When people say things such as 80% of marijuana purchases are on the black market, how are they getting data for this?
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One way they can test the general consumption of a large population is drug testing the sewer systems. With this they can more or less tell how much marijuana is consumed in that region then compare that to how much is sold in white markets, then conclude the remainder is black market.
This is really choppy data for a lot of reasons. In addition to the fact that the process of drug testing sewer water is already prone to a ton of issues, (one being that not all sewege it “mixes” evenely so some parts might have more THC than others) they also mainly get this data from urban centers and cities because it’s easier to test a large amount of people in those sewer systems. As a result the data is skewed towards a certain demographic (people livin in cities).
It’s a pretty ineffecient way of getting the statistics, but it’s the only method available for obvious reasons.
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