Five people have been charged in connection with Matthew Perry’s death from a ketamine overdose last year, including the actor’s assistant, two doctors and a woman known as the “Ketamine Queen,” a federal prosecutor announced Thursday.
US Attorney Martin Estrada announced the charges Thursday, saying doctors gave Perry large amounts of ketamine and also wondered in a text message how much the former “Friends” star would be willing to pay.
Federal agents served multiple arrest warrants in Southern California early Thursday in connection with the sudden death of actor Matthew Perry last year, law enforcement sources told sister station NBC4’s I-Team.
Perry was 54 when he was found unconscious in the pool of his Pacific Palisades-area home and pronounced dead by paramedics.
“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction problems to enrich themselves. “They knew what they were doing was wrong,” Estrada said.
Perry died in October of a ketamine overdose and on the day of his death he was given multiple injections of the drug from his personal assistant who lived with him. The assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, is the one who found Perry dead later that day.
Two people, including an accused doctor, have been arrested, Estrada said. Two of the defendants, including Iwamasa, have already pleaded guilty to the charges, and a third man has agreed to plead guilty.
Iwamasa’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
The prosecutor said the defendants exchanged messages shortly after Perry’s death, alleging ketamine was the cause of death. Estrada said they tried to hide their involvement in providing Perry with ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that is sometimes used to treat chronic pain and The drug is used to treat depression.
Los Angeles police said in May they were working with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the US Postal Inspection Service on an investigation. The 54-year-old actor had too much surgical anesthesia in his system.
Iwamasa found the actor face-down in his hot tub on October 28 and immediately called paramedics and pronounced him dead.
His autopsy, released in December, found the amount of ketamine in his blood was within the range used for general anesthesia during surgery.
The decades-old drug has seen a huge increase in use in recent years as a treatment for depression, anxiety and pain. People close to Perry told coroner’s investigators he had been receiving ketamine infusion therapy.
But the medical examiner said Perry’s last treatment a week and a half ago would not explain the level of ketamine in his blood. The drug is typically metabolized within a few hours. At least two doctors were treating Perry, a psychiatrist and an anesthesiologist who served as his primary care physician, according to the medical examiner’s report. No illegal drugs or paraphernalia were found in his home.
Ketamine was the primary cause of death, which was determined to be an accident without reasonable doubt, according to the report. Drowning and other medical problems were contributing factors, the coroner said.
Perry’s autopsy results
The Los Angeles County medical examiner concluded that Perry’s death on Oct. 28, 2023, was the result of the acute effects of the drug ketamine and included drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid use disorder.
Los Angeles Police Department detectives and agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and United States Postal Inspection Service had been investigating the source of the ketamine for months.
Perry had been receiving ketamine infusion therapy to treat depression and anxiety, but his last session with his primary care doctors had been more than a week before his death, and the coroner noted that the ketamine in Perry’s system “could not have come from that infusion therapy, as the half-life of ketamine is 3 to 4 hours or less.”
