Availability and reuse of government data on the seizure of drugs of abuse

an analysis based on the DGABr metric

Abstract

The availability and quality of data on drug seizures are essential prerequisites for better understanding the problem of drug trafficking and for formulating more effective public policies. However, the lack of studies assessing the quality and accessibility of these data in Brazil represents a significant gap in knowledge on this topic. In this study, the DGABr metric was used to analyze the availability, quality, and reuse of DGA on drug seizures, seeking to understand the current scenario in Brazil. The data were manually collected from websites and web platforms of the main national security agencies between 2022 and 2023. The analysis of the datasets revealed that they only partially met the metric criteria, with emphasis on the Federal Police data on synthetic drugs, which presented a high score in the metric, reaching four points on a scale of zero to five in the reuse indicator, while the other databases analyzed presented a score of three in the indicator. Despite the good overall results, the research identified the need for several improvements, such as the development of more accessible dissemination tools, in addition to compliance with the open data plan and data standardization, as evidenced by dimensions 13, 21, 22, 25 and 26 of the metric. By demonstrating its potential to deepen the analysis of data on drug seizures, the metric opens up new possibilities for research and contributes to the advancement of open data assessment in Brazil.