Matthew Perry’s Longtime Friend Recalls the First Time He Tried Heroin: “It Was Madness”

Earlier this month, Matthew Perry was rushed into surgery in LA for a gastrointestinal perforation — and he was in grave condition. “It was a very scary moment for him,” a source told In Touch at the time. “Everyone in his family and inner circle immediately thought the worst, that he relapsed.”

And while there’s no evidence that he did, the Friends star has battled addiction — and spoken candidly about it — for years. Now, one of Perry’s longtime friends Kayti Edwards, who witnessed the actor doing drugs firsthand, is opening up to In Touch exclusively about the extent of his addiction — including the first time he tried heroin. Watch the video above to see the interview. 

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Edwards met the successful actor at her grandfather’s house more than a decade ago and said she had an “intimate” relationship with him. He later told her he had a “Vicodin problem” and confessed that he was taking “up to 80 pills a day.”

In February 2011, Edwards revealed she got an “awkward” Facebook message from Perry, who said he really needed to talk to her. “He told me that he wanted to get high and he wanted to get all of these different drugs,” she recalled. She added, however, that at the time, she “only knew him as an 80-a-day Vicodin habit. Now, he’s wanting cocaine, and crack, and Oxycontin. He definitely was on a roll for about three months.”

While in his kitchen, Perry said he wanted to smoke heroin, but it didn’t exactly go as planned. “He lit the tin foil, and smoke was going everywhere but his mouth. He was wasting it all, and he was getting more angry because he felt like he wasn’t doing it right,” Edwards said.

“Here I am in the kitchen with Matthew Perry while he’s trying to smoke heroin, which, to my knowledge, he’s never done before. I didn’t know how to help him,” she said. “So it was just madness.”

The now 49-year-old — who is worth $80 million — was buying up to $5,000 worth of 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,” a source said. “Cough medicine, coke, heroin, everything.”

In May 2011, Perry entered a treatment facility for the third time. “I couldn’t stop. Eventually, things got so bad that I couldn’t hide it, and everybody knew,” he admitted in 2013. “You can’t have a drug problem for 30 years and then expect to have it be solved in 28 days. Getting sober is really a hard thing to do.”

For more exclusive celebrity news, be sure to pick up the latest issue of In Touch Weekly, on newsstands now.