EscobAddictions — Global Drug Data Analysis

Context

Academic data science project at UQAC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), inspired by the Netflix series Narcos. The team approached the project from the angle of a fictional anti-drug agency: rather than a single narrow question, we conducted four independent studies to understand the evolution, impact, and correlations surrounding global drug phenomena. Data was sourced from Kaggle, Our World in Data, the World Bank, and UNODC.

Approach

• ·Study 1 — Analyzed drug-related overdose deaths in Connecticut (2012–2018): mortality rate per substance, average victim age, and sex breakdown using Chief Medical Examiner data
• ·Study 2 — Mapped drug use patterns by age group across the US (12–65+): consumption rates and frequency for 12 substances including alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and fentanyl
• ·Study 3 — Explored the correlation between cocaine death rates and intentional homicide rates across countries using normalized covariance on World Bank + Our World in Data datasets
• ·Study 4 — Tracked prison admission trends for drug trafficking vs. possession across countries over 2016–2021 using UNODC Criminal Justice Statistics
• ·Built an interactive Power BI dashboard with 3 pages: deaths by substance, drug use by age, and a world map of cocaine mortality rates (1990–2019)

Solution

Four Jupyter Notebooks covering end-to-end data pipelines — ingestion, cleaning, feature engineering, analysis, and visualization — consolidated into a written report and an interactive Power BI dashboard for stakeholder communication.

Applications

• ·Drug-related mortality trend analysis
• ·Demographic consumption profiling
• ·Cross-country policy impact comparison
• ·Data storytelling with Power BI