How did Matthew Perry die?
Matthew Perry
August 19, 1969 — October 28, 2023
Pacific Palisades, California
Matthew Perry died on October 28, 2023 in Pacific Palisades, California, aged 54. The official cause of death was acute effects of ketamine; drowning, coronary artery disease, and buprenorphine effects as contributing factors. Readers have raised 2 theories about how it happened.
Matthew Langford Perry was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, raised in Ottawa by a mother who was press secretary to the prime minister, and was a nationally ranked junior tennis player before he decided the thing he was actually good at was being funny in a way that made other people feel better. He was fifty-four when he was found in the hot tub at his house in Pacific Palisades.
For ten years he was Chandler Bing, the one with the timing, and he spent much of those ten years, by his own later account, drunk or high and terrified someone would notice. He wrote all of it down in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published a year before he died: the fifteen rehabs, the colon that burst from opioid use in 2018, the five months in hospital, the therapists, the near-misses. He said he wanted to be remembered for helping other people get sober more than for the show. He had, in the last year of his life, been using ketamine, a drug that is legal in clinics for depression and illegal in the quantities he was buying.
He is survived by his mother, Suzanne, his father, John, and five siblings. His foundation, set up in his name, funds addiction treatment.
Photos with Matthew
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The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: Acute effects of ketamine; drowning, coronary artery disease, and buprenorphine effects as contributing factors. Accident. (Los Angeles County coroner, December 2023)
On the afternoon of October 28, 2023, his live-in assistant found him face down in the heated pool at his home in Pacific Palisades, about forty minutes after leaving him there. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. He was 54.
The Los Angeles County coroner reported in December 2023 that he died of the acute effects of ketamine, with drowning, coronary artery disease, and the effects of buprenorphine (a drug used to treat opioid addiction) as contributing factors. The ketamine level in his blood was in the range used for general anesthesia. He had been receiving ketamine infusion therapy for depression and anxiety, but the coroner noted that his last clinical session had been a week and a half before his death, too long for that ketamine to still be in his system. The manner was ruled an accident.
In August 2024, federal prosecutors charged five people in connection with the ketamine that killed him: two doctors, his live-in assistant, an acquaintance who acted as a middleman, and a dealer prosecutors called "the Ketamine Queen." Prosecutors said the doctors had sold him ketamine at enormous markups, that text messages between them discussed how much "this moron" would pay, and that the assistant had injected him with ketamine on the day he died, including several times that morning. All five eventually pleaded guilty.
What happened
The cause of death has been confirmed. The theories below are how readers understand it, and what people thought before it was known. Everyone here is anonymous.
He was in the hot tub with anesthetic levels of ketamine in his blood, injected by his own assistant, bought from doctors who called him a moron in texts. The coroner said accident. Five people pleaded guilty. What do you call this?
The page creator
- Confirmed56 of 59 readers find this likely
He lost consciousness in the hot tub from an anesthetic-level dose of ketamine and drowned
The coroner's finding, in plain terms. He'd been injected several times that day, the last dose put him under, and he was alone in heated water. Heart disease and buprenorphine lowered the threshold. Everything the prosecutors later proved is about how the ketamine got into him; nothing they proved changes what it did once it was there.
Anonymous. Says they are an anesthesiologist.
Confirmed by the Los Angeles County coroner, December 2023. The criminal case that followed is part of the record above.
- Also raised51 of 55 readers find this likely
An accident in the coroner's sense, and a crime in every other sense
Five people pleaded guilty, including the assistant who gave the injections and two doctors who sold him the drug at a markup while mocking him in texts. On this reading "accident" means no one intended his death, which is probably true, and also means nothing about who is responsible for it, which the courts decided separately. This is the theory most readers hold, and it isn't really a theory; it's the record.
Anonymous.
- Also raised38 of 44 readers find this likely
A relapse he'd written about as inevitable, with a drug that was legal enough to feel safe
His book is an account of a man who knew his addiction would find the next thing. Ketamine was the next thing, and it came with a clinic and a prescription attached, which made it feel like treatment rather than relapse. He went from supervised infusions to buying it in volume in a matter of months. The cause is the coroner's; the pattern is his own, in his own words.
Anonymous. Says they are an addiction counselor.
The confirmed cause carries this mark and stays at the top. Theories can still be added; they sort below it.
Ketamine is an anesthetic. At low doses, in a clinic, it is used to treat depression, and that is what he had been prescribed. At high doses it causes the loss of consciousness and of the ability to protect your own airway that it is designed to cause in surgery. The coroner found a level consistent with surgery, not therapy. In a hot tub, loss of consciousness means drowning; the coroner listed drowning as a contributing factor because the water finished what the drug had started. Coronary artery disease and buprenorphine both reduced his margin.
The legal case that followed did not change the medical finding. It changed the word. "Accident" is the manner of death; the people who supplied and administered the ketamine were charged with crimes because they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. Both things are true at once, and this page is where readers work out how to hold them.
Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, report released December 15, 2023 U.S. Attorney's Office, Central District of California, charges announced August 15, 2024, and subsequent plea agreements Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (2022) Wikipedia, "Matthew Perry"
Questions people ask
- What was Matthew Perry's cause of death?
- The official cause of death was acute effects of ketamine; drowning, coronary artery disease, and buprenorphine effects as contributing factors.
- When did Matthew Perry die?
- Matthew died on October 28, 2023, at the age of 54, in Pacific Palisades, California.
- What happened to Matthew Perry?
- 3 theories have been raised on this page and ranked by readers. The cause is settled; the theories are about understanding how it happened.
- Who else died in 2023?
- See everyone on Ohbit who died in 2023. Matthew was 54.
Add a theory
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