On 28 May 2026, Kenneth Iwamasa, the personal assistant of actor Matthew Perry, was sentenced to a term of imprisonment for his role in the death of his employer, which occurred on 28 October 2023. Perry, known worldwide for playing Chandler Bing in the series Friends, died at 54 from an acute ketamine overdose. The exact length of the sentence varies across sources, which place it between three years and five months and forty-one months.
The ruling against Iwamasa is part of a broader case involving several co-defendants: physician Mark Chavez, intermediary Erik Fleming, and a supplier described as the "Ketamine Queen," Jasveen Sangha. Together, these figures with distinct profiles formed a supply network around the actor. Iwamasa's role was deemed decisive because he was not merely an intermediary: he personally administered injections to Perry, who had publicly described his decades-long struggle with addiction in a memoir published in 2022.
The case unfolds against the backdrop of the aftermath of the opioid crisis and, since 2019, the rise of ketamine-assisted therapies to treat resistant depression. In the United States, the line between supervised medical use and abuse of this anaesthetic substance remains blurred, fuelling a regulatory debate over ketamine therapy clinics.
Several points remain disputed. Some actors view the sentence as a strong judicial signal against networks surrounding vulnerable public figures, while others question its proportionality and the assistant's subordinate position. The debate also pits a reading focused on individual responsibility against an approach stressing flaws in the prescription system.
