Half of all Americans take prescription medications. Eighty one percent take some type of pill. 100,000 die every year from a prescription med that they either didn't need or that was not properly prescribed. What is going on here?

Human beings are, to put it gently, in a unique position in the animal world. We're the only species smart enough to plan systematically for the future -- yet we remain dumb enough to ditch even our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. Even simple changes in thinking and behavior can markedly increase the chances of success in managing habits.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse recently offered adolescents the first ever "Drug Facts Chat Day." Students from high schools and middle schools across the country submitted anonymous questions online—about alcohol, the brain, addiction and everything in between...

The sometimes controversial work of Dr. Nora Volkow and others during the past 15 years has provided a better understanding of how neurobiological changes in the brain can lead a person to lose control over his or her behavior and become addicted to drugs.

Psychiatry, at least for certain diagnoses, has confused the really serious forms of the illness with the far lesser forms. The best example is depression. There has been a confusion and conflation of this diagnosis that confuses serious disorders with far lesser conditions or, in many cases, life problems. We've medicalized a lot of life issues that are not mental illnesses.

While some look for answers to addiction in religion, 12-step programs and the power of positive thinking, scientists are pushing forward the frontiers of neurobiology. Researchers are figuring out how addiction rewires the brain. The goal is to eventually be able to rewire an addicted brain back to the way it was, before the drugs, the cravings, and the self-destruction.

"Five or six years ago, I saw the writing on the wall. I knew the party was over," actor Robert Downey Jr. tells PARADE for this Sunday's issue. "It was time for me to come out of the Dark Ages and get real." For much of his adult life, Downey, 43, was caught in a ruinous cycle of drug addiction, imprisonment and disgrace. Downey claims that by 8 he already had used drugs with his filmmaker father.

Dual diagnosis services are treatments for people who suffer from co-occurring disorders -- mental illness and substance abuse. Research has strongly indicated that to recover fully, a consumer with co-occurring disorder needs treatment for both problems.

Addiction is a painful secret many families are too ashamed to discuss. In 2005, one father came forward in a very public way to share what it was like to love a child whose drug and alcohol abuse threatened to tear their family apart.

The pattern of out-of-control consumption in the United States, which per capita consumes 70 times more than India, with three times the U.S. population, is not qualitatively different from the well-known patterns of behavior of substance abusers.