The Hard-Partying, Rock-Obsessed Nurse at the Center of a Massive Opioid Bust
Video collages by Sara Serna
You need to be a certain kind of person to want a reality-TV show about yourself. Jeffrey Young was one of those people. In 2016, Young, who was 42 at the time, invited a cameraman to shoot a pilot episode about his life as a nurse practitioner in Jackson, Tennessee. It doesn’t sound like much of a sell—a middle-aged man doling out medical advice in a city midway between Memphis and Nashville. But Young was eager to let the world know that he was no typical nurse practitioner.
Throughout Jackson, he had created for himself a reputation as a rock-and-roll renegade, happily showing off his piercings, tattoos, and goatee. He blasted heavy metal at his private practice and filled his Instagram feed with photos of himself smoking cigars. In his frequent social-media updates, he would drink and flip off the camera. Though he was not an M.D., Young christened himself “the Rock Doc.”
His vision was, evidently, to one day launch a reality series of the same name. The pilot footage—some of which Young posted to YouTube, and some of which I obtained from a person who was once close to Young—portrays the Rock Doc as a medical bad boy who’s willing to break free from the establishment to deliver real talk. In confessional-style interviews, Young seems to enjoy offending anyone who’s shocked by his approach. In one scene, he and his best friend, a pharmaceutical representative named John Kevin Phillips, broadcast themselves on the video-streaming app Periscope. With a heavy “Mercy me,” Phillips produces a pair of women’s panties from a bag. Young grabs them and takes a big whiff. “Let’s see here, she’s 23,” Young says. “Brown hair, green eyes, amazing body.” He smells them again. “And no education whatsoever,” Phillips jokes.
Defending himself in one of his on-camera interviews, Young acknowledges that he is “maybe a little untraditional” and that he “might like to drink a little bit after hours.” But, he says, “I’m very passionate about what I do … I work hard, but I play harder.” Young’s practice was, for a time, an inexpensive, reliable option for medical care in Jackson. The waiting room often overflowed with patients. Young put his name behind charity projects around town, took health insurance, and offered discounts for people who otherwise couldn’t afford care. He exhibited a certain tenderness as he filled syringes and sutured skin. For the cosmetically minded, he hosted alcohol-fueled Botox parties.
Young was, in short, a medical provider who acted like everyone’s best friend. As the cameraman who filmed the pilot told me, “Everywhere he went, it was like the Beatles.”
But the way in which Young gained some of these fans has become the focus of a federal court case. In April 2019, he was indicted on drug-trafficking charges, along with five other medical providers in Jackson, two of whom were the supervising physicians Young, as a nurse practitioner, was required to have. Young and the others were among dozens of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists arrested across seven states, targets in the nation’s largest takedown of medical providers related to prescription opioids. Prosecutors say Young used his rebellious persona to take advantage of patients, distributing highly addictive painkillers on demand and in large quantities for profit—and, often, his own sexual gratification. At least 50 women are thought to have come to the clinic to have sex with Young, some of them allegedly doing so in exchange for drugs, according to court testimony. (Young has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Through his attorney, he declined to comment on this and the other allegations in this story because of a gag order issued by the judge in the case.)
Over the past two decades, opioids have claimed more than 450,000 American lives. Though many of these deaths have been caused by street drugs such as heroin and illegally manufactured fentanyl, the nation’s opioid epidemic was sparked by the kinds of painkillers medical providers prescribed. The allegations against Young point toward an especially sordid type of abuse in which some doctors victimize patients twice: first by getting them addicted to drugs, and then by sexually exploiting them. In the past five years, at least 40 medical providers nationwide have been accused of exchanging sex for addictive drugs.
As so often happens with irresponsible medical providers, Young’s popularity in the community—along with an indifferent, slow-moving bureaucracy—allowed him to operate for half a decade despite initial warning signs and then multiple arrests and investigations. One other factor might help account for his long, illicit career: the sheer number of patients who stood by
