The source of drugs that celebrities use
is probably not what you imagine.
Most of the celebrities that you've heard of who have died
were given the drugs by a physician.
Responsible for Matthew Perry's death?
...respond to the drowning.
There are willing physicians ready to treat special people
and open their prescription pad.
Is this your biggest regret here, Dr. Chavez?
The scary thing is,
they took an oath to do no harm.
There was no possession.
He was known as Doc Hollywood.
The physician added to his demise.
Just because it's coming from a doctor doesn't mean it's safe.
Without a prescription.
I wonder how much this moron will pay?
Attaining all your dreams like that isn't necessarily
a good thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Matt, Matt,.
I wanted to be different.
There was no prescription medication
without a prescription.
This is a tragedy for all of us.
Yep.
I like coming at it from the standpoint of the providers
and how up they are,
I don't like blaming the patients.
I don't like-- the patients are,
they're doing what they're doing, they're patients.
But then when the doctors treat them improperly,
that's where I lose my mind.
Dr. Drew, interview take one, AB common mark.
My mother was a opera singer who ended up singing with
the big bands,
and then doing sort of B movies in the early 1950s.
What are you doing here?
I bought a boat yesterday from a character by the name of...
...all the right places.
This was a whole period of her life that she hid from us,
and I did not discover until she was about 80 years of age.
But there was a lot going on around this time.
My mom told this strange story.
She was performing in Las Vegas,
and she started having anxiety with the workload,
and this doctor showed up to
"relieve her anxiety" and started giving her injections.
And the physician administering that medication
was Dr. Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood.
He became known for prescribing these...
vitamin cocktails that were a mix of a lot of different
things and not just vitamins.
I mean, they had enzymes, animal parts,
bone marrow, and amphetamines.
Amphetamine causes elevated mood,
escalation, lack of sleep, ultimately manic psychosis,
and if you use enough amphetamine,
anybody will become psychotic.
It is a very dangerous medication, and people can
then, as they try to avoid the withdrawal,
easily compulsively pursue it and develop addiction.
And this was the pep shot of the day.
And Dr. Jacobson made it his business
to administer this widely and especially to
"special patients"-- celebrities, politicians.
John F. Kennedy,
Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe,
and my mother.
Well, today here I am.
So, you're the one who's been calling...
So after God knows how long of taking this,
she finished her job in Las Vegas, came home,
and promptly went into withdrawal,
which is a miserable condition.
Agitation, mood lability, sense of desperation, seizures.
She went to her doctor not understanding what was going on
because she didn't know what she had been given,
and he immediately recognized what it was.
That's amazing to me, that in 1955 or whatever that was,
a doctor knew how to treat that and knew what it was quickly.
She made it through.
But imagine the potential harm there.
That's just one example.
You know, there's a very, very dangerous story
with John F. Kennedy,
where he, at the hands of Dr. Feelgood,
developed an amphetamine psychosis.
And it is documented that he threw off his clothes
and was literally doing cartwheels down a hotel hallway
in a psychotic state.
This was around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Imagine if he had been in that state when that was happening.
Thank God, a psychiatrist came over, quickly identified
what was going on,
and told the president he must never see this doctor again.
There's few people I have just massive disdain for,
and he's one of them.
It's disgusting.
In 1973, Dr. Jacobson was charged with unprofessional
conduct and fraud, and in 1975, he relinquished his license.
Then, ultimately, he passed away
in December of 1979,
leaving destruction in his wake.
I'm talking about all the people he's strung out on
drugs, all the people that died of addiction.
There's just so many, so many adverse events potentially that
he was a part of. It's almost hard to measure.
I've been an entertainment reporter and journalist for
almost the last 15 years in Los Angeles.
I've covered a lot of different Hollywood stories in my time.
You see the glitz and the glamour, and you also
see the darker side of the business, too.
When a celebrity dies of an overdose, it's very easy to
criticize a celebrity whenever they get caught up
in addiction.
But the aspect of these cases that doesn't get highlighted
enough is accountability.
What surprised me the most when
researching celebrity overdose deaths
is the number of doctors,
medical-board-approved doctors, that are involved
in these casualties.
Because the reality is these celebrities don't just create
the drugs themselves.
They have to get the drugs from someplace.
I was a special agent
for the Drug Enforcement Administration for 30 years.
Well, there's no doubt that it's different working in LA as
a DEA agent.
I think Hollywood creates these type of doctors.
They're making tons of money.
They like the celebrity association.
And with celebrities and the addiction, I think
it's more a lifestyle issue.
And there's a lot of pressure in Hollywood.
A lot of pressure to keep up with these production deadlines
and to keep up with your image.
And so I think that's just indicative of an environment
that supports this type of drug use.
So these are the three sort of big categories of dangerous
addictive drugs that are pharmaceutical and being
prescribed by physicians.
The commonly addictive pharmaceuticals were
the opiates and opioids-- the painkillers like Vicodin,
Percodan, Percocet, OxyContin.
Then there was the anti-anxiety medications that were being
used to treat the mild opiate withdrawal symptoms
that people were having.
That's why everyone on opiates ended up on
the benzodiazepines, which is the Valium,
the Ativan, the Librium, those sorts of drugs, Xanax.
And that includes sleeping medication like Ambien.
And then the stimulants.
Stimulants get going when young celebrities,
particularly female, will get going on them
to try to lose weight.
When the prescription drug thing came along,
I was a big proponent of hanging these doctors
in the public square,
making an example out of them.
I didn't know anything about prescription drugs.
But I got assigned to my partner.
She was well-trained in the prescription drugs,
and so the two of us worked together on these cases.
There was one case which was shocking.
This was not publicized.
You know, we didn't list celebrity names.
But it changed my perspective.
He was someone that we commonly referred to as Doc Hollywood.
We worked with a lot of local police departments.
I remember being in the office and getting the call from
the detective at Redondo Beach Police Department.
He said, "Hey, we're buying Adderall off Craigslist."
And they're saying it's coming from a doctor,
from a Dr. Nathan Kuemmerle.
He was a psychiatrist.
He was not affiliated with any large facilities.
His office was in West Hollywood on Sunset.
And so that's when we made
the determination to start looking at sending
an undercover in with the informant.
This is Dr. Kuemmerle's office right here.
This would be the front door.
His office was up on the third floor.
This is the alley behind the building right here.
And there's a back door to this
that leads you into the building.
