Pew Charitable Trusts

Drinking is more likely to be the cause of death in much of the Southwest than in other parts of the country. Suicide by gun stands out as disproportionately lethal in parts of the Upper Midwest and Alaska.

California has a problem: Fifty-two percent of its managers in the state workforce could decide in the next five years that they’re tired of working, grab their retirement packages and go. Their departure would create a serious brain drain for the state, which has the largest number of state employees in the country — 220,000.

They are doing so despite studies that show the laws can make more offenders homeless, or make it more likely they will falsely report or not disclose where they are living.

In the face of a drug overdose epidemic that killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, a handful of states are insisting that health professionals do a little research before they write another prescription for highly addictive drugs like Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin.

The relatively high percentage of American women who die as a result of pregnancy, which exceeds that of other developed nations, is prompting a new national prevention campaign that is relying on the states to take a leading role.

In small doses, flakka elicits euphoria. But just a little too much sends body temperatures rocketing to 105 degrees, causing a sense of delirium that often leads users to strip down and flee from paranoid hallucinations as their innards, quite literally, melt.

At a time when state taxes from traditional gambling like lotteries and casinos are flat or declining, a majority of states are now seeking to regulate — and possibly raise revenue from — daily fantasy sports sites.

Some smart city advocates emphasize efforts to engage and connect with residents, others emphasize infrastructure. But the general goal — something no city has yet achieved — is to collect immediate data on everything from traffic patterns to home water use, analyze it, and use that information to make the city work better.

Unlike most of the roughly 1,400 methadone clinics across the country, the Broadway Center offers not only methadone, but the two other federally approved addiction medications, buprenorphine and naltrexone, and a full complement of mandatory addiction counseling and group classes.

For years, recycling programs seemed like magic. Municipalities, counties and state-run programs were not only improving the environment, but spending little to do so and in many cases saving money by not having to pay landfill fees or making money by selling the material to processors who wanted it.