Ben Brazant
BBC News
She was a woman who seemingly had it all: a privileged upbringing, a good education, and a wide circle of friends.
But Jaswin Sanga had a dark secret that some of her closest friends claim she kept hidden even from them.
This dual British-American citizen was a dealer for Hollywood's rich and famous, running a "snack house" of drugs, including cocaine, Xanax, fake Adderall pills and ketamine.
Her job - and the illusion of a flawless life - came to an abrupt end after she secured 50 vials of ketamine that were eventually sold to Friends actor Matthew Perry.
Among them was the dose that led to his death from an overdose in 2023.
Sanga, along with five other people, including two doctors, pleaded guilty to criminal charges in connection with Perry's death.
The first verdict in this case was recently handed down - one of the doctors was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
In February 2026, Sanga is also scheduled to be sentenced in this case, which exposed an underground ketamine trafficking network in Los Angeles.
She could be sentenced to a maximum of 65 years in federal prison.
She is "an extremely educated person who decided to make a living from drug dealing and use that drug money to fund a social media influencer," Bill Bodner, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Los Angeles office at the time of Perry's death, told the BBC.
The gang ran “a fairly large drug trafficking operation that catered to the Hollywood elite,” he adds.
Prosecutors stressed that Perry had been taking legal, prescribed amounts of ketamine to treat depression, but then craved more than his doctors allowed.
Court records related to the federal investigation show that this led him to multiple doctors and eventually to a dealer who was providing drugs for Sanga through an intermediary.
Her lawyer, Mark Geragos, said Sanga accepts responsibility.
She denies, however, that she personally knew Perry, best known for his role as Chandler Bing in the long-running sitcom. Friends.
"She feels terrible. She felt terrible from day one," Geragos told reporters after she pleaded guilty in the case.
"It was a terrifying experience."
How did Sanga manage to lead a double life?
A few weeks before Perry's death, Sanga spoke on the phone with longtime friend Tony Marquez.
He and others spoke to the BBC and presenter Amber Hack in a new documentary to be shown on iPlayer that looks at the circumstances of Perry's death.
It's the first time friends have opened up about the woman who became known around the world as Queen of Ketamine.
Sanga and Marquez have known each other since the 2010s and he says he has met her family.
Like Sanga, Marquez was a regular on the Los Angeles party scene.
He too faces drug-related legal problems and has a previous conviction for drug trafficking.
But even though the two have a long history together, he says Sanga has never hinted that she is in big trouble.
Just a few months earlier, her North Hollywood home, which prosecutors had declared a "shack house," was raided by police.
Jesh Negandi attended the University of California, Irvine with Sang in 2001.
They remained friends for more than 20 years.
“She was a big fan of the dance music scene,” Negandi recalls.
"She loved to dance and have fun."
Negandi says he was taken aback by the discovery that his friend was a drug dealer.
"I didn't know anything," he says.
"Absolutely nothing. She didn't talk about it."
In any case, most of her friends assumed she didn't need the money.
"She always had it," says Marquez.
"She traveled everywhere and often by private jet, long before everything fell apart."
Sangini's grandparents were multi-millionaires who were involved in retail sales in the fashion industry in East London, according to The Times.
Sanga, the daughter of entrepreneur Nilem Singh and Dr. Baljit Singh Chokar, was set to inherit the family fortune.
Her mother remarried twice and moved to Calabasas, California, where Sanga grew up.
Her family home in Los Angeles is “beautiful” and “large,” according to Marquez.
“We would have barbecues in the backyard or have pool parties at her parents’ house,” he says.
"Her parents are very caring and very warm, they treated us like their own children."
Sanga spent some time in London after high school and graduated from Halt International Business School in London in 2010.
In the pictures, he can be seen smiling charmingly at the camera in a sleek black suit with straightened brown hair during a visit to the Financial Times in 2010.
"She didn't seem like a fraud," points out a former classmate.
The Sangha was pleasant, although somewhat reserved.
She wore designer clothes to class and loved to socialize.
There were no rumors that he was involved in drugs.
"If she had taken it to Halt, we would probably have known about it."
She returned to Los Angeles shortly after graduating.
Sang's mother and stepfather ran KFC franchises in California, and the company sued them for more than $50.000 in 2013, according to court documents, because they failed to pay royalties to the company for the use of their brand.
Sanga's stepfather declared bankruptcy before the case was concluded.
