Children's Health Defense By
The laundry list of drugs found in Matthew Perry’s home and, according to his autopsy report, in his body shows just how deeply Perry and the physicians who treated him had internalized the better-living-through-chemistry mantra that our pharmaceutical industry so successfully markets.
California sober.
If you haven’t heard the phrase before, “California Sober” is a clever way to say, “I’ve quit drinking or using drugs, but I still smoke pot.” Because cannabis doesn’t count. Cannabis is “medicine.”
Occasionally people who use the phrase extend it even further, usually to psychedelics.
To be California sober, you see, is not to be sober at all.
I kept thinking about California sobriety as I read Matthew Perry’s autopsy report, a tragic and depressing glimpse into the way far too many Americans live now.
Matthew Langford Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the hit NBC sitcom “Friends,” was found dead in a jacuzzi at his home in Los Angeles on Saturday, Oct. 28. On Dec. 15, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s department released Perry’s autopsy report, available online with minimal redactions.
(An aside: I firmly believe autopsies should be public. As a 19th-century English judge wrote in explaining why families of the dead cannot sue for defamation against them, “The dead have no rights and can suffer no wrongs.” But maybe they can help the living learn from their mistakes.)
Perry was a quintessential Californian man-child, though he was born in Massachusetts in 1969, spent much of his childhood in Canada and gained his fame thanks to a television show set in Manhattan.
“Friends” started in 1994, when Perry was only 25, and was an immediate and huge hit in a way hard even to imagine in today’s fractured cultural landscape. By the late 1990s, all six of the “Friends” had fame and fortune.
After the show ended in 2004, the other actors all eventually managed to escape their youth and move forward with their lives. Not Perry. He was one of Hollywood’s most desirable single men but never seemed close to settling down. He was forever Chandler Bing, clever, unreachable Chandler.
To quote Billy Joel: “He’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke/But there’s some place that he’d rather be.”
(We’ll talk about Paul the real-estate novelist another time.)
Perry filled the void, or tried to, with drugs and alcohol…
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