Matthew Perry and the Hollywood drug network exposed by his death

Published

3 months ago

September 2, 2025

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Before he died alone in his jacuzzi, Matthew Perry had received three injections of ketamine in the space of just six hours. “Shoot me up with a big one,” he told his personal assistant, ahead of the final, fatal dose.

According to court documents, in the period leading up to 28 October 2023, Kenneth Iwamasa was illegally administering Perry with between six and eight shots of the drug, an anaesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects, each day.

A live-in assistant, he admitted to finding the actor unconscious at his Pacific Palisades home on at least two occasions in the weeks prior.

The hit that ultimately killed the Friends star was supplied by Jasveen Sangha, also known as the “Ketamine Queen” – a dealer who apparently only dealt “with high-end and celebs”. She has agreed to plead guilty to five charges and will appear in court later today.

Her charges, along with others filed against Iwamasa and others over the supply of ketamine to Perry, exposed part of Hollywood’s underground drug network – and put the spotlight on the world of celebrity, money and power.

‘Yes men’ with terrible consequences

Perry’s death was met with both utter shock and a sad sense of the inevitable. The world knew him best as Chandler Bing, the comic heartbeat of Friends. But behind the jokes and the sarcasm, he was deeply troubled.

“It almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight,” is how his former co-star Jennifer Aniston described his addiction in a recent interview. “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better… I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”

The actor was an addict, and vulnerable – but also a huge star, worth millions.

Iwamasa was administering the injections, ultimately playing God – but to him, the power most likely lay with his famous boss. His actions may seem inexcusable, but did he feel he had a choice?

“I think it was a situation that increasingly got more and more out of control,” says Bonnie Low-Kramen, a former celebrity assistant turned trainer, and author of Be The Ultimate Assistant.

Those who do the job, especially in Los Angeles, can be put under an enormous amount of pressure, she says, “tasked with doing things many of us wouldn’t imagine carrying out for our employers. It is a job which comes with an inherent power imbalance”.

Which means it can be incredibly hard to say no.

“When people are rich and famous, they often have people around them who won’t say no,” she says. “And assistants are in the yes business anyway.

“We’re in the business of figuring out, ‘well, let’s solve the problem…’. When money is no object, there are new rules that apply in that situation and that can be really hard to handle.”

Iwamasa is not the first celebrity assistant asked to administer or pick up illegal drugs, she says, and Perry is not the first star to die after taking drugs.

Ms Low-Kramen highlights the deaths of Janis Joplin, Prince and John Belushi as just a few other examples.

“Unfortunately, there are so many examples of this tragic end, where the abuse of drugs gets to a point where they’ve handled it for a really long time, and then the day comes when it can’t be handled anymore.”

For those struggling with addiction, being surrounded by “yes men” can have terrible consequences, says Garrett Braukman, an addiction treatment executive in Hollywood.

“Treatment is difficult for people when they have yes men. They have a lot of people that are going to tell them you can get whatever you want, you can get drugs, you can get alcohol, you could do whatever, and no one is willing to really look at that from the perspective of how dangerous that is.”

Mr Braukman says addiction can go hand in hand with fame and that a “high” percentage of his patients work in the entertainment industry.

“I don’t know how I would be able to stay clean and sober if I go to my grandma’s house and there’s 20 guys outside of my grandma’s house taking pictures of me walking in. You become an animal to a degree that people are watching.”

Rise in use of ketamine

The use of ketamine recreationally has been on the rise in recent years, in the UK as well as the US. In England, some 3,609 people started treatment for problems with the drug in the year 2023-2024 – more than eight times the number in 2014-2015, when 426 sought help, according to government statistics.

In January, drag queen The Vivienne was found dead in the bath at their home in Cheshire, aged 32. The star’s family later told how the performer had died “from the effects of ketamine use causing a cardiac arrest”.

Ketamine is usually taken recreationally as a crushed powder, but also sometimes injected or swallowed – making people feel detached and dreamlike. It can also cause severe bladder and kidney problems.

Perry’s struggles with alcohol and other drugs, before ketamine, were long running and well documented, starting with drinking as a teenager before moving on to painkilling prescription drugs Vicodin and OxyContin, and tranquilliser Xanax.

“I have spent upward of $7m (£5.8m) trying to get sober,” he wrote in his memoir, released when he was clean, just a year before his death.

