When people say things such as 80% of marijuana purchases are on the black market, how are they getting data for this?
In: Other
There is no single entity surnamed “The Black Market”, it is effectively a collective of all illicit means of purchase. So, effectively, you poll 100 people, 20 say they get it from a dispensary or legal store, bam, 80% is from the spooky black market.
They know how much is purchased legitimately, so they just take the total amount and subtract the legitimate amount, ergo the remainder is the black market stuff.
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
Hi Everyone,
This post is getting popular and that is wonderful. I want to remind everyone new (and old) to the sub to read through the rules before commenting. We are a strict sub and we know that.
In particular for this one rules 3 and 5. This is not a place to share a personal story about purchasing weed or your impression of your neighborhood. It is also not a place for you to complain about how statistics are portrayed.
I’d really rather not lock the post (I don’t like doing that), but unless the sheer volume of rule breaking comments slows down it will have to be done to deal with them.
Please report any rule breaking comments you see and let us know if you have questions,
You can reach out to us in mod mail or if you have ideas for the sub you can try r/IdeasForELI5
Petwins
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”.
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”
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.
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..
IMO They are always fear stats… stats that can’t be actually verified as true or false… normally used to push the war on drugs, rape stats and shit like that.
The 80% of weed is bought on the black market is a great example… also how low reporting rape actually is so the real stats are so off… there are lots of examples like this.
When I see weird stats like that I always think what agenda are they pushing.
Who do you think controls the drug trade?
Latest Answers