Maureen Boyle, chief of the Science Policy Branch of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Edward Bilsky, a professor of pharmacology and the founding director of the Center for Excellence in Neurosciences at the University of New England, showed how opioids can commandeer the brain's natural systems that control
pain and reward, and trigger a vicious
response cycle that can diminish the
pain - relieving power of medications, prompt users to reach for increasingly
larger quantities of opioids and lead to deadly overdoses.