Addiction Counselor Who Supplied Matthew Perry's Fatal Ketamine Gets 2 Years

When Erik Fleming asked for mercy, he was hoping for a light sentence — just three months in prison, followed by residential drug treatment and supervised release. What he got instead was two years behind bars, handed down Wednesday morning at United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Fleming’s role in Matthew Perry’s death was far from incidental. The 54-year-old actor drowned in his jacuzzi in October 2023 from acute ketamine toxicity, but the drug didn’t appear by accident. Fleming, a trained addiction counselor, distributed 50 vials of ketamine to Perry’s live-in personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa. He’d obtained the supply from Jasveen Sangha, the woman prosecutors nicknamed the“Ketamine Queen,”who was sentenced to 15 years in prison last month.

What made Fleming’s case particularly damning wasn’t desperation or addiction — it was calculated commerce. Federal prosecutors argued he wasn’t some struggling addict making reckless choices. He was a professional who understood addiction treatment and leveraged that knowledge to broker drug deals for profit. He pleaded guilty in August 2024 to conspiracy to distribute ketamine and distribution of ketamine resulting in death, admitting in court documents that he knew exactly what he was distributing and to whom.

In his letter seeking leniency, Fleming said he’d spend the rest of his life trying to make up for his role in Perry’s death. A federal judge apparently decided two years was the appropriate start to that process. The case underscores how Perry’s death wasn’t a tragic accident but the result of a chain of criminal choices — each person in the supply line bearing responsibility for what came at the end of it.