"'I wonder how much this moron will pay,' Dr. Plasencia texted Dr. Chavez, who prosecutors said later supplied [Matthew Perry] with a total of 22 vials of ketamine and ketamine lozenges..."

"... obtained through a fraudulent prescription for the drug. 'Lets find out.' Dr. Chavez agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine. Dr. Plasencia, known as 'Dr. P.,' soon instructed [Perry's assistant, Kenneth] Iwamasa on how and where to inject ketamine into Mr. Perry’s body. 'Found the sweet spot but trying different places led to running out,' Mr. Iwamasa texted Dr. Plasencia on Oct. 4, according to court documents. Over the next several days, Mr. Iwamasa’s requests for ketamine became more urgent. 'I just ran out,' Mr. Iwamasa texted the doctor, who replied he had two vials to sell him if the assistant could meet him in downtown Santa Monica."

From "'Shoot Me Up With a Big One': The Pain of Matthew Perry’s Last Days/Court papers show that Mr. Perry, the 'Friends' star who had long struggled with addiction, was increasingly taking ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, in the days before he died" (NYT)("Mr. Iwamasa was one of five people who the authorities in California said this week had been charged with a conspiracy to distribute ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, to Mr. Perry. The defendants also included two doctors, a woman accused of being a dealer and an acquaintance who pleaded guilty to acting as a middleman").

"Mr. Navalny was able to send hundreds of handwritten letters, thanks to the curious digitalization of the Russian prison system..."

"... a relic of a brief burst of liberal reform in the middle of Mr. Putin’s 24-year rule. Through a website, people could write to him for 40 cents a page and receive scans of his responses.... In a letter... Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and 'switch between them.'... Describing prison life... he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko. Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'.... the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag.... 'Everyone usually thinks that I really need pathetic and heartbreaking words,' he wrote... 'But I really miss the daily grind — news about life, food, salaries, gossip'.... 'I really like your letters,' Mr. Navalny wrote in the last message that [his friend, the Russian photographer Evgeny Feldman, received. 'They’ve got everything I like to discuss: food, politics, elections, scandalous topics and ethnicity issues.'"

Writes Anton Troianovski, in "Inside Aleksei Navalny’s Final Months, in His Own Words/Trump. Indian food. Matthew Perry. And books, books, books. Excerpts from letters obtained by The Times show Mr. Navalny’s active mind, even amid brutal prison conditions" (NYT)(free access at that link).

Why is Matthew Perry in the headline? We're told that Navalny had never watched "Friends" — a show with plenty of food, gossip, and scandalous topics — but he'd read the actor's obituary in The Economist, "Matthew Perry changed the way America spoke" ("[I]n the audition it was he who had nailed it, reading the words in that unexpected way, 'hitting emphases that no one else had hit'; making everyone laugh. It was less that he, Matthew Perry, could play Chandler than that he was Chandler. He changed the part—and then the part changed him").

The NYT piece tells us that that Navalny's prison library had the classics — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov — and “Who could’ve told me that Chekhov is the most depressing Russian writer?”

There's also some material here about Trump, but it's a little hard to understand. Perhaps it was enigmatic in the original. There's "Mr. Navalny confided that the electoral agenda of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump looked 'really scary.'" Not the man, the "electoral agenda"? And then he went on to say "Please name one current politician you admire."

"Ketamine is a powerful anesthetic that has become increasingly popular as an alternative therapy for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder..."

"... and other hard-to-treat mental health problems. It is also used recreationally. The autopsy report said that Perry had been on ketamine infusion therapy but that the ketamine in his system could not have been from his last known therapy session, which was about a week and a half before he died.... 'At the high levels of ketamine found in his postmortem blood specimens, the main lethal effects would be from both cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression,' the autopsy report said. It noted that the level of ketamine investigators found in Perry’s blood was equivalent to the amount that would be used during general anesthesia. The Food and Drug Administration issued an alert in October warning about the dangers of treating psychiatric disorders with compounded versions of the drug...."

From "Matthew Perry Died of ‘Acute Effects of Ketamine,’ Autopsy Says/The medical examiner said drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of an opioid also contributed to the death of the 'Friends' actor, who was found in a hot tub in October" (NYT).

ADDED: Here's Joe Rogan promoting the stuff 2 months ago.

AND: From "Matthew Perry denounced ketamine in his memoir, said it made him think he was ‘dying’" (NY Post):

Describing the drug as a “giant exhale,” [he] said he would receive ketamine while blindfolded and listening to music. He explained that he would “disassociate” during his infusions and often felt as if he were “dying.” “‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘This is what happens when you die,'” he recalled.... 

