ep 23- audio

The podcast discusses the death of actor Matthew Perry and the reactions to it, focusing on the issue of addiction. The host highlights the need for a better understanding of addiction and the harmful comments made by some individuals. The host shares personal experiences and emphasizes the importance of addressing addiction as a crisis. The podcast aims to shed light on the complexities of addiction and urges for more empathy and support for those struggling with it. Welcome to the Bill Kelly podcast, critical discussions in critical times. Here's your host, Bill Kelly. And on today's special edition, we want to talk about the death of actor Matthew Perry and the fallout from that, the reaction to that, and possibly the way going forward. Now, to be clear, this is not going to be a regurgitation or an evaluation of Matthew Perry's career as an actor. There are other platforms that will do that and have done that and will continue to do that and good for them. I want to talk about a different aspect of it, and we've seen with the social media reaction that's gone on in the last little while after the death was announced, most of it good, which is positive, I suppose, and somewhat encouraging. But there are some others that have made some comments about this that I think are misguided, misinformed that we need to talk about here going forward. Just to set the tone, as if anybody doesn't know this by now, Matthew Perry died a couple of days ago, October 28th, I believe it was, 54 years old, he was found dead in his Los Angeles home, more specifically in his hot tub. The original assessment of this was drowning, but that just led to speculation, which is what happens, I guess, on social media all the time, right? Because of some of the revelations we knew about Matthew Perry's life and career and some of the demons, as some people characterize, that he had been fighting for quite some time. And I think that's what we want to focus on here. And in the interest, by the way, of full disclosure, I've never met Matthew Perry, I've never interviewed Matthew Perry, and quite frankly, I was never a big show of friends, the TV show. Not because I didn't like it, I just didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to it. If I sat down and somebody else was watching it, I found it amusing sometimes, not so amusing other times, but it's not as if, oh my God, this guy was a huge fan and a major part of our life, let's just talk about this. He was an actor, an acclaimed actor, it was a show that he had great success with, with his other cast members, and he'd done some other movies, too, and I'm sure you've read all about those and seen them on entertainment and other websites, but that's pretext to what's gone on since then. Since Friends went off the air, there have been a couple of other adventures that he has been involved with from a theatrical standpoint, but the stories about Matthew Perry subsequent to that had an awful lot to do with substance abuse and addiction, and because he has admitted to those, he talked about that a lot in the book that he wrote, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, his memoir of some of the things that have gone on in his life. And this is a teaching moment, and this is what I wanted to talk about here today. I don't profess, nor am I qualified, to be an expert on addiction, addicts and research, rather, and the impact that it can have, but in my time as a broadcaster, we have endeavored to try to learn more about that because it's an ongoing problem. As a matter of fact, I think there's a very strong case to say this is a crisis, it's an epidemic when we talk about addictions and the results of that in our communities. The people that are intent on campus right now, many of them are suffering from addiction problems and substance abuse problems. We've done shows about this where I've had panel discussions with medical experts, social service experts, addiction experts, quite frankly, and even law enforcement and police because they play a role in this as well, about how we're going to deal with this, what are we doing to deal with this, how are we going to reach out to people. There was a time, not too many years ago, when people that were dealing with addictions like this were simply tossed in jail, you're a criminal, get on. There are some politicians still today, sadly, that seem to think that throwing them in jail or just cutting them off cold turkey is the best thing for them. We know, I think medically, we know better than that now, and we'll get into that in further discussions, I think, but I want to swing it back to what Matthew Perry has done here too. He has done what other folks have done that do a platform. I mean, there are people in Hamilton, in Toronto, in Burlington, in London, I mean, just everywhere where you're watching right now, there are people in those communities that are dealing with addiction. And it's not characterized as some people would say that, oh yeah, they're at a party and somebody said, hey, sniff some of this, this would be great, or here, drink some of this. I'm not sure that happens, but an awful lot of the addiction problems that occur start, I don't want to say innocently, but I mean, in ways that you wouldn't think would lead to this sort of thing. Painkillers, things of this nature. People that have had major surgery become addicted to painkillers. And once the body starts to crave that, it's very, very difficult to fight that, as it is with alcoholism and a number of other things. This is like a chemical reaction, and it's not just, hey, I need this. The brain comes into play here, too, the most important organ in our bodies that says, hey, I need this. And that's where things can get very, very dicey here, and I don't think an awful lot of people really seem to understand that. Now, having said that, there was an awful lot of very positive and I think sympathetic reaction to Matthew Perry's untimely death, a lot from his people in the acting community and the entertainment community, and others who maybe have some insight into addictions and the impact that it can have. There are a few that had another approach to this. One jerk, I think, who I'm not even going to mention his name, apparently used to write for Saturday Night Live and fashions himself as an on-the-edge comedian, who basically said he found it rather comical that a junkie like Matthew Perry would die in a