Marijuana Distribution in Illinois and Beyond

I came across two stories on marijuana distribution today that I thought might make for an interesting post.

First, the State Journal-Register writes about the efforts of prospective marijuana growers to set up shop in Illinois cities as a result of the medical marijuana law.

The (Bloomington) Pantagraph reports that a Chicago-based company has leased a building in the central Illinois town of Normal for a possible growing operation. Green Thumb Industries founder Ben Kovler tells the newspaper that Normal's central location is appealing and the city government runs well. Normal City Manager Mark Peterson says several representatives of the company have met with him. 

Farther south, St. Clair County officials are considering a special use permit for a marijuana cultivation center near the village of Marissa. 

The growers want to be ready to roll (pun intended) in the event they are awarded one of the 21 permits that will allow them to sell their product to the 60 dispensiaries permitted under the law. 

FiveThirtyEight, run by election-forecaster extraordinaire Nate Silver, has an interesting story where the author attempts to use the Fermi estimation technique to "ballpark" the total number of marijuana dealers in the United States. Here's how that works:

Instead, I approached the question through a technique called Fermi estimation, a back-of-the-envelope strategy that is generally good about making sure you’re in the right order of magnitude if not exactly correct. You’re probably somewhat familiar with it if you’ve ever heard the classic interview question, “How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago? 

First, break the problem into parts. You estimate the demand (the number of piano tunings needed in Chicago in a year), and then given the demand, you estimate the supply (the number of piano tuners) needed to meet that demand. How many people are in Chicago? Given that, how many households? How many households with a piano? How often does a piano need to be tuned? How many pianos can a piano tuner tune in a week? So, how many piano tuners do you need to satisfy demand?

And the result of this estimate?

With 18.7 million marijuana transactions per month and 240 transactions per dealer, division says that we’d need 77,917 pot dealers to satisfy demand. This seems surprisingly reasonable. That’s a little less than the number of employed real estate brokers in 2011, another profession which involves a member of a community going to other people’s homes to make deals. 

So, how does this stack up against other metrics of the drug salesman profession? Again, we sought to estimate the minimum number of people required to satisfy the market, but unsurprisingly the actual number may very well be higher. Based on FBI statistics, there were about 94,900 arrests for marijuana sale or manufacturing in 2011. And while this number accounts for the entire marijuana production apparatus in the U.S. — at all steps in the chain, from producers to major traffickers to low-level part-timers — it’s unreasonable to expect that the nearly 78,000 estimate is exactly right. But hey, at least our source isn’t Yahoo Answers.

So there you have it.