‘Ketamine Queen’ spiralled before Matthew Perry death, friends tell BBC

She was a woman who appeared to have it all: a privileged upbringing, a good education and a wide circle of friends.

But Jasveen Sangha had a dark secret that some of her closest friends say she concealed even from them. The dual British-American national was a dealer to Hollywood’s rich and famous, who ran a “stash house” of drugs including cocaine, Xanax, fake Adderall pills and ketamine.

Her business – and the illusion of her charmed life – came to an abrupt end after supplying 50 vials of ketamine that were ultimately sold to Friends actor Matthew Perry, including the dose that led to his overdose death in 2023.

Now, Sangha is among five others, including two doctors, who have pleaded guilty to offences in Perry’s death.

In February Sangha is set to be the final defendant sentenced in the case, which uncovered an underground ketamine drug network in Los Angeles. She could face a maximum of 65 years in federal prison.

Bill Bodner, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Los Angeles office at the time of Perry’s death, told the BBC she was “a highly educated person who decided to make their living trafficking drugs, and use that money from drug trafficking to finance this social media influencer persona”.

He said Sangha was running a “somewhat large drug trafficking operation catering to the Hollywood elite”.

Prosecutors have outlined that Perry was taking legal, prescribed amounts of ketamine to treat depression, but then started wanting more than was permitted by his doctors.

Court documents relating to the federal investigation show it led him to multiple doctors and then to a dealer who sourced the drug for Sangha via an intermediary.

Her attorney, Mark Geragos, has said Sangha is taking responsibility but has denied she actually knew Perry, who was best known for playing Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom Friends.

“She feels horrible. She’s felt horrible from day one,” Geragos told reporters after she pleaded guilty in the case. “This has been a horrendous experience.”

Weeks before Perry’s death, Sangha spoke on the phone with long-time friend, Tony Marquez.

He and others talked to the BBC, as part of an upcoming documentary on iPlayer that looks into the circumstances around Perry’s death. It marks the first time that friends have opened up about the woman who has become known worldwide as the Ketamine Queen.

Sangha and Marquez had known each other since the 2010s, and he said he had even met her family. Like Sangha, Marquez was also a regular on the LA party circuit.

He has also faced legal issues over drugs and has a previous conviction for drug trafficking. But while the two shared a long history, he says Sangha never hinted that she was in deep water.

Only a few months prior, her North Hollywood home, which prosecutors dubbed a “stash house” had been raided by police.

Jash Negandhi attended University of California, Irvine with Sangha in 2001, and they have remained friends for more than 20 years.

“She was very much into the dance music scene,” recalls Negandhi. “She loved to dance and have a good time.”

Negandhi said he was blindsided by the revelation that his friend was a drug dealer.

“I knew nothing,” he says. “Absolutely nothing. She hadn’t spoken about it.”

Certainly, most friends assumed she didn’t need the money.

“She always had money,” says Marquez. “She travelled all over by private jet, and did that way before everything blew up.”

Sangha’s grandparents were fashion retail multimillionaires in East London, according to The Times, and Sangha – the daughter of entrepreneur Nilem Singh and Dr Baljeet Singh Chhokar – stood to inherit the family wealth.

Her mother remarried twice and moved to Calabasas in California, where Sangha grew up. Her family home in Los Angeles is “beautiful” and “big”, according to Marquez.

“We would have cookouts or a pool party at her parents’ house,” he says. “They’re very caring, very loving, and they treated us like we were their kids.”

Sangha spent time in London after high school, and graduated with a MBA from the Hult International Business School in London in 2010. In pictures, she can be seen smiling sweetly at the camera in a smart black suit with straightened brown hair during a visit to the Financial Times in 2010.

“She didn’t come off as a hustler,” notes one former classmate. Sangha was friendly, if somewhat aloof.

She wore designer clothes to class, and enjoyed socialising. There were no rumours of involvement in drugs. “If she was a user in Hult, we’d probably know about it.”

She returned to Los Angeles soon after completing her MBA. Sangha’s mother and stepfather ran KFC franchises in California and were sued by the company for more than $50,000 in 2013, court documents show, for failing to pay royalties to the company for the use of its branding.

Sangha’s stepfather declared bankruptcy before the case was over. If Sangha’s family was experiencing financial difficulty during this period, however, she did not disclose it to many people.

