When people say things such as 80% of marijuana purchases are on the black market, how are they getting data for this?

Question

When people say things such as 80% of marijuana purchases are on the black market, how are they getting data for this?

In: Other

Answer 1

They aren’t using HARD data, they are using survey data, and probably not enough of that lesser, inferior data, to make the effort of performing statistical analysis worthwhile as an endeavour.

In short, unless they have access to the total transactions performed, legal and illegal both (which is physically impossible for them to have) there is basically no way to provide or present information on the topic in a useful fashion. There IS however a method of producing and presenting SOME data for the purposes of misinformation, propaganda and control of the narrative.

Now, which way that propaganda bias goes depends on the people curating the data, but there is no way to have an impartial look at the figures on such a topic, because an honest person would simply say “Unless I have access to all the information about every sale of this substance, I probably shouldn’t be trying to produce an analysis”.