So, we did see a lot of what appeared to be
drug-seeking people coming in and out the back.
And we started to recognize the people that were coming in
and out the back door as celebrities,
which isn't really normal.
You know, normally patients come in and out the front door,
not the back door.
So, during the first undercover buy, unlike other
doctor's offices where you have to call, make an appointment,
you just walk in.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then they got in to see, um, Kuemmerle, getting
the Adderall prescriptions.
I mean, normal people go to the doctor,
tell about their conditions, and then the doctor determines
what's prescribed, where, with these pill mills,
you go in and ask for what you want.
Yeah.
Mm.
Yeah.
When you go to the doctor's office, you typically
don't order off a menu,
and, uh, there was no medical exam.
There was no discussion of medical history.
And so our undercover paid $150 in cash for the prescriptions
and walked out.
We did another undercover buy,
and this one, it was within a couple weeks.
And this time we instructed the undercover officer to ask
for a prescription in his brother's name.
And so Kuemmerle agreed for the extra $50 to write him
a prescription for his brother, who was not present,
which is clearly outside the usual course
of professional practice.
A month later, we decided to do another undercover buy.
They go in,
and there's paperwork.
We told him to just write, you know, squiggly lines,
but don't write anything that makes really any sense.
And so an office manager for Dr. Kuemmerle
took the paperwork from him and just filled it out himself.
And so it was clear that this paperwork was more of a CYA
and had nothing to do with any medical evaluation.
And during this visit, lots of strange things happening.
Yeah.
Including, you know, construction workers
being allowed to come in to the room.
May it be a shining star.
It was clear that he was under the influence of something
and that his behavior was becoming more and more erratic.
Yeah.
It's such a huge hit.
And in my experience, most of these guys that
hand out drugs to drug addicts
are themselves drug addicts.
You gotta be.
He did everything from saying he was
a writer and a psychiatrist and a predictor of the future.
So he was not only selling Adderall, he was probably one
of his own best customers.
We decided to go in and do another undercover buy.
We were trying to demonstrate that this isn't a one-off.
This isn't just one prescription.
This is numerous red flags associated with
every prescription that's being written.
And during this visit, Kuemmerle was talking about
different celebrities.
And so we started going, "wow, this is going to be
a much bigger investigation."
The office manager comes into the room
and whispers something to Kuemmerle.
Kuemmerle tells our undercover
that there's a celebrity in the office.
Can't say who it is, but says...
"She's on the cover
of Cosmopolitan magazine right now."
I'm looking at the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine on
the day of that tape I just viewed.
And it was Amanda Bynes.
She stated in several interviews that she had
a problem with Adderall and was addicted to it.
She initially had started for weight loss
and then couldn't stop.
Amanda Bynes was known as a breakout star
on Nickelodeon shows like "All That"
and "The Amanda Show."
Later, she became notorious for troubling headlines.
So he was not protecting his patient privacy.
It was this bragging, this grandiose ego that
we saw displayed.
And his patient list had several other celebrities
coming here because a lot of celebrities were taking
Adderall to stay thin.
And then they continued to take more and more Adderall
because it helped with their long 16-hour days.
Yeah...
I think he fancied himself
to be the psychiatrist to the stars.
He was the number one prescriber of Adderall.
And this is back in 2008-2009, a situation where he wrote
probably three times as many prescriptions
as the number two person.
The celebrity aspect was just kind of an obstacle that was
constantly over our shoulder. With the celebrities came fame.
With fame came public focus.
With that public focus came attention.
And the undercover cases
work better when we don't have that attention.
With Nathan Kuemmerle, it was for him, in my opinion,
all about being close to celebrity and kind of getting
in those celebrity circles and, in his mind, perhaps,
becoming a celebrity himself by being their doctor.
I actually published a study about
narcissistic traits and addiction.
And one of the most dangerous things
for public figures is physicians who bask in
the narcissistic glow of celebrity.
I'm making that patient feel better.
I have this special patient. Only I know how to help them.
And that's hubris. That's narcissism.
It's basking in the narcissistic glow,
and it's the opposite of the practice of medicine.
That to me is just a stunning abuse of
the trust that we place in our healthcare providers.
They take a Hippocratic oath to protect patients and to
look out for their best interest.
And when they just completely trample over that trust,
that's an egregious violation.
This was my lowest sentence of any doctor case I investigated,
either in Texas or California.
I don't think that sends a message that
the top prescriber for the entire state of California
for Adderall received time served...
of, you know, approximately 10 months, right?
Here's a thing that I haven't really touched on, is juries
have a hard time understanding how a doctor would risk
his entire career
to write a prescription drug outside the scope of
a legitimate medical practice.
Juries have a hard time believing that.
And, you know, what always happens is they lose
their medical license temporarily.
They lose their ability to prescribe drugs from DEA
temporarily, but they always get it back.
This was kind of a perfect storm, and the medical board
up until that point had really never had to deal with
criminal cases against doctors.
We are supposed to be driven by the priority of "do no harm."
I started to notice it got worse when
the opioid epidemic was upon us.
So in early 2000s is where the rise of the companies that
were selling these opioids as the end-all, be-all-- the cure.
And it's not addictive, right?
And so there was a lot of kind of
this false marketing out there.
We didn't realize how dangerous it was because it was in
a prescription bottle.
And so there was this just lack of understanding that just
because it's coming from a doctor doesn't mean
it's safe, doesn't mean it was legitimately prescribed.
There was an incident with Dr. Jules Lusman.
He came on everyone's radar because of Winona Ryder.
A lot of us know Winona Ryder
because of "Edward Scissorhands,"
the iconic Tim Burton film with Johnny Depp.
Today, we know Winona Ryder because of "Stranger Things."
And this was a major comeback for her,
especially because she had a huge stain
on her career from her shoplifting incident.
December 2001, Winona Ryder was arrested for stealing
$5,500 from Saks worth of designer clothing.
Why would Winona Ryder, America's sweetheart,
be stealing from Saks Fifth Avenue?
I mean, can't you afford to buy whatever you want from
Saks Fifth Avenue?
Winona, how are you doing?
Winona, how are you feeling today?
So this label, "kleptomaniac," gets thrown
around in relation to Winona Ryder.
I immediately announced that this is opiate addiction.
Immediately.
Because one thing my female opiate-using patients
were doing frequently back then
was in order to get that endorphin rush
that they were used to getting from the drugs,
they will do sensational things, particularly stealing.
