Hollywood’s creeping ketamine habit might have carried on quietly for years, were it not for the death of Matthew Perry. But unlike many celebrities’ high-profile struggles with opiates, cocaine and alcohol, even the most desperate ketamine-dependency cases – and the “Friends” star’s was certainly one – have been consigned to the shadows.
Overdose deaths from ketamine alone are extremely rare, experts say, and no national fatality statistics exist. And yet Perry’s fast ride to deep dependency — an indictment said he shot up six to eight times on the day of his death – was a shock to many.
“That’s a lot of ketamine,” Mike Diamond, an addiction recovery expert who appears on A&E’s “Intervention,” told TheWrap. “I don’t know of anyone that’s died of ketamine – personally. But I wouldn’t want to be lying in a hot tub if I was using drugs.”
“He really pushed it to the extreme in a way that most ketamine users don’t,” Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, said. “I would say there’s a lot of ketamine in Hollywood … and it’s used and abused much, much more than it’s properly used in a doctor’s office.”
Though Perry’s official primary cause of death was listed as “acute effects of ketamine,” four people with experience using the drug, as well as treating dependency, who declined to be identified, told TheWrap that drowning — also listed as a factor in the coroner’s report, along with underlying health issues — is likely what did Perry in. Taken unsupervised and immersed in water, as Perry was when he was found face-down in his hot tub on Oct. 28, the powerful anesthetic could easily cause a person to slip beneath the surface in total oblivion, they said.
But just because ketamine-related deaths almost always include other factors doesn’t mean it can’t develop into a problem.
“Ketamine is addictive,” Diamond told TheWrap. “I was in the New York club scene for years. Everyone was addicted to Special K.”
Though many find it hard to believe that ketamine alone would have killed Perry, the official autopsy report was unequivocal: “At the high levels of ketamine found in his postmortem blood specimens, the main lethal effects would be from both cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression.”
Perceived safety and successful therapeutic use has surely driven ketamine’s rise, but so far precious few celebrities have openly acknowledged using it. Chrissy Teigen and Elon Musk are outliers: The model and TV personality once posted about hallucinating a meeting with her miscarried son during a clinically supervised infusion, while the Tesla billionaire defended his doctor’s prescription to treat depression in an interview with Don Lemon.
Beyond that, ketamine has so far operated under “Fight Club” rules in Hollywood.
First synthesized in the 1960s, ketamine was used for decades as a veterinary tranquilizer. It became prevalent in the coastal club scenes 10-15 years ago as a party drug, though most who took “Special K” back then would immediately slump into an oblivious state, Diamond said, which pushed its use deeper into the shadows.
The drug has recently gained rapid traction as a treatment for depression, PTSD and pain management, giving it an entry point as a recreational-use trend among California’s elite technologists, experience-seekers, life-hackers and human-potential types. Think Silicon Valley, Burning Man or the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. All roads that lead straight to Hollywood.
Or at least into entertainment. Some music artists have also abused ketamine. In a tragic case, house music DJ Erick Morillo died of accidental “acute ketamine toxicity” (with MDMA and cocaine as contributing factors) at his home in Miami Beach in 2020. Morillo was known to struggle with depression and his death set off deep soul-searching within that community around DJs’ mental health struggles amid incessant touring.
By now, surely many industry players have dabbled in the trendy therapy that’s proven to stop depressive episodes cold, but also can make the user feel weightless and disconnected from the body while producing hallucinations that range from relevatory to hellish. They can also be both, as anyone who’s been in a “K-hole” — an oblivious out-of-body experience — can tell you.
In the meantime, private, legal, “off-label” ketamine clinics in the United States have gone from a few dozen to hundreds in just the past few years, and they certainly aren’t hiding. Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, one of the 30-mile zone’s largest practitioners, sponsors more than 20 sections of L.A.’s roads as part of the Adopt a Highway program, with commuters on the I-405 and I-10 grinding past its branded signage every day.
As harmless or well-intended as that might make ketamine seem, the timeline of Perry’s last month of life reads more like the desperate thrash of a spiraling addict than a man seeking needed medical treatment. Perry’s previous addiction struggles were stuff of legend. He battled with alcohol, cocaine, opiates and tobacco, and had recently begun seeking medically supervised ketamine treatments to ostensibly help with separating from those substances.
