Since Colorado changed their laws on marijuana, you can now buy it legally from a licensed pot shop, with taxes or register for a medicinal marijuana card to get it cheaper.  

Despite this, most people, especially students, are still going to their dealers for their marijuana.  Most students do not want their name on a medical registry and that it is surprisingly, massively cheaper.  Marijuana from a dispensary will cost you around $400 an ounce, whereas getting marijuana straight from a dealer is somewhere closer to $60-237 for a home-grow, depending on the quality and where you acquire it.  

Students have fears that their information could be somehow compromised and this would lead to funding being cut off.   Colorado marijuana dispensary owners say this is not an unusual decision; nobody wants to be on a list, so people continue to foster the black market. 

Some legal warehouses are more than 40,000 square feet in size and have a diverse range of customers, from businessmen to grandmothers.  Customers in Colorado can buy different strains of marijuana or buy a kit to grow their own.  This all comes with a 10% state tax, a 2.9% state sales tax and sometimes a 15% wholesale tax, bringing it up to 36% altogether.  The state then uses tax money to build schools and enforcement laws. 

There is also a lack of cost regulation across Colorado state, soaring demand vastly outstripping supply and overhead costs for the stores, such as applying for new licences, packaging and instituting the state's mandatory radio frequency which tracks each plant from seed to sale.  

The price of legal marijuana will probably drop as more stores open across Colorado and supply meets demand, but dealers are likewise starting to feel the squeeze of legalisation; "Once you could pull in $60,000 a year, but these days it's more like a minimum wage job." said one.