🌍 NarcoScope
Live: narcoscope.com · evidence newsroom: 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.
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.
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 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.
The Evidence Newsroom tab reads a checked-in dossier and receipt generated
without network access or model calls. Publication requires sentence and visual
citations, active upstream-source independence for synthesis, a countercase,
limitations and causal/culpability safety checks. See
docs/EVIDENCE_NEWSROOM.md.
Evidence newsroom publication contract
The newsroom is visibly labelled automated evidence analysis, with
humanReviewStatus: not_recorded. No generative model participates in its build,
no expert or affected-person testimony is included, and it never simulates those
human voices. Its initial article makes no named allegation, records right to
reply as not_required, and publishes a correction/update history with stable
revision and content hashes.
An official record used by the build can support an attributed observation. An
analytical or methodological synthesis requires at least two independent,
actively used official upstream groups; merely registering an available,
capability-only or unavailable source contributes zero corroboration. When the
inputs lack a lawful-trade denominator, record-level join, adjudicated outcome or
defensible country allocation, the newsroom abstains. It does not turn origin
labels, administrative designations or a separate mortality trend into guilt or
causal attribution.
Publication surfaces are:
- app route:
/#newsroom;
- standalone HTML:
/news/china-linked-precursor-incidents-official-record.html;
- machine brief:
/news/china-linked-precursor-incidents-official-record.machine-brief.json;
- cited dossier:
/news/china-linked-precursor-incidents-official-record.dossier.json;
- JSON Feed:
/news/feed.json; and
- Atom feed:
/news/feed.xml.
Run npm run news:build to regenerate the offline bundle and
npm run news:check to verify every checked-in byte. The production build runs
the stale-artifact check before TypeScript and Vite.
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
npm run scrape:myanmar -- --pretty
npm run ontology
npm run news:build
npm run news:check
npm run bridge:palimpsest-bri:check
npm run build
npm run preview
npm run typecheck
npm test
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 stubn/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 and qualified
precursor-flow records: done (WDR 2025 Annex 8.1 and the paragraph-located
INCB 2025 precursor report). Remaining: a citable precursor-price series 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.
- A second designating authority for the Designations tab (it is OFAC-only
today). The UN Consolidated list was evaluated and ruled out — it is a
counter-terrorism instrument with almost no narcotics designations; EU
Sanctions Map is the live candidate. See
docs/ROADMAP-PARALLEL-ECONOMY.md
for the ordered backlog and for the methods excluded on ethical or
data-quality grounds.
License
MIT covers the application code. Data retains its source-specific license and attribution requirements. The WDR annexes are reproduced for this educational project; resale and other commercial reuse require publisher permission. The API and CSV exports preserve these terms.
Connected China and regional research
BRI, CPEC/Gwadar, Balochistan and Myanmar views include a shared Palimpsest research desk. Switch the research area to China for detailed NBS findings. Annual national debt, reserve, current-account and inflation comparisons keep reference years visible; they do not measure project or district outcomes.
The REST resource is /api/v1/connected-research; MCP exposes get_connected_research. Both serve the validated public/data/palimpsest-connected-research-v1.json snapshot with its SHA-256 sidecar. npm run bridge:connected:sync refreshes from the fixed Palimpsest URL; npm run bridge:connected:check verifies the packaged copy offline. The Hetzner wire publisher refreshes it during scheduled publication. Failed acquisition preserves the dated copy.
Snapshots can also include the China evidence observatory: deduplicated economic histories, EU-reported trade, official-document changes and historical methodology cases. China shows the complete findings; regional views show the separately attributed trade context. The optional observatory summary adds a fifth named input hash and a matching source clock. Its hash identifies the full Palimpsest evidence snapshot; the packaged-file SHA-256 also binds the summary served by REST and MCP. Older four-input snapshots remain readable.
The bridge admits four fixed public dataset routes and reviewed coverage counts. SAFE numeric records remain private; its card and download contain acquisition metadata only. Document absence, methodological revisions and trade disagreement do not establish concealment, culpability or causality. Official-announcement dates remain separate from collection dates.
NBS statistical-data attribution, World Bank CC BY 4.0 attribution and publisher metadata-only terms remain source-specific. Shared geography or timing does not establish actor relationships, culpability or causality. Detailed collector/analysis methods are in Palimpsest’s docs/CONNECTED-ECONOMIC-RESEARCH.md.
Global market research workspace
The shared dark research interface connects NarcoScope and Palimpsest. The data library queries source-native country, city, category, breakdown and period observations; it includes linked choropleth maps, comparison histories, geographic bars, source-record inspection and attributed CSV downloads. Existing seizure, organized-crime, regional, overdose and wastewater views remain accessible.
The new library contains 129,217 source cells (74,373 numerical observations and 54,844 explicitly unavailable cells) across 58 indicators. Sources include the WDR2026 drug annexes, monthly Statistics Canada wastewater measurements, World Bank informality estimates, and source-licensed WDI conventional-arms and firm-survey series. Armament transfer TIV is not a monetary value or a classification of illegal trade. Informality models do not measure the entire black economy. Each source retains its reference dates and restrictions.
npm run markets:check verifies the public source-bound catalog and contracts; npm run workspace:build produces the portable explorer used by Palimpsest. /api/v1/markets discovers coverage and valid filter combinations; /api/v1/market-observations returns paginated measurements. The MCP equivalents are get_market_catalog and query_market_observations. The source datasets remain external to the initial JavaScript bundle.
Connected research
The Seiche research_network tool and /api/v2/research-network endpoint
connect Palimpsest's complete source catalog with separately completed funding
context and explicit research steps into LiquiLens, Undertow and NarcoScope.
Use topic, offset and limit; follow next_offset for remaining datasets.
The human desk is https://seiche.info/#RESEARCH. Telegram readers can use
/research china, /research regions or /research liquidity.
Catalog rows are references, not permission to redistribute source values or
change a score. Source clocks, rights and missingness remain attached. The
retrieved catalog hash is a byte identity, not a producer attestation.
