Priceofweed.com price of weed medical or not?

Websites Drive Down Prices with Data
Posted December 08, 2010 8:23AM PST
Online databases of street prices for marijuana are supplanting unreliable federal statistics and driving down the cost of marijuana in places where dispensaries compete.
Up until now, price data has been hard to come by, and official sources like the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy cannot be trusted, said an independent report released in October by the RAND Corp.

"Existing estimates about drug production and consumption are cryptic, inconsistent, and often impossible to verify," RAND stated in the study titled, "Reducing Drug Trafficking Revenues and Violence in Mexico."

Simple and anonymous new website PriceofWeed.com asks for user data on location, and marijuana cost by weight and quality, then polls for local levels of drug law enforcement and tolerance. The site strips identifying internet protocol addresses from respondent data and presents a searchable, worldwide price index with over 12,000 data points.

The state of California contains over 1,200 data points, high enough to contain statistical validity, when controlled for outliers. The vast majority of Californian PriceofWeed.com respondents report buying high-quality cannabis, which retails for $341.80 per ounce. In New York, an ounce of high-quality marijuana costs $441.87, demonstrating a relationship between drug law severity and price. An independent study by the RAND Corp. titled "Altered State" found more than 80% of the price of black-market marijuana comes from risk.

PriceofWeed.com's founders did not respond to a request for a phone interview. But it stated on its blog that it is adding technical updates to the site.

Popular dispensary-review and strain-location website Weedmaps.com also reports prices. Dispensaries voluntarily submit them to Weedmaps.com and pay for higher placement in user searches. The market data helps drive down prices, said founder Justin Hartfield. Fueled by the price pressure, San Francisco dispensaries have begun to regularly advertise new menu additions and deals online via email lists, Twitter and Facebook.