Two Charleston Police Officers are being credited with saving a man's life on Charleston's West Side Wednesday, when they administered naloxone, which reversed the effects of his drug overdose.
U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin honored the officers, patrolmen Seth Johnson and Nick Castleman, and Charleston Fire Department captain Mark Strickland during a lunchtime press conference at Charleston City Hall on Friday.
Goodwin, who scheduled the press conference during the lunch hour during a break from the Don Blankenship trial, said the occurrence is a cause for celebration. The state has a drug epidemic that started with prescription drugs and has evolved into a heroin crisis, he said.
EMS workers have been using naloxone, also known by the brand name Narcan, for decades to treat overdose patients they encounter in the field. Earlier this year, the West Virginia Legislature passed a bill to allow police, firefighters and friends and family members to administer the drug to people overdosing on heroin or prescription pain pills. The Kanawha County Sheriff's Office launched a naloxone program in September.
The Charleston Fire Department trained the Charleston Police Department to use the drug at the end of September and first part of October. Wednesday's incident was the first time that Charleston officers have had to use the drug to save a life, officials said.
"The idea here is if the police officer is there first on the scene, which sometimes happen, they have the ability to do something and do something quickly," Goodwin said.
Seconds count when it comes to drug overdoses, he said.
The police officers were first on the scene Wednesday evening because the Charleston Fire Department was tied up with two fires on the West Side, Strickland said. A Charleston ambulance was assisting a cardiac arrest patient in Elkview, he said.
Castleman was the first to respond to a possible drug overdose around 8 p.m. at a house on Beech Avenue on the West Side, he said. There he found a man lying on his back. The man's skin was pale and his lips were blue, "which are all telltale signs of an opiate overdose," he said.
Castleman administered Narcan in the man's nostril and the man responded a little bit but he was still unconscious, he said. About that time Johnson arrived on scene and gave the man another dose of the drug, which revived him.
"After a minute or two he came to and was up and alert and talking," Castleman said.
The man, who has not been named but was in his early to mid 20s, was taken to Thomas Memorial Hospital, police said.
"Unfortunately [drug overdoses are] something that come out over the radio quite often," Johnson said. "Before, we didn't have Narcan so we were there to assist medics and let medics come in. That may be a minute or 10 minutes before they got there. Now with the Narcan we're able to do something about it."
Strickland said firefighters respond to drug overdose calls daily and sometimes multiple times in a day.
"It comes in spurts," Strickland said. "It's an average of one or two a day if you break down statistics, but we've had as many of 14 in about a 16-hour period and we've had shifts where we didn't run an overdose. Oddly enough, those are the days when he hear that the drug unit has done a drug bust somewhere and we reap the benefits of that."
Reach Lori Kersey at Lori.Kersey@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1240 or follow @LoriKerseyWV on Twitter.