The doctors arrested in connection with Matthew Perry’s death were “seeking a huge payout” from the actor, Drug Enforcement Agency head Anne Milgram told Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” Sunday. “They charged him around $50,000 over the course of one month to supply ketamine.”
Dr. Salvador Plasencia and Dr. Mark Chavez were arrested on Thursday. The same day, Chavez agreed to a plea deal with prosecutors.
The abuse of ketamine via a doctor is similar to the early stages of the opioid epidemic, Milgram added. “So in the case of Matthew Perry’s death, we announced charges against the five individuals who we believe are responsible for that.”
“And again, what happened there is it started with two unscrupulous doctors who were violating — we charged with violating their oath, which is to take care of their patients — and instead supplying Matthew Perry with enormous quantities of ketamine in exchange for huge amounts of money,” Milgram said.
“And then it switched to the street where Matthew Perry was buying the ketamine from two drug traffickers on the streets of Los Angeles,” Milgram continued. “And so this, unfortunately, is a tragic work that we have seen — thinking back to the opioid, the beginning of the opioid epidemic, where many Americans became addicted to controlled substances in doctor’s offices and through medical practitioners that then turned into street addiction as well.”
Ketamine is classified as a controlled substance and the Federal Drug Administration regulates it as such, Milgram said. “The FDA regulates the medical prescribing of ketamine and so they have approved it as an anesthesia. They have approved it through a nasal spray for the treatment of depression. And so they regulate the medical side of this,” she explained.
But the DEA’s focus is on medical care providers abusing access to ketamine in exchange for a financial windfall — “anyone who is essentially diverting legitimate controlled substances from the normal medical practice to do what we saw happening here,” Milgram said.
Plasencia and Chavez “were not evaluating Matthew Perry” as a patient, she continued. “They were leaving behind vials of ketamine for Matthew Perry to be injected by his assistant.”
Like ketamine, fentanyl is also used by medical professionals in a supervised environment for legitimate treatment — but the latter drug is “the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45,” as identified by the DEA, Brennan pointed out. Milgram agreed and noted that 107,941 lives were lost to the drug in 2022.
“So we are fighting what I would argue is the greatest threat in narcotics that we’ve ever faced,” Milgram said, “And at DEA, we’re focused on saving American lives.”
You can watch the interview with DEA Administrator Anne Milgram in the video above.
