Clarkstown Police Save Woman Reacting to Prescribed Painkiller

Clarkstown Police were called to a medical emergency on Inverness Drive in New City at 4:18 a.m. Nov. 11.

The first officer on the scene saw a woman unresponsive and in severe respiratory distress. Her boyfriend, 65, had called 911 and alerted the responding officer that the victim, 50, had applied a prescribed Fentanyl patch due to a recent back injury. A short time later she was unresponsive —and he called 911.

The responding officer happened to be one of the fivecertified paramedics in the department, said P.O. Peter Walker of the Clarkstown Police Department Office of Public Information. He identified the situation as an opportunity to use Narcan to reverse the effect of the Fentanyl.

So he administered 2 doses of Narcan and provided oxygen to the victim. Within a couple of minutes, she began breathing on her own and regained consciousness.

RPS Paramedics and New City Volunteer Ambulance arrived on scene to provide ongoing treatment and transportation to the hospital.

Although Narcan is widely known to reverse the deadly effects of Heroin, it also has the same lifesaving effects on legally prescribed opioid drugs, police said.

Fentanyl, for example, is a potent, synthetic opioid analgesic used primarily as a pain reliever. It is approximately 80-100 times more potent than morphine and many times more potent than heroin.

Naloxone (Narcan) is an opioid antagonist used to counter the effects of opioid overdose, such as heroin or morphine. It works by reversing the depression of the central nervous system, respiratory system, and drop in blood pressure caused by an overdose of drugs such as Fentanyl and heroin.

The Clarkstown Police Department was the first department in Rockland County to train all of its officers on the proper use of the drug and deploy all patrol officers with the drug to combat the current heroin epidemic.