Retail marijuana purchases in designer and commercial markets in New York City: Sales units, weights, and prices per gram

Abstract

This paper documents the bifurcation of the market for commercial marijuana from the market for designer marijuana in New York City. Commercial marijuana is usually grown outdoors, imported to NYC, and of average quality. By contrast, several varities of designer marijuana are usually grown indoors from specially bred strains and carefully handled for maximum quality. The mechanisms for marijuana sales include street/park sellers, delivery services, private sales, and storefronts. Retail sales units vary from 5 dollars to 50 dollars and more, but the actual weights and price per gram of retail marijuana purchases lacks scientific precision. Ethnographic staff recruited marijuana purchasers who used digital scales to weigh a purposive sample of 99 marijuana purchases. Results indicate clear differences in price per gram between the purchases of commercial (average 8.20 dollars/g) and designer (average 18.02 dollars/g) marijuana. Designer purchases are more likely to be made by whites, downtown (Lower East Side/Union Square area), via delivery services, and in units of 10 dollar bags, 50 dollar cubes, and eighth and quarter ounces. Commercial marijuana purchases are more likely to be made by blacks, uptown (Harlem), via street dealers, and in units of 5 dollar and 20 dollar bags. Imported commercial types Arizona and Chocolate were only found uptown, while designer brand names describing actual strains like Sour Diesel and White Widow were only found downtown. Findings indicate clear divisions between commercial and designer marijuana markets in New York City. The extent that these differences may be based upon different THC potencies is a matter for future research.

Conditions That Increase Drug Market Involvement: The Invitational Edge and the Case of Mexicans in South Texas

“…This market characteristic changed, at least temporarily, with the explosion of crack cocaine in the 1980s and 1990s when the social hierarchy of drug dealing changed primarily to vertically integrated dealing organizations comprised primarily of minorities (Johnson et al, 1990). The New York drug market continues to change as documented by recent research identifying a bifurcation of the market into commercial and designer marijuana sectors (Sifaneck, Ream, Johnson, & Dunlap, 2007). These sectors involve differences in ethnic composition, geographic location in the city, and quality of the drug.…”

Yield and turnover of illicit indoor cannabis (Cannabis spp.) plantations in Belgium

“…In most studies on pricing mechanisms in drug markets or, more specifically, in local cannabis markets [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], analysis of pricing mechanisms is based on quantitative and qualitative data used or produced by the police and/or judicial authorities. However, the latter are often biased because: (i) police investigation methods can be based on stereotypes (certain types of suspects could be neglected since they do not match known types of suspects, whereby the former may use other pricing mechanisms than the stereotype suspects [18,[30][31][32][33][34]; (ii) changing priorities in public drug policies and in investigation by police result in unsystematically collected data [19,24,34]; (iii) information on drug prices in police data is mostly limited to the amount of drugs seized whereas the value of these drugs is always derived from interrogations of the arrested person [16] who often undervalues his crop to avoid higher sentences; (iv) police rarely takes the phenomenon of quantity discounting into account (i.e.…”

Bayesian inference for the distribution of grams of marijuana in a joint

“…If, for example, dealers on average sold 0.9 g as 1 g, then multiplying the estimated grams per joint by 0.9 would recover the actual grams per joint. Sifaneck et al (2007) studied 99 retail marijuana transactions in Manhattan in 2005 and found that actual weights ranged from 11% higher to 24% lower than the advertised weight and that 75% of the transactions were less than 90% of the advertised weight. We do not have any more comprehensive data than this on the likely weight of "a gram" of marijuana.…”