Kyle Duggan at iPolitics: “The national statistics agency is launching a crowdsourcing project to find out how much weed Canadians are consuming and how much it costs them.
Statistics Canada is searching for the best picture of consumption it can find ahead of legalization, and is turning to average Canadians to improve its rough estimates about a product that’s largely been accessed illegally by the population.
Thursday it released a suite of “experimental” data that make up its current best guesses on Canadian consumption habits, along with a crowdsourcing website and app to get its own estimates – a project officials said is an experiment itself.
Statscan is also rolling out a quarterly cannabis survey this year.
The agency has been combing through historical research on legal and illegal cannabis prices, scraping price data from illegal vendors online and, for some data, is relying largely on the self-reporting website priceofweed.com to assemble as much pot information as possible, even if it’s not perfect data.
The agency has been quietly preparing for the July legalization deadline by compiling health, justice and economic datasets and scouring to fill in the blanks where it can. Come July, legal cannabis will suddenly also need to be rolled into other important data products, like the GDP accounts….(More)”.