Dec. 3 (UPI) — A doctor who pleaded guilty earlier this year to providing ketamine to the late Friends star Matthew Perry is set to be sentenced Wednesday in a Los Angeles court.
Dr. Salvador Plasencia is one of five people convicted in connection with Perry’s 2023 death from an overdose of ketamine. The 54-year-old actor was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Pacific Palisades and was unable to be revived.
An autopsy showed Perry died of an overdose of ketamine, which he originally began taking to treat his depression and anxiety. His use of the drug, however, increased to the point that he was injecting it six to eight times per day in the weeks leading up to his death.
Plasencia, who pleaded guilty to four counts of distribution of ketamine in June, is the first of five people to be sentenced in the case, ABC News reported. He faces up to 10 years in federal prison for each count at his 11 a.m. PST hearing in federal court in Los Angeles.
Plasencia operated an urgent care clinic in Malibu and admitted to working with another doctor, Dr. Mark Chavez, to provide Perry’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, with the ketamine. In his plea agreement, Plasencia admitted he sold 20 5ml vials of the drug, a partial package of ketamine lozenges and syringes.
The doctor visited Perry at his home and at least one other location to administer injections of ketamine. In his plea agreement, he said he left vials and lozenges with Iwamasa to give to Perry despite knowing he wasn’t trained to do so.
Federal prosecutors said Plasencia was eager to make a profit off of Perry and become his sole supplier of the drug.
“Indeed, the day defendant met Perry he made his profit motive known, telling a co-conspirator: ‘I wonder how much this moron will pay’ and ‘let’s find out,’” prosecutors said.
Perry’s parents submitted victim impact statements to the court ahead of Plasencia’s sentencing. Suzanne Morrison and Keith Morrison shared the letter with Rolling Stone magazine. They described Plasencia as “among the most culpable of all” those involved in Perry’s death.
“How do you measure grief? Can you possibly provide any rational accounting? The bottom falling out? Yes, that,” the letter reads.
“Here was a life so entwined with ours and held aloft sometimes with duct tape and baling wire, with anything that might keep that big, terrible thing from killing our firstborn 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.”
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