Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
timharford.com
timharford.com
I was an avid pot smoker in my college days (long time ago, now) and even over the relatively small span of a 3 year time period I paid everything for a quarter-ounce (~7 grams) from $10 ("ditch weed") to $400 (REALLY good stuff from Cali or Colorado). So I'm not sure what he's talking about with the $10/gram thing being some benchmark that's lasted decades.
I know that's anecdotal evidence, but it's the shared experience of every smoker or ex-smoker I've ever known. And considering the wide variations of produce quality, I think it's odd to suggest that prices are tied to any sort of specific weight.
It's like saying, "Fish always costs $x per pound. (man) Why?" The answer is simply, "No it doesn't."
What the $10 is referring to are the bags you can buy on street corners in some cities. It is the same with crack and heroin, a standard and simple price, with standard terminology (a bag, a dime, etc.) all to make the street-based transaction easier and less conspicuous.
It has no bearing on the real value of pot, which can vary from a few dollars a gram through to $50+ a gram. What changes is the type and amount of pot you get in a $10 bag.
Also as someone who used to know the economics of weed, there are nickel, dime, and dub ($20) bags. This is for people like high school kids and street drug dealers that sell at this level though. I would add that you can probably buy dime bags from the hippies in Golden Gate Park SF, but that feels much more like a crack deal than some legitimate transaction.
You can also grab a quarter (1/4 of an ounce) but it's not going to cost you $25 ... it will cost you more than $100.
I love how this was good enough to be published in the Financial times even though it was wrong. There's a reason that the Freakonomics guys went and lived with the crack dealers: they wanted actual research, not second hand rumors.
The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to find similarly-burning vegetation to dilute the amount of product in a fixed-weight bag at a level undetectable to the average buyer.
This is what a cannabis bud looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macro_cannabis_bud.jpg
You can't just throw some similarly looking vegetation in there without the buyer noticing. You could throw in low-grade hemp, but that's just as hard to grow, so it's of no benefit to the dealer.
One thing you can do is to not dry it. The moisture will add a bit of weight, but probably not more than 5-10% more, depending.
I am not sure about that. Shouldn't low-grade hemp be cheaper in areas where it can be grown legally? After all, the risk of losing a harvest to law enforcement is lower.
There was a time when a dime bag was 1/4th of an ounce.
And I'm sure somebody even older than me is going to chime in with a recollection of an even more outrageous price.
Times have changed!
Disclaimer: I don't smoke pot, so this is second hand smoke, so to speak. But, there were so many hippies around where I grew up that I literally thought patchouli was what people smelled like when then hadn't bathed in a week.
A slice being an 1/8th of an ounce (as in a slice of pizza)
An elbow being a pound (as in 1 lb)
The author says that a gram costs, and always has costed, $10. This can certainly be true today if he's buying relatively low quality marijuana. If he's been smoking for many decades, he'd notice the quality of pot has gone up significantly, but so has the price. The kind of stuff my generation's parents smoked in the 70s is now what people are selling for $10 a gram, and apparently what the author is still buying.
The times they are a-changin'.
* Edit: Made my initial point less ambiguous.
Practically speaking decriminalization is making pot available to a much wider audience at a lower cost as (at least in Denver) there's no practical limit to how much people can buy. One person with a medical marijuana card can (and does) supply a fair number of people without.
* Edit: Fixed a typo.
Also, in many of these states you'll find that enforcement of marijuana laws are fairly lax in general. A friend was pulled over with marijuana in their car and the judge changed the charge to "public disturbance" or some such so that they wouldn't lose their student loan eligibility and other things.
The laws are clearly in flux now. It's in this crazy gray region, where sure, some people that have cancer, MS and AIDS are in MUCH BETTER positions where they don't have to deal with black market BS outside of their comfort zone to get medication that makes them feel so much better, but on the other hand, people who clearly want cannabis just for recreational use are getting prescriptions to get high. Which I don't see anything wrong with, other than the fact that the law should just face reality and acknowledge that some people want to spend their afternoon hikes and TV time high on weed and not try to control their lives.
This is progress, but it's not there yet. Clearly the next step is to stop making casual smokers pretend they are in severe pain' or 'uncurable depression' to get their weed. It's not any more harmful than beer, and even if it was more harmful than gin, it's not any of the government's business to tell people how they spend their mind power.
The increase in potency strongly correlates with the increase in inflation.
