Q: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
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 / Updated By Corky Siemaszko 
  
 How many Americans are using prescription opioid painkillers? About one in three. 
  
 That's the stunning number in a new survey released Monday from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which calculated that a whopping 91.8 million Americans used drugs like OxyContin or Vicodin in 2015. 
  
 And nearly five percent of the adults surveyed told researchers they took these drugs without their doctor’s permission, the study reported. 
  
 They didn’t get their meds from some seedy drug dealer, either. 
  
 “The most commonly reported sources were friends and relatives for free,” the study reported. “Or a physician.” 
  
 The NIDA study was released on the same day that the presidential opioid commission, chaired by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, released its first report and recommendations for tackling an opioid plague that killed more than 15,000 people in 2015, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
  
 The study urged President Donald Trump to "declare a national emergency" and noted that "America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks." 
  
 “As access to prescription opioids tightens, consumers increasingly are turning to dangerous street opioids, heroin, fentanyl alone or combined, and mingled with cocaine or other drugs," the commission stated in an interim report to Trump. 
  
 NIDA said the treatment of pain is at the root of the problem. 
  
 “Our results are consistent with findings that pain is a poorly addressed clinical and public health problem in the United States and that it may be a key part of the pathway to misuse or addiction,” the group stated in the study. 
  
 NIDA’s recommendations included "better prevention and treatment of the underlying disorders are necessary to decrease pain and the morbidity and mortality associated with opioid misuse,” the study said. 
  
 Related: Son of Nashville Mayor Dies of Drug Overdose 
  
 “Simply restricting access to opioids without offering alternative pain treatments may have limited efficacy in reducing prescription opioid abuse.” 
  
 It could also “lead people to seek prescription opioids outside the health system or to use nonprescription opioids such as heroin or illicitly made fentanyl, which could increase health, misuse, and overdose risks.” 
  
 Trump launched the commission on March 29 to tackle a drug problem that kills an estimated 78 Americans per day. 
  
 In their report, the Christie-led commission made several recommendations. Among other things, they suggested expanding treatment facilities across the country, educating doctors about the proper way to prescribe pain medication, equipping all police officers with the anti-overdose remedy naloxone, developing new fentanyl detection sensors, and improving data-sharing among law enforcement agencies. 
  
 "Since 1999, the number of opioid overdoses in America have quadrupled," the presidential commission stated. "Not coincidentally, in that same period, the amount of prescription opioids in America have quadrupled as well." 
  
 The commission’s first report on the federal response to the opioid crisis was supposed to be released 90 days after Trump launched it in March. But it was delayed twice while the Republican-led House and then the Senate tried and failed to repeal and replace Obamacare. 
  
 Related: How One Man’s Mutant DNA May Help End the Deadly Opioid Crisis 
  
 Critics said the Obamacare repeal plans the GOP was pushing would have gutted existing programs that have been helping legions of substance abusers kick their habits. 
  
 Meanwhile, the Democrats accused Christie and the Trump administration of "dragging its feet" on the issue. 
  
 “There’s money available,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday. “The commission is supposed to put (forward) the best ways to spend that, and they haven’t done that." 
  
 Christie insisted the delays were necessary because they got far more input from the public than they had expected. 
  
 Criminal justice professor Brian Levin said the feeling among many academics is that Trump’s commission is "window dressing." 
  
 “Like many initiatives coming out of the administration, it’s hampered by the chaos around management,” Levin, of the California State University San Bernardino, told NBC News. “Moreover, there seems to be a concentration on rhetoric and law enforcement responses at a time when resources from health and addiction are on the chopping block.” 
  
 Levin, a former New York City police officer who walked a beat in Manhattan at the height of the crack epidemic, said arresting more people won’t end the opioid crisis. 
  
 “The research indicates that enforcement alone, absent a systematic medical and counseling response, is due to fail,” Levin said. |||||  
  
 A pharmacy technician poses for a picture with Hydrocodone and acetaminophen tablets, also known as Vicodin, in 2010 at the Oklahoma Hospital Discount Pharmacy in Edmond, Okla. (Sue Ogrocki/AP) 
  
 What's the dollar value of pain? Or more accurately: What's the value of getting rid of it or avoiding it completely? 
  