According to the indictment, Perry’s pursuit of ketamine progressed rapidly from legal clinics — where his requests for higher doses were rebuffed by doctors — to elite street dealers and daily hero doses. But that would merely echo his old patterns of sustained abuse, no matter the substance.
And just as the world witnessed with pop star Michael Jackson’s deadly descent into propofol abuse, Perry had powerful enablers.
Five people were charged last week, including his live-in assistant, two medical doctors and two drug dealers, in what prosecutors called a “broad, underground criminal network” to distribute illegally, according to court documents. One of those dealers, Jasveen Sangha, known as “The Ketamine Queen,” “only deals with high-end and celebs. If it were not great stuff she’d lose her business,” Erik Fleming, an acquaintance of Perry, told Perry’s longtime personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa in a now-chilling text message exchange.
Fleming, the other dealer who took a plea deal after facing charges in Perry’s death, was also Hollywood-connected. The former filmmaker directed Scarlett Johansson and Eva Mendes in the 1999 children’s fantasy “My Brother the Pig,” produced the first season of the 2003 reality show “The Surreal Life” featuring celebrities including Vince Neil, Corey Feldman and MC Hammer, and co-ran a production company called Rich Hippie.
Authorities say Fleming helped broker large quantities of liquid ketamine for Perry through Sangha.
Though the potential for the presence of fentanyl in street-level ketamine is a concern, the quality of the drug that Perry was taking the day of his death was never in question.
But the quantity he was self-administering far outran what would be used in any clinical setting.
Turning a quick buck on Perry’s addiction
The morning of his death, Perry asked Iwamasa to inject him with a dose at 8:30 a.m. Four hours later, Perry got another shot while he watched a movie. A mere 40 minutes after that — barely enough time for the effects of the last shot to wear off — Perry asked Iwamasa to “shoot me up with a big one” before he got into the hot tub. When Iwamasa returned from an errand, Perry was dead.
The month that led up to Oct. 28 was an increasingly frenetic mission for Perry and Iwamasa to bolster the actor’s personal supply, according to court documents. At one point, Perry met one of the doctors near the aquarium in Long Beach to get injected in a car.
Evidence included flurries of text messages between the doctors and dealers who were clearly all trying to turn a buck on the actor.
In all, the doctors collected $55,000 in cash for 20 vials of ketamine that month, charging him $2,000 for vials that cost them $12, authorities said. During their many exchanges, Dr. Salvador Plasencia asked Dr. Mark Chavez about how much to charge Perry, texting: “I wonder how much this moron will pay,” according to indictment documents.
Plasencia, who was charged with conspiracy to distribute ketamine and other related offenses, has pleaded not guilty, and is scheduled for an Oct. 15 trial. Chavez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine, as the primary source for Plasencia. He is expected to receive a reduced sentence.
Fleming pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine and distribution of ketamine resulting in death. He is said to have supplied the vials connected to Perry’s death and could face 25 years. And prosecutors charged Sangha with conspiracy to distribute ketamine and distribution of the drug that caused Perry’s death. She pleaded not guilty, with trial set for Oct. 8.
As for Iwamasa, Perry’s assistant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death earlier this month and faces up to 15 years.
A warning about the dangers of self-administration
None of this is likely to slow down the growing popularity of ketamine, which some experienced users call the “most intense, life-changing” drug experience they’ve had. Many everyday people, from veterans with PTSD and folks who experience severe depression, say that clinical ketamine infusions have saved their lives.
But as Hollywood comes to grips with the compounding mental health crises of COVID and a collapsing industry, experts warn that the slow march from clinical infusions to casual, self-administered use needs to be checked.
“You cannot hand out prescriptions for ketamine like candy,” Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program, told CNN this week. “We just don’t know how many people are getting this drug. We don’t know what doses it’s being used at. We don’t know what the adverse events are.”
Perry’s case may be the most extreme to make it to the public consciousness, and should serve to warn even successful users about the dangers of self-administration.
“I’ve never seen anyone use it or abuse it like Matthew Perry was,” Rahmani said. “He was using amounts that even people who are partying on it – six to eight times a day is exponentially more. He had an anesthetic dose. You could have performed surgery on the guy.”
And that may have more to do with Perry’s voracious addictive tendencies than any broader dangers of the drug itself.
“If you’re an addict, there’s a gray line,” Diamond said. “But unfortunately, if you have money, people become co-dependent and uncaring. They buy into ‘I’m doing it at home … it’s OK, right?’”
