You could buy a fancy purebred dog with the amount of money you're dropping in dispensaries.

We all know legal weed ain't cheap, but exactly how much of our appallingly miniscule paychecks are we spending to get high?

Headset Inc., a so-called "cannabis intelligence firm," reviewed more than 40,000 legal weed purchases made in Washington state between September 2014 to July 2016 to find out. From their data, they discovered that the average legal weed customer is none other than a 37-year-old man who buys traditional marijuana buds. The median amount spent by this patron average Joe was $647 annually, with an average of 19.5 days between purchases.

However, that's just middle-of-the-line weed customer, the poster-child of data averages. What about the rest of us? How much are we spending?

Turns out, the answer has much more more to do with both age and gender than we'd imagined.

According to Headset's study, weed customers in their twenties spend about $27 per visit to a dispensary, but make trips more frequently than other age groups. Us 20-somethings visit our friendly local weed store about every 16 days, while our hot older friends in their thirties go every 18.2 days. People in their forties go every 20 days, which points to a clear trend: younger people visit the dispensary more often than oldies, but oldies spend way more money per visit. After all, they did learn how to save and not bankrupt themselves on lavender hair dye and Coachella tickets.

The median spend per trip for 80-year-olds topped out at whooping $64 per visit; seems like those Johnson & Johnson stocks really pay off decades later.  Yet, since older people go shopping less frequently, they're not the biggest spenders.

That accolade would belong to members of Generation X: users in their forties who spend $823 per year on weed. Great job, young dads and just-now-graying women getting into tantric yoga.

'"As you're older, you might have more money to go and make bigger purchases," explained Headset co-founder Cy Scott. "The millennials might be out and about more; they can drop into [marijuana dispensaries] more often. Older people might just plan more."

There are also some slight gendered differences in people's purchasing habits. Although the type of product a person buys is largely stable across ladies and gents, women do seem to prefer pre-rolled joints, edibles and "other" products (cough, weed tampons) while men go for traditional bud and concentrates just slightly more than chicks.

No word on which gender buys more weed lube.

Of course, all this data is from Washington, so it doesn't count (kidding). 

Colorado has yet to figure out our per-person weed expenditures, but considering that by May of 2016, Colorado already spent half a billion dollars on legal weed, we're guessing it may be quite a bit more than Washington.

However, experts from Perfect Price estimate that in Colorado, 40 percent of marijuana is still being purchased on the black market. Incredibly, they guess that buying illegally only saves Coloradans 2 percent more money; street and dispensary prices are almost identical. By contrast, people in California (where the black market is strongest) can save 27 percent by buying illegally.

Weed is just expensive; there's no way around it … but it seems like with the money you'd save living anywhere else than in Colorado, you could afford to start your own personal grow and never pay for this shit again.

Or, you could just follow our lead and pay your weed dealer in awkward massages and erotic foot photography. That's freer than the eagle that soars.