Police accuse Penn Township nurse practitioner of illegally 'prescribing pills by the thousands'

The arrest of a nurse practitioner accused of writing fake prescriptions culminated from months of police work, including examining trash put out at the suspect’s Penn Township home, executing search warrants at 19 locations and surveillance, court filings show.

Penn Township police Chief John Otto said his department received a tip from Westmoreland County sheriff’s deputies in August that Joseph G. Sapp, 55, was writing fake prescriptions for oxycodone, a powerful pain reliever. Sapp was not employed at the time, police said.

“This guy was prescribing thousands, at least, of opiate-based pills over a period of years to people that existed, as well as people that did not exist,” Otto said. “He was prescribing pills by the thousands to everybody and nobody during an opioid epidemic.”

Sapp was arraigned Friday afternoon and waived his right to a preliminary hearing. He is free on $250,000 unsecured bail. Sapp is charged with acquisition by misrepresentation, forgery, criminal use of a communication facility and related offenses.

After getting the tip, Otto said township police sought the help of the state attorney general’s office. The two agencies filed the charges jointly. As a nurse practitioner, Sapp was permitted to write prescriptions while under the supervision of a physician.

But authorities said in court papers that he didn’t have the required supervision when he picked up a 55-year-old man at a New Stanton hotel on numerous occasions between September and November. The pair went to pharmacies in Westmoreland and Fayette counties and came out with bags of pills, authorities said. The other man has not been charged.

Police said investigators used the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program on those dates to see that Sapp wrote prescriptions for fake and real people who were not his patients. Pharmacists told investigators Sapp would confirm prescriptions by calling on his personal cellphone. Physicians who Sapp worked with in the past said they weren’t aware he was still using their authority to write prescriptions, according to court papers.

During the same time frame, police examined trash Sapp put out for collection. Nineteen search warrants around the region were executed Nov. 29.

Police said items seized from Sapp’s home included:

• A case of fraudulent prescription pads connected to a nonexistent Latrobe doctor’s office.

• Several rifles, shotguns and handguns.

• Empty and partially full prescription bottles of oxycodone for people who did not live there.

• A list of people for whom authorities believe Sapp was writing prescriptions.

• Pharmacy prescription receipts for real and fake people.

Sapp admitted to writing fake prescriptions and told authorities that he and the man he picked up in New Stanton traveled around to pharmacies to get oxycodone pills, according to court papers.

“Sapp stated that he had been abusing controlled substances, oxycodone, for over 20 years,” police wrote in the complaint.

His attorney did not respond to a message.

Otto questioned how the alleged prescribing practices went unnoticed for so long with the amount of state oversight involved in licensing and the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program.

“It’s not until street cops start pulling information out of people that we catch wind of this,” he said. “The next thing you know, we got a major player off the street here in Westmoreland County.”

The Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, launched in 2016 in Pennsylvania, is an electronic database that collects information about all controlled substance prescriptions. It can be accessed by pharmacists and health care providers.

Sapp was licensed by Pennsylvania as a registered nurse in 1995 and as a certified registered nurse practitioner since 2006, state records show. Both of those licenses were last renewed in April. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Westmoreland County Common Pleas Court on April 3.