While accepting the almost unsurpassable legacy of the hit show that made him a star, he said he hoped his support for fellow addicts would be the achievement he was best remembered for.

“When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned – I want helping others to be the first thing that’s mentioned and I’m going to live the rest of my life proving that.”

He only lived for another year.

Illegal use v therapy

Before he died, Perry had been undergoing legal ketamine infusion therapy to treat depression and anxiety. The drug can be used as a treatment in clinical settings in the US, and some specialist and private centres in the UK – although there are concerns from some medics here about its use even in those settings.

According to a postmortem report, the actor had reportedly been clean for 19 months before he started obtaining the drug illegally as well.

It was not the supervised doses that killed him, but the idea of an addict taking the drug to help their problems might still sound shocking.

In California, ketamine drips are legally used as pain relief, to treat mood disorders and to help with addiction. Other celebrities and notable figures – including Chrissy Teigen, Elon Musk and Sharon Osbourne – have all shared details of ketamine therapy and how it helped them.

Dr Austin Harris, owner and medical director at NeuroRelief Ketamine Infusion Therapy, says historically the drug is “extremely safe” when used in the right conditions, and swears by its effectiveness.

At the clinic in California, he explained to Sky News how it can help people with mood disorders and chronic pain, as well as those in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse.

“Which a lot of people who don’t really understand this at a scientific level might think is an oxymoron,” he says. “But actually, it’s profoundly beneficial – done properly – in resetting both neurologic and psychological patterns for substance abuse.”

Ketamine infusion “restarts in our brain what should already be there”, he says, in terms of “the neurologic road workers, to be able to then direct, to build new patterns and actual new nerve pathways”.

One patient having therapy at the clinic also spoke to us, saying he had abused alcohol and marijuana, and occasionally opiate painkillers, for many years.

“I’ve had enough experience and decades of being addicted to drugs and alcohol and traumas and trying different things,” he said. “When I came out of that infusion I was like, wait a minute. I didn’t have the shakes. I didn’t have the cravings.”

Dr Harris emphasises the need for administration by a professional in a clinical setting. “Matthew Perry was being illegally sold ketamine on the black market. The fact that a doctor happened to be one of several people that was illegally selling it to him should not be confused with the appropriate legal utilisation of ketamine.”

The actor was vulnerable, Dr Harris continues. “It’s absolutely abominable… You have someone with serious addiction problems, lifelong. And sadly, I think that he was really taken advantage of.”

The drugs stash

As well as Sangha and Iwamasa, the others charged over Perry’s death are Erik Fleming, an associate of Perry’s who was in contact with Sangha, Dr Mark Chavez, a physician, and Dr Salvador Plasencia, who also supplied ketamine illegally to Perry.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Dr Plasencia said in a text exchange between him and Chavez.

After Perry died, Sangha desperately sought to cover her involvement. “Delete all our messages,” she instructed Fleming in a message on Signal.

In March 2024, law enforcement searched Sangha’s home and found 1.7kg of pressed pills containing methamphetamine, 79 vials of liquid ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy) tablets, counterfeit Xanax pills, baggies containing powdered ketamine and cocaine, and other drug-trafficking items such as a gold money counting machine, a scale, a wireless signal and hidden camera detector, drug packaging materials, and $5,723 in cash, according to her plea agreement.

Sangha was happy to supply to Hollywood’s rich and famous – and not an anomaly.

Several books have been written by Tinseltown dealers, and only a few months ago, the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial heard from a former personal assistant to the hip-hop mogul who testified about meeting sellers for his boss.

Now, as she becomes the last defendant to admit her role in Perry’s death, the Ketamine Queen’s guilty plea brings to a close the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.

But in a world where money talks, where fame and addiction or mental health issues often go hand-in-hand, it is unlikely to be the last.

US

Pras Michel: Fugees rapper ‘who betrayed US for money’ is jailed for 14 years

Published

50 mins ago

November 22, 2025

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Pras Michel: Fugees rapper 'who betrayed US for money' is jailed for 14 years

A Grammy-winning rapper who “betrayed his country for money” has been sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, who was part of 1990s hip-hop group The Fugees, was convicted of illegally funnelling millions of dollars in foreign contributions to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.

The Justice Department had accused the 53-year-old of accepting $120m (£92m) from Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho, who wanted to gain political influence in the US.

Prosecutors said Michel “lied unapologetically and unrelentingly to carry out his actions” – and sought to deceive the White House, senior politicians and the FBI for almost a decade.

