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Drug counselor who delivered ketamine dose that killed Matthew Perry gets two years
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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What the fuck. The ketamine didnt even kill him (which would be almost impossible), he fucking drowned. You would need to inject like a litre of ketamine infusion for a lethal dose.
"A medical examiner’s report found that Perry died from the acute effects of ketamine, a surgical anesthetic, and drowning was a secondary cause."
I know you're getting disliked, but I feel like I have to agree with you. How the fuck is drowning a secondary cause of death? The Ketamine definitely could have K-holed him and made him drown, which I guess you could say the Ketamine killed him in that way, but in reality, it seems silly to say anything other than he just drowned.
If somebody is drunk driving and crashes and kills themself, I don't think we'd report alcohol toxicity as the primary cause of death.
Not to be unnecessarily mean to the dead guy, but you have to be pretty stupid to do a large amount of a drug that is very well known to make you pretty much unconscious while in a body of water.
And yet in your example we could easily cite and convict the bartender who kept serving him.
Thanks for proving the point masterfully.
Well said
He didn't die because of the coma, he died of starvation! Because he couldn't eat, because he was in a coma.
Same when you have AIDS, you don't die of AIDS, you die of the smaller infections that would never have killed you if you didn't have AIDS in the first place, we all know it's AIDS that killed you. Doctors aren't dumb, they know that the cause is the drug that put him in the state that caused him to drown. He wouldn't have drowned without the drug. That's why drowning is a secondary cause, the drug is still the first. Like when you get drunk and pass out in a puddle and drown, the cause of death is alcohol, by means of drowning.
It is literally drunk driving. Well, crashing while under the influence.
I see you have no concept of addiction.
You only need a few grams to be lethal(normal dose is a couple hundred milligrams) and that's if you're not drinking alcohol. Alcohol is a bad idea to mix.
Ketamine and alcohol can make you nauseous but unable to control your body so you asphyxiate in your own vomit.
Afaik LD50 of ketamine is estimated at around 100 times the amount of a recreational dose, so around 100x100mg=10g. Sure, you could just eat it, but you would need way more than that, because the bioavailability of ingested Ketamine is much lower.
Smorting 10g of ketamine is literally impossible because your nose would clog up after max. 1g and you wouldnt be able to lift a finger for the next few hours.
But what were actually talking about here is injected ketamine (not sure if he used IV or IM, but it should be similar), which would need to be dissolved in water. You cant dissolve 10g of ketamine in 10ml of water. What I was talking about is the regular medical IM/IV solution (which Perry probbaly used), which usually is 50mg/ml. For 10g of ketamine, that would be 10g/(50mg/ml) = 10.000g/(50mg/ml) = 200ml. So maybe not impossible, but it would take 20+ normal syringes. There are higher concentrattion solutions, for which it is recommended to dilute them first for medical use, but for the sake of the argument you could probably inject 40ml of 250mg/ml solution and OD from that.
But just to be clear, in Perrys case they tested his blood and the ketamine concentration was around a "regular" recreational dose.
I just did some brief research and the LD50 for intravenous ketamine is way lower than that. I've seen a lot of different numbers but anywhere from 50 to 150 milligrams per kilogram. Oral LD50s are much higher in the range you're talking about.
Well 50-150mg/kg would be 4-12g for an 80kg adult. I dont think 10g is such a bad estimate. Ofc we cant know for sure because there are probably only a handful of ketamine deaths in humans. Estimates usually come from tests with rats or mice.
Oral being higher is kind of what I was saying with the lower bioavailability.