Five charged in Friends star’s death

Police say five people have been charged in connection with Matthew Perry’s drug-related death last year, including two doctors and the actor’s personal assistant.

Police said Thursday that their investigation, which began in May, had uncovered a “large underground criminal network” of drug dealers distributing large quantities of ketamine.

Perry, 54, died at his Los Angeles home in October. A postmortem examination found high levels of ketamine in his blood and determined that the controlled substance’s “acute effects” had killed him.

“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction problems to enrich themselves,” U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said Thursday. “They knew what they were doing was putting Mr. Perry at risk, but they did it anyway.”

Three of the defendants, including Perry’s assistant, have already pleaded guilty to drug-related charges, while two others, a doctor and a woman known as the “Ketamine Queen,” were arrested Thursday, according to the Justice Department.

Ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, is used as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain. People close to Perry, who starred as one of the main characters in the NBC television series Friendshe stated during a coroner’s inquest after his death that he was undergoing ketamine infusion therapy.

But his last session had been more than a week before his death. The medical examiner said the ketamine in Perry’s system could not have come from infusion therapy because of the drug’s short half-life.

According to the medical examiner, the levels of ketamine in his system were equal to those administered during general anesthesia.

An indictment filed in federal court detailed the elaborate drug-buying scheme that prosecutors say led to Perry’s death.

Prosecutors said Perry’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, worked with two doctors to supply the actor with more than $50,000 (£38,000) worth of ketamine in the weeks before his death.

Officials have alleged that those involved in the scheme sought to profit from Perry’s known substance abuse problems. One of the doctors, Salvador Plasencia, is alleged to have written in a text message: “I wonder how much this idiot is going to pay.”

According to the indictment, Mr. Plasencia, 42, supplied Perry with ketamine “outside the ordinary course of professional practice and without a legitimate medical purpose.”

According to the police indictment, he also taught Iwamasa how to inject ketamine into Perry without proper safety procedures and without proper supervision.

In the four days before his death, Iwamasa administered at least 27 injections of ketamine to Perry, prosecutors said.

He did so even after a large dose of ketamine earlier that month had caused Perry to “freeze,” leading Mr. Plasencia to advise against a similarly sized dose in the future, prosecutors said. The doctor still left several vials of the drug with the actor and his assistant after the incident, according to the indictment.

Also charged in the case is Jasveen Sangha, the so-called “Queen of Ketamine,” who supplied the drug to Plasencia with the help of two other co-defendants, Erik Flemming and Dr. Mark Chavez.

Chavez, Flemming and Iwamasa have all pleaded guilty.

Ms. Sangha and Mr. Plasencia will be arraigned in Los Angeles court on Thursday afternoon, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Prosecutors allege that the defendants attempted to cover up the alleged crimes after Perry’s death.

According to the indictment, Ms. Sangha allegedly sent a message to another suspect, telling him to “delete all our messages.” Mr. Plasencia also allegedly falsified medical records.

Drowning was also listed as a contributing factor in Perry’s death, which was ruled an accident. Other contributing factors included coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine, which is used to treat opioid use disorder.

At the height of his fame, Perry struggled with addictions to painkillers and alcohol, and visited rehab on several occasions. He detailed his struggles with substance abuse in his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

In 2016, he told BBC Radio 2 that he had no memory of the three years of filming Friends, due to alcohol and drugs.

After attempting treatment, he wrote in his memoirs that he had been mostly sober since 2001, “save for about 60 or 70 accidents.”