In 2018, it is claimed he urged the Trump administration and the justice department to drop embezzlement investigations against Low.

Michel was convicted of 10 counts by a federal jury in 2023 – and last month, he was ordered to forfeit about $65m (£50m) for his role in the scheme.

Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio testified at the trial, and Low was a primary financier in his 2013 film The Wolf Of Wall Street.

The Oscar-winning actor said the businessman’s funding and legitimacy had been carefully vetted before they entered a partnership.

Prosecutors had been seeking a life sentence to “reflect the breadth and depth of Michel’s crimes, his indifference to the risks to his country, and the magnitude of his greed”.

However, the rapper’s lawyer Peter Zeidenberg has argued that the 14-year term is “completely disproportionate to the offence” – and is vowing to appeal.

Last year, a judge rejected Michel’s request for a new trial after claiming that one of his lawyers had used AI during closing arguments.

Low Taek Jho has been accused of having a central role in the 1MDB scandal, amid claims billions of dollars were stolen from a Malaysian state fund.

The 44-year-old is a fugitive but has maintained his innocence, with his lawyers writing: “Low’s motivation for giving Michel money to donate was not so that he could achieve some policy objective.

“Instead, Low simply wanted to obtain a photograph with himself and then President Obama.”

Michel, who was born in Brooklyn, was a founding member of The Fugees with childhood friends Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean – selling tens of millions of records.

US

Trump peace plan: We could all pay if Europe doesn’t step up and guarantee Ukraine’s security

Published

2 hours ago

November 21, 2025

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Trump peace plan: We could all pay if Europe doesn't step up and guarantee Ukraine's security

The Donald Trump peace plan is nothing of the sort. It takes Russian demands and presents them as peace proposals, in what is effectively for Ukraine a surrender ultimatum.

If accepted, it would reward armed aggression. The principle, sacrosanct since the Second World War, for obvious and very good reasons, that even de facto borders cannot be changed by force, will have been trampled on at the behest of the leader of the free world.

The Kremlin will have imposed terms via negotiators on a country it has violated, and whose people its troops have butchered, massacred and raped. It is without doubt the biggest crisis in Trans-Atlantic relations since the war began, if not since the inception of NATO.

The question now is: are Europe’s leaders up to meeting the daunting challenges that will follow. On past form, we cannot be sure.

The plan proposes the following:

• Land seized by Vladimir Putin’s unwarranted and unprovoked invasion would be ceded by Kyiv.

• Territory his forces have fought but failed to take with colossal loss of life will be thrown into the bargain for good measure.

• Ukraine will be barred from NATO, from having long-range weapons, from hosting foreign troops, from allowing foreign diplomatic planes to land, and its military neutered, reduced in size by more than half.

And most worryingly for Western leaders, the plan proposes NATO and Russia negotiate with America acting as mediator.

Lest we forget, America is meant to be the strongest partner in NATO, not an outside arbitrator. In one clause, Mr Trump’s lack of commitment to the Western alliance is laid bare in chilling clarity.

And even for all that, the plan will not bring peace. Mr Putin has made it abundantly clear he wants all of Ukraine.

He has a proven track record of retiring, rallying his forces, then returning for more. Reward a bully as they say, and he will only come back for more. Why wouldn’t he, if he is handed the fortress cities of Donetsk and a clear run over open tank country to Kyiv in a few years?

Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Europe has tried to keep the maverick president onside when his true sympathies have repeatedly reverted to Moscow.

It has been a demeaning and sycophantic spectacle, NATO’s secretary general stooping even to calling the US president ‘Daddy’. And it hasn’t worked. It may have made matters worse.

The parade of world leaders trooping through Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, lavishing praise on his Gaza ceasefire plan, only encouraged him to believe he is capable of solving the world’s most complex conflicts with the minimum of effort.

The Gaza plan is mired in deepening difficulty, and it never came near addressing the underlying causes of the war.

Most importantly, principles the West has held inviolable for eight decades cannot be torn up for the sake of a quick and uncertain peace.

With a partner as unreliable, the challenge to Europe cannot be clearer.

In the words of one former Baltic foreign minister: “There is a glaringly obvious message for Europe in the 28-point plan: This is the end of the end.

“We have been told repeatedly and unambiguously that Ukraine’s security, and therefore Europe’s security, will be Europe’s responsibility. And now it is. Entirely.”