If Sanga's family was going through financial difficulties during this period, she didn't confide it to a large number of people.
"I haven't heard anything about it," says Negandi.
Sanga seemed to want to achieve the entrepreneurial successes of her parents.
She opened a short-lived manicure salon. Stiletto Nail Bar and told friends about her ambitions to become a restaurant franchise owner.
Drug parties that lasted for days
But she was most interested in the club scene.
In Los Angeles, she had a tight-knit circle of friends called "The Cats," according to Marquez, a clique mostly of female friends who liked to throw parties—and which celebrities attended.
They would often meet at Avalon, a historic club in the heart of Hollywood that hosts concerts and electronic music events, and they would party until the wee hours of the morning.
He says they would take pills and ketamine.
Sometimes their parties, which took place all over California, would last for days.
“We would go on trips to Lake Havasu, rent a big old mansion and bring our DJs, haul in our sound system and every night would be a theme night just for us,” Marquez says, referring to the lake on the California-Arizona border.
"We'd all dress up in costumes, we'd have a white party, a sequin party. We'd have a mushroom party."
At those parties, “ketamine would always be used,” he says.
But although Sanga had many nicknames in this circle of friends, no one ever knew her as the "Ketamine Queen."
"Nobody called her that," says Marquez.
The group was concerned about the contamination of illegal drug supplies with the deadly opioid fentanyl and therefore made special efforts to obtain large quantities of exceptionally high-quality ketamine.
“If we were going to make ketamine, we wanted to get it straight from the source,” says Marquez.
The friends allegedly ordered couriers to go to Mexico and bring back the drug, which is used as a sedative during surgical procedures, from corrupt veterinarians and pharmacies across the border.
"I didn't know Jaswin was doing that," Marquez says.
"But did we have access? Did we have people doing it? We did."
Marquez claims he never suspected Sanga was dealing drugs on the side.
"It's shocking, I tell you."
"I've known this person for years and years. I know their family. I know how they act, I know what they're capable of. I know where they come from."
"To this day, I can't believe this is happening," he says.
Looking back on it all today, Marquez suspects that Sanga became "addicted" to the social status that came with being a drug dealer to the rich and famous.
“I truly believe that Jaswin has become addicted to a life of celebrity dealing,” he says.
"She was addicted to belonging to those social circles and being desired among the celebrities that ordinary people see on television their whole lives."
He says he doesn't believe she was ever a "drug boss" or a major dealer, but simply got into the business because she "loved taking ketamine, just like the rest of us."
Sanga's actions, however, suggest a more cruel side to her.
Prosecutors said that in 2019, Sanga sold ketamine to a man named Cody McClaury.
McClaury overdosed and died.
After his death, his sister sent a text message to Sanga to tell her how the drugs she sold to her brother had killed a man.
“At any time, any reasonable person would have gone to the police, and in any case, any person with any semblance of a heart would have stopped these activities and not distributed ketamine to others,” says Martin Estrada, the former U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, who filed federal charges against Sanga in August 2024.
"She continued to do so and saw, a few years later, how her continued activities ended in the death of another person, Matthew Perry."
Another friend from the second circle of friends who went clubbing with Sang in the 2010s recalls being similarly surprised by the news.
He told the BBC that he had known Sanga since high school and often hung out with her at the same time as Marquez.
This friend wanted to remain anonymous so he could speak openly about a woman he knew who was now "accused of being a drug lord."
"We were partying all the time, every night. For many, many years without stopping," he says.
"She never offered me anything."
He recalls how Sanga took her uncle Paul Singh with her almost everywhere she went.
"That's really not the behavior of a drug lord," he says.
"And it wasn't like she was just letting him sneak up on her. He was elegantly dressed."
Paul Singh appears in photographs from the event with Sang and was present in the courtroom to hear her plea on September 3.
At one point in the 2020s, Sanga went into treatment for addiction, according to Marquez.
In court filings, her attorney Mark Geragos claimed she had been sober for 17 months.
During their last conversation with Negandi, they talked about the future.
"We're both in our forties, and usually when you get to those years, you start to draw the line."
“And you start thinking, what do we want to do now that we're at that age?” he says.
"She was very excited because she had been clean for a while and was looking forward to many things in life."
Sanga did not mention that she had recently been arrested.
"I had no idea she was going through all that when we were talking," he says.
"She didn't reveal any of that to me."
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