Good news for drug addicts, bad, bad news for government conspiracy theorists.

BYU researchers have utilized the protein responsible for addiction in rats to get them addicted to things like heroin without them ever actually using the Schedule 1 drug.

"If we can understand how the brain's circuitry changes in association with drug abuse, it could potentially suggest ways to medically counteract the effects of dependency," said Scott Steffensen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University who co-authored the study.

Previous research identified that drug addicts have an increase of the naturally occurring protein called BDNF in the brain's reward circuitry. By skipping the drug addiction portion of the equation and simply pumping in more BDNF, researchers from BYU and the University of Toronto were able to get rats to behave as if they were addicted to opiates.

"This work may reveal a mechanism that underlies drug addiction," said the study's lead author Hector Vargas-Perez, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto.

Steffensen, who teaches in BYU's psychology department, says this work suggests that BDNF is crucial for inducing a drug dependent state. The research will be published Friday in the journal Science.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in 2007, nearly 20 million people across the country were users of illicit drugs with the most popular being marijuana.

Federal and state governments spent a combined $467.7 billion fighting the effects of drug abuse, with the vast majority -- 95.6 percent -- being spent on reactionary measures such as jails and prisons. Just 1.9 percent was spent on prevention and treatment, according to a study released Thursday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.