High Times started printing weed prices in 1974 so buyers would stop getting fleeced by people who knew the going rate. Trans-High Market Quotations is now a live index at index.hightimes.com, and we want your numbers next.
In the summer of 1974, High Times magazine, under the guidance of its very young editor-in-chief, Ed Dwyer, began printing weed prices submitted by anonymous field informants scattered all over the country. It was an act of rebellion, like the magazine itself. Trans-High Market Quotations also served the noble purpose of letting readers know a little about the quality and price of weed, helping show that marijuana was just another product that could be bought and sold like forks, T-shirts, cars or baby wipes. So what was the big deal if a young woman buying a quarter in Cleveland could see that her dealer had marked it up 100 percent over the going rate in Detroit?
The first issue of Trans-High Market Quotations, from High Times Magazine – Summer 1974
Trans-High Market Quotations came from mailed-in notes from readers and back-channel networks of the people actually doing the buying, and it ran for decades. It was analog crowdsourcing before the term existed, and it was, in the exact, useful and militant sense, a piece of consumer protection established in the vacuum prohibition had created.
That’s why we decided to bring it back. This time, it’s interactive. It runs on daily point-of-sale data from Hoodie Analytics, a cannabis market data and analytics firm, covering 12,000 licensed dispensaries across the country and backed by more than 4,000 direct POS integrations.
So, yeah, something’s changed.
You can now see what an eighth costs in your state, in the state next door and everywhere else with legal retail sales. It updates monthly and, of course, it’s free.
It lives at index.hightimes.com. Go click.
You Can Chip In (Please Do)
As you probably know, weed is not one legal product but 50 different legal frameworks laid across a country. Since April, marijuana held under a state medical license sits in Schedule III, along with FDA-approved products containing marijuana. Everything else, including every gram sold in an adult-use store, is still Schedule I while a federal hearing plays out over whether the rest of it follows.
That’s why the interstate commerce that keeps the price of a gallon of milk within pennies of itself across the map does not exist here. Every legal state is an island, and prices vary a lot.
You’ll notice that the tracker now looks like a tool for shoppers in the 24 states and Washington, D.C. with adult-use programs, and for medical patients in the states without them. It includes enough months of data to show year-over-year information, along with many other fun tools you can play with if you are into data.
But the population of weed consumers in America, and everywhere else in the world, is not represented by dispensary receipts alone, and it never has been. The most consequential piece of cannabis commerce on the planet is still the informal and illegal trade that touches billions of people, and it is precisely the part that legal-data platforms cannot capture.
That’s why we are calling on our community to send us purchase reports.
This is where all of you should step in. The case for price transparency in illegal markets is not complicated. Prohibition creates an information asymmetry between the person who knows the going rate and the person who doesn’t. That gap is the mechanism of exploitation, and every dollar it hides is a dollar transferred from the buyer with less information to the seller with more. Publishing prices closes that gap, just as High Times did in the 1970s. It’s an empowerment tool.
So, please, send us your anonymous purchase reports from illicit markets.
We would love to have information from Texas and, from there, Nicaragua, Argentina, Malaysia, Nigeria and everywhere else.
This is our first build, which the people at Hoodie were very generous in facilitating. They did not hesitate for a moment when we asked them to collaborate.
The next thing we plan to build is the rest of it: the countries where cannabis is illegal, the states where it is decriminalized but not sold openly, the semi-legal social clubs in Barcelona, the coffee shops in Amsterdam, and the delivery networks in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Bangkok and everywhere else where receipts do not exist.
If you bought weed recently, we want to know what you paid: where you bought it, how much you bought, in what form, and at what price. That’s it. The submission takes 30 seconds and joins thousands of others in an aggregated pool. We do not ask for your name, your email or your address, and we publish only aggregate figures, never an individual entry.
One thing worth saying out loud, because our readers are not all in Denver. In much of the world, buying weed still carries real criminal exposure. Use your judgment about where and how you file a report, and skip it if you have any doubt.
What emerges is a picture of the global cannabis market: a month-by-month record of what cannabis actually costs, which we never got to have.
So, if you live outside the U.S., please get ready. And if you are thinking of ways to collaborate, send an email to rolando@hightimes.com.
The Index
The interactive THMQ is the first release. It shows the weighted average price per gram and per eighth by state, updated monthly, sortable, sourced and open to inspection. You can zoom in at the state level, compare prices, and see national and regional averages.
In the coming months, it will add medical and recreational filters and other features.
Submit what you paid at index.hightimes.com/#/submit.
Check what your state is charging at index.hightimes.com.
Disclosure: the Trans-High Market Quotations index is built with point-of-sale data provided by Hoodie Analytics under an editorial partnership. No money changed hands in either direction, and Hoodie has no say over what High Times publishes.
