The courtroom felt like it was holding its breath when a California physician—once trusted, once respected—heard the words that would define his next 30 months: federal prison for feeding a famous man’s spiral.
The doctor, 44-year-old Salvador Plasencia, had run an urgent-care clinic just outside Los Angeles. On paper, he was a healer. In reality, as federal prosecutors outlined, he had become a supplier—quietly delivering ketamine to Matthew Perry in the days that led to the actor’s fatal overdose in 2023.
Perry, beloved for shaping Chandler Bing into a pop-culture touchstone, had been found motionless in his home jacuzzi at 54. The autopsy was blunt: the “acute effects of ketamine,” layered with other contributing factors, pulled him under.
Ketamine, a legitimate anesthetic with a shadow life as an illicit escape, had long hovered at the edges of Perry’s struggles. When one clinic refused to boost his dosage, others with fewer scruples circled. That’s where Plasencia stepped forward. He injected Perry multiple times—at the actor’s home, and once, astonishingly, in a parked car. He had already surrendered his medical license by the time he stood before the judge.
Court records revealed messages showing the doctor’s disdain for the patient whose trust he was exploiting. In one text to a co-defendant supplying him with the drug, he wrote: “I wonder how much this moron will pay.”
The supply chain only got darker from there: a San Diego doctor, a dealer known on the streets as the “Ketamine Queen,” and Perry’s own personal assistant, who ultimately administered the dose that ended everything.
When the judge finally spoke, her words cut through the silence: Plasencia and his co-conspirators had “helped Mr. Perry stay on the road to such an ending.” The sentence: 2½ years in prison and a fine.
Plasencia turned to face Perry’s family, voice strained, shoulders collapsing under the moment.
“I failed Mr. Perry. I failed his family. I failed the community. I’m just so sorry.”
His apology hung in the room, met with quiet grief. Perry’s mother responded earlier with her own stark truth—doctors take an oath, she said, “and I think it really got forgotten.”
Four additional defendants, each woven into the chain that delivered the fatal drug, have already pleaded guilty. Their turn before the judge is still to come.
The story—part tragedy, part betrayal—has no clean ending, only the echo of a grief that outlived the man who made millions laugh.