He is probably holding quality as a fixed constant, so the real price goes down as the products relative inferiority increases, and the increase in nominal price due to inflation cancels it out.
edit: (man)
Reasons for a smaller dollar amount: inflation, cheaper production, too few buyers, too many sellers (thus more competition)
Reasons for a bigger dollar amount: more expensive production, too many buyers, too few sellers (thus less competition)
I'm no economist but I suppose the reason should be a combination of the above. However, my intuition would expect weed gets cheaper over the years due to inflation and competition. So there is probably another reason: It might have to do with weed culture itself, which is highly ritualistic I think. The ritual (of consumption) probably doesn't change and the price doesn't change either.
And then you're right, basic supply and demand theory would suggest that supply growth has outpaced demand growth over the same period (and by a rate about the same as the inflation rate to keep nominal prices constant). But why? loosening regulation/enforcement is mostly on the demand side, I would say. It's probably getting easier to grow higher quality pot (more information readily accessible, better equipment, mobility, economies of scale, etc). The overall market likely behaves perfectly competitively (its a commodity, no single dealer could charge more per unit of 'high' without losing business). So, perfect competition with supply growth = lower real prices.
By far the mode price I've encountered for 1/8 oz (3.5g) is $25; $30 if something very special (though this is in Southern Ontario and British Columbia, and I've apparently been spoiled for quality). Seeing this hold so exactly when I moved from Toronto to Vancouver was my delightful first real encounter with communication-without-intent through large-scale dynamic systems.
---Interestingly enough, the price at the dispensaries seems to be about what street prices were before the medical marijuana dispensaries became so prevalent, maybe even a tad lower.
Tobacco, coffee, gold are better currencies alternatives to weed due to their stable legality. Weed's stable demand in relatively illegal times may change drastically if it becomes completely legal. But if that happens, it may be more stable a currency than tobacco since most people on it feel that it does no harm and therefore don't feel incentivized to quit.
Good on all of you. Don't rearrange your own 1's and 0's.
I'm no expert either, thankfully. Although the medical benefits do seem to be real (i.e. pain reduction, appetite stimulation, etc.)
There are basically two qualities of marijuana on the market in the US: low grade Mexican imports, and high grade domestic/canadian. You could add a third, a 'midgrade', which would be really good mexican or low grade canadian (mass imported BC bud, aka 'beesters'). (Interestingly, in the UK and Europe, the Mexican equivalent is 'African').
The Mexican stuff sells for $200-$1200 a lb, depending on your proximity to the border. For instance, it might be $250 a lb in Las Cruces, NM, $500 in Albuquerque, and $600 in Denver. This equates to a price of $25-80 an ounce retail varying similarly by location. It is not very fresh, may be chemically adulterated (splashed with gasoline to hide the smell, for instance), is compressed into bricks. Your average teenager or blue collar worker smokes this. . Potency by weight is probably 2-6% active cannabinoids. Smell ranges from hay-like, to mildy sweet and herbal, to old and musty. It's the Budweiser of pot.
The other type is the high grade, aka 'kind bud', 'headdies', 'nugs', or so on. This is typically produced in hydroponic farms in the US, from seeds of Californian or Dutch varieties that have been the result of intensive breeding for quality. As such, it is much more fresh and potent. Sometimes the Canadian material is compressed a bit, but never into 'bricks' like the Mexican. Potency by weight is probably 5-25% active cannabinoids. This is preferred by connoisseur smokers, upscale customers, people concerned about their health and medical patients. That's the type you'll find at the medical dispensaries in California or Colorado, for instance - locally grown, high quality. Smell is fresh and herbal, showing a wide range of floral scents typical to the plant. A beer comparison would be a tasty craft brew from a brew pub or a regional microbrew. I guess the Canadian stuff would be the equivalent of Sam Adams. The prices range from $250 to $450 an ounce, showing little regional variation. My friend has a license to produce for dispensaries in Colorado, and he said the prices there are $175 to $350 an ounce, similar to the old prices on the black market. The price for this type is usually, as noted, $20-25 a gram. More typical is a 1/8 ounce (3.5 g) for $50-60, and a quarter ounce for $80-100. So, it actually works out to about $14 a gram.
And, there HAS been inflation in the price of this in the past 20 years, invalidating this article's viewpoint, but it goes in spurts. The price for a quarter ounce of this higher quality type was about $60-80 in the early 90s, and then became $80-100 in the later half of the decade. It's stayed remarkably stable at that price, and $350-400 an ounce, since then.
Kine is a hawaiian words that translates to "the one". It is used to express like or show praise towards something or someone. The term has been popularized in the continental United States in reference to potent Cannabis.
Highest rated urban dictionary definitions for "Kind Bud" also state and correct this common mistake.