hot tub.
Nine months have passed and now the media is shining the spotlight on the five people who are facing criminal charges for supplying the alleged amount of Ketamine that caused the beloved comic actor to pass out and drown in his hot tub. Rather than speculate about how this happened, or how any other celebrities came to die from drugs, I think I can shed more light by telling my side as an ordinary person who has used Ketamine for depression under the supervision of two clinics with some differing attitudes and opinions.
I started getting Ketamine in July of 2020, which reporters say is the same year Mr. Perry began using Ketamine for depression. One of the first things that I was told was that some people end up needing very little Ketamine after a certain amount of time, while others need frequent IV infusions long term. After a few months of treatment, I found myself getting IV infusions every two weeks and having days where I felt great benefits, and other days I questioned if the drug was helping me.
A year later, I discovered that a friend of mine was getting infusions at another clinic in New York City that had been around longer than the one I started with. Upon discovering that my friend was getting infusions every four weeks and using dissolvable lozenges to make it until the next infusions I asked my doctor about it and I received a discouraging answer. He claimed the DEA had determined that prescribing them was unsafe as it could provoke drug abuse and cause patients to experience the temporary side effects of Ketamine without a doctor present. He also stated that his research had shown that they were ineffective.
Some clinics like Mindbloom, which I haven’t tried, lean further in the opposite direction by offering exclusively at-home treatment with lozenges at lower prices. I can’t weigh in on this with any medical expertise, but what I can say is that upon switching to my current clinic in March of 2023, I found that my new clinic’s methods were instantly more effective for me. The doctors and nurses administered the Ketamine through the IV at a much slower pace giving me a much more relaxed infusion. What I already knew when I switched was that many times I would feel relieved for 9-12 days after an infusion, but then end up spending 2-5 days feeling extreme levels of anxiety and depression before getting another infusion and gradually starting to feel better.
At first, I felt like I wasn’t getting much more benefit in my everyday life, but when my team of doctors at the clinic agreed to try Lozenges in between my infusions every other week, I started to feel minor improvements. The doctor who heads the clinic was skeptical about giving me infusions more frequently and more determined than any doctor I’ve ever worked with to avoid taking advantage of me financially, but he admitted that doing so was a safe thing to try. Eventually, the team and I made another decision that my previous clinic wouldn’t have agreed to, which was to give me infusions every 10 days. That choice enabled the drug to be more effective than ever before and now I’m getting infusions every 7 days without lozenges.
In my experience, it doesn’t hurt to seek multiple opinions. I think the most important thing for those of us with conditions that can only be treated with drugs that aren’t standard pharmaceuticals is that even if we are not celebrities with drug problems, we are still caught in the middle of the War on Drug Policy that has been going on since the discovery of marijuana’s effect on cancer patients.
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