Chief Administrator –
January 25, 2019 – Decker deftly administers Narcan, an overdose-reversing medicine, and soon the woman comes to. “In my first 15 or 20 years of service, I bet I didn’t administer Narcan no more than a dozen times,” says Decker, who’s now in his 27th year as a firefighter. “In the last two-and-a-half or three years we’ve probably given 100 doses of Narcan on runs I’ve been on.” In 2016 there were 18 overdose deaths in Newark. One year later, that number shot up to 41. Most of those deaths, Decker says, are a result of opioids.