“I didn’t hear anything about that,” says Negandhi.

Sangha seemed to want to reach her parents’ entrepreneurial accomplishments. She opened a short-lived nail salon Stiletto Nail Bar, and talked to friends about ambitions including owning a franchise of restaurants.

But her real interest seemed to be in clubbing. In Los Angeles, she had a close-knit circle of friends called the “Kitties”, according to Marquez, which was a clique of mostly female friends who liked to throw parties – attended by celebrities.

They would often meet at Avalon, a historic theatre in the heart of Hollywood that hosts concerts and electronic music events, and party until the early hours of the morning.

He says they would take pills and ketamine. Sometimes their parties, which they held across California, would go on for days.

“We would take a trip to Lake Havasu, rent a big old mansion, and we would bring our DJs, all our sound systems, and every night would be a theme night that would just be us,” Marquez says of the lake, which borders California and Arizona.

“We’d get all dressed up, and we’d have a white party, a glitter party. We had a shroom-shroom party.”

These parties “always involved ketamine,” he says. But even though Sangha had many nicknames within this clique of friends, no one ever knew her as “The Ketamine Queen”.

“No one called her that,” says Marquez.

The group was concerned about contamination of the illegal drug supply with the deadly opioid fentanyl, and therefore went to extraordinary lengths to source large quantities of high quality ketamine.

“If we were going to do ketamine, we wanted to get it from the source,” says Marquez.

The friends allegedly used couriers to go to Mexico to retrieve the drug, which is used as a sedative during surgery, from corrupt veterinarians and pharmacies across the border.

“I wouldn’t know of Jasveen doing that,” says Marquez. “But did we have access? Did we have people that did it? Yes.”

Marquez claims he never suspected Sangha was dealing drugs on the side: “It’s shocking, I’m telling you.”

“Years and years I’ve known this person. I know her family. I know the way she acts, I know what she’s capable of. I know where she comes from. I cannot – still to this day – I can’t believe this is happening,” he says.

Looking back, Marquez suspects that Sangha became “addicted” to the social status that came with being a drug dealer to the rich and famous.

“I truly believe that Jasveen was addicted to that life of dealing to celebrities,” he says.

“She was addicted to being in that social circle and being wanted by celebrities that people have seen all their lives on TV.”

He said he believes she was never a “king pin” or a bigtime dealer, but simply fell into the trade because she “loved doing ketamine, just like all of us”.

Sangha’s actions suggest a more ruthless streak, however.

Prosecutors have said that in 2019, Sangha sold ketamine to a man called Cody McLaury.

McLaury experienced an overdose and died. Following his death, his sister texted Sangha to tell her that the drugs she had sold her brother had killed him.

“At that point, any sensible person would have gone to law enforcement, and certainly any person with any semblance of a heart would stop their activities and not further distribute ketamine to others,” says Martin Estrada, the former chief prosecutor for the Central District of California, who announced federal charges against Sangha in August 2024.

“She continued doing this, and we saw, several years later, the continuation of her conduct resulted in the death of yet another person, Mr. Perry.”

Another friend from a different circle who used to go to clubs with Sangha in the 2010s recalls being similarly surprised by the news.

He told the BBC he had known Sangha since high school, and socialised extensively with her at the same time as Marquez.

The friend did not want to be named, so he could talk candidly about the woman he knew who is now “being accused of being a drug lord”.

“We were always at parties, like every night. For many, many years,” he says. “She never offered me anything.”

He recalls that Sangha took her uncle Paul Sing with her almost everywhere she went. “It’s not really drug lord behaviour,” he says. “[And] it wasn’t like she just let him tag along. He was always dressed fashionable.”

Paul Sing appears in event photos with Sangha, and was present in court to hear her plead guilty on 3 September.

At some point in the 2020s, Sangha attended rehab, according to Marquez. In court filings last month, her lawyer Mark Geragos claimed she had been sober for 17 months. In her last conversation with Negandhi, they spoke about the future.

“We were both into our 40s, and you tend to self evaluate when we get to that age. And, you start thinking, what is it that we want to do now that we’ve hit this age?” he says.

“She was very excited about being clean for quite some time and she was just looking forward to a lot of things in life.”

Sangha didn’t mention that she had recently been arrested.

“I had no idea that she was going through all of this when we were talking,” he says. “She hadn’t revealed any of it.”