hot tub. I don't know where this idiot's coming from. I guess the rationale there is, well, once a junkie, always a junkie. What do you expect? And to which I would say to this guy that wrote that, once an asshole, always an asshole. You have no fucking understanding about other people and the problems that you're dealing with or how to deal with them, so just shut the hell up because you don't know what you're talking about. Sadly, it happens. I'd like to think that this is a minority opinion. I'd like to think that we have a better understanding of what's going on to try to deal with this, because it's been happening forever. Addictions have been a real concern. It's been that ugly little thing that people don't talk about, you know, where's John Bob Smith? Well, he hasn't been to work for a couple of weeks. Oh, he's taking a little time off. He may well be in a center to try to deal with some of the problems. We just didn't talk about it back then, and maybe that was part of the problem, because it started to fester, you know, people that became addicted, and we talked to some of those panels that I had on the show years ago, and they said, look, put a face on these people. You know, some loser junkie that's, you know, shooting up in an alley someplace. Oftentimes these are professional people, get addicted to painkillers or any number of other things, and their body craves it. Maybe it's a bad surgery. I can relate to that, not that I was addicted to it, but I mean, I can see where it's coming from. I've had two knee replacements over the last number of years, and for those of you who have not had that kind of surgery, it hurts like hell for a long, long time, and the pain is severe. And now you're in the hospital. This happens with a lot of surgeries, I guess, that made you, you know, they give you the pump, right, the morphine drip that they call it, and you got the little tube right here and the little thing going down, and you got a little button. You know, when it really starts to bug you, just hit the button, and yeah, you get a shot. Now, again, I want to clarify, there is a limit to how much you can take. I mean, you might want to click, click, click, click, click, and it's only going to give it, as you would any other medication, but it's kind of self-prescribing, so the nurses don't have to come running in all the time. But I know a lot of people that were going through that same sort of thing. They were going, come on, come on, come on, and then they're, you know, bringing the bill for the nurse. I need more, I need more. We can't have more because we don't want to cause that sort of an addiction, and that's morphine. And then oftentimes when those people are discharged, doctors will write prescriptions for things like oxycodone and other painkillers, and they are addictive. We know that now that they are addictive. Well, if the pain doesn't subside, and we know that people have chronic illnesses, they still need these sorts of things, and after a while the prescriptions run out, where are they going to get the stuff? They become addicts. They start doing terrible things. They start stealing. They start doing whatever they need to do to get that fix because they need that. I didn't go through that, thankfully, in my situation. I mean, yeah, we used the drip in the hospital, et cetera. I got prescribed some of those drugs when I went home, and I felt like shit. I just had the total opposite reaction to me. I didn't get high. You know, maybe the pain went away, but I just didn't like what was going on in my head. So after a couple of days, I just said, get rid of this stuff. I don't want this. I'd rather put up with the pain. I'll take some Tylenol, and that's it. Now, not everybody goes through that, and I'm not suggesting I was holier than thou. It just didn't have that impact on me, but I can understand how it can happen to other people, and I think you need to have that understanding that, oh, maybe that's not me. Maybe I've never gone through that, but have a little understanding for other people that are going through this and how it might impact them, too. This is wide-reaching. We know the names, the famous names, Matthew Perry being one, that have gone through this and lived to tell their stories. Elton John has gone through the same process. I'm a huge Elton John fan, as you know. We didn't always know the story about what was going on in his life back in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, but he's written about it. He's talked about it quite freely. If you saw the movie that was out a few years ago, kind of a semi-documentary there, a biopic called Rocket Man, which he oversaw, by the way, it told the ugly story of his addictions and how it impacted his life and ruined his personal relationships and almost killed him. It's very cathartic, I suppose, for them to talk about this, but I think the reason that celebrities especially do this sort of thing is to try to teach us that, hey, it can happen. It can happen to anybody. Yeah, I'm rich. Yeah, I'm famous. Yeah, I've got all sorts of celebrity status, but my body is aching right now for this. John Lennon wrote about that. Remember with the Plastic Ono Band, he did a song called Cold Turkey. That was him coming off of heroin and how ugly that was. Not a pretty song, but a song that we had to hear. Others have gone through similar situations and written books about it, and they're not doing it to say, hey, look at me. I think the motivation for that an awful lot of the time is, please learn from me because not everybody has the opportunity to come through this as I may have. I think that's what was happening with Matthew Perry and his situation. He was an admitted addict. He talked about this. He looked so emaciated during the last couple of years of Friends. We know that he went through a number of different programs. