“HE GLUED HIS HANDS TO HIS LEGS”

Inside Matthew’s Sad Drug Spiral 34 IN TOUCH AUGUST 27, 2018 A pal opens up about watching Matthew Perry hit rock bottom during a shocking drug binge

He was fighting for his life. When Matthew Perry was rushed into surgery for a gastrointestinal perforation in LA recently, he was in grave condition. “It was a very scary moment for him,” says one insider. “Everyone in his family and inner circle immediately thought the worst, that he had relapsed.”

There’s no evidence that he did. But Matthew has battled addiction for years — as recently as 2017, he reportedly asked a porn-star lover for opiates. And now two people who witnessed the former Friends star, 48, doing drugs in 2011 have come forward, telling In Touch about the devastating extent of his addiction. “There was a time period where he was really struggling. He was up to 80 Vicodin a day,” says Kayti Edwards, who has known Matthew for more than a decade. “Then crack and cocaine became his thing. During one three-month period in 2011, he was doing it every day. He barely left his house for three months straight.”

HIS LOWEST POINT Kayti witnessed his desperation firsthand. One day in 2011, she says, she arrived at his home and heard him screaming for help. “He was so high and out of it, he had superglued his hands to his knees,” says Kayti, adding that he looked like he hadn’t showered in more than a week. “He said his hands wouldn’t stop twitching, and he thought it would be a good idea to superglue them to his legs. He wasn’t thinking correctly. I think he knew that this was going to be his last hurrah before rehab. He wanted me to unstick him so he could go back to his drugs.” Kayti used nail polish remover to free him. “The hair off of his legs came off. He had red, raw patches where his hands were. It was horrible.”

She says she also witnessed him trying to make cocaine into crack. “But he would mess it up,” she says. “He was failing and wasting it all, and getting really mad.” During that same period, both Kayti and another source tell In Touch they saw him try to smoke heroin for the first time. “The smoke kept going everywhere except his mouth. He kept getting angry because he had never done it before.”

Kayti recalls him telling her about an episode where he ended up naked in a neighbor’s pool. And she says Matthew once asked her to send an escort friend of hers to his house. “But he opened the door totally disheveled and said he wasn’t up for company,” Kayti claims. “He just handed her an envelope with $3,000, then shut the door.”

According to the source, in 2011 the actor — who’s worth $80 million — was buying $5,000 in drugs for a single night. “He would get a buffet platter: uppers, downers, the whole nine yards, and then get super paranoid that his maid would find it. Cough medicine, coke, heroin, everything,” says the source. For a time, he was able to keep his relapse a secret from those around him, but he couldn’t hide it for long.

In May 2011, Matthew entered a treatment facility for his third stint in rehab. “I couldn’t stop. Eventually things got so bad that I couldn’t hide it, and everybody knew,” the actor admitted in 2013, when he was presented with a Champion of Recovery award at the White House for his support of rehabilitation-based drug courts and for his candor about his experiences with addiction. But he also acknowledged that he’s in for a lifelong battle. “You can’t have a drug problem for 30 years and then expect to have it be solved in 28 days,” he says. “Getting sober is a really hard thing to do.” ◼