Bill Maher confessed on Friday’s “Real Time” that the death of Matthew Perry was personal for him.
“Matthew and I weren’t super close, but he was enough of a friend and enough of a good guy to make me very angry when I read about all the enablers” who helped kill him, Maher explained during “New Rules.”
Perry’s death was the hook Maher used to rail against what he called the “medical industrial complex,” which broadly speaking includes corruption throughout American medicine. Maher also objected to what he argued is the over-prescription of drugs, something he tied back to the death of Perry.
Watch the whole clip below:
“Someone has to tell me why we love taking the piss out of lawyers with lawyer jokes, but not doctors,” Maher began. “And yet, doctors killed Matthew Perry, just like they killed Michael Jackson, Prince, Tom Petty, Elvis Presley — doctors have killed more rock stars than twin-engine planes.”
“The medical industrial complex says there are just a few bad apples, but are they? From 2006 to 2019, over 145 billion oxy and hydrocodone pills were prescribed, resulting in over 210,000 overdose deaths, and they weren’t prescribed by the opiate ferry,” he continued.
“Could you be any more irresponsible? Fentanyl is a drug 50 times stronger than heroin that no one heard of 10 years ago, and now it’s killing thousands of people who probably started on oxy first. I’ve been railing against the Western medicine approach to healing for a very long time, and a lot of people hate me for it. They hate me for being honest about obesity, for questioning how we handled COVID, for lots of stuff, because it turns out medicine is a lot like religion,” Maher argued. “It has to do with your mortality, so it’s super scary, and people just want to believe in some kind of priesthood who tells you they know what you couldn’t possibly know, and only they can keep you safe.”
“But if doctors really were so infallible,” Maher asked, “then why are there so many TV shows about an eccentric genius doctor constantly proving that all the other doctors are idiots?”
Maher then criticized the fact that pharmaceutical advertising is legal in the United States, as well as the opaque nature of how medical treatments are explained to people. He then returned to the topic of Perry.
“Matthew Perry asked his doctor, ‘is ketamine right for me?’ And his licensed and trained, legitimate doctor, texted another doctor and wrote, ‘I wonder how much this moron will pay.’ ‘Let’s find out.’ Apparently, the Hippocratic Oath now means, first, do no harm to your bank account,” Maher said, referring to the horrifying details about the people who enabled Perry’s drug use, leading to his death.
“Sometimes it takes a village to kill an addict. Matthew and I weren’t super close, but he was enough of a friend and enough of a good guy to make me very angry when I read about all the enablers. I mean, done-in by your assistant? To a celebrity, that’s the cruelest blow of all,” Maher joked.
“Matthew’s last rehab was at a pricey clinic in Switzerland, where, instead of weaning him off the drugs he was on — which is how we naively assume rehab works — they simply gave him a different drug, which accomplished the goal. If the goal was getting Matthew Perry addicted to a new drug, it’s like if he had stopped by the firehouse and they set him on fire,” Maher continued. “I’m not a doctor. I’m just a comedian who couldn’t possibly know what they know. But here, it’s the world’s single most famous living drug addict, the one who had just written a book with the phrase ‘the Big Terrible Thing’ in the title — the guy who, more than anyone on Earth, came pre-advertised to be weak to the allure of drugs.”
“If that guy comes to you for help, maybe don’t give him more drugs.”
“Ketamine clinics are now a growth industry. There’s over 500 just in America. It’s what always happens with Western medicine — the insistence on pretending that their respectable drugs aren’t the same as street drugs, but they are. One is paid by insurance and gets you into rehab. One isn’t, and you go to jail. But oxy is heroin, Adderall is meth, and Ritalin is cocaine for kids,” Maher said.
Maher continued along these lines, discussing how some addictive substances are freely available and some are available by prescription, while others are illegal. “Everybody needs to know going in, that when it comes to resisting anything that makes a profit in America, you’re on your own,” he said.
“Yes, I know something about addiction, because I smoked cigarettes for 20 years. That’s an addiction, when the drug tells you when to do it,” Maher said as he started to wrap things up. “Yeah, I’m not addicted to pot, because pot never does that, and I’ve never been an everyday smoker. And to those wise asses always asking me if I get hot before the show, the answer is no. Well, not right before,” the famed marijuana fan said as he concluded. Of course, he does smoke before and during his “Club Random” podcast episodes, while not doing so for “Real Time.”
