When a tag for this article came up in my Gmail, I couldn't resist clicking to see if Utah was in the top ten. It is not. With the odd exception of Iowa, the top 10 is completely dominated by the Southeast. The article links high rates of medication with high rates of obesity, diabetes, and / or tobacco usage. Not mentioned in the article, as I recall, was the fact that obesity and its accompanying health problems are linked to poverty, and poverty correlates with race. So no surprise that most of the poorest states in the country, with the highest percentages of African-Americans, are among the most medicated. Which comes back to the fact that it is very expensive both to be poor and to blithely allow poverty to persist. But maybe it's a price we're willing to pay in order to carry on with our biases.
California is in the bottom ten. You don't need a prescription for the Napa Valley (though technically you might need one for other medications grown in Northern CA).
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