Matthew Perry Shared His Experience with Ketamine in 2022 Memoir: 'Like Being Hit in the Head with a Giant Happy Shovel'

Matthew Perry had spoken about his experience with ketamine a year before his death.

In his 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the actor wrote about using ketamine therapy to treat his depression. Likening its effects to “being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel,” Perry said he enjoyed the drug.

“[It] has my name written all over it — they might as well have called it ‘Matty,’” he wrote, later adding, “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.”

Perry said the IV contained both Ativan and ketamine, and he would lie down for an hour while he received the drip.

“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,” he wrote in the book. “As the music played and the K ran through me, it all became about the ego, and the death of the ego.”

“I often thought that I was dying during that hour. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘this is what happens when you die,’” he continued. “Yet I would continually sign up for this s--- because it was something different, and anything different is good.”

Although he liked its effects, Perry explained that he decided “ketamine was not for me.” The “hangover was rough,” he wrote, adding that he felt “like a f---ing pincushion.”

One year later, Perry died from “acute effects of ketamine” and subsequent drowning

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According to documents, the Friends star woke up on October 28, 2023, and asked his assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, to inject him with ketamine, which is known for its anesthetic and dissociative effects. That same day, he requested a second dose, and then a third, which ultimately killed him.

Five people have been charged in connection to Perry’s death, including two doctors — Mark Chavez and Salvador Plasencia — who prosecutors alleged in their filing learned of Perry’s want for the drug in September 2023 and upsold him injectable doses.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia allegedly wrote to Chavez, per court documents. Prosecutors claim that Chavez obtained ketamine with a fraudulent prescription, and sold it to Plasencia.

Jasveen Sangha, also known as “The Ketamine Queen,” allegedly also provided Perry with ketamine by giving it to Hollywood director Erik Fleming to transport to Perry’s Pacific Palisades home in exchange for cash from Iwamasa, according to the prosecution's court documents. She allegedly sold him the dose that he took the day he died, per that same filing.

"In the end, these defendants were more interested in profiting off Mr. Perry than caring for his well being," United States Attorney Martin Estrada claimed when charges were announced.

In Perry's PEOPLE cover story in 2022, he opened up about his addiction and revealed that he was no longer using.

“I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side again,” he said at the time. “I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down. I was pretty certain that it would help people if I did.”

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.