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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The data comes from a lot of different places, many of which have been mentioned here already – polls/surveys, federal data, law-enforcement data, etc. All of that data is then aggregated, meaning that it’s cleaned up and linked together in one data set.
I think the logical next question would be, “Well, how can you trust it”, and that would be fair. The data is only really ever as good as the people who are collecting it. If they have rigorous standards, good methods, and care about what they’re doing, the data could be very accurate. If they’re less meticulous, it might *not* be so good. Furthermore, there are a lot of factors that are unavoidable that make your samples less generalizable, meaning you are less able to say that your results are true for everyone, as opposed to a specific population. The obvious example is that it’s difficult to get facts/opinions from all the unique groups of people that exist in the United States for one single study, let alone all our data. There’s a reason we don’t take census every year. Phone surveys are inherently biased towards people who have phones, and cannot represent people who do not have phones. Lots of quirky stuff with data collection.
At the end of the day, data is always just a “best guess”. If we want to nitpick, we could find problems with all data – no question. Some data is good, some data is not as good, but all data is just an estimation that was gathered and interpreted by people, to the best of their abilities.
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.
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A **black market**, **underground economy**, or **shadow economy** is a [clandestine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy) [market](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_(economics)) or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by some form of noncompliant behavior with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services whose production and distribution is prohibited by law, non-compliance with the rule constitutes a black market trade since the transaction itself is illegal
Most data thet give general percents fabricate the data wholesale, or seek less reputable sources for seemingly accurate data, to hide the fact that all their data is BS.
The fastest way to get published is to sell a lie based on another lie.
PS: they identify 80% are sold by non-legal means. A callus generalization, and clearly fraudulent data.
I did a quick Google search and I think you’re referencing the statistic from Canada. But I got stuck behind a pay wall
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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