I Was a Doctor — Then Got Sent to Federal Prison for 14 Years | Rich Morgan
August 11, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readRich Morgan was a third-year medical student in 1997 when he took his first painkiller. Ten years later, he was arrested on a federal conspiracy charge. By the time he was sentenced, he had been writing prescriptions for himself under fake names, filling them at dozens of pharmacies across the tri-state area, and eventually selling prescriptions for cash. He received 168 months — 14 years — in federal prison. This is his account of how a doctor became an inmate, and what happened after.
The First Pill and the Slow Descent
Morgan had never taken a pill in his life. As a child, he had such a severe gag reflex that his mother once hid an antibiotic in a peanut butter sandwich, which made him vomit and gave him a lifelong aversion to peanut butter. That changed in 1997, when a wisdom tooth extraction led to a 103-degree fever, lockjaw, and an abscess that required surgical drainage. The oral surgeon prescribed Vicodin. Morgan took it for the pain, but soon noticed something else: a feeling of euphoria and confidence he had never experienced before. "It made me feel like I could take on any situation," he says.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:02) **Introduction: From Doctor to Federal Prisoner** - Host Ian Bick introduces Rich Morgan, a medical school graduate who became a doctor and was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison just ten years later.
- 2 (02:16) **Early Life and the Call to Medicine** - Rich describes a normal middle-class upbringing on Long Island and his lifelong ambition to become a doctor.
- 3 (07:31) **Medical Education: DO vs. MD** - Rich details his path through college, osteopathic medical school (NYITCOM), and a residency at NYU’s Rusk Institute.
- 4 (16:57) **The First Pill: A Watershed Moment in Med School** - Rich explains that his addiction began during his third year of medical school after a wisdom tooth extraction led to a severe infection.
- 5 (20:58) **The Mechanism of Addiction: Doctor Shopping and Forged Scripts** - Rich describes how his addiction progressed from using his own prescriptions to writing fake prescriptions for himself.
- 6 (27:19) **9/11 and the Escalation to Oxycodone** - Rich reveals how the trauma of working at Bellevue Hospital on 9/11, including seeing his own name on the memorial wall, dramatically escalated his drug use.
- 7 (32:14) **The "Wild West" of Pharma and the Trap of "Dope Sickness"** - Rich describes a system with no safeguards, where drug reps wined and dined top prescribers, and hospital pharmacies were unmonitored.
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Show Notes
Rich Morgan graduated from the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1998, completed his residency at NYU Rusk Medical Center in 2002, and had everything a decade of medical school and training was supposed to produce — until a common dental procedure exposed him to opioids and changed the direction of everything he had spent his career building. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, he shares what the ten year opioid addiction that followed that dental procedure actually looked like, what writing fraudulent prescriptions to pharmacies to fuel his addiction and eventually selling prescriptions to drug dealers actually involved, what getting caught after a customer cooperated with the government actually felt like, and what being sentenced to 168 months in federal prison as a doctor — and navigating the federal system as a Jewish inmate — actually required of him before he was finally ready to rebuild what the addiction and the federal system had taken.
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#doctor #prison #truecrimestories
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Thank you to HIMS & FACTOR for sponsoring this episode:
Hims: Visit https://hims.com/lockedin to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you.
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Connect with Rich Morgan:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richmorgan8761/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-morgan-b45366143
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Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick:
https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en
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Timestamps:
00:00 Introducing Rich Morgan
00:16 Growing Up on Long Island
01:04 Parents and Early Life
01:51 Dreaming of Medicine
02:17 The Incident That Inspired Him
03:33 Fascination with Fixing
04:33 Medical Shows and College
05:31 College and Med School
06:18 What is a DO?
08:46 DO vs MD Schooling
09:57 The Growing Prevalence of DOs
11:05 Salary and Residency
12:15 The First Pill
14:09 The Spiral Begins
15:12 The First Pill Experience
17:19 Dentists and Overprescription
19:30 Writing Himself Prescriptions
21:39 Life at the Height of Addiction
23:12 9/11 and Its Impact
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