I don’t see anybody really trying to exonerate Matthew Perry in the tragic ending to a decades-long battle with Substance Use Disorder.
What I do see is that many of us are trying to avoid invoking the Sackler Family approach of methodically and solely blaming the victim in order to avoid being held to account for your own morally repugnant actions.
I suspect that the DOJ has some strong cases against these defendants.
I also think that – in criminal law – “I was in fear for my job” is probably a weaker argument than “I was in fear for my life” as a defense against charges.
IIRC from his autobiography, Perry flew back to Switzerland on a private jet for something like $75k to refill a prescription to which he was addicted because he was refused in the US. I may not have all the details right since it was an audiobook, but that was the gist. He was a man with money to throw around, which is never helpful for people with the intense addictiveness he had.
As a Rush fan since I was 14, of course I had to read Geddy Lee’s autobiography when it came out late last year. They started making really good money in the late 1970s, which also coincided with the peak of cocaine use overall, and they all realized this was becoming a problem, not so much because any of them couldn’t give it up, as that a lot of really skanky people had entered the band’s orbit.
He, for one, was thankful that he was a “take it or leave it” kind of person.
I’m not sure I agree. His addiction did kill him fairly young. I used to have such an addiction. But I also had a job, responsibilities and family. I didn’t have a lot of money and certainly no influence so it made getting drugs in quantity, problematic. At that time you could legally get phone prescriptions from Florida (I lived in Texas). So I had them Fed-Exd to me. It was a lot to be sure, but there were limits. Had I had Perry’s “massive tv fortune”, I would be dead now. Not every addict ends up in the street. And if you don’t, you just suffer silently until to pull wears off.
I was prescribed Oxy 10/325s. I was taking so many it became impossible to keep track so I wrote down when I took them in a little spiral notebook. Years later I came across one of of those notebooks. At my peak I was taking 26 a day. That’s 260 mgs of Oxy and 8,450 mgs of Tylenol a day - every day. Not to mention the oodles of Soma I was eating along with them.
No one ever knew, or at least questioned, my sobriety, including close friends and family.
ETA: For those wondering, that was 30 or so years ago. At this time I am showing no residual effects. I am clean and sober and have been for a while.
I won’t post links because it could reveal my exact location, but earlier this year in my city, in fact just down the road, a house was set on fire and two people, a man and a woman were found dead. Turns out they were murdered and the house was set on fire to try and hide evidence, and all of the people involved were very heavily involved in the drug trade in our area, mostly meth but heroin and other drugs of addiction as well. The man who died was basically the kingpin.
His wife, from whom he was separated but she didn’t consider him estranged, denied being addicted to drugs but she was definitely a trainwreck in her own right. Unfortunately, the answer to the next question is yes - they did have children. It didn’t sound like either parent was much involved with taking care of them, on any level.
The Rhoden mass murder in Ohio, an intra-family tragedy that resulted in 8 deaths and made worldwide headlines and STILL isn’t fully solved, was catalyzed by a succession of bad marijuana deals.