Matthew Perry’s lethal log book: 55 pills a day, a bag of his own teeth… and a multi-million-dollar pact with the devil

Matthew Perry once mused, ‘It is very odd to live in a world where, if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.’

For nearly three decades, behind the glamour of an A-list existence, his life always seemed at risk: The Friends star fought a very public battle with alcohol and prescription drugs that at times threatened to ruin his career.

In his bestselling memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry laid out, by the numbers, what his drug addiction had cost him. Not only financially – based on his accounting, he spent $9 million, which amounted to half of his typical annual earnings, in his struggle to get sober – but also mentally, emotionally and physically.

He estimated that in his lifetime, he went to rehab 15 times, detoxed 65 times and attended 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in hopes of getting sober. After a near-fatal ruptured colon, he endured 14 major stomach surgeries and once had to carry a baggie full of his top teeth to the dentist after he bit into a slice of peanut toast and they all fell out. Yes, all 16 of them.

When Perry died in October 2023 at the age of 54, having accidentally drowned in his hot tub from the acute effects of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects, it felt as though his family, friends and fans had already done the math and knew that his life could only end one way: tragically.

Sadly, he seemed to know this, too. It was just a matter of when.

Matthew Perry estimated that in his lifetime, he went to rehab 15 times, detoxed 65 times and attended 6,000 AA meetings in hopes of getting sober

The Friends star fought a very public battle with alcohol and prescription drugs that at times threatened to ruin his career

‘Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it bad,’ he wrote in his book, published nearly one year to the day before his death.

‘I have it as bad as you can have it, in fact. It’s back-to-the-wall time all the time. It’s going to kill me.’

Perry was only 14 years old when he started drinking.

Cheap wine and even cheaper beer were his drinks of choice during his teenage years, which were marred by his parents’ difficult divorce.

It was right around this time he started acting, which, he explained in his memoir, ‘was another one of my drugs. And it didn’t do the damage that alcohol was already starting to do.

‘In fact, it was getting harder and harder to wake up after a night of drinking.’

By the time he was 21, he was on the cusp of Hollywood fame and was already showing signs of being consumed by the ‘terrible thing’ that would control him for the rest of his life.

It was then, he wrote, that he ‘first felt the obsession for alcohol’ and started drinking alone.

The actor’s struggle with drinking and drugging only intensified after joining the cast of Friends at 24.

The show, which ran for ten seasons, turned him into one of the biggest stars of his generation. Perry earned $20 million per year in residuals from his iconic sitcom and, at the time of his death, was worth an estimated $120 million. Unfortunately, wealth from such fame allowed him easy access to his vices.

After a 1997 jet ski accident on the set of the Salma Hayek rom-com Fools Rush In left him with back problems, Perry developed an addiction to Vicodin.

Within 18 months, he weighed a skeletal 128 pounds and was popping 55 pills a day.

In his book, Perry admitted that ‘by the end of season 3 [of Friends], I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day. I had to have 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick.

Perry was only 14 years old when he started drinking

Friends co-stars Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, Perry and Courtney Cox at the 1996 Golden Globes

After a 1997 jet ski accident on the set of the Salma Hayek rom-com Fools Rush In left him with back problems, Perry developed an addiction to Vicodin

‘It was a full-time job: making calls, seeing doctors, faking migraines, finding crooked nurses who would give me what I needed.’

That year, he checked himself into rehab for the first time, spending 28 days at a Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Minnesota.

But it was certainly not his last. He would spend more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities, though he always ended up back on drugs or booze.

Worse, he knew that being on the biggest TV show in the world meant that everyone could see when he had relapsed.

‘You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season [of Friends],’ he wrote in his book.

‘When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.’

In 2000, Perry spent 30 days in the hospital being ‘fed fluids through an IV’ after he was told his excessive drinking was the cause of his pancreatitis, an uncommon ailment for someone who was only 30 years old.

While recovering in the hospital, Perry was given Dilaudid, a potent opioid derived from morphine that changes the brain’s relationship to pain.

‘It was my new favorite drug,’ he wrote, ‘and I would have stayed in that hospital for a hundred days if they kept administering it.’

In 2002, Perry was such ‘a mess’ while filming Serving Sara with Elizabeth Hurley that he checked himself into rehab mid-shoot for his ‘methadone, Xanax, cocaine and a full quart of vodka a day’ habit.

When he returned to set, he was forced to re-record all of his slurred dialogue, ‘which meant I looped the entire movie.’