"Anastasiya Nigmatulina, 28, a beautician in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine, said she had watched the show over and over since the war started."

"'It helps me to feel better,' she said. Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often.... There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina 'felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,' she said. 'And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,' she added. 'I feel like I lost a close friend.' 'Friends' also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English. 'I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,' said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to 'Friends.' As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired. She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said.... 'This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,' Ms. Po said. '[Matthew Perry] was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.'"

From "Somewhat Guiltily, Ukrainians Miss Matthew Perry/Even as the war’s devastation rages on, Ukrainians have found space to mourn an actor who brought them comfort and laughter" (NYT).

The day after Matthew Perry died, "'Friends' was the most-watched series or movie on the Max streaming service...."

"In a way, this was no anomaly. 'Friends' has been a weekly fixture among the 10 most-watched series or movies on the streaming service.... [A] show that was born in the 1990s and seemed completely of-its-time (no cellphones, a coffee shop with cushy couches as a main setting) seemed to have new appeal among teenagers and 20-somethings. 'The one-sentence pitch is: It’s about that time in your life when your friends are your family,' David Crane, one of the show’s creators, once said...."

The NYT reports.

"You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season — when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol..."

"... when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills. By the end of season three, I was spending most of my time figuring out how to get 55 Vicodin a day — I had to have 55 every day, otherwise I’d get so sick... [Notice] how I look between the final episode of season 6 and the first of season 7 — the Chandler-Monica proposal episodes. I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven [it’s supposed to be the same night], but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends."

Wrote Matthew Perry, quoted in "Matthew Perry Revealed Before His Death Why He Never Watched Friends/ The actor — who died aged 54 on Saturday — last year shared why he could not watch himself as Chandler Bing on the iconic sitcom" (People).

And here's an interview from last year, when he was promoting his memoir. He says he couldn't watch the show, because he'd be looking at himself and seeing what substance he was struggling with....

"Matthew Perry was so similar to the wisecracking character he played..."

"... that when he first read the script for Friends Like Us (later renamed Friends) in 1994, he said it was as if somebody had followed him around for a year, stolen his jokes and aped his 'world-weary yet witty view of life.'  'It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler, I was Chandler,' he said of the character known for such one-liners as: 'Hi, I’m Chandler, I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable' and 'I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?' The likeness was so uncanny that Perry’s actor friends, who were auditioning for the series in 1994 and had also spotted the similarities, flocked to his apartment to seek his advice. Perry suggested techniques and claimed that most of his friends copied him, but when it came to his own audition he 'broke all the rules,' ditching the script and landing jokes on odd emphases, a trick which would come to define his role and influence a generation of comedy actors. (Could he be any more funny, for example.) Much of Chandler’s humour, though already eerily matched with Perry’s own, was shaped by an interview the producers arranged with the cast before filming. Perry told them that he always filled silences with witticisms and that he 'didn’t do well with women.'"

From "Matthew Perry, who played Chandler Bing in Friends, dies aged 54/The actor, whose sitcom character was wisecracking, world-weary and awkward with women, reportedly drowned in his hot tub" (London Times). 

Goodbye, Chandler.

ADDED: The One With Chandler in a Box:

"In a recent memoir, the actor Matthew Perry, of 'Friends' reveals that his parents spent the hours before his birth playing the board game Monopoly."

"It was an unhappy marriage, Perry writes, and they divorced when he was a baby.... Most aficionados agree that Monopoly, if not a bad game, is at the very least designed to embitter its players.... But in... a new PBS documentary, we learn that... [t]he game... originally designed in 1903, by Lizzie Magie, a charismatic feminist, actor, and poet... Stephen Ives, [the] documentarian ...was once eager to introduce his children to Monopoly. 'It’s like the early Beatles or Disneyland or something....When are they going to be ready? What you don’t really realize is that you’re performing this ritualistic introduction to raw, unbridled American-style capitalism. You’re saying, "This is how society works. This is how you have fun, and crush other people."'... Games are systems, and... a shrewd designer can steer players toward a particular viewpoint through their experience of that system.... The game disguises luck as skill, misrepresents the American Dream, and promises wealth and power at the expense of others. Only in its final moments do we see the victor’s most enduring reward: isolation

Writes Simon Parkin in "How Monopoly Became America’s Cruellest Board Game/In 'Ruthless: The Secret History of Monopoly,' we learn how a game meant to critique capitalism came to embody it" (The New Yorker).

Even as the "shrewd designer can steer players toward a particular viewpoint," the shrewd documentarian will steer viewers toward a particular viewpoint.