I think one problem you will run into is that you are attempting to compare prices while also keeping fuzzy distinctions like quality. Alabama has cheaper "high quality" weed than California? That tells me that what would sell for $400/oz in CA is not available at any price in AL.
If you cut out the user-supplied quality metric or figure out some way to try to normalize this across the samples (e.g. ask submitters if they have purchased in other states and how they would rank this purchase against that past purchase) you would probably get better useful data.
Indeed, quality is highly subjective and relative to product available on the market. I have a personal hypothesis that most average smokers can't distinguish high quality vs medium quality.
I'm not sure how practical it is to get users to try and compare product quality from different locations; the sample size would probably be very low because most people buy and consume where they live.
True. I was mostly suggesting that you should drop the quality distinction but trying to leave you an out in case there was some clever way to normalize this. I think that in general people would find an accurate average more useful because then they could perform any quality discounting on their own using the known basepoint.
I actually think there could be some objective quality measures, but you would need someone with a fair range of experience to judge. Perhaps number of buds per ounce in the mix or a simple color/image chart to select from?
If you cut out the user-supplied quality metric or figure out some way to try to normalize this across the samples (e.g. ask submitters if they have purchased in other states and how they would rank this purchase against that past purchase) you would probably get better useful data.