If Europe does not step up to the plate and guarantee Ukraine’s security in the face of this American betrayal, we could all pay the consequences.

US

‘He must have got this from K’: What mistaken tweet tells us about ‘secret’ plan to end Ukraine war

Published

2 days ago

November 20, 2025

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'He must have got this from K': What mistaken tweet tells us about 'secret' plan to end Ukraine war

There are developments in the quest for peace in Ukraine.

It’s been one of those days when different snippets of news have come together to create a picture of sorts. The jigsaw remains complicated, but the suggestion is neither the Ukrainians nor the Europeans have been privy to the developments.

As it happened: Russia responds to spy ship claim

The most intriguing development came at lunchtime on Thursday.

“He must have got this from K…” wrote Donald Trump‘s special envoy Steve Witkoff on X. He clearly thought he was sending a private message.

He was replying to a scoop of a story by Axios’s Barak Ravid.

The story revealed a “secret” plan to end the Ukraine war. The report suggested the Americans had been talking secretly to the Russians about a renewed effort to bring the war to an end, which involved Ukraine ceding land it still controls to Russia.

Who is “K” in Witkoff’s message? It’s probably Kirill Dmitriev, who has become Putin’s unofficial and unlikely envoy to Washington. Kyiv-born and Stanford-educated Dmitriev is, essentially, Witkoff’s Russian opposite number.

In a sense, they are the yin and yang of this geopolitical puzzle. Witkoff is a real estate mogul. Dmitriev is an economist. They are opposing forces with backgrounds that are, on the face of it, equally unsuited to geopolitical conflict resolution. Yet their two leaders are trusting them with this huge task.

‘Territorial concessions’ in 28-point plan

So, back to the developments to have emerged over the last 24 hours.

First, we know senior US Department of War officials, including Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, have arrived in the Ukrainian capital to meet their counterparts there.

Their visit was scheduled but the focus shifted. The plan to discuss drone technology and the winter offensive morphed into a discussion about a Russian-presented peace plan Witkoff and Dmitriev had been discussing.

This is the second development. The Axios report – which Witkoff seems inadvertently to have suggested came from Dmitriev – claims the two envoys met recently in Florida (Witkoff’s base) to discuss a 28-point plan for peace.

A defence official told our partners at NBC News that Driscoll has been briefed on the 28-point plan. Driscoll and his military staff are thought to have been presenting an initial brief to the Ukrainian side of this Russian-sponsored plan.

Ukrainian sources have suggested to me in clear terms they are not happy with this Witkoff-Dmitriev plan. Sources tell me it includes “territorial concessions” and “reductions in military strength”. The Ukrainian position is the plan represents the latest attempt to “play the American government”.

What’s happening with security guarantees?

Ukraine wants security guarantees from the US. Trump signalled during Zelenskyy’s last visit to Washington that he was willing to provide those. This was framed by the Europeans as a huge positive development, even though the White House did not spell out the crucial detail – what would these guarantees actually entail?

The latest reporting, from Axios, suggests the security guarantees (still undefined, publicly at least) are dependent on Ukraine giving up the whole of the Donbas region – this would include about 15% of territory Russia does not currently hold.

Crucially, the areas of the Donbas from which Ukraine would withdraw (the 15%) would be considered a demilitarised zone. The plan is very similar to one floated by Vice President JD Vance in the months before Trump won last year’s election, which was roundly rejected as a non-starter at the time.

Is Gaza plan the model?

Another source, from a third country close to the negotiations, has told me the Qataris are playing a role in the talks and were present at the weekend when Steve Witkoff met Ukraine’s national security advisor Rustem Umerov last weekend.

Qatari and Turkish mediation, along with the multipoint peace plan for Gaza, is being projected as a model transferable to Ukraine despite the conflict, challenges, and root causes being wholly different.

Other European sources told me this morning they were not aware of this Russian-American plan. It’s worth remembering it’s in the interests of the Russians to be seen to be engaged in peace proposals in order to avoid secondary sanctions from the US.

Zelenskyy has been in Turkey over the past 24 hours, where he singled out Trump’s efforts to find peace.

“Since the beginning of this year, we in Ukraine have supported every decisive step and the leadership of @POTUS, every strong and fair proposal aimed at ending this war.” Zelenskyy wrote. “And only President Trump and the United States have sufficient power to make this war come to an end.”

This is the vital language of flattery.