Data from the Center for Disease Control’s Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Automated Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) with figure by GraphPad Prism 9.4.

Can something be inferred from this? Or is it a cool correlation? (Sorry I’m rarely on these but, I can’t sleep)

… perhaps a not so cool correlation?

The main inference might be that methadone for pain, which is used at lower-doses, is pretty safe. Methadone for opioid use disorder, not so much.

Yes, its just a correlation, but a very strong one! It would be nicer to have a comparison group that didn't change their take-home rules.

How does the data imply that methadone for pain is safer? The average (over dose size, which is a bad average as we don’t know how prevalent each dose is…) overdoses/100k of both groups are about the same, and for the same dose it seems like methadone for OUD is much much safer. The graphs do imply that large doses of methadone for OUD are less safe than small doses, but overall it seems like small and even moderate doses of methadone for OUD are much safer than the average use of methadone for pain.

[deleted]

>The main inference might be that methadone for pain, which is used at lower-doses, is pretty safe.

Methadone for alleviation of pain actually seems less safe than for addressing opioid use disorder from the data presented.