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they work and you have a relapse. It's like going on and on and on in situations like this because that craving can still be there. You just have to be able to control it. Again, some of the experts have told me in some of the shows we've done that it never goes away. You just have to be able to control it and understand the signs and avoid circumstances where it's going to try to take you over and become the beast in your body once again. That's hard for some people. Those are the celebrities. Those are the Elton Johns. Those are the Matthew Perrys. Those are the others that have gone through these sorts of things and written books about it and talked about it. For every one of those celebrities, there are millions of people out there whose names you will never know, whose circumstances you will never know that are going through that same hell and some of them don't come out the other side, sadly, which is why cities talk about things like safe injection sites because you're addicted. You can't just say, okay, you're not going to get that stuff anymore because that can kill you as well. Do you remember when COVID started and we started talking about the restrictions and I don't want to get into the vaccination stuff or all the government policies, that's for another day. One of the things that they did had to do with the LCBO, the liquor stores here in Ontario. The immediate reaction was, when all the shutdowns were occurring, was, okay, we've got to shut down the liquor stores too. The health experts, the health experts said, you can't do that. I mean, yeah, there's the social drinking, et cetera, but there are a number of people, millions of people that are addicted to alcohol and you can't cut off that supply cold turkey because the health ramifications could be fatal. So they continued with the LCBO, the liquor stores, et cetera. Just one example of how important this is for us to understand the ramifications of addiction and I think that's one of the things that Matthew Perry tried to talk about. I saw him on a number of the talk shows, Graham Norton and some of the other shows over the years after he did Friends, again, again, after his memoir came out. Yeah, he's trying to sell the book, but he also wanted to sell the story of what that book was talking about. And I give credit to he and others that have come forward and said, look, my life was shit because of this and because of my addiction to this and because of the fact that I needed this and crave this. Don't let it happen to you. And I know, I know we overuse things like that, you know, we just went through Halloween. Oh, I'm addicted to chocolate. No, you're not addicted to it. You just like it. But when you're in a situation where you just have to have it and you go into shakes and you go through withdrawal with some of these other substances, that's a living hell in and of itself. I'll go back to this example I used of John Lennon and the sign cold turkey. Google it, listen to it and the kind of stuff he went through with withdrawal. It's not a pretty picture. It's not a picture that a lot of people can go through. They don't always go through that successfully, too. So Matthew Perry decided because of his circumstance and because of the platform that he had as a celebrity, he was going to talk about this. He was going to talk about the impact that it had and how he tried to battle this. And he didn't just talk about it. He doesn't write a book about it. He started a foundation. He used some of his money. He actually dedicated his house in Los Angeles as a center for people to go to, to try to get over these addictions. And as we look at, you know, the old bit for a guy like Matthew Perry, I don't want him remembered. And again, I got no skin in this game. He's not just the old guy that was on crack and all this other stuff. And then finally, first of all, we don't know that there's no proof that that actually happened. Yes, he died at a rather young age, but he put his body through an awful lot of hell. Sometimes there's a price to pay for that, even though you may still be clean. The body is ravaged. That happens. We don't know. And I'm not going to start to speculate on that right now. But this is a guy who went through hell and said, look, I want to tell my story so other people can understand two things. First of all, don't go down that road. But secondly, if you do go down that road or if you're already in that road and you're looking for a way out, there are ways out. And that was the message he put in his book. And I think it was the message that he talked about an awful lot in those talk shows and the other celebrity pieces that he did. There's a quote that he did on a podcast just, I guess, about a year ago. And I'd like to think that this is how he's going to be remembered. Yes, he's a guy that had a great success in acting and comedies, etc. But he wrote and said on this on this particular cast, he says, the best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, I can't stop drinking, can you help me? And he said, I can say yes and follow up and actually do it. And he went on to say, Matthew Perry went on to say, he says, when I die, I don't want friends to be the first thing that's mentioned in my orbit. I want it to be that first thing that I was there to help people that really needed help. And he says, I'm going to spend the rest of my life proving that. Well, I think he did. And I think that is what we should remember him for, the fact that he was a flawed human being, as all of us are. He tried to deal with his demons, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so, as all of us do. But he died trying to help himself and to help others. And that's, I think, the legacy of Matthew Perry and so many others who go unnamed to try to do that same thing. That's it for this special edition of the Bill Kelly podcast. Until next time, take care. This podcast was brought to you by Rebecca Wissons and her team at Wissons Law. Rebecca Wissons is a 20 time winner of the Hamilton Reader's Choice Awards for their exceptional client care and legal practice specializing in personal injury, car accidents, accidental falls and Wilson estates. Now, if you or a loved one have been seriously injured or if you want to make sure that your family is taken care of for the future with the will and powers of attorney, call Rebecca Wissons, 905-522-1102 for a free consultation. When life happens, you can rely on Rebecca Wissons and Wissons Law. And trust me, Rebecca is my wife. I don't know what I'd do without her. That's Wissons Law, 905-522-1102 for a free consultation. Subscribe to my sub stack for timely news updates and commentary straight to your inbox. Let's keep the conversation going. I'd love to hear your thoughts on today's episode. Let me know what you think we should be talking about next by contacting me through my website at www.billkelly.co. Thanks for tuning in. This is Bill Kelly. Till next time, you take care.