‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry says opioid addiction led to near-death experience

In his upcoming memoir, “Friends” alum Matthew Perry says his struggle with drug addiction ultimately led to a near-death experience when he was 49.

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According to People magazine, the now-53-year-old actor, who played Chandler Bing on the popular ‘90s and early 2000s sitcom, reveals in “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” that longtime opioid use caused his colon to burst four years ago.

“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,” Perry told People, adding that he was in a coma for two weeks. “I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs.”

He went on to spend five months in the hospital and nine months using a colostomy bag, the magazine reported.

Perry said his addiction to alcohol had just begun to emerge when he was 24 and joined the “Friends” cast, according to People. Eventually, he started to take as many as 55 Vicodin pills daily, he told the entertainment outlet.

“But there were years that I was sober during that time,” he told People of his time on the sitcom. “Season 9 was the year that I was sober the whole way through. And guess which season I got nominated for best actor? I was like, ‘That should tell me something.’”

Perry, who has undergone 14 stomach surgeries and made 15 trips to rehab, told the magazine that he’s “pretty healthy now” and hopes that sharing his story will help others battling addiction.

The revelations came eight months after Perry first announced his memoir, which hits shelves Nov. 1.

“So much has been written about me in the past,” he tweeted Feb. 10, Deadline previously reported. “I thought it was time people heard from me. The highs were high, the lows were low. But I have lived to tell the tale, even though at times it looked like I wouldn’t. And it’s all in here. I apologize it’s not a pop-up book.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid overdose deaths have increased more than eightfold since 1999 and grew by 38% from 2019 to 2020. Nearly 69,000 of 2020′s 91,799 deadly drug overdoses involved opioids, the agency said.

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Photos: Matthew Perry through the years 1994: Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing on "Friends" in 1994. (Reisig & Taylor/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

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