The investigation into the death of Matthew Perry has concluded and prosecutors have reportedly made at least one arrest for involvement in the Friends actor’s acquisition of the lethal amount of the dissociative anesthetic ketamine found in his blood.
NBC News reported on Thursday morning that a person in Southern California was arrested Thursday in connection with Perry’s accidental overdose. The Associated Press, TMZ and ABC News are reporting that multiple arrests were made in the early morning operation, citing law enforcement sources.
The charges will be announced at a news briefing later in the day, with the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles and the DEA administrator.
The criminal probe launched in May included investigators with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Postal Service. Detectives indicated they were tracing the actor’s procurement of the illegal drug, which has been used recreationally for decades but has recently been discovered as broadly useful in the treatment of depression.
Perry’s body was found by an assistant after he had drowned in his swimming pool’s hot tub at his Pacific Palisades home on Oct. 28 after the lethal dose of ketamine caused him to have cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office. The amount of ketamine found in his blood was about the same as what would be used during general anesthesia, the medical examiner said. The office lists the acute effects of the drug as the main cause of his death and added drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid use, as contributing factors.
After his death, friends confirmed that Perry was undergoing ketamine therapy. However, the actor’s most recent session had been a week and a half prior to his death, according to the Medical Examiner’s report. No other drugs were found in Perry’s system, and there was no paraphernalia discovered in his home, officials said.
In his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote about undergoing ketamine therapy. “I often thought that I was dying during that hour,” he said. “Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this shit because it was something different, and anything different is good.”
He added, “Taking K is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel. But the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me.”
Perry had been open about his decades-long struggles with addiction to alcohol and opioids, recalling in his 2022 memoir how, at the height of his addiction, which was during his later years on the classic NBC sitcom, he was taking 55 Vicodin pills a day.
According to the medical examiner’s report after his death, a psychiatrist and an anesthesiologist who also served as Perry’s primary care physician were the medical professionals known to be treating Perry in October.
