Doctors in some states seem to wield a freer hand issuing prescriptions for powerful narcotic medications, leading to wide variations in narcotic drug use among states, U.S. health officials reported Tuesday.
Physicians in Alabama -- the state with the highest number of narcotic painkiller prescriptions -- issued nearly three times as many of those prescriptions as doctors in Hawaii -- the lowest prescribing state, according to researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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