A California doctor who supplied ketamine to Matthew Perry has been jailed for 30 months, as he becomes the first person to receive prison time in the actor’s overdose death.
Dr. Salvador Plasencia, who operated an urgent-care clinic outside Los Angeles, pleaded guilty in federal court in July to four felony counts of illegal distribution of the prescription anaesthetic. He could have faced up to 40 years in prison had he been convicted at trial.
Plasencia, 44, was the first person to be sentenced of the five defendants who have pleaded guilty in connection with the Friends actor’s death at aged 54 in 2023.
Matthew Perry struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for decades, beginning in his youth and continuing throughout his rise to fame.
His experiences with substance abuse and recovery were documented in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, and openly discussed in interviews.
In October 2023, Perry passed away from the “accute effects of ketamine” while drowning was also listed as a contributing factor of his death.
Perry’s family asked the judge for a lengthy sentence, calling Plasencia “most culpable”, as they detailed their struggle to understand why he repeatedly supplied Perry with drugs.
Perry’s mother and stepfather, Suzanne and Keith Morrison, accused Plasencia of “feeding on the vulnerability” of their son.
“How do you measure grief? Can you possibly provide any rational accounting? The bottom falling out? Yes, that,” they wrote in a letter to the court obtained by Rolling Stone.
They went on: “Here was a life so entwined with ours and held aloft sometimes with duct tape and bailing wire, with anything that might keep that big terrible thing from killing our first-born son, and our hearts with him.
“And then those greedy jackals come out of the dark, and all the effort is for naught; it all crashes down.”
The pair called their pain a “deep well” and Suzanne said Perry’s addiction and the people he trusted got between her and her son.
The other four defendants who reached deals to plead guilty will be sentenced at their own hearings in the coming months.
