So Matthew Perry’s assistant is behind bars for 41 months, handed a sentence that reeks of performative justice. Let us be clear: no one sheds a tear for the enabler of a star’s self-destruction. But the spectacle, the moralising, the smug self-congratulation of the American legal system—it all stinks of a civilisation that has lost its nerve. For here we are, once again, using the criminal law to medicate a societal sickness that no prison can cure. And in Britain, we cluck our tongues and tut about our own draconian drug laws, as if the problem is merely a matter of dosage or legality. It is not. The Perry case is a mirror held up to a decaying empire, and the reflection is unflattering.
Let us begin with the facts: Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry’s live-in assistant, injected the actor with ketamine on the day of his death, having acted as a go-between for dealers and a facilitator for months. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine, and a federal judge handed down 41 months. The judge, speaking of the tragedy, noted that Iwamasa ‘crossed the line from caregiver to drug dealer.’ How neat. How tidy. But this is the kind of moral calculus that satisfies only those who believe the law can sort the world into sinners and saints.
Consider the broader context. Perry had long battled addiction. He was wealthy, famous, and surrounded by enablers—some paid, some sycophantic. His death was an inevitability written in the stars of Hollywood excess. And yet we pretend that sending his assistant to prison for three and a half years will do anything to address the epidemic of opioid and ketamine abuse ravaging America. It will not. It is a ritual sacrifice, a scapegoat offering to the gods of public opinion. We have seen this before: every celebrity overdose yields a frenzy of arrests, a clamping down on dealers, and then nothing changes. The machine grinds on.
Now, what of Britain? Our own drug laws are no less draconian, no less hypocritical. Ketamine is a Class B substance here, but its use among the young is rampant. We criminalise possession, we imprison dealers, and yet the tide of addiction rises. The Perry case has, predictably, sparked calls for a rethink: ‘Perhaps we should decriminalise,’ murmur the liberals. ‘Perhaps we should treat addiction as a health issue.’ But this misses the point. The problem is not the law. The problem is a culture that worships sensation, that medicates the emptiness of modern life with whatever substance provides a temporary escape, and that then finds a scapegoat to blame when the escape turns fatal.
We live in an age of intellectual decadence. We have lost the ability to grapple with the real causes of despair: the breakdown of family, the erosion of community, the hollowing out of religious and civic institutions. Instead, we tinker at the edges, adjusting sentences, tweaking schedules, as if the right bureaucratic fix will restore meaning to lives that are addicted to distraction. It will not. The Roman Empire did not fall because of bad drugs laws; it fell because its citizens lost the will to virtue, to duty, to sacrifice. And so it is with us.
Iwamasa’s sentence is a footnote in that larger decline. He was a cog in a machine fuelled by celebrity, money, and a culture that equates happiness with chemically induced euphoria. The judge’s words ring hollow because they ignore the systemic rot. Perry himself was a victim, yes, but also a perpetrator—of his own degradation, and of the myth that fame and fortune can fill the spiritual void.
What then is to be done? We must stop pretending that the law can save us from ourselves. We must stop looking for villains to punish when the tragedy is collective. And we must ask the hard questions: Why do so many of our brightest and most talented seek oblivion? What have we lost that we now need drugs to feel alive? Until we answer those, the Perry case will be just another headline, an exercise in moral theatre, and the cycle will repeat. The assistant will serve his time, the media will move on, and the next celebrity will die, and we will all pretend to be shocked.
I am not shocked. I am merely tired.
