Crowdsourcing the price of Weed

In the last few years, we've seen how crowdsourcing has been employed for a range of important tasks including disaster relief in Haiti, monitoring the recent Kenyan elections, and now mapping the price of weed. This is a great example of how crowdsourcing can produce information that is simply unavailable otherwise. After all, there are no official price data on marijuana markets given its illegality.

Map from the PriceOfWeed.com Website
(Green = < $300 per oz; Yellow = $3oo-400 per oz; Red = > $400 per oz

Quite an interesting distribution with cost rising as one moves west from the Pacific coast (with Oregon being the cheapest). Florida shows up as a low spot as well. Both patterns are consistent with what is known about the geographies of production and distribution. Of course given the overall much lower reported prices for weed in Canada (is it subsidized?), one has to wonder if this site will only serve to further increase the US trade deficit.

We have previously done some analysis on the geographies of marijuana, if anyone wants to compare.

Google Ganja or Mapping Marijuana

We're sure that many were disappointed that the comparison between tobacco, alcohol and caffeine did not also include other possible vices. So these folks should be happy with the next series of posts when we begin to get into some of the geography of drugs.

We're going to start with a gateway posting to this topic with a quick comparison between user generated placemark references to tobacco and marijuana. Starting with North America one see that while the majority of locations have more references to tobacco there are plenty of places with more references to marijuana. California stands out as do Washington, Oregon, Florida and Ontario.

U.S. Map of Marijuana and Tobacco

Given the illegal nature of marijuana production in most of the U.S., production statistics are less reliable than those coming from the census. Still according to an article published in the Bulletin of Cannabis Reform (we have to admit this is the first time we've cited this particular journal), the top marijuana growing states are California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and Florida. This corresponds well with our findings.

Moving up to the global level, tobacco again reigns supreme. There are pockets of marijuana production with Mexico (an important supplier to the U.S.) some interesting clusters in the Himalaya region of Northern India and Nepal as well as Morocco which supplies into Europe.

Global Map of Marijuana and Tobacco

The lack of any marijuana-preferring cluster around Amsterdam is a bit perplexing, to say the least, given its reputation as a site of pilgrimage for the weed obsessed.

Similarly, given that Kentucky is reported to be a major center of marijuana production in the U.S. (and the North American home of Floatingsheep.org), we were surprised to see that it did not show up very strongly in this map of the largest clusters of references to marijuana in user generated placemarks.
Perhaps marijuana growers are NOT documenting their production sites in Google Maps? Come to think of it, this makes quite a bit of sense...