Cache::Memcached and converting warnings to fatal

InfiniteLoop has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings,
Im using Cache::Memcached in my script. The following call to stats() will throw warnings if the memcached server is not running:

use warnings;
use Cache::Memcached;
my $memd = new Cache::Memcached {servers => ["$host:$port"]};
my $stats = $memd->stats();
[download]

I want to trap such warnings as errors (so I can eval/die in my code), hence I tried this in my code:

use warnings FATAL => 'all';
[download]

Since, the above pragma will not "leak across files" according to perllexwarn, Im forced to do this:

 $SIG{'__WARN__'} = sub { die $_[0]};
[download]

not that anything is wrong with setting up signal handlers, I want to know if I can somehow use the warnings pragma to achieve the same. Thanks.