After the felony preliminary hearing today conducted in
Division I of the Beverly Hills Courthouse,
Judge Fox held the defendant to answer
on four felony charges.
Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting, and she had
multiple prescription bottles in her purse.
I'm telling you right now, there was no possession of
prescription medications without a prescription.
She essentially had Demerol,
which is an incredibly powerful opiate,
and then various forms of Vicodin
and Percocet, Percodan.
And one of the prescribers was a Dr. Jules Mark Lusman.
So Dr. Lusman is a plastic surgeon,
just basically running a medical practice from his home.
You know, his bedroom was the exam room.
His living room was the waiting room.
He would request payments in cash.
Dr. Lusman was known to charge large amounts of money
to make after-hours calls to celebrities, to special people,
often giving them infusions of substances, opiates,
and he did have Winona Ryder's medical file.
He was taking care of her under the name,
however, of Emily Thompson.
Over several months, Dr. Lusman prescribed
multiple different opiates and some under the name
Emily Thompson.
Not something that doctors are supposed to do.
And I've seen it in a bunch of cases because they say
they're protecting the privacy of the patient, etc.
But it's not legitimate and it can cause significant problems
because no other doctor, then, will know
that this patient is taking that drug.
After that, he went to South Africa and started
practicing medicine there.
Had he stayed here in California and waited out
his probation time, he would have been relicensed
by the state. It happens all the time.
There's constantly second and third chances for doctors
who are in similar situations like that.
It's important to talk about these cases because the doctors
who are enabling these addictions need to be stopped.
A lot of addictions started with legitimate prescribed
medical use of opiate drugs, some kind of injury that
opiate drugs are normally used to treat
those injuries for pain.
The opioid crisis was way underway
and I was just fighting it.
And at the time being told I was old-fashioned,
I was interested in patient suffering, I was opiophobic,
I didn't know what I was talking about while my patients
were dying constantly at the hands of my peers.
Mike Starr, Alice in Chains.
We got him sober for a year. A miracle.
This guy was a lifetime drug addict.
No pain, no nothing, starting to thrive.
He moved to Utah with the band.
One day he calls me and goes, Drew, I'm having back pain.
And I said, "Mike, please, whatever you do,
do not tell a doctor that you have pain. Please."
Two weeks later, dead,
pain pill-- benzodiazepine at the bedside.
Jeff Conway, chronic pain patient.
Got him off drugs.
But of course, he goes back to the doctors.
They say, "Why do you listen to these people?"
"You just need to take these medicines.
"I told you you're gonna need to take them
the rest of your life."
Two weeks later, dead.
I saw other celebrities die from deadly combination of
drugs mixed with anti-anxiety medication.
Heath Ledger was prescribed
a ton of drugs by a doctor and stopped breathing.
Anna Nicole Smith...
I was singing it from every hilltop that you are watching
a woman die and nobody seemed to care.
We just roll over these celebrity deaths.
My cousin was Prince.
A lot of people are afraid to say this
because they probably get called crazy.
When he died, that disturbed me to the core.
I think somebody should be held accountable
for killing somebody.
I'm from Minneapolis. Born 1956.
Prince and I, our grandmothers are sisters.
We got earrings in our ears at eight years old.
See? See, I have four in this ear
and one in this ear.
And people used to tease us and call us all kinds of names.
But we was some rockers, for real.
So I will tell you the whole story.
Now, this is a famous story about our group,
the first group that everybody knows all of us from.
It's called Grand Central.
It was me on drums, Prince Nelson on guitar.
Anything Prince wanted to do, he would do.
That's the way this man was on his music and anything else
that we did.
The freedom that I had
came from a long, hard fight of trying to get them to
understand that I wanted to be different.
Everybody knows he was a great artist, great musician,
a true fighter,
creative genius.
There'll never be anything like it.
Everybody knows that.
But to me, that's my cousin.
Excuse me for a moment.
Our whole family was proud of him.
Man.
The one, the only, Prince!
One, two, three!
This is Jimmy Kimmel at a stage behind his studio.
And he'd occasionally have concerts out there.
And this evening, it was Prince.
And my wife and I went there to see him.
Oh, I was a fan.
Yeah.
I just liked the funk quality that he had.
I just thought it was great.
I would die for you.
Ooh, darling, if I want me to-- you.
Ooh, I would die for you.
Hoo!
Those little hoos. That was so Prince.
He was authentically him.
He had a connection to people that spanned countries
and cities and demographics and races.
Prince spoke a universal language that we all share.
But we really didn't know that he was struggling with
health issues leading up to his death.
Supposedly, Prince complained of hip pain.
Although he had lots of complaints of pain, there was
never any hints of anything inhibiting his performances.
And one of the things to treat the pain
was an opiate pain reliever.
So if he was in pain, my hips are so bad, I need surgery,
and now I'm hooked on the opioids.
Can you imagine Prince telling people, you know,
they can't wait to pounce on him.
So I knew he was in a spot,
his legacy and everything.
Hello, good night.
Prince plays his final show on April 14th, 2016.
And it was clear that he was not doing well.
Yee-hoo-hoo-ooh...
He looks extremely thin.
There's no man who should be weighing 90-something pounds.
That was horrifying to me.
And the next day, he was on a private flight
from Atlanta to his home in Minneapolis.
Breaking news came on and said the plane had to do
an emergency landing.
And this is what got me when they said
they gave him Narcan.
They didn't say anything else behind it.
I was going, what the hell is Narcan?
One of my friends called me up and he told me, "man,
Narcan brings a person back from opioid overdoses."
I was like, "What?"
What I remember most vividly
was, I was telling everybody that this is addiction.
I knew it. I could see it.
And I knew he was in serious danger.
- But Sarah, here's what I know. - No.
Anytime a publicist says "dehydration,"
don't listen to it.
Because adult, otherwise healthy young males
don't get dehydration, number one.
And number two, he didn't have the flu.
Flu doesn't come and go.
But drug withdrawal feels like the flu.
I was saying it on HLN. I was saying it repeatedly.
This is what they're gonna die of
if they're young and healthy.
Eight minutes up the road.
Paisley Park is eight minutes. We looked this up.
It is eight minutes from Hazelden.
The fact that no one was attending to it, I thought
was a scandal.
And he lived minutes from Hazelden, from one of
the premier treatment centers in the country.
And I kept saying, throw him in the trunk and take him
to Hazelden. Do what you got to do.
