Ketamine counselor gets two years for Matthew Perry overdose case

The middleman in Matthew Perry’s ketamine network walked away with two years in federal prison, a sentence that will read as either lenient or exactly what his role deserved. Erik Fleming, a 56-year-old licensed drug addiction counselor from Hawthorne, California, was sentenced in Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett and also received three years of supervised release.

Fleming pleaded guilty in August 2024 to conspiracy to distribute ketamine and distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury. Prosecutors said he sat between Perry’s former live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, and Jasveen Sangha, the North Hollywood supplier known as the “Ketamine Queen.” According to investigators, Fleming delivered 51 vials of ketamine to Perry through Iwamasa, including the dose that killed the Friends star.

The sentence mattered because Fleming was not treated as the head of the operation, but as a conduit in a chain that prosecutors say kept moving ketamine toward Perry even as his addiction history was well known. He faced up to 25 years in prison. In court, Fleming told the judge, “It’s truly a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

His term was the fourth sentencing in the case built around Perry’s death, which the U.S. Department of Justice said involved five defendants, including two doctors, charged in connection with the actor’s fatal overdose in October 2023. Jasveen Sangha received 15 years in federal prison in April 2026, and a former physician was sentenced to 30 months for selling ketamine to Perry despite knowing the drug was being administered without medical supervision.

That distribution of punishment tells the story here as clearly as any plea agreement. Sangha took the longest term so far, the physician got a much shorter one, and Fleming landed in the middle as the counselor who handed over the vials but did not, in prosecutors’ view, sit at the very top of the supply chain. Kenneth Iwamasa was scheduled to be sentenced on May 27, 2026, as the court kept working its way through the people who fed Perry’s final dose.