He then did ‘the most press possible in the history of press, bending over backward to make things right.’

Elizabeth Hurley and Perry at the premiere of Serving Sara

At one point, Perry spent 28 days at a Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Minnesota

‘You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season [of Friends],’ he wrote in his book. (Pictured in a 1998 episode of Friends)

Unfortunately, he could not charm his way into making this bad movie – which, he wrote, ‘was made much worse by how bad I was in it’ – a smash hit.

The comedy, which he was paid $3.5 million to make, was a box office bomb, bringing in a total domestic gross of $16.9 million on a $29 million budget.

Perry ended up getting sued by the studio for shutting down production over the health issue that he claimed would have killed him had he not gotten help.

At the mediation table, he recalled writing ‘a team of insurance flacks’ a check for $650,000. ‘Small price to save my life.’

For the first time in a long time, Perry was focused on getting clean.

He hired a sober companion to be with him on the set of Friends and spent months in a live-in detox center.

According to Perry, season nine of the beloved NBC series, which premiered in September 2002, is the only one that he filmed fully sober.

While shooting the 2004 series finale, Perry was taking buprenorphine, ‘a detox med,’ as he refers to it in his book, designed to help addicts withdraw from harder opioids.

When filming for the final episode wrapped and his castmates, even the most stoic Friend Matt LeBlanc, bawled their eyes out, he ‘felt nothing’ and wasn’t sure if it was the numbing effect of the drug ‘or if I was just generally dead inside.’

In those post-Friends years, Perry struggled to stay clean and had more than a few near-death experiences.

The actor’s struggle with drinking and drug usage only intensified after joining the cast of Friends at 24

When filming for the final episode of Friends wrapped and his castmates, even the most stoic Friend Matt LeBlanc, bawled their eyes out, Perry ‘felt nothing’ 

In his book, Perry admitted that ‘by the end of season 3 [of Friends], I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day’

Despite how it may have looked though, he was never suicidal. ‘I never actually wanted to die,’ he noted in his memoir.

‘But, if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept.’

In 2018, at 49, Perry’s colon ‘exploded’ due to his opioid abuse and he had to have a seven-hour emergency procedure. His doctors said he had a two percent chance of making it through the night.

‘That’s the time I really came close to my life ending,’ he wrote.

He spent two weeks in a coma, followed by a five-month stay in the hospital.

For the next nine months, he wore a colostomy bag that broke at least 55 times, leaving him covered in his own excrement.

Yet this, and the 14 follow-up surgeries he braved, wasn’t enough to keep him off drugs for good.

Two years later, his heart stopped beating for five minutes after doctors at a luxury rehab facility in Switzerland, which would cost anywhere from $44,000 to $140,000 per week, plus the $350,000 for the private jet he hired to fly him back and forth from Los Angeles, administered a sedative that interacted with the opioids in his ravaged body.

Healthcare professionals at the facility managed to resuscitate him but broke eight of his ribs in the process, forcing him to pull out of a role in the 2021 Academy Award-nominated film Don’t Look Up starring Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

Perry does not sugarcoat his long list of health emergencies in the book, which he dedicated to all his ‘fellow sufferers’ who he hoped would find solace in his struggle.

While promoting the release, Perry claimed to be 18 months sober, but sources told the Daily Mail shortly after his death that he was ‘never clean.’

Before his accidental overdose, Perry had been receiving prescribed ketamine therapy. Once a popular party drug in the late 1990s known as Special K, it can be used to treat anxiety and depression, typically in a supervised clinical setting.

But Perry had not had one of those controlled treatments for a week and a half prior to his death. This meant that the ketamine found in his system after he drowned, which was in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery, had not been prescribed.

In the months prior to Perry’s death, his drug dealer Jasveen Sangha, known as the ‘Ketamine Queen’ to her high-end celebrity clients, and drug addiction counselor, Erik Fleming, sold him 51 vials of illegal ketamine, which were then handed over to his personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, according to prosecutors.

‘Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it bad,’ he wrote in his book, published nearly one year to the day before his death

Posting five days before his death, Perry shared his last photo on social media 

Ketamine was the primary cause of Perry’s death, according to the coroners, with drowning listed as the secondary cause

Perry paid Iwamasa, who he had known since 1992, $150,000 a year to be his live-in personal assistant, and it was Iwamasa who injected the actor, despite having no medical training, with what would ultimately be fatal doses of the drug.

