A physician who pleaded guilty to providing ketamine to Matthew Perry, who died of an overdose in 2023, was sentenced Wednesday to 30 months in federal prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said.
Salvador Plasencia is the first to be sentenced among the five accused in the death of the ‘Friends’ actor, and his sentence includes two years of supervised release and the payment of a $5,600 fine.
The doctor, known as Dr. P., appeared before a federal judge in downtown Los Angeles and, according to the Los Angeles Times, turned himself in immediately after the hearing to begin serving his sentence.
Plasencia pleaded guilty on July 23 to four counts of ketamine distribution and surrendered his California medical license in September 2025.
On October 28, 2023, Perry was found unconscious in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home at age 54 and the autopsy report revealed that he died from the acute effects of ketamine.
The U.S. Department of Justice charged five people with belonging to a clandestine criminal network responsible for distributing large quantities of ketamine, the substance that was found in the performer’s body at the time of his death, and all five accepted plea deals.
Prosecutors stated in a sentencing memorandum, cited by the same publication, that the doctor’s “gross breaches of trust and abandonment of his oath to ‘do no harm’ undoubtedly contributed to the harm suffered by Mr. Perry,” for which they sought a minimum three-year sentence.
For its part, the defense requested that he be sentenced to three years of probation under supervision, arguing that the doctor had already lost his license, his clinic and his professional career.
In a victim impact statement filed in federal court this week, Perry’s mother and stepfather, Suzanne and Keith Morrison, wrote that they believed Plasencia was “one of the most guilty of all.”
According to Plasencia’s plea agreement, he distributed 20 vials of ketamine, ketamine pills and syringes to Perry and the actor’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, another culprit in the case, in the months of September and October 2023.
The performer, celebrated for his Chandler Bing character, had spoken publicly about his struggle with addictions in his memoir ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir’ (2022), reported Agencia EFE.
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