🌍 NarcoScope

Live: drug-price-observatory.vercel.app · permanent home: narcoscope.io (domain reserved, coming soon)

An educational, public-good data explorer that makes the world's drug-trade data legible. UNODC, INCB, and EUDA already publish street (retail) prices, precursor-chemical prices, and trafficking-flow/seizure data — but it's buried in dense PDFs and CSVs most people can't read. This app is a translation layer on top of that public data: clean charts, maps, and plain-English explanations.

Mission: democratize hard-to-read official drug data. Not a new data source — a way to understand the existing one.

What it shows

• Street Prices — retail price trends by country, with a purity-adjusted view and an affordability lens (price expressed as days of average local income).
• Precursor Flows & Prices — trafficking corridors and precursor-chemical prices, with source hubs (notably China) highlighted.
• Flow Map — an Equal-Earth world map of corridor arcs, animated over time.
• Triangulation — reads seizures against modalities that interdiction agencies do not collect. Seizure volume moves with enforcement capacity at least as much as with trafficking volume, and nothing inside the seizure data separates the two; overdose mortality (vital-statistics registrars) and wastewater load (environmental chemists) can. Where the modalities agree the reading is credible; where they diverge, the divergence is the finding — seizures up with consumption flat reads as an enforcement effect, consumption up with seizures flat reads as expansion interdiction missed. Every verdict reports how many independent modalities backed it and whether it survives dropping any one of them. Validation case: Canadian cannabis 2019→2023 reads seizures −94% against measured wastewater consumption +69%. Canada legalised cannabis in 2018, so the seizure collapse is enforcement stopping, not demand stopping — and the tool says so rather than reporting a shrinking market.
• Designations — the ~2,600 entities on the OFAC SDN list under the narcotics and transnational-crime authorities, searchable by name or by OFAC-published alias, plus a jurisdiction network built from the countries Treasury records each entity in. Betweenness and articulation-point analysis show which jurisdictions hold the designated networks together.
• Myanmar Focus — province-level (Golden Triangle) detail: production regions, civil-war conflict pressure, China/third-country precursor inflows, cross-border corridor towns, and seized volumes. The intelligence layer fuses multi-source evidence into per-region risk/confidence scores, flags cross-source disagreement, weights sources by reliability tier, computes a year-over-year risk trajectory (rising/falling/stable) so analysts see momentum, flags a geographic spillover watch when a calm region borders one that has already crossed the high-risk threshold, flags evidence staleness (current/aging/stale) when a region's freshest record predates the reporting year, discounting confidence accordingly, and scores precursor-corridor concentration with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (diversified/moderate/concentrated) to flag single-source supply dependency — both a fragility signal and an interdiction priority. Risk profiles and the evidence-graph ledger can be exported as CSV directly from the briefing for offline analyst review.

Every view carries an auto-generated "In plain English" sentence and hover tooltips that explain each figure in human terms.

Screenshots

Street Prices now ships official data: UNODC World Drug Report 2025, Statistical Annex 8.1 (retail per-gram prices + purities, 2019–2023, 208 records across 69 countries), with World Bank GDP-per-capita (2024) powering the affordability lens. Flow-map, precursor and Myanmar figures remain illustrative pending ingestion — the in-app badge states exactly which is which.

A dark, motion-led interface: a WebGL globe traces precursor corridors out of their source hubs (coral) toward transit and destination nodes (cyan), headings reveal letter-by-letter, and sections spring in as you scroll. The immersive layer is fully gated behind prefers-reduced-motion and falls back to a lightweight 2D canvas on mobile / WebGL-less devices.

Street Prices — price trends + affordability lens, with a plain-English summary:

Flow Map — Equal-Earth world map of precursor corridors, animated by year:

Myanmar Focus — province-level Golden Triangle detail:

Ethical scope (please read)

This tool reports aggregate, published statistics — country-level, annual, and (for focus regions) province-level — strictly for awareness, education, and research. By design it does not provide point-of-sale, real-time, sub-street, or navigable location data, and the precursor layer stores logistics only (what, how much, where, control status) with no chemistry, synthesis routes, or yields. It is not, and must not be used as, a guide to obtaining any substance.

Named entities

The Designations tab names people and companies, which every other layer avoids. The line it holds:

• A designation is a published act of a government — an entity placed on a list under a stated legal authority on a stated date. NarcoScope reports what the government did. It does not characterise what the entity did, carries no free-text allegation field, and a designation is not an adjudication of guilt. OFAC delists; check the live list before relying on any row.
• Addresses, passport and national-ID numbers and dates of birth are present in the upstream OFAC file and are deliberately not extracted.
• Journalism and crowd-sourced trackers are leads, not records. C4ADS, InSight Crime, EIA, GASO and the rest are registered in the source registry and read by the governed scraper into an analyst work queue. A named entity reaches a bundled dataset only if it also appears on an official designation list. The rule is written into scripts/scrape/myanmar-sources.json as verification_rule.
• The designation graph has no entity-to-entity edges, because OFAC publishes none. Inventing them and running centrality over the result would produce confident rankings of private individuals from a graph this tool made up. docs/ROADMAP-PARALLEL-ECONOMY.md records the methods excluded on these grounds, and why.

Data provenance

Most bundled figures are now official extracts, regenerated by the pipeline from the sources below. What is still illustrative is named explicitly: the Myanmar region-level flow volumes and the precursor price series (INCB publishes no precursor prices). The in-app badge states which is which, and every generated dataset carries a provenance header naming its source, retrieval date and extraction rules.

