Drug counsellor gets two years in Matthew Perry ketamine death case

A licensed addiction counselor who prosecutors said helped steer Matthew Perry into a ketamine supply chain was sentenced to two years in prison on Wednesday, as the case continued to expose how addiction treatment can be bent by people who know the system from the inside.

Erik Fleming, 56, had pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death, becoming the first defendant in the case to admit guilt before arrests were publicly announced. Prosecutors had asked for 2 1/2 years in prison. Fleming’s lawyers asked for three months in prison and nine months in a residential drug treatment facility, saying he had relapsed after the 2023 death of a beloved stepmother and had gone to extreme lengths to atone for what he did.

The sentence makes Fleming the fourth defendant punished in a case federal prosecutors cast as a deliberate exploitation of Perry’s addiction. Prosecutors said Fleming connected Perry to Jasveen Sangha, the drug dealer they called the Ketamine Queen, and that the two sold Perry 51 vials of ketamine in October 2023. Perry had been receiving ketamine treatments for depression, an off-label use that has become increasingly common, but prosecutors said he was seeking more of the drug than he could get through doctors in the weeks before he died.

On October 28, 2023, Perry’s live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, repeatedly injected him with the ketamine supplied through Sangha and Fleming. Prosecutors said Perry received at least three shots that day, and that the injections caused his death in the Jacuzzi of his Los Angeles home. Perry was 54.

The sentencings have moved through the case in a way that underscores how broad the supply chain was. Sangha was sentenced to 15 years in prison in April 2026. Salvador Plasencia received 30 months in prison in December 2025. Mark Chavez was sentenced to eight months of home detention and three years of supervised release. The family of Matthew Perry, including his mother, Suzanne, and stepfather, Keith Morrison, said in victim impact statements that the people sentenced were among the most culpable for hastening his death.

Prosecutors said Sangha operated a high-volume drug trafficking business out of her North Hollywood home and used Signal messages that later auto-deleted after Perry’s death, while also telling Fleming to delete messages. For prosecutors, the case has become more than a celebrity overdose prosecution. It is a test of whether the justice system can hold accountable the people who exploit addiction while occupying positions of trust, and whether treatment oversight is strong enough to stop the next supply chain before it reaches a vulnerable patient.