

What is the true street value of Marijuana? - coryl
http://www.priceofweed.com/

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coryl
This is a project my friend and I launched to answer some curiosities we have
about the real street value of marijuana. I got the idea after watching a
National Geographic documentary on Marijuana where they gave some interesting
but not totally believable figures about the price of marijuana as it travels
across borders, facing different economic/legal statuses from state to state.

I realized nobody really knows the price or street value, as the flow of
information is nearly none due to its black market status.

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harmonik
Think you could open the results to the public? or am I missing a link?

~~~
coryl
We're showing last 10 now, we'll make a page that shows all posts and maybe
some googlemaps/visualizations.

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mpk
As this is a global project, you might want to make grams an option.

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petervandijck
Finally a use for crowdsourcing!

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hysterix
This is a really cool idea! Unfortunately it is difficult to check this for
any accuracy.

It is not clear what is low, medium, and high quality, perhaps a strain name
for example? (high quality - og kush) etc.

I noticed the prices were wrong in California as well, hence I bring up my
point about accuracy. Cool idea, I think you just need lots and lots of people
to average it all out.

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coryl
I think most people can at least tell the difference between good and bad
quality. Average/medium is slightly harder, so it might be more useful to
group medium with high.

For the most part, the entries look accurate to me. I noticed a lot of
variance in California as well, I'm wondering if thats because some people are
buying legally (medical), some not. My hypothesis is that the overall price
should drop from before, but now we have two different supply and demand
graphs because the number of licenses for buying and growing is limited.

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russell
The current price is high because the supply is constrained. If CA Proposition
19 passes, the price is probably going to drop by an order of magnitude. The
dreams of the tax revenue rescuing the state are going to vanish. (No citation
because I pulled this out of my nether regions.)

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tptacek
Pricing is probably disrupted more by the inefficiency of the market; like
most people, if I wanted to buy an eighth tomorrow, how would I know whether
$50, $75, or $250 was a good price?

Which is to say that there are least two factors (scarcity and lack of
transparency) artificially inflating pricing.

On the other hand, in a truly free market for tobacco, a pack of American
Spirits might only cost a buck or two; nicotine is our one and only drug-war
success, and I think the state has demonstrated that it can extract profits
from vice goods if it wants to.

You'd still pay $75 (is that the right price?) for an 1/8 if that was the only
legal way to do it, even if you could get it illegally for $30. At least, I
would.

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mikemol
(pedantic) For a physical object, scarcity isn't inherently an artificially
inflating factor. Enforced scarcity is a different matter. (/pedantic)

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NateLawson
This doesn't make sense. Whether scarcity is enforced or natural, it's the
demand & supply that drives the price inflation. The reason for scarcity (lack
of supply) does not come into play during a static economic analysis.

It's only in a dynamic analysis that the "enforced" part comes into play,
usually because it is easier to get around artificial scarcity than discover
new resources (natural scarcity).

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mikemol
Scarcity is a natural property of supply, which is a natural factor of price.
As a property without inherent artificial component, scarcity cannot
artificially affect price without said scarcity itself being given an
artificial component such as being purposefully controlled to that end.

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shrikant
Why do I see only 3 Kent options in my drop-down?

Screencap: <http://i.imgur.com/mBKi9.jpg>

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coryl
The geoIP detection isn't perfect unfortunately, we use your IP and try to
show the best guesses with the database we have. If you could tell me your
location it would help in trying to improve it.

Thanks

~~~
shrikant
_[..] we use your IP and try to show the best guesses with the database we
have._

So if I'd blazed up in LA or Copenhagen or Brussels, then gone back home to
Bangalore and discovered this site, I wouldn't be able to enter data?

I'm in London now, fwiw.

~~~
coryl
Not at the moment, but perhaps in the future.

