PITTSBURGH -- City police said a strong or mixed batch of heroin caused at least three deaths and 34 overdoses in the city, as well as four overdoses in the suburbs, in the past few days.

Four of those who overdosed did so while driving vehicles and were involved in accidents, police said.

Lt. Kevin Kraus said the drug is being sold in stamp packets marked "Get High Or Die Trying" and "Dynasty."

The cases were reported in rapid succession in Hazelwood, Brookline, Greenfield, Lincoln Place and the North Side, during a period that began at about 3 p.m. Saturday, police said.

Investigators are trying to find the source of the heroin, Kraus said. They think it came in from another city, and they have specifically been in contact with police in Detroit.

Police said the heroin killed 45-year-old Joseph Zielinski of Penn Hills. He was found unconscious on Sunday in a Greenfield apartment with another overdose patient who survived.

Kraus said there have been so many overdoses that they are straining city police resources. Still, he doesn't consider the situation to be an epidemic.

So far, five arrests have been made.

Autopsies on the victims concluded that the deaths were all caused by heroin laced with fentanyl.

Detroit, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Chicago and other cities have all seen drug users die from heroin combined with fentanyl, which is considered 80 times more powerful than morphine.

Federal agents, working in cooperation with the Mexican government, closed down a lab in Mexico that might be the main source of the painkiller, U.S. drug czar John Walters said Monday.

Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said it's still not clear whether the fentanyl was mixed with heroin at the lab in Mexico or after it entered the United States. Fentanyl-laced cocaine also has turned up in some cities, he said.

He warned drug users that millions of deadly doses of fentanyl-laced heroin might still be on the streets.

Fentanyl might also be coming from other sources, he said.

"There may be more than one source," Walters said. "We think this is the principal source."

During Pittsburgh's notorious China White drug scandal in 1988, at least 18 people died from overdoses of 3-methyl fentanyl, a synthetic heroin. There were also about 75 nonfatal overdoses.

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