This guy's gonna die.
Instead, a doctor named Howard Kornfeld,
who did some addiction treatment,
sent Suboxone.
Suboxone is a replacement therapy for opiates
of various types.
It also is an excellent treatment for chronic pain.
But Kornfeld couldn't come. He was tied up.
He could not go to Minnesota.
So he sent his son to Minnesota to see Prince.
Scandalous.
Some guy flies out from San Francisco.
Wild!
Taking drugs across state lines in a backpack.
This was insanity.
Hazelden was right down the street.
Throw him in the car. Go to Hazelden.
Get treatment. That's it.
When my wife called me,
I fell to my knees.
That feeling overwhelmed me. I couldn't even--
I couldn't even breathe.
What I remember most vividly was Van Jones on my HLN program
breaking down and sobbing at his friend's death.
There were so many things...
that...
Oh...
...that he was trying to do now,
and he cared so much just about ordinary people.
You've seen the streets of when he passed away of
downtown Minneapolis. Wasn't one fight.
In New York.
Fans.
LA, packed in the streets.
That was Prince.
There were a lot of rumors and speculation swirling
after Prince's death.
The decision was made to process the scene.
One of them that his death was linked to an addiction
to painkillers.
Results from that autopsy may take several weeks.
For sure, Prince believed he was taking
a legitimate pharmaceutical pill.
But reality is Prince died of deception.
The autopsy lists accidental fentanyl ingestion
as the cause of death.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid.
We used to use it mostly in ICUs.
Used as part of a regime for anesthesia, like when
you're going under anesthesia.
Fentanyl is many times more powerful than heroin.
Like 50 times more powerful than heroin.
It's cheap to get and incredibly addictive.
But in 2016, fentanyl was rarely mentioned.
It was heroin, Vicodin, OxyContin.
Those are the opiates you heard about.
Prince was probably one of the first celebrity people that
was victim of fentanyl here in the United States.
Two milligrams or more is a potentially deadly dose.
And that's like the tip of a pencil.
That's really all it could take to kill you.
They said that you can have a little grain about this big,
and you can die from it.
And they said he had enough of them to kill an elephant.
So, because of the nature of Prince's death, police officers
decided to serve a search warrant there.
And they found a lot of drugs in the house, in all different
places around the house, and all packaged in a way to
kind of try to conceal what they actually were.
Dr. Schulenberg's name, one of Prince's doctors,
his name came up pretty quickly because of
some of the prescriptions found in the house.
This is a surveillance video of Prince visiting
his physician the day before he died.
That's Dr. Schulenberg...
seeing Prince with his bodyguard.
This is Dr. Schulenberg.
Dr. Michael Schulenberg prescribed Vicodin for Prince,
but in the name of his bodyguard.
That is unethical. That is fraud.
This is that weird thing again.
I've seen doctors go, "Oh, oh,
"you don't want to be public about this?
We'll just use somebody else's name."
That is bullshit! Doctors should never do that.
That disturbed me to the core because I was going,
why do you have to--
if Prince is in pain and he really needed
something to help him,
why do we have to-- why do you have to forge and lie
and do stuff? Why not be upfront about it?
However, the pill that killed Prince,
or contributed to his death,
was clearly not something prescribed by Dr. Schulenberg
because he was prescribing pharmaceutical oxycodone,
which does not have fentanyl.
So where did the fentanyl come from?
While the police searched the house, they did find
counterfeit pills at Prince's house.
Sometimes people will refer to
them as prescription drugs laced with fentanyl.
And I really push back. That's not the case.
The only active ingredient in these pills is fentanyl.
It's not like someone took a real Vicodin
or a real oxycodone and added fentanyl to it.
It's just much cheaper to make a pill that looks like those
other pills and do it just with fentanyl.
So Prince believed he was taking a legitimate
pharmaceutical pill, probably a Vicodin or an oxycodone.
He didn't know that he was taking a pill where fentanyl
was the active ingredient.
Man.
Heck yeah, it's a lot.
They showed us what the pills looked like.
Next to each other, a real one,
fake, looked exactly alike.
There was no way Prince knew what he was taking.
It was just-- it would have fooled everybody.
The investigators tried to look at phone records.
They did search warrants to look at who people were calling
up until Prince's death.
They looked at the bodyguard's phone.
The reality is, they never found out
who supplied the fentanyl to Prince.
This is the death of one of the most high-profile musicians
to ever live, and we still don't know who killed him?
We don't know how he got these pills?
We wanted the people that did this...
to admit it
and take responsibility for it.
That has to happen.
There were many physicians along the way who enabled
the addiction that led to his death.
So there's plenty of blame to go around here.
And yet,
we live in a world where the addict gets blamed for
their disease and even their death.
There are a lot of celebrity deaths that
we've never solved, right?
That we don't know who is responsible.
There's been no accountability.
If we held...
suppliers accountable for the deaths downstream from
the drugs they supply, there would be a lot of people
in serious trouble that skate these days.
I would like to see that. I would love to see that.
But that would be...
It's-- look, it's murder.
As a federal prosecutor,
I worked at the US Attorney's Office
in what's called the Central District of California.
We served the largest population.
Yes, is the short answer.
So I was the chief of the criminal division
at the time at the US Attorney's Office,
and the lead prosecutor on the case, Ian Yanniello,
came in one day and said he got a call from LAPD.
They told Ian about the significant case.
And that case...
was the death of a celebrity,
Matthew Perry.
B, C, and X common mark.
No, she was not as fat.
Matthew Perry was most known for his role as Chandler Bing
on "Friends."
Weddings are a great place to meet women,
and when I dance, I look like this.
Of course, I watched "Friends" on right after
"Seinfeld" back in the day.
It was impossible to miss "Friends."
It was everywhere.
We're friends. I mean, we're six
different people that seem to gel pretty well.
We're talking about a show that shaped hairstyles.
It shaped language that we still use today.
You guys all like--
Yes, yes, for the last time, we are all actually
good friends. Thank you.
It's one of the most successful shows
in the history of television.
No, nothing special.
No, yeah, we had a really good idea that this had a very good
shot at at least having a chance at being successful.
That show, that role was so larger than life.
It really eclipsed his career and was the role that most
people think of when they think of his name.
I follow that to a freakish degree, actually,
because the numbers are actually good,
and all my other shows, the, uh--
I think the last show I did, we were ranked 83rd
out of 83 shows every time.
