Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Steve Merski. Got a minute?

We've been dealing with an epidemic in the United States related to opioids.

Wilson Compton, Deputy Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

He spoke February 12th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

What we've seen is that the increased number of prescriptions are driving the non-medical use of prescription drugs.

Drugs that are prescribed to treat pain.

So there's tremendous availability of prescriptions.

There's some 260 million prescriptions written in each year

for opioids. That's not tablets, that's prescriptions. So it's millions and millions of these,

and some of them are available for diversion and use inappropriately. Some of the pain patients may

become hooked, or their meds may find their way to friends or relatives who take

them recreationally, or a prescription opioid user may transition to heroin.

Heroin is just another opioid drug, so the brain doesn't distinguish, whether it comes from a pharmacy

or from a street drug dealer. What's been drawing the most public health attention is the overdose

death rates related to

prescription opioids and heroin, which have increased markedly over the last 15 years.

Right now, we see drug overdoses killing nearly 50,000 persons in a giving year in the United States.

...