Where legal markets matured, street cannabis got cheaper — a 20% gap
The reader asked: U.S. cannabis prices by state, official and street. There is no federal official retail-price series — “official” here means legal flower prices from state government data and market trackers, and “street” means crowdsourced PriceofWeed observations analyzed in a 2026 peer-reviewed study.
Coverage: legal flower prices for 25 states plus D.C. (market tracker, Jan 2026), the study’s street medians for 2018–2024, and its seven-state legal-vs-illicit yearly means — all in USD per gram.
Legal retail flower price per gram, with study street medians where reported
Hover a state for detail · states with no usable price row are hatched — values are not manufactured
no usable price rowstreet median 2018–2024 (study)
Legal vs illicit mean $/g, seven recreational states
Exact yearly means from the study’s Table 2; the state sample grows from 2 states (2018) to 7 (2023–24)
Reading the comparison
The study compares means for legal vs illicit (most state legal data is only published as means) but medians for the 50-state street comparison. Legal menu data may exclude tax; quality and potency differ between markets; observation windows differ by state. This is a best-available comparison, not a live apples-to-apples 50-state price list.
Across 2018–2024, illicit flower had an overall median of $7.10/g in states with recreational dispensaries vs $8.90/g without them — 20.2% lower; in 2024 the medians were $5.00/g and $7.14/g. doi.org · ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
In the seven-state comparison the overall mean was $9.53/g illicit vs $8.43/g legal (not statistically significant); by 2024 it was $8.50 vs $6.51. Massachusetts, Illinois, Maine and Connecticut — the newer markets — had legal prices above illicit ones. doi.org
The lowest street medians were the oldest legal markets: Oregon $5.36/g, Washington $5.71/g, Colorado $6.07/g; the study says D.C. was highest, though the accessible text does not expose its exact value. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Older street-price reference (PriceofWeed ounces, pre-study): a high-quality ounce ran from $210.75 in Oregon to $597.88 in D.C. against a $326.06 national average. oxfordtreatment.com
The rows
Legal $/g: market-tracker snapshot, Jan 2026 (source dates vary by state; some programs are medical-only). Street $/g: study median, 2018–2024.
Data: legal flower prices for 25 states and D.C. extracted from a Jan 2026 market-data tracker (377 candidate web rows filtered to explicitly named states with numeric per-gram flower prices; ounce, concentrate, duplicate and context-mismatched rows dropped); street medians and yearly legal-vs-illicit means from the 2026 peer-reviewed study “High stakes: how legal cannabis pricing impacts the illicit market” (PriceofWeed crowdsourced data, 2018–2024; DOI and NCBI copies deduplicated); Oregon’s $5.36 street median recovered from quoted study text. All prices USD per gram; legal figures may exclude tax and are not all contemporaneous. States without a usable row are hatched, not estimated.