So now that there's good news, I call up and tell everybody.
Matthew Perry was a beloved actor,
and he had bad addiction.
I only knew about it from talk in the treatment community.
People were asking me for, you know, advice and things.
Tell me what it's all about.
Well, it's all about people in their 30s and their 40s who are
kinda broken people.
I play a character named Jack who is a drunk.
The research I've done, and I have the only published
literature on this, suggests that typically people
that pursue celebrity have childhood trauma.
There are some experiences that are in my own life
that are shared in the play.
With Matthew Perry, we don't know what
the issue was, really.
I grew up in Canada
with my mom, so I didn't really see my dad a whole lot.
Wake up with Old Spice.
He was the Old Spice man.
And the way I would see my dad was on television.
He would call me up and say, "so I'm getting shot on 'Mannix'
on Thursday night, so tune in." And I think I generated kind of
a respect for the business that way, because it was through
the television that I got to see my dad.
That aloneness and emptiness,
that injury and that deficiency that that creates, people try
to fill that with performing, and an audience and celebrity,
and it doesn't work.
And they think fame is supposed to solve that trauma,
which it does not, and provides ample opportunity
for the addiction to flourish.
I've interviewed actually a lot of the cast members
from the "Friends" show, and when did it sink in that
your lives weren't quite gonna be the same?
Well, I guess the show really, uh...
became huge in between the first and second season.
In that summer, I went, "Whoa, this is a little bit more
"than a hit show. This is...
"This is something that people are really taking an interest
in, and it's terrific."
Can you put the--
That is a great idea.
In 1997, while also filming "Friends," Matthew Perry was in
a movie called "Fools Rush In."
- Imagine, yeah. - Ah!
Funny, very funny.
A lot of the humor came from this dynamic
between this white guy...
Lucy, you got some explaining to do.
Oh, my God.
...interacting with a Mexican family.
He fell into some cactus, a lot of cactus.
During the filming, he unfortunately was in
a jet-ski accident.
As a result of his back injury,
and like so many people at that period of history,
were given tremendous doses of opioids
for a minor pain syndrome.
And if you have the potential for addiction,
now it's gonna start.
Now it's gonna escalate.
The public during the last year of "Friends," you were starting
to hear about something, that something was up.
I remember seeing Matthew Perry struggle very publicly
with addiction throughout the years.
What's up, Matthew?
- Hey. - How are you, man?
Over the course of 30 years, Matthew Perry would undergo
about 15 rehab stints and spend roughly $9 million
on recovery efforts.
Frankly, it's an embarrassment.
It should not cost a lot of money.
You're wasting the money.
I grew up seeing these celebrity stories
and going into rehab, coming out,
going back into rehab, coming out.
And in my head, you just thought,
"OK, well, this is something that happens to celebrities."
And you kinda had the sense of, well, they're probably not
trying hard enough.
But in fact, as I started learning more about it,
the financial motivations of the people who own some
of these luxury rehab centers is not necessarily to get
these people well, but to actually have them keep
coming back so that they can continue
making money off of them.
So the reality is that these luxury rehab centers,
they are made to attract these high-end clients.
So they have equine therapy, they have horses,
they have sound baths and like organic chefs.
And they say, like, celebrities can have
their phone, they can use their laptop.
Someone charged $80,000 a month,
which is a lot of money.
And you expect, when you pay that much
as top-notch medical care,
that you're gonna get better.
But typically, it doesn't actually help the celebrities
get better, but in fact makes them relapse
into their addiction.
I've seen billing for services not conducted.
I've seen facilities where they maintain stashes of drugs
at the places and distribute the drugs to patients.
Sometimes it's illicit drugs, sometimes it's prescription
drugs that are administered without prescription.
Or there's people using drugs in the facility while you're
trying to stay sober.
I mean, one case that we wrote about, a woman was able to get
Postmates delivery of drugs to her.
They're a way to kind of get a piece of the Hollywood money,
and it's really, really sad.
Many of them are for-profit businesses who benefit
from the revolving-door nature of addiction and recovery.
This is what happened with Matthew Perry.
The fact that he went to so many rehabs, and spent so much money,
I wonder, you know, were there times
when he was taken advantage of?
Were there times that he was exploited,
victimized, because he was a vulnerable person with a lot
of money, willing to spend it
with the hopes of getting better?
I fear that in some cases that probably happened to him.
And eventually got to the point where he was taking
50, 55 tablets a day.
55 Vicodin a day, which is where I was.
- 55? - Yeah.
This interview with Diane Sawyer is the first time
that we, as the public, actually got to understand
the full extent of his addiction.
I did all sorts of things.
I had a bunch of doctors and fake
migraines and all that stuff.
He was doctor shopping.
If someone couldn't provide him
with the drugs that he needed, he would go to someone else.
He would go to absurd lengths to acquire these pills.
And I guess the weirdest thing I did was, on Sundays, I would
go to open houses and go to the bathrooms in the open house
and see what pills they had in there and steal them.
Standard oral opiate addict.
And then stealing from family, friends, open houses, that's--
he learned that from somebody.
Somebody gave him that technique.
I was rushed to the hospital because I was in intense
pain.
It was in there that my colon exploded.
Matthew Perry suffered a complication of opiate use
where the colon stops moving, ruptures, causes peritonitis,
and then sepsis.
And in his case, he was given about a 2% chance of surviving,
was in a coma for an extended period of time,
but did ultimately survive.
My health is good.
I'm doing really well now.
How will we know when you're in trouble,
when you're not OK?
He presented this image to the public of health.
But as we now know, that turned out to not be true.
Is if I ever say I'm cured.
He strikes me as depressed. He does not strike me as sober.
It's not fun to talk about this stuff.
I don't like talking about it.
He's not talking about his recovery.
He just seems to be still suffering.
It was really heartbreaking when I found out
you don't know him, but you feel like you do know him.
He just kind of seemed like that funny friend
that everybody has.
He was just a very unique character, and I don't think
anyone else could have really played that.
I honestly don't know how to react to this.
I just wanna appreciate him for giving
one of the best comedic performances in history.
I really also wanna mention someone that's not here today.
And that's Matthew Perry,
who was so kind and generous with me while we worked
on "17 Again."
It was so much fun.
And it really did propel me and motivate me,
uh, in so many ways.
It really pushed me into the next chapter of my career.
And for that, thank you so much, Matthew.
I'm thinking about you a lot today.