 That's the question posed by a team of Icelandic and American economists in a working paper published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It's not just an academic inquiry — the opiate epidemic currently ravaging many U.S. communities owes much of its existence to the more aggressive stance toward pain that pharmaceutical companies, doctors and patients started adopting in the 1990s. 
  
 The question of "how did we arrive at a place where 60,000 people a year die from drug overdose," in other words, is at least partly a question of "how far would we go to avoid pain?" 
  
 But if you're an economist, answering that question is surprisingly difficult. You can't simply flat-out ask people how much they'd pay to avoid pain. Most people aren't used to thinking of their suffering in dollar terms. People who haven't experienced severe or chronic pain are likely to underestimate the value of being pain-free. There's often a gap between what people say on questions like these, and what they actually do. 
  
 So for this paper, the researchers used a technique that's been used to study the implicit "cost" of a number of different ailments, like migraines, cancer and arthritis. They analyzed data from over 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 who had taken part in the Health and Retirement Study, a federally-funded survey of older Americans, between 2008 and 2014. 
  
 That survey asked respondents three key questions. First, how satisfied they were with their life overall. Second, how much money they made in the past year. And third and most crucially: "Are you often troubled with pain?" 
  
 Triangulating a dollar value for pain from these three variables requires some statistical jiu-jitsu. To heavily oversimplify it, you can use the three numbers to estimate how much money it would take for a person currently suffering pain to rise to the same level of overall life satisfaction as somebody not experiencing pain. Conversely, for a person not experiencing pain you can estimate how much money you'd have to take away for them to have the same life satisfaction as a pain-sufferer. 
  
 As the study's authors put it, you get an implicit answer to this question without having to actually pose it to people: "Consider your overall satisfaction with life being often troubled by pain, what would you be willing to pay to be just as happy but without pain?" 
  
 The answer: between $56 and $145. A day. Which works out to between $20,000 and $53,000 a year. Recall that the median household income is about $56,000, and the trade-off becomes stark: Some people would theoretically be willing to give up their entire livelihoods to be pain-free. 
  
 These results control for a number of other factors that could presumably influence this trade-off, like marital status, age, race, and various health conditions. The authors nonetheless found that two considerations have a lot of influence on the numbers: pain severity (the more pain you're in, the more you'd pay to make it stop) and overall income (if you have more money to burn, you'd pay more to get rid of pain). 
  
 Still, the overall well-being cost of pain is staggering, particularly when you stack it against the cost of products designed to make pain go away: prescription opiates. At current prices, according to drug price aggregator GoodRX, you can purchase a 120-pill supply of Oxycodone for about $20 (without insurance). That works out to a generous day's supply of four pills for a total of 68 cents. Insurance coverage would drive the price down to practically zero. All you need is a doctor's prescription. 
  
 Imagine you're a rational pain-sufferer, willing to pay upwards of $100 a day to ease your suffering. Along comes a product that offers the promise of doing that for less than 1/100th of that price. What are you going to do? 
  
 This new study has limitations, of course. It focused exclusively on older Americans — the math might be different for young folks. The pain price estimates are just that — estimates, based on survey data that may be subject to its own forms of error. 
  
 But it nevertheless underscores the huge gap between what people appear to be willing to pay to get rid of pain and the actual price dealing with pain via opiate painkillers. |||||
A:
Chronic pain can be downright unbearable, and opioids to treat it can be hard to quit. In fact, with opioid addiction claiming more lives than ever, the US is experiencing what President Trump has just called a national emergency. Researchers found that in 2015, one in three Americans took opioid painkillers—sometimes prescribed by physicians, sometimes not, reports NBC News. And with aging populations in the US and beyond, researchers are now helping governments put a price on pain so that officials can decide how much of a spending priority to make pain management and research into pain management. In short, the new research says that for people who are 50 and older in the US, avoiding chronic pain is worth anywhere from $56 to $145 a day, reports Quartz. Specifically, researchers looked at three things: each respondent's life satisfaction, income, and pain level. To "heavily oversimplify it," as the Washington Post puts it, the numbers represent either how much extra money a person suffering from chronic pain would need to make every day to enjoy the life satisfaction of someone not in pain, or how much a person not experiencing pain would have to lose to experience the life satisfaction of someone in pain. The range adds up to $20,000 to $53,000 a year, which almost reaches the country's $56,000 median household income. Not surprisingly, wealthier people and those in the most pain are willing to pay more for pain management. (The opioid epidemic may be considerably worse than previously calculated.)