Source: alexberenson.substack.com
California sober.
If you haven’t heard the phrase before, “California sober” is a clever way to say, I’ve quit drinking or using drugs, but I still smoke pot. Because cannabis doesn’t count. Cannabis is medicine. Occasionally people who use the phrase extend it even further, usually to psychedelics.
To be California sober, you see, is not to be sober at all.
I kept thinking about California sobriety as I read Matthew Perry’s autopsy report, a tragic and depressing glimpse into the way far too many Americans live now.
(To learn why I think Matthew Perry’s relationship with drugs and doctors offers hard lessons not just for recovering addicts but for all of us, subscribe.)
Matthew Langford Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the hit NBC sitcom Friends, was found dead in a jacuzzi at his home in Los Angeles on Sat., Oct. 28. Yesterday, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s department released Perry’s autopsy report, available online with minimal redactions.
(An aside: I firmly believe autopsies should be public. As a 19th century English judge wrote in explaining why families of the dead cannot sue for defamation against them, The dead have no rights and can suffer no wrongs. But maybe they can help the living learn from their mistakes.)…