One of my first thoughts is, like, such a tragedy ending
to what could have been a great story of redemption.
A human life was lost.
And often our response and ability is,
what can we do about it?
And so it was very important for us, in this case
in particular, to figure out, did a crime occur?
Earlier that day,
October 28, 2023, Matthew Perry's at home.
His live-in assistant is at home, Kenneth Iwamasa.
Iwamasa later finds Perry face down floating in the hot tub.
And early on, there were some indications that it was
an overdose death.
I thought for sure that this was gonna be a fentanyl
overdose, but it was different
than I think what we all initially thought.
So this is the death certificate of Matthew Perry.
Overdose death, ketamine poisoning,
is essentially what it was.
Ketamine doesn't fall into the three common buckets
of addictive drugs. It's not an opioid.
It's a dissociative anesthetic.
Ketamine infusions are associated with improved
outcomes for pain and depression.
Ketamine can only be advertised for use
as an anesthetic, but it is not against the law.
It's completely legal for a doctor to prescribe
ketamine for any reason at all.
There's ketamine in the form of lozenges and lollipops,
and it is used by some doctors to treat addiction.
But also, ketamine became a party drug.
It's important to understand, there's no such thing
as a good drug or a bad drug.
There's just their biological effects on the human system
and our relationship with those drugs.
That's it.
The drug itself isn't good or bad.
It's just a molecule.
If you have depression and you have a ketamine infusion and it
helps with your depression, ketamine is good.
If you're a drug addict and ketamine is part of
the drugs you're taking indiscriminately,
it can kill you.
So, here is his autopsy report.
And on this file, you see he's not on fentanyl.
He's not on amphetamine. He's on lots of ketamine.
Studies show that in drug overdose deaths,
ketamine is rarely present.
And in 99.9% of cases where there is ketamine,
other drugs are detected.
Matthew Perry's death is no exception.
He's on benzodiazepines.
He's on a mood stabilizer, lamotrigine.
He's on antidepressants.
And he has advanced emphysema, and he's diabetic, and he has
coronary disease. He is a mess.
But what's important is the but-for cause of death,
meaning but-for the presence of ketamine in his body,
he would have lived at least one more day.
The ketamine was the factor that then kind of exacerbated
these other underlying issues that Matthew Perry had.
So ketamine was ruled the cause of death.
When the pathology report came through,
immediately authorities wanted
to know where that ketamine was coming from.
And there was at least one other person present
when he passed.
Kenneth Iwamasa, Matthew Perry's assistant.
The LAPD talked to Kenneth Iwamasa,
who provided him some information about what happened
earlier in that day.
Kenneth had injected him three times with ketamine.
This is unthinkable.
Kenneth had infused Matthew at 8:30 AM, 12:30 PM, at which
point Matthew asked Kenneth to get the hot tub ready
and "inject me, infuse a big one."
Which is only like an hour later.
People would wonder why Kenneth got to the point where he was
even considering or willing to do this, and I'm afraid Kenneth
was an unwitting dupe.
Somebody convinced Kenneth that this was a good idea,
and then the addict starts pushing it along a little
further, and he's afraid of losing his job, and he wants
to help Matthew, and he's seeing how he's suffering.
But he's not a medical professional.
This is exactly why he can't be doing this.
He doesn't understand the risks of what he's doing.
He's not trained.
There's no reason he should understand it.
It was pretty clear, ultimately, who gave it to him,
and the case could have ended there.
But the LAPD is not satisfied with that.
They wanted to go farther and higher.
And so that was the focus. Where did you get it?
And then where did that person get it?
From the scene of the crime, one of the significant items
found were vials of ketamine, but they were also unmarked,
meaning that it did not appear to be
a legitimate prescription.
In addition, ketamine lozenges
were prescribed to someone not named Matthew Perry.
So search warrants and subpoenas were executed to
get phone records for Kenneth Iwamasa's phone,
and you start to see conversations
with a doctor named Salvador Plasencia.
Dr. Salvador Plasencia graduated from
UCLA Medical School in 2010 and...
...was actually an internal medicine doctor,
like, an urgent care doctor.
But his background wasn't in ketamine.
We met with Dr. Plasencia.
He agreed to provide information that explains some of the text
messages he had with Mr. Iwamasa.
So Dr. Plasencia was approached
by Matthew Perry for ketamine.
Dr. Plasencia went to his colleague,
Dr. Chavez, who actually ran a ketamine infusion center
for depression.
Which means he has a lot of
access to both to ketamine, but also to patients
who are potential victims.
Now we had two doctors potentially involved in
basically, trafficking ketamine.
DEA went to his place of business to do an audit.
And they find out that there's ketamine missing.
And they confront him and they ask him what happened to it.
And he says he threw them out after they melted
or got destroyed because he left them in his car
and it got really hot.
And he told a lie there because the drug was redistributed.
It was redistributed right to Dr. Plasencia
and Matthew Perry.
Dr. Plasencia and Dr. Chavez could have been well-meaning.
"I'm making that patient feel better."
And with the addict at the center, the addict is
always gonna be doing his or her thing, manipulating,
obfuscating, lying, getting drugs.
In their brain, their survival depends on
the access to the drugs.
And if a physician doesn't understand that when he
or she is prescribing,
not good.
But investigators find a series of text messages between
Dr. Plasencia and Dr. Chavez.
On September 30th, 2023, they discussed how much
to charge for ketamine, stating, quote,
"I wonder how much this moron will pay."
Plasencia texts Chavez, "If today goes well,
we may have repeat business."
In a subsequent text, Plasencia said they would be
best served not having to look elsewhere and be his go-to.
You don't see messages about, how is he doing?
Did it go OK?
The absence of any level of concern or care after that
because they were behaving as a cruel drug traffickers,
not sworn medical doctors.
Some of these text messages
around Matthew Perry are reprehensible.
And-- and I-- there's no excuse.
Matthew Perry paid these doctors about $55,000 in cash
in less than a month.
It was just about exploiting
him and sucking money out of him.
I expect that behavior from drug dealers, right?
I don't expect it from doctors who took an oath
to protect their patients.
I don't understand
how my peers get there. I don't get it.
It's my own biases.
I don't wanna believe this is possible.
That is just what it looks like.
I wanna believe that they
poorly trained, made errors,
got sucked in, were manipulated.
But in addition to the horrible financial motivations,
there were egregious behaviors that I was not expecting
from a physician.
