Are you overpaying for weed? Find out with this map.

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Are you overpaying for weed? Find out with this map.

How much do you pay for weed in your area? If you’re in the far northern midwest, you probably pay a lot more for the privilege of getting high due to the fact that the network isn’t as established to bring it up to that neck of the woods very often. But if you’re in urban areas, you might also be paying more, because people in urban areas will pay more.

The map was put together by FloatingSheep, a group that maps and analyzes location-specific data. In this case, it took data from the Price of Weed website, which crowd-sources marijuana prices. As Floating Sheep explains, using that data it was pretty easy to create a weed price map:

After cleaning the data to get rid of the outliers, we created a continuous surface using a statistical interpolation technique known as kriging to identify the average variance among price differences through a spherical semivariogram model. To obtain a price for each location show in the map above, an interpolated value was estimated as a weighted average of prices from its twelve neighboring points.

The whole thing is an interesting look at black market economics, a world where normal supply and demand rules don’t always play a part. There’s some of that— if you compare northern California, where weed is as abundant as clouds, the prices are dirt cheap, compared to North Dakota where its scarcity makes it more expensive. But then there’s also the factor of what the market is willing to pay. In urban areas like southern California, NYC/Rhode Island/CT, Raleigh, NC (gasp!), and DC, prices are high, due to a combination of higher quality weed and people willing to pay higher prices, whereas in rural areas that are near urban areas, prices are dirt cheap, because people don’t have the money to pay for the good shit.

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