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

Generally speaking, I’d say it’s probably a good policy whenever you see a statistic to mentally prepend it with “as best we can figure.” Of course people are quite clever and a lot of times the “best we can figure” is a pretty good approximation, but not always. You kind of have to citation trace the reported number back to its originating study and check the methodology to determine how reliable any particular statistic is.