In a verdict that has sent tremors through the Palm Beach social circuit and left rehab facilities nationwide checking their insurance policies, the assistant to the late Matthew Perry has been handed a 41-month stretch in federal chokey for playing pharmaceutical courier to a man who had everything except a functioning off switch. Kenneth Iwamasa, a man whose job title apparently included 'retail pharmacist to the stars,' pleaded guilty to supplying the ketamine that ultimately parked Perry's soul in the great hot tub in the sky.
Let us pause to marvel at the sheer banality of this tragedy. Here we have a man who made millions playing a wisecracking neurotic on a show about friends and coffee, and he ends up dead because his personal assistant decided that dispensing horse tranquiliser was within the remit of 'other duties as required.' The prosecution painted a picture of Iwamasa as a bumbling Dr. Feelgood, injecting Perry with shots of ketamine in his living room while the actor watched movies and presumably worked on his third act comeback. The defence argued that Iwamasa was merely a loyal employee trapped in the orbit of a demanding celebrity. Loyalty, it seems, is now a criminal defence.
One has to admire the audacity of the American justice system, which can look a man in the eye and say, 'You are a monster for injecting a drug addict with the very substance he was addicted to,' while simultaneously handing out slaps on the wrist to pharmaceutical executives who flooded the country with opioids. The judge, perhaps channelling the spirit of a disappointed school headmaster, described Iwamasa's actions as 'extremely reckless and dangerous.' As if bringing a gun to a knife fight is reckless. This man practically had 'enabler' tattooed on his forehead.
But let us not spare a thought for Iwamasa, who will now have plenty of time to contemplate his career choices in a federal facility, where the only Friends reruns will be the ones played on a communal television with a broken volume button. The real question is this: what kind of world do we live in where a TV star requires a personal assistant to manage his illicit drug supply? Are we not past the era of dealing with your own demons? Or have we become so infantilised that we cannot even procure our own lethal injections? Perry, for all his charm, was a walking autopilot disaster, and his assistant was the co-pilot who forgot to pull up.
This case is a grim parable about the hazards of proximity to fame. It seems that if you stand too close to a celebrity, you risk being scorched by their burnout. Iwamasa will serve three and a half years, during which time he will have plenty of opportunity to reflect on the wisdom of mixing loyalty with lunacy. Meanwhile, somewhere in Hollywood, a thousand assistants are secretly updating their CVs, just in case their boss asks them to pick up a 'prescription' from a shady guy in a van.
In the end, this is a story about the death of common sense. A man died because he could not say no, and another man is going to prison because he could not say no either. The rest of us are left to watch from the sidelines, clutching our own vices a little tighter and thanking the heavens that we are not famous enough to have personal assistants willing to go down with us.