The investigation covered a two-week period from
September 30th to October 12th, where we identified the doctors
as a primary source of the ketamine for Matthew Perry.
At one point, Dr. Plasencia met them
at a parking lot in Long Beach and injected Matthew Perry in
the backseat of a car.
And then another time when Dr. P injected Matthew Perry,
there was an adverse reaction, a blood pressure spike.
Matthew Perry was unable to move all of a sudden.
At that point, obviously,
Dr. Plasencia should have known that this was very
dangerous administration of the drug outside a hospital.
But they continued to supply Matthew Perry with ketamine,
really through an intermediary, Kenneth Iwamasa,
who was Matthew Perry's live-in assistant.
And they actually, I hesitate to use the word "trained,"
because that would kind of intimate that there was some
type of formal process of medical training that went on.
The doctor showed Kenneth how
to inject Matthew Perry himself with ketamine,
because it was not feasible for the doctor to keep traveling
back and forth doing these injections.
It's mind-boggling that Matthew's physicians trained
a layperson to infuse Matthew with ketamine...
to give IV injections of a seriously dangerous chemical.
At the very beginning, they start charging really
exorbitant amounts of money.
Initially, it was $1,000 to 10-milliliter vial.
Now, all of a sudden, $3,000
for a 10 milliliter vial.
And what happens?
Iwamasa and Matthew Perry start reaching out to contacts
they have in the black market.
This tangled web of conspirators that were involved
in Matthew Perry's death stretches far wider than just
Dr. Plasencia and Dr. Chavez.
All right.
My name is Taylor Shannon.
I got into opiates in like my late teens.
William Cooney is from Birmingham, Alabama.
Most of his friends called him Bammer throughout the years
just growing up.
I knew him but not well until we went to
the same rehab facility.
That's when we got really close.
And ever since then, I mean, I've talked to him every day
for like 12 years, probably.
He was very athletic.
He was a left-handed pitcher for baseball.
And he could throw the ball really hard.
I have not used any opiates or hard drugs for,
it'll be 16 years in January.
Thanks.
William stayed clean, but he had a relapse,
and it was ketamine.
And he never stopped, and I stopped.
And I think just from then,
it was just constant relapse for him.
It had been years since I had used opiates at that time when
William was getting really deep into his addiction to where,
like, I could be there to help him.
I mean, I've pulled him out of drug houses.
I've driven around with him in a car while he's using.
We're pushing really hard to get him into a rehab facility.
He said he would only go if he went to The Red Door.
I have heard of this facility--
an upscale drug treatment center in Bel Air.
Welcome to Dr. Drew Podcast, everyone.
Thank you, thank you. We appreciate your support.
One time, I interviewed the co-founder on my podcast.
Today, we're talking to Bernadine Fried.
The treatment facility is Red Door Life Recovery.
It opened in 2018,
and Bel Air is a part of Hollywood.
It's all glitz and glamour and fancy bourgeoisie activity.
And it became a sought-after destination
for members of Hollywood.
No one could have known at the time that one of
the employees at Red Door would eventually be linked
to Matthew Perry's death.
Erik Fleming was a TV and film producer
and director in Hollywood.
He was the director of the film "My Brother the Pig,"
starring Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes.
He produced the first season of "The Surreal Life."
His career ended up fizzling out in the 2010s.
In 2021, Erik Fleming becomes the program director at a place
called The Red Door.
Program director is sort of the administrator
of the program.
Erik Fleming is not a physician,
he's not a clinician.
When William was at The Red Door, he would call me.
But William was obviously high.
I could barely understand him,
which he usually isn't like that.
Yeah, I think he was there two or three days.
And one night, I got the call that he passed away.
Um...
Yeah.
William Cooney was found unresponsive on the floor
of his bathroom at The Red Door.
He was found by one of his fellow residents,
and they tried to resuscitate him,
but they were unsuccessful.
According to the coroner, he overdosed on
fentanyl and meth.
I knew he already was getting drugs outside of the facility.
It was actually when Matthew Perry died.
My editors wanted us to look into this death.
As I started learning more about it, Perry found Fleming
through this web of connections, who's kind of
connected to various celebrities.
He's kind of described to us as a kind of celebrity hanger-on.
After the doctors struggle
with their procurement of the ketamine,
Kenneth Iwamasa contacts Erik Fleming.
At this point, Erik was no longer working at Red Door.
Kenneth, he texts Erik, "Here, Batman's butler.
"He said I can text you directly.
"How much do you want per bottle?
What's the nice tip you want?"
Erik Fleming provided 50 vials of ketamine days before
Perry died.
And our next question is, where did you get them from?
Hollywood dubbed her the Ketamine Queen.
That is a moniker that was told to us.
She was active in the LA club scene.
She didn't really fit the profile of who the public
probably thinks a drug dealer is.
I met Jasveen around 2010.
It was during one event, and it's electronic music.
She was maybe 25, 26 when I met her.
You can kind of tell she came from some money, but she still
had that hustle in her.
She comes from Indian heritage, grew up in London
and Los Angeles.
I knew she had gotten a master's degree.
I knew she had a business background.
She worked, I believe, at Merrill Lynch.
And I was under the assumption that she was, and she told me
she was in the event business.
She was definitely branding herself as being an it girl,
a popular person, and she was.
Mind you, I was a bit surprised at the way things turned out.
Based off information provided from Erik Fleming,
who is one of the main sources who identified
the Ketamine Queen as a source of his drugs,
a search warrant was executed by local authorities,
supported by the federal authorities
at Jasveen Sangha's house.
Ketamine was found.
Cocaine was found.
Methamphetamine was found in significant
trafficking quantities.
Thousands of pills were found.
In addition, guns, firearms.
And they later found that the ketamine seized
from her apartment matched the vials sold to both
Matthew Perry and another young man who had died of an overdose,
Cody McLaury.
Cody grew up in Alaska. It was a small town.
He wanted to go and, like, explore and travel
and see things. So he moved to Los Angeles.
We both had a sweet tooth.
Like, we would go run around the neighborhood that we
lived at, 'cause I was doing just, like, small runs,
like, 5K, 10K.
But we always ended up eating Oreos afterwards.
And one year for my birthday, he got me a gallon of milk
and probably, like, five or six packages of Oreos, and I was
like, "This was my favorite present, I think, ever."
Cody always knew that he was gay.
At the time that he came out, it wasn't on his terms.
That was very difficult for him.