• UNODC — Drugs: prices & World Drug Report — https://dataunodc.un.org
• INCB — Precursors annual report & PICS — https://www.incb.org/incb/en/precursors/
• CDC NCHS — VSRR provisional drug overdose death counts — https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/VSRR-Provisional-Drug-Overdose-Death-Counts/xkb8-kh2a
• Statistics Canada — drug metabolites in municipal wastewater — https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310087101
• US Treasury OFAC — Specially Designated Nationals — https://sanctionslist.ofac.treas.gov/Home/SdnList
• EUDA (EMCDDA) — price, purity & wastewater — https://www.euda.europa.eu/data
• World Bank — GDP per capita — https://data.worldbank.org
• ACLED / International Crisis Group — Myanmar civil-war context

The full registry is 40 sources across three tiers — automated datasets, manual-step datasets, and investigative reports that feed the analyst work queue rather than the app — in scripts/pipeline/sources.json. Each entry records its licence, cadence, automation tier, and what it feeds. Two entries are registered specifically so the reasoning is not relitigated: OpenSanctions publishes no licence on its bulk artifacts and is therefore a lookup pointer rather than a bundled dataset, and OCCRP Aleph's per-collection licences forbid redistribution.

Wastewater comes from Canada, not Europe. EUDA returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients (on the current URL, the legacy one, and the copy linked from data.europa.eu) and ACIC ships PDFs, so neither of the famous programmes can be automated. Statistics Canada publishes the same measurement, at the same grain, in the same SCORE unit, through a keyless API under an open licence — so that is the bundled default, and Canada is the second fully-triangulated country. European and Australian coverage still needs a verified export through the CSV panel.

Load real data through the "Load official data (CSV)" panel in the footer; each file is parsed by src/lib/ingest.ts and bad rows are reported, not silently dropped. See src/lib/ingest-config-reference.md for the column mapping.

Myanmar conflict and precursor-flow source triage can be prepared with the Palimpsest-style governed scraper:

npm run scrape:myanmar -- --out docs/sources/myanmar-observations.csv --pretty

That output is an analyst work queue with excerpts and content fingerprints, not direct app data; verify and code rows into the Myanmar civil-war / precursor CSV schemas before loading them.

A derived ontology of every entity and relation type actually present in the data is regenerated by npm run ontology into docs/ontology/. It is induced by observation over the bundled datasets rather than generated by a language model: the corpus is already typed and provenance-tagged, so the schema can be read off it directly, which removes the hallucination risk entirely. It is a draft for review and is never auto-applied to src/types.ts.

The new Enterprise Intel tab adds an event/entity evidence graph, regional risk scores, confidence/source-diversity indicators, and an evidence ledger for analyst review. See docs/ENTERPRISE_HARDENING.md for the paper-backed design.

Tech

React 18 · Vite 8 · TypeScript · Recharts · react-simple-maps (world-atlas bundled locally). The interface layer adds Three.js / React Three Fiber (a lazy-loaded hero globe with bloom post-processing — kept out of the initial bundle), @react-spring/web (physics-based letter/section reveals and animated counters), and Lenis (global smooth scroll) — all behind a prefers-reduced-motion guard. Runtime data store (src/lib/dataStore.ts) swaps sample → real data on load.

Develop

npm install
npm run dev        # local dev server
npm run scrape:myanmar -- --pretty
npm run ontology   # regenerate docs/ontology/draft-ontology.{json,md}
npm run build      # type-check (tsc) + production build → dist/
npm run preview    # preview the build
npm run typecheck  # tsc --noEmit
npm test           # run unit tests (Vitest)

Deploy (Vercel)

The repo is Vercel-ready (vercel.json pins the Vite framework). Either:

• Dashboard: import the Git repo at vercel.com — zero config, auto-detected.
• CLI: npx vercel (preview) / npx vercel --prod (production).

Data pipeline

npm run data:refresh fetches the automatable open sources (UNODC WDR annexes, World Bank GDP, CDC VSRR mortality, OFAC SDN designations), regenerates the bundled datasets, and validates them against the test suite. Individual refreshes: npm run data:overdose, npm run data:designations. A quarterly GitHub Action does the same and opens a PR when the data changes. The full source registry (including the manual and API-key sources not yet wired in) lives in scripts/pipeline/sources.json; the playbook is docs/DATA_PIPELINE.md.

Status / TODO

• purityAdjustedPrice() is an intentional stub done — it now returns price per pure gram and refuses to adjust when purity is unknown (an honest n/a beats comparing a cut street price against a pure one). See the editorial note in src/lib/metrics.ts.
• Load and verify real UNODC/INCB data Street prices: done (WDR 2025 Annex 8.1, see src/data/prices.ts provenance header). Remaining: precursor prices, flow corridors, and the Myanmar dataset.
• Wastewater now ships (Canada). Extending it to Europe or Australia still needs a manually-fetched EUDA or ACIC export — both publishers block automation. Each one added is another country where divergence detection works.
• The UN Consolidated Sanctions List is registered and verified reachable but not yet converted — it would give the designation layer a second independent designating authority. See docs/ROADMAP-PARALLEL-ECONOMY.md for the ordered backlog and for the methods excluded on ethical or data-quality grounds.

License

MIT — free to use, adapt, and build on, with attribution.