A Tennessee nurse practitioner who called himself the “Rock Doc” has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for illegally prescribing thousands of doses of opioids including oxycodone and fentanyl in return for money and sex, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Jeffrey W. Young Jr., was sentenced Monday in federal court, about a year after he was convicted of unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances out of a clinic in Jackson, Tennessee. There is no parole in the federal court system.
Young, 49, was among 60 people indicted in April 2019 for their roles in illegally prescribing and distributing pills containing opioids and other drugs. Authorities said the defendants included 53 medical professionals tied to some 350,000 prescriptions and 32 million pills.
Young, who dubbed himself as the “Rock Doc,” promoted his practice with the motto “work hard, play harder.” The indictment states he prescribed drugs that were highly addictive and at high risk of abuse as he tried to promote a “Rock Doc” reality TV pilot and podcast while obtaining sex and money for prescriptions.
https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)60750-7/fulltext
That’s a general article about opiod metabolism and what causes it to vary. So it talks about what I had said but also some other reasons people are effected differently like liver/kidney disease.
When companies started pushing extended release, it greatly exacerbated the differences. They knew that from research, but pushed doctors to try it as the first step.
Edit:
Side note, that article also shows what liver enzyme metobalizes certain opioids.
A huge example is Fentanyl using a different one from Oxycodone and other common opioids.
So not only is it dangerous because of its dosage amounts, someone that believes they have a strong opioid tolerance due to abuse might be a fast CYP3A4 metabolizer. So just the tiniest but of Fen could make them OD.
All this shit is way more complicated than most people ever realize.
I took a class on pharmaceuticals and the professor started every class by saying:
Anything that deals with hormones, neurotransmitters, or metabolism is going to react differently, even if most fall into a normal distribution, there’s always outliers.
We really should have started normalizing genetic testing and tailoring treatment to individuals decades ago.
This shit isn’t expensive and avoids a lot of trial and error that could cause serious complications not to mention wasted time.