Prosecutors said that in the days leading up to the tragedy, Iwamasa – known as the ‘Alfred’ to Perry’s ‘Batman’ – gave the actor at least 27 shots of the drug, including at least three injections on the day he died.

The actor’s final request to Iwamasa was ‘shoot me up with a big one.’

In court documents, Iwamasa, whose previous work experience was as an executive assistant to Perry’s agent Doug Chapin, admits he did as he was told.

He then went out to run ‘errands’ for two-and-a-half hours, leaving Perry alone either near or in the hot tub at the actor’s 3,500sq ft Pacific Palisades mansion, which sold for $8.55 million one year after his tragic passing.

It is there, face down in the jacuzzi, that Iwamasa, Perry’s sole caretaker who, according to the actor’s family, was tasked with helping him stay sober, found him when he returned around 4pm.

Ketamine was the primary cause of Perry’s death, according to the coroners, with drowning listed as the secondary.

Notably, the sitcom star had previously employed two assistants plus a nursing team on hand to supervise the taking of prescribed medications and in case of medical emergencies just like this.

One assistant, Briana Brancato, quit in 2023 to become a personal trainer after seven years of service. His live-in sober companion, Morgan Moses, who, according to his book, was his closest confidante and had saved his life many times, stopped working for him in 2022.

Moses, who previously worked at a rehab clinic before she joined Perry’s team in 2018, left after an angry confrontation in which he shoved her onto a bed, according to an exclusive 2024 report from the Daily Mail. The altercation was allegedly over his continued abuse of prescription drugs.

Iwamasa was hired not long afterwards.

In May, after a more than two-year legal saga, five people were convicted for their role in Perry’s overdose, including Sangha, Fleming and two doctors, Dr Salvador Plasencia and Dr Mark Chavez, who conspired to sell Perry $4,500 worth of illegal, off-the-books ketamine in the days leading up to his death. 

In the months prior to Perry’s death, his drug dealer Jasveen Sangha, known as the ‘Ketamine Queen’ to her high-end celebrity clients, sold him huge quantities of ketamine

Prosecutors said that in the days leading up to the tragedy, Kenneth Iwamasa gave the actor at least 27 shots of the drug, including at least three jabs on the day he died

Dr Salvador Plasencia was one of the doctors who conspired to sell Perry $4,500 worth of illegal, off-the-books ketamine in the days leading up to his death

Perry pictured with friend Morgan Moses – their relationship met a difficult end

Prosecutors say the group preyed on the vulnerable star’s addiction issues, with the doctors even referring to him as a ‘moron’ in cruel texts where they discussed how to further exploit him.

In one instance, Dr Plasencia worked with Dr Chavez to charge Perry $2,000 for a vial of ketamine that cost $12, after he became increasingly desperate to get his hands on the drug, according to court filings.

Sangha received the longest sentence – 15 years in federal prison for providing the dose that led to Perry’s death.

But it was Iwamasa, who took steps to remove and destroy evidence of the late actor’s drug use in the wake of his death, that Perry’s family felt was most responsible for their loved one’s demise.

‘I cannot read Kenny’s thoughts. But I know that when Kenny left the house, he was doing one of two things,’ Caitlin Morrison, Perry’s younger half-sister, wrote in a statement submitted to US District Judge Sherilyn Garnett in a May 20 court filing.

‘He was either escaping from something he knew he had done, or he was willfully abandoning a vulnerable person in a dangerous situation.’

On May 27, Iwamasa was sentenced to more than three years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine, causing death.

In addition to his 41-month prison sentence, he was ordered to pay separate fines of $10,000, and be on supervised release for two years.

In his plea agreement with prosecutors, which awarded him a lesser sentence in exchange for aiding the investigation against his fellow co-defendants, Iwamasa revealed that in the month leading up to Perry’s death, he had found his boss unconscious ‘at least twice’ after receiving illegal doses of ketamine.

Iwamasa also conceded that he had met with Dr Plasencia seven times before Perry’s death, handing over a total of $55,000 in a 29-day period.

Ten days before Perry was found in his hot tub, Dr Plasencia visited the actor’s home and administered a large dose of ketamine, which caused Perry’s body to ‘freeze’ and sent his blood pressure spiking alarmingly.

‘Let’s not do that again,’ the doctor told Iwamasa after the medical emergency was over, according to prosecutors.

Tragically, he did not heed the warning.

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