You ever read or watch a news story in which they mention the “street value” of some marijuana bust and think to yourself, “That doesn’t sound right”? Of course you have. And so have the guys behind priceofweed.com, a website and blog that’s compiling and reporting market data on marijuana sales from all over the world.
Submissions are rolling in rapidly as the site has been covered by CBS News, Business Insider, Seattle Weekly and others. Visitors to the site are invited to report the particulars of their most recent buy, including location, price and even quality of the bud. The Journal reached the site’s creators via e-mail. Here’s what they said:
Our names are Cory and Andy. We’re Web developers and Internet entrepreneurs. We’re from Toronto, Ontario Canada, and we just finished college. PriceOfWeed was born out of a personal curiosity; I was watching a National Geographic documentary about marijuana prices, and they threw out some numbers that didn’t sound too practical. I realized that since it was a black market, nobody was sharing information, so there was no real way of validating price estimates.
We whipped the site together and posted it on Reddit and HackerNews, which [generated] a really great response. Once we had enough data, we expanded some of our features and added a Googlemaps visualization. From there, it took off on its own, getting covered on Time.com, CBSnews.com, Gawker, Business Insider, and we just did a phone interview with a reporter for ABC news. We plan on continuing to build out useful/informative features; we already have a social metrics measurement started (getting people to rate the social properties of their areas, such as law enforcement, social acceptance, etc.).
It’ll be interesting to watch how these data are affected should Prop 19 pass in November. The latest price in California is just over $365 for an ounce of high-quality. Sound right?
This article appears in Hooked.
$365 an OUNCE? I wish I had that kind of money to spend on “recreation”!
Oh my God, this is terrible! How will I explain this to the children?
Oh, sorry. Wrong thread.
Do I think the “street value” of some marijuana bust “doesn’t sound right”?
“Of course I have” ?
Not.
I guess I am too far away from the illegal narcotics industry to know.
Not if you live in Humboldt County, you’re not.
I bet growroom business is booming right now in the southeastern states. If you’ve ever watched the tv show COPS, they show no mercy for marijuana down them thar parts.
No surprise there. Hypocrisy is the bible belt’s biggest export.
There is plenty around here too. It just looks different.
This website only matters to commercial growers who are looking for untapped or high-end markets to replace the California ones that are already flooded and can’t make them the same cash they used to. Cali is the only state where this stuff is so tolerated. Go to any other state and you go to jail for having a seed in your pocket. Literally. The rest of America isn’t so keen on weed– we live in an imagined land of pot tolerance and we need a major wake-up call. Legalization will drive the market farther out of state and end up costing more than it will make. How? When all you dummy stoners try to smuggle 100 pounds to Jew Jersey and end up getting busted in Utah. The product and/cash are gone. Estimate loss to local growers? Oh, only about a HALF MILLION. If everyone is okay losing a half mil every other run across the country then by all means, ship it on outta here. Just make sure your smuggler isn’t a total idiot or you both go to prison for 25 to life with no possibility of parole.
The pot industry is so FUN! Who couldn’t have fun losing millions and spending life in a prison cell. Just don’t lose the wrong people’s ganja or they won’t let you survive prison…
I mean NEW Jersey. Talk about a bad typo (the N and the J are “jext” to each other)
Gasp! Amazing to think that Humboldt might loose our internationally known claim for being pot gods
So is most of Humboldt weed grown indoor? If so then anyone, anywhere, can grow just as good weed as Humboldt does. Sounds like to me we just have a bunch of stoners saying how good the weed is here so it attracts bums from everywhere to come sleep on our streets and smoke weed. We need to get a better rep if we want Humboldt to be a nicer and cleaner place to live.Will that ever happen? Yeah when it becomes legal and people who have been banking on all this weed money to pay bills can not pay them anymore. So I guess we will see…
I say our rep needs to include spiked shoulderpads and spraypainted football helmets.