NarcoScope — illicit-economy evidence atlas

🌍 NarcoScope

Live: [narcoscope.com](https://narcoscope.com) · evidence newsroom: [narcoscope.com/#newsroom](https://narcoscope.com/#newsroom)

Deployment status verified 2026-09-08: both narcoscope.com and www.narcoscope.com serve the Railway runtime. The Hetzner Fleet publisher deploys validated source from GitHub and verifies the exact commit on the provider and public origins. Registry metadata and agents use the apex MCP endpoint.

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.

Agent and API access

• RFC 9727 API Catalog: https://narcoscope.com/.well-known/api-catalog
• OpenAPI: https://narcoscope.com/openapi.json
• MCP manifest: https://narcoscope.com/server.json
• Streamable HTTP MCP: https://www.narcoscope.com/mcp
• Machine-readable product context: https://narcoscope.com/.well-known/ai-catalog.json
• Agent-readable guide: https://narcoscope.com/llms.txt

{

"mcpServers": { "narcoscope": { "url": "https://www.narcoscope.com/mcp" } } }

The MCP service is read-only and returns JSON Schema-backed structuredContent for every tool. Version 1.3 supports both the stateless MCP 2026-07-28 discovery lane and the legacy 2025-06-18 initialization lane. It preserves official, illustrative, stale, unavailable, and restricted states rather than turning missing evidence into a score.

The staged/live/Registry boundary and mandatory publication sequence are recorded in docs/MCP-1.3.0-RELEASE-GATE.md.

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.
• Evidence Newsroom — a deterministic, offline-capable publication pipeline with sentence-level citations and independent-source gates. Its first bounded analysis keeps lawful trade, selected official incidents and US harm data in separate evidence lanes, and states what cannot be joined or causally attributed from the public record.
• Palimpsest BRI context — a pinned, bounded source-readiness and national economic context lane for CPEC, Gwadar, CMEC, Kyaukpyu and Balochistan. It preserves official, independent and modeled claim classes plus unavailable WDI coverage, but cannot enter drug-market, actor, route, guilt, political or causal inference.
• 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.

Private ScamShield signal

The Hetzner analyst environment can ingest ScamShield's privacy-minimized Telegram aggregate for private review. This does not enter the website or its Git-backed datasets. A strict schema firewall rejects raw messages, exact IOCs, source identifiers, universal-coverage claims, public-eligibility claims, and anything that drops the human-review requirement. The importer has no network access and retains only aggregate counts, a source-file hash, hourly snapshots, and an append-only receipt ledger under /var/lib/narcoscope-analyst/.

See deploy/private-import/README.md for the trust boundary and production service.

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. These methods are outside the published aggregate-data scope.

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 Report 2025 (exact audited PDF) — https://www.incb.org/incb/uploads/documents/Publications/AnnualReports/AR2025/Precursors_Report/E_INCB_2025_4_eng.pdf
• 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 spans 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 Ca