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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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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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.
Sorry I’ll dumb it down further. They know how much weed is sold online. They know how much is smuggled across the borders. They know about how much is sold legally because it’s ridiculously easy to monitor sales of legal weed. If they have an approximate volume of sold vs. Known or average consumption of a population, then it’s pretty easy math… I’m not saying they’re correct. Odds are that number is pulled from the Aether..
You know, I actually posted another comment, but I wanted to come at this from a different angle. It depends on what you mean by *they*. Now, on one hand, they might get the data in all the ways that you see in this thread – data is collected at bunches of little sources at the granular level (a single school, a single restaurant, a single laboratory, etc.), then people above them aggregate the data from bunches of single sources (aggregate meaning they pull all the data together, clean it up, and turn it into one data set) – this might be a whole school district, the corporate of a restaurant, etc. This might also happen on a larger scale; for instance, the WHO or the World Bank might collect already-aggregated data sets and combine those to form massive, international data sets.
But! If you mean *they* as in the people who use the data, *you* can personally get data from all kinds of different places. For instance, I recently did an analysis of global suicide rates. I got this data off of a website called Kaggle. The person who posted the data had aggregated it from like four different sources. You can download data, usually for free, from places like the WHO, the World Bank, Kaggle, and tons of other places.
EDIT: Spelling.
Did a research paper on a topic when I was in college and I had to do a survey with a large enough sample size for the data to be useful. After I gathered the data I remember thinking to myself “People will tell you almost anything of you ask enough of them”
8 out of 10 people purchased weed legally, saw the 35% tax and were like “nahhh fam imma just call the plug”
Source: was a budtender when weed became recreational. Probably more like 9 out of 10 honestly
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”.
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