What I was trying to get at is that, at first glance it seems like a consistent normalized way to depict the comparison. Let's say you have a list of OD deaths(d) and a list of populations(p) over the years. You're using d/p for each year, right? but while d seems like an independent variable, the p also accounts for a corrected value due to natural deaths, gun violence, disease, other substance abuse etc., So if you had 2 subsequent years with the same number of people dying of Opioid overdose, but the population changed drastically with larger deaths or more births, the d/p changes. These 2 need not be balanced all the years and especially during the pandemic. Just using regular counts won't be affected by variability of population. if one year the (d,p) is (50,300) and next it is (45,200), has it increased or decreased per 10 people? Even though deaths decreased by 5, the deaths per 10 people are 1.6 and then 2.25, which means it increased a lot. So which way are you doing it and why not just show actual counts of it on the y scale instead? why would that give any wrong info?

Isn't it better to do a histogram or use the actual count for Y-axis, since population will keep varying and declining for various reasons. Would it be different from deaths per 100k metric?

>This was mostly an attempt to collect more info from people who might see their usual trick not mentioned there.

Yes, trust me I learnt that the hard way. I tried to include multiple scenarios and will keep updating it

Thanks for your insight. We're you even able to access the link? Turns out it was behind a membership thing. I updated the link url so it should be free now. I couldn't find any helpful solutions to my problem and had to try everything, until the last paragraph which finally solved it and I had to figure that out through trial and error. So instead of someone new opening 35 tabs the next time , I figured I'd consolidate everything I attempted into a post that I can keep editing if I come across anything more, or if someone decides to share anything useful about their experience with this issue, along with what sort of models they were running.

This was mostly an attempt to collect more info from people who might see their usual trick not mentioned there. I'm glad I could cover everything you already know