By Paul Peirce
A former Allegheny County
police officer, jailed in Westmoreland County on charges of impersonating a
police officer, was charged on Thursday with running a prescription drug ring.
A state grand jury accused Mark
Fisher, 34, of Irwin, who worked as a police officer in Swissvale and Turtle
Creek, of directing an illegal prescription drug ring from 2007 to 2011. The
participants sold drugs in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties, the grand jury
said.
Fisher developed an addiction
to pain medication since an undisclosed injury in 2007 and recruited several
people to help distribute prescription pain narcotics, Attorney General
Kathleen Kane said.
Kane said she anticipates
additional arrests.
Fisher eventually stopped using
others and began to pass illegal prescriptions at pharmacies, written in his
name or his wife's, Kane said.
Fisher and his wife became
patients of a Westmoreland County doctor who gave Mark Fisher prescriptions for
the painkiller Roxicodone and a sedative, Ambien, the grand jury said. The
couple then became “social friends” of the doctor, according to the grand jury.
Fisher is charged with
acquiring a controlled substance by misrepresentation, fraud, forgery,
deception or subterfuge; possession with intent to deliver a controlled
substance; conspiracy; and impersonating a public servant.
In 2011, authorities charged
Fisher with attempting to illegally forge prescriptions from the Westmoreland
County doctor's office. Fisher claimed he needed blank prescription pads for
his work as an undercover officer, police said.
The doctor's cousin, who worked
in the office, told the grand jury that he telephoned police about “obviously
forged documents purporting to be from the Turtle Creek Police Department and Mark
Fisher.”
Authorities said Fisher no
longer was an officer when he attempted to obtain the forms. State police
arrested him in Greensburg on charges of impersonating an officer, theft by
deception and receiving stolen property.
Online court records show
Fisher was expected to plead guilty to those charges in January but did not
appear for the hearing.
Westmoreland County Judge Rita
Hathaway issued a warrant for his arrest. He has been held in the county prison
since Friday.
A witness told the grand jury
that Fisher's drug distribution crew sometimes met him “while Fisher was in a
police uniform in a patrol car” and that he would provide them with
prescription forms to obtain painkillers.
Pennsylvania has the
14th-highest rate of drug overdoses in the nation. Most are caused by
prescription drugs.
