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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Pricing is probably disrupted more by the inefficiency of the market; like most people, if I wanted to buy an eighth tomorrow, how would I know whether $50, $75, or $250 was a good price?

Which is to say that there are least two factors (scarcity and lack of transparency) artificially inflating pricing.

On the other hand, in a truly free market for tobacco, a pack of American Spirits might only cost a buck or two; nicotine is our one and only drug-war success, and I think the state has demonstrated that it can extract profits from vice goods if it wants to.

You'd still pay $75 (is that the right price?) for an 1/8 if that was the only legal way to do it, even if you could get it illegally for $30. At least, I would.

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I'm not sure that nicotine is a drug war success. There's a thriving and very serious black market in cigarettes, at least across the Canadian/American border. It supplies a lot of funding to groups like the Hell's Angels.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/after_hours/opinions/article...

(pedantic) For a physical object, scarcity isn't inherently an artificially inflating factor. Enforced scarcity is a different matter. (/pedantic)

This doesn't make sense. Whether scarcity is enforced or natural, it's the demand & supply that drives the price inflation. The reason for scarcity (lack of supply) does not come into play during a static economic analysis.

It's only in a dynamic analysis that the "enforced" part comes into play, usually because it is easier to get around artificial scarcity than discover new resources (natural scarcity).

Scarcity is a natural property of supply, which is a natural factor of price. As a property without inherent artificial component, scarcity cannot artificially affect price without said scarcity itself being given an artificial component such as being purposefully controlled to that end.

I'd pay the premium to know that I'm not getting something laced with rat poison or PCP.

There's no incentive to lace weed with poison. It's an old wives' tale.

Funny enough, back in college my roommates and I once received a pack of weed that smelled like Pine. It was hard to burn, so in his paranoia, one friend suggested it was spiked with Pine Sol. He rationed that it was sprayed in order to weigh down the weed. He refused to continue smoking it and called us naive for not believing someone would spray it to weigh it down.

After some arguing and googling "weed smells like pine", he came down from his paranoia perch and relaxed.

There is an incentive to lace it with anything that will increase weight and not be obvious to the user.

There was a news report in the UK a while ago about people adding glass (or something like), IIRC it was well substantiated.

I believe it, but it can't be common, since pot in end-user quantities is described by weight but actually bought by volume. An eighth looks like an eighth looks like an eighth - you eyeball it, say 'yeah, that looks like an eighth to me', and fork over your cash.

Say the dealer laces his pot so a twelfth of an ounce actually weighs an eighth. Unless the additive somehow plumped up the pot's volume, the buyers would look at it and say 'you're ripping me off - that's a really light eighth.'

Sure, the dealer could then bust out some scales, but that would be weird. Not to mention dealers love repeat customers and glass in the mix would put an end to that quick.

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