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Oxycodone pills, or Roxies, as they are known on the street, are as addictive as heroin or morphine. The addiction to these pills are affecting large swaths of the population in cities and suburbia. Pill chasing has become the new trend in some areas of this country.

These pills were designed as a safe and effective pain management tool, and, when used as prescribed and responsibly, do exactly as they were designed. Unfortunately, they are routinely used as the new heroin: an opiate which produces an intense high.

A new study in Current Biology has determined that the compulsive overconsumption of reward characterizes disorders ranging from binge eating to drug addiction. The evidence showed that enkephalin surges in the brain and contributes to generating intense consumption of palatable food.

Enkephalins are defined as an endorphin-like peptide that activates cerebral opioid receptors which contributes to what can be intense drive to keep eating, by the same mechanism that narcotics kill pain.

The researchers sought to solve the problem that binge-eating and addiction are both centered on the compulsive overconsumption of something that triggers the brain's reward center. But we do not yet fully understand the systems of neurotransmitters that motivate us to eat to binge eat.

Researchers injected rats with an artificial drug that activated the neostriatum -- an area of the brain previously associated with movement, habit, and the response to learned cues.

Then, they watched to see how activating that region of the brain affected the rats' eating behaviors. They came up with some interesting results. The rats' chocolate consumption increased by over 250 percent, to an average of about 10 M&Ms in a period of twenty minutes (considering they were human-sized M&Ms, that's comparable to us eating about six pound of chocolate in an hour). Their eating frenzy triggered a surge in enkephalin -- a natural peptide that resembles opium -- which remained elevated throughout the binge.

As a result, researchers showed that encephalin, an endorphin-like peptide that acts on opiate receptors in the brain, is released when rats (and presumably humans) eat chocolate, which contributes to what can be intense motivation to keep going.

Attention to all Chocoholics: The next time you finish off that industrial size bag of M&Ms without noticing they are gone, you may need a spell in rehab.