Marijuana Is Cheaper In States Where It’s Legal

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I don’t know why this occurred to me, but I got curious about the price of marijuana in states that had legalized it for recreational use. So I headed over to Priceofweed.com, a crowdsourced font of information about the price of weed. There’s a pretty sharp divide at the Rocky Mountains, so here’s the price of pot in all eleven states west of the Rockies:

Sure enough, marijuana is noticeably cheaper in the four states that legalized recreational use more than a year ago. (Nevada has also legalized recreational use, but the law has been in effect for only a few months.) I’m really glad this turned out to be the case since it would have been damn strange if it hadn’t.

As for the east-west divide, that’s a little mysterious. Why is pot so expensive in the bustling and competitive markets of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, and other populous states? And does it really cost $500 per ounce in Washington DC, the highest priced market in the nation? They don’t get represented in Congress and they have super expensive pot. Why does anyone live there?

POSTSCRIPT: Someone is sure to point out that maybe marijuana was cheaper in the green states all along. Could be. I’ll leave it to some enterprising grad student in the study of freakonomics to round up the data and do all the proper econometric calculations.