He had struggles with mental health or depression.
Cody did like to do ketamine.
I think the thing that drew him most to it was,
you know, the therapeutic side of what he would get from it.
It helped him, you know, cope with things that he might
have been struggling with at the time.
At the age of 33 in 2019, he died of a ketamine overdose.
I was sitting in an office by myself,
and a friend had called me,
and he just said that Cody was dead.
And it's like immediately my heart just sunk.
It was the last thing you expect to hear.
I think shock.
One of LA's public officials had released
a statement kind of dismissing his death as just another death
in the gay community from somebody, like a drug addict.
After Cody died, Cody's sister had gotten his phone back
from the police.
She had been going through some text messages.
Ended up finding conversations
and then a Venmo transaction to Jasveen,
talking about him getting ketamine from her
and purchasing it that day.
And she sent it to the police department doing
the investigation in LA
And then five months later, after they did nothing,
that's when she messaged Jasveen and told her that
the cause of death was ketamine.
There was no communication back.
Our investigation revealed that in 2019, Jasveen Sangha
took upon it herself to try to identify whether she could be
held responsible and looking into whether ketamine could be
listed as a cause of death on an autopsy report.
Sangha did a Google search, and the search was,
"can ketamine be listed as a cause of death?"
She already knew, and that's a big issue.
She continued to traffic drugs because it's a cycle of just
greed and harm that just keeps going.
And on the day that news broke that Matthew Perry died,
Jasveen Sanga asked Erik Fleming
to delete their messages.
They had it over Signal, right?
An encrypted messaging app that they had on their phones.
But, you know, what's interesting is people
have a misunderstanding about how it works, right?
Yes, you can delete messages.
Sometimes messages are stored on the cloud and they can be
accessed from a search warrant served on
the Apple Cloud or the iCloud.
So we learned that on October 12th, a photo was transmitted
relating to the product Jasveen Sangha has
available and the prices.
Sangha and Fleming had sold 25 vials of ketamine
to Matthew Perry for $6,000.
And another 25 more just 10 days later.
So 50 vials in almost a two-and-a-half week period
is a significant amount of ketamine.
How do we know that that was the ketamine, right,
that Sangha supplied that killed Matthew Perry?
Really, it's just based on what prosecutors might call
temporal proximity.
What dose of ketamine was purchased closest to the time
of his death?
And is there any specific evidence that suggests
that that's not the dose that killed him?
And in this case, it was pretty apparent that it was
the ketamine from Sangha that actually killed him.
It was shocking.
I-- I could not understand what was going on.
The person that I met that I knew being associated with
the death of Matthew Perry.
She never came off that way.
You know, she wasn't like doing business around me.
We were just chilling, hanging out as friends.
She seemed like she was making moves.
She was smart.
You know, she wasn't just rich girl partying it up.
I think Jasveen most certainly was living,
you know, two lives.
There is no about that, and she played--
she played it well.
For those of you who are in courtroom,
I thought the government was
turning the responsibility in this case on its head.
Why is she in custody and the people,
whether it's medical professionals or the people
who are administering the drug, are out?
So the investigation uncovered essentially two threads that
were the main sources for Matthew Perry to get ketamine.
On both threads, the sort of unifier was Mr. Iwamasa.
Kenneth had Erik Fleming, who was a middle person between
himself and the Ketamine Queen.
And then Mr. Iwamasa also utilized as a middle person,
Dr. Plasencia, who was getting
his drugs from Dr. Chavez in San Diego.
...responsible for Matthew Perry's death.
Come here, Mark. Come here.
Go ahead. This way.
Let's go around.
- OK. - Excuse me, guys, we gotta get to court.
I'm sure doctors were saying things like,
"Hey, we didn't actually provide the ketamine
"that killed Matthew Perry.
That came from the Ketamine Queen."
- ?¿Nos puede decir si se siente arrepentido? - - Excuse us.
What's your biggest regret here, Dr. Chavez?
But why wasn't the ketamine that they sold the ketamine
that killed Matthew Perry?
It was because they were basically extorting the guy.
They had become so predatory
and were trying to exploit him so much
that he decided to find another source.
So their conduct, in my mind, was so egregious that even
he didn't wanna deal with him anymore.
Is there anything you'd like to say.
You gonna be able to keep your license, Mr. Chavez,
after all this?
You don't have to
My client is accepting responsibility,
and he's incredibly remorseful.
It's really tragic that someone like Matthew Perry was
surrounded by the kind of people who could have helped
him live a long life,
but instead they betrayed him.
People are looking at this young guy dying
of addiction, and a physician
added to his demise.
I think doctors traditionally get off easy.
And I think that oftentimes, they're given second chances
that regular folk like you and I aren't given.
The reality is, you know, the Ketamine Queen
didn't take an oath to do no harm.
These doctors did take that oath, and they were there
earlier than the Ketamine Queen.
They saw what was going on.
How come you're the only one on the show
that signs autographs? - I don't know, man.
You gotta talk to those people.
Dr. Plasencia was at Matthew Perry's house
and knew the depth of addiction that he was in.
- How are you, man? - Hi, guys.
And really, if they had had Matthew Perry's best interests
at heart, the death could have been avoided.
And they didn't do that.
So to some extent, they got off relatively light for what
they did in this case.
Hollywood creates these doctors, and I think Hollywood
attracts these doctors.
The unfortunate thing is there's a dark side
to Hollywood, and there's gonna
be people there looking to exploit.
And sometimes they're wearing white coats and they have an MD
after their name.
Has your life changed a lot since you made
a lot of successful movies lately?
No, um I mean, the last movie I made was a year ago.
The addiction to drugs is a massive problem.
You know, the doctors have a responsibility.
So do the individuals.
My mission is called Justice4cuz.
The Justice4cuz means we believe that Prince left
this earth unjustly.
And I feel like he deserved to have
someone fighting on his behalf.
There's going to be somebody
that's gonna make a decision in their life.
Either I'm going to take this pill and take a chance to take
it, or Imma remember all the people
that passed from this.
No, she was not as fat.
For my profession?
Uh, we-- we--
I'm very discouraged these days.
You're getting me in a bad mood.
But, um, because the job of physician,
at least in my era, was
one of the most important jobs you could ever do.
And do no harm is our number one priority.
My hope is, here's my hope, that this profession is
restored to the importance that it--
it needs
and that the people that do the work understand how
important the job is and behave accordingly.