Alice Bell, an outreach worker for the group, said overdoses kill more people in the Pittsburgh area than traffic accidents or homicides. Bell and others have provided hour-long training sessions to 3,000 people since 2003; 2,000 were prison inmates.

Targeting inmates is important because they are at elevated risk of overdosing on drugs once they get out of prison, said Robert Heimer, associate professor of epidemiology and public health at the Yale University School of Medicine. Many overdoses occur because inmates lose their tolerance for drugs while they are behind bars and then take a too-strong dose of their drug of choice when they get out.

Prevention Point does not distribute the anti-overdose drug Narcan to those attending the classes, but may begin doing so at its needle-exchange programs. Rather, the training focuses on such issues as factors that affect drug tolerance, never taking drugs while alone, and dispelling myths such as the belief that an overdose victims should be packed in ice.

"The cure for a heroin or other opiate overdose is oxygen," Bell said. "If you can keep someone breathing, you can keep them alive."

One attendee at Bell's inmate class, Frederick Tillman, 47, later said: "I think everybody needs this training who is in active addiction or knows someone who is. I learned some things today that may help save a life -- maybe my own life, though my goal is to go out of here and stay clean."

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