Legalization pushed up price of pot by 17%

The legalization of marijuana in Canada has caused the price of the drug overall to increase by about 17 per cent, but people who are buying it legally are paying about 57 per cent more than black market buyers.

That's one of the main takeaways of a new report from Statistics Canada on Wednesday, showing what the data agency has learned about changes happening in the market for cannabis before and after the drug became recreationally legal on Oct. 17 of last year.

Getting accurate data on something illegal is always tricky, which is why Statistics Canada has been trying something a bit different. It has been asking Canadians to voluntarily submit information about their marijuana purchasing and use, without fear of repercussions, to build a database of what's happening in the market.

The so-called StatsCannabis crowdsourced database received 19,443 submissions from people prior to legalization last fall. On average, the numbers suggest that Canadians paid $6.85 per gram, on average, for dried cannabis prior to legalization.

Since then, however, the average price has jumped to $8.04, which is a 17.3 per cent increase. That's based on 1,129 submissions from Canadians, both legal and black-market buyers, 936 of which were deemed to be reliable enough to pass the data agency's data-cleaning process.

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Source : CBC.ca ( https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cannabis-legalization-data-1.5091788 )