Nobody Is Reading Oregon's Homework

Oregon publishes its cannabis market data. Not a summary of it — the actual thing. Prices, sales, harvest weights, and every license in the state, free, through an open API. No login. No records request. No relationship with anyone at the agency.

I went looking for the price data. The dataset had 77 views and 15 downloads in its lifetime.

Fifteen. For a statewide record of what an entire legal industry sells its product for.

I keep turning that over, because it doesn't fit the story we tell about data. The story is that the useful numbers are locked up — behind a subscription, a vendor, someone's proprietary dashboard. And sometimes they are. But this one isn't. It's sitting in public, in a format a computer can read, and almost nobody has opened it.

That's not a scandal. Nobody did anything wrong. It's just a gap between published and read, and that gap is where this project lives.

What's actually in there

Prices going back to 2016. Monthly sales broken out by county and product type. Wet weight harvested, by county and by producer type. And the full register of licensed businesses in the state, updated daily.

I got a number wrong in the first ten minutes of reading it. Not because the data was bad — because the file answers a slightly different question than the one I thought I was asking, and nothing about it announces that. The correction took ten minutes and it's the single most useful thing I learned that day: having the data and understanding the data are two different things, and the gap between them is not obvious from the outside.

That's the shape of most of what we've found so far. The data is real, it's free, and it will quietly mislead you in specific, learnable ways. Some of those are worth a post of their own, and they'll get one.

So we're building our own tools to read it

The question we're actually asking is whether a few Oregonians with public data and ordinary software can build something that answers our own questions about our own businesses. I work in hospitality. I'm not a data scientist, and there's no team here. If it takes a specialist to read the state's own published record of its own industry, that's worth knowing too, and I'd rather find out in public than quietly.

So the tools get built out loud. The mistakes stay in. When something we published turns out to be wrong, that becomes its own post, because the corrections are more useful than the conclusions.

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Dataset view and download counts read from Oregon's open-data portal on 2026-08-18. The portal keeps counting, so they will have moved on. Nothing here is financial, investment, or business advice, and nothing here is a recommendation about any position, purchase, or sale.