Built this dashboard to visualize cannabis sales in real time across North America during 4/20. The data updates live from thousands of dispensary POS transactions as the day unfolds. Under the hood, we’re using Estuary for data streaming and Tinybird to power super fast analytical queries. The charts are made in Tremor and the map is D3. |
Is there a law mandating realtime reporting, or something, or are there just limited number of POS providers and they all have realtime API(s)?
I bet the dashboard doesn't have Johnny from my street corner's transaction...
FYI, the time displays are a bit off. The time box seems correct. The time slider is off. The animation goes beyond the last time. Up to you if the slider stops in the middle, or goes to 100% which becomes larger as the day progresses
Clearly not partaking in 420 ;-)
As someone who came of age drinking with my friends and who avoided weed for law and job reasons, it’s hard for me to wrap my emotional thinking around the concept. It’s still deep in my brain that weed is a bad thing people should avoid. And yet, intellectually I know I'd be better off pouring the liquor in the pantry down the drain and switching to marijuana.
On the other hand, giving the population an alternative to alcohol is a good thing, especially when it can have positive medicinal effects in some situations.
I would personally limit the number of purchases like we do Pseudoephedrine, and if you need more, get a medical prescription. We'll probably realize this in about 20 years, like we are finally realizing about social media. Social media needs to be 18+, like porn sites. Took us 20 years, but many places are doing it. We never have a serious discussion about anything when we roll it out. Alcohol on every corner and supermarket was one of the stupidest things we ever did.
Yeah, weed is probably bad for you, given enough of it. It turns out there's no safe dose of alcohol, and no one’s figured out where weed’s harm eventually kicks in, so why worry about its societal effects which we know are vastly lesser?
I drink beer and don't use weed. All of the above is from someone who couldn’t care less about marijuana for themselves.
I'm wondering who, angry and scared about the state of society, is checking out, rather than speaking out.
I'm not convinced that there isn't a line every Sunday.
Yes, its weird.
Anyway, I didn't actually address the OP yesterday, so I'll do so now. It's one of the more beautiful and well-done dashboards and visualizations on HN. Regardless, our tendency here would have been to marvel at the tech but not actually take in the data which is that a lot of people are now on drugs.
Yes we do. Drugs are not new. We're tired of prohibition and the needless human suffering it has bought about. It has not and will never work. The answer is education and mental health services. Not treating the public like children.
I vape dude, my "peers" are teenagers. I'm an adult, and every kid I see vapes. Now I actually regret picking this stupid username because I never actually stopped to think that HN has young people here. Now that I think about it, I had a convo with some college kid inquiring about Nicotine patches from me on Discord because I kinda mentioned I was trying to stop vaping lol. What the hell is going on out there? They are literally into every bad thing, and we just kinda go like "well the adults need it 24/7 so no rules".
When you mix alcohol and thc, it's a full drug cocktail. It takes nothing but a brisk 5 minute walk to get both in a major city.
Edit:
Deliberately enough, this is on the frontpage of CNN today:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/health/marijuana-dementia-wel...
"They speak of my drinking but not of my thirst"
I think it's important to have safeguards around substances like alcohol and THC, age restrictions, education, etc. But we also should think about why people turn to these things. If kids are vaping and spending hours scrolling on social media, maybe we should assess what can be done to bring their attention away from those things and towards activities, third spaces, and offer non-substance ways to alleviate stress and anxiety. Some of these things are available, but perhaps not in the ratio required to make a dent in the substance/media usage.
Not real time in WA, but all records are public and reported fairly consistently. See https://www.topshelfdata.com for an example of that.
> or are there just limited number of POS providers and they all have realtime API(s)?
This is Headset who is probably the largest retail POS provider (amongst other offerings on the producer/processor side and more) for legal marijuana sales. I'm assuming the data presented here is exclusively from their POS platform. I don't know of any public sources for real time sales data.
> I bet the dashboard doesn't have Johnny from my street corner's transaction...
Yes I'd also bet Johnny doesn't report his sales to a central database/platform.