Methodology
How this site is built
openarcos is a static site assembled from three public datasets. Everything below — sources, cleaning, joins, caveats — is reproducible from the repo at GitHub.
Sources
- Washington Post ARCOS
- County-, pharmacy-, and distributor-level shipments 2006–2014. View at arcos-api.ext.nile.works. Released under the Post's investigative usage terms.
- DEA Diversion Control
- Annual enforcement summaries and notable actions. View at deadiversion.usdoj.gov. Public domain (17 USC §105).
- CDC WONDER
- Overdose deaths by county-year via the D76 multiple-cause-of-death dataset. View at wonder.cdc.gov. Cells with fewer than 10 deaths are suppressed per CDC rules; we preserve this as a boolean flag rather than a zero.
Joins
The pipeline builds a canonical FIPS × year grid from Census PEP population estimates, then LEFT JOINs each cleaned source. The result lives at data/joined/master.parquet and is the input to every emitted artifact.
Caveats
- ARCOS covers 2006–2014 only. Later years are not in this dataset.
- CDC suppression hides cells with fewer than 10 deaths in a county-year — the map shows these as "suppressed," not zero.
- Pill counts are in DEA "dosage units," not individual pills; a 100mg tablet counts as one unit regardless of strength.
- DEA enforcement totals are scraped from annual PDFs; our counts are approximate and may diverge from DEA's internal tallies.
Licenses
- Code: Apache 2.0 — View license
- Fonts: SIL OFL 1.1 (Space Grotesk, Inter) — View license
- Data: Each source's upstream license applies; see above.
Access dates
The data bundle is refreshed weekly by .github/workflows/build-data.yml. The build date is stamped in the site footer.