Maybe illicit growers and sellers in those areas want to avoid government intervention in their process and profits? I have no idea how much voting power that industry has, though.
Maybe not the growers themselves, but there's a lot of money there, and I guarantee somewhere along the line it flows through the hands of people with wealth & power to protect.
Not yet, in CA. That time will come, but in 2010 (Prop. 19) the growers and vendors were not organized enough to make anything happen. The inevitable consolidation has still not occurred in 2014, but you're right, it will eventually.
No, the point is the black market wanted Prop. 19 defeated, because if you legalize it they lose their profits. (Some parts of) the black market wants drugs to say illegal.
I get your point. I'm saying no segment of the MJ/MMJ market was strong enough in LA County to swing the election. The pushback from rank-and-file residents against the dispensaries was in the front sections of the LA Times for months. The growers were not part of the discussion.
It's true that there are multiple constituencies in the MJ/MMJ community (patients, recreational users, growers of all kinds, licensed dispensaries, unlicensed, street gangs, cartels) and that Prop. 19 split them. Perhaps a different Prop. might have made the MJ community slide definitively to one side or the other, but that's a different question.
The neighborhood where I live was affected by this, and one of the lightning rods was a friend (interviewed in the LA Times several times), as were some people on the other side. That makes me consider myself well-informed, but who knows, maybe I'm biased. ;-)
If they were it would almost certainly be through a front in such a way that it wasn't publicly known about unless/until a scandal broke stopping that particular incident. As to whether that's likely to be happening... I've absolutely no idea, for all I know it could be extremely likely, or conspiracy theory level.
I'm really very skeptical when it comes to the US. Why? It's very difficult for them to transport money since they're mostly shut out of the international banking system. Even when they get some access, it doesn't last long (see HSBC).
Another reason is I feel that most bribes in the US are more subtle: they're in the form of political campaign funding, non-profit funding, a future board member, and so on... You need access to the banking system to do that stuff easily.
The impression I've always had was that money laundering, as long as they dont mind losing a big chuck of their cash by doing it, is pretty easy - and therefore if they saw the value in getting it into a legal banking system (to lobby through a non-illegal front) it wouldn't be impossible, just more expensive than lobbying with legal money. But the extent of my knowledge on money laundering comes 30% from an old friend who used to work for a bank detecting it and 70% from breaking bad, so could easily be wrong!
Yes there is a lot of money. It's in the pharmaceutical and alcohol industry lobbies. There will be a strong marijuana lobby one day, but it doesn't exist now.
