It’s Friday, and I do have shit to do. But if I’m to believe priceofweed.com, an anonymously crowdsourced, regional index of the going street rates for marijuana, I could steal away from this desk, wander around outside and begrudgingly fork over $500 for an ounce of high quality bud. If I were back in Chicago, that figure would be more like $480; out in Denver, about $290.01; and in Portland, something like $253.35.These are averages, of course. And maybe this is a no-brainer bit of Manifest Destiny (probably not), but it magnifies a central tenet of Economic Theory 101: Criminalize a good and you not only forfeit all control over it, but you fracture its underground economies. By nature, black markets aren’t disposed to rigorous study and analysis. They often lack empirical data and are full of skittish research participants that are flung across all possible environments.READ MORE
