The marijuana growers in California did not support legalization as they felt (correctly) that it would impact their profit. They supported the status quo, which was enough to defeat legalization in California.
That's a second-order effect. The first-order effect is that even large, urban areas like LA did not get behind Prop. 19. The growers have minimal influence on LA voters.
Note that Prop 19 in effect makes marijuana use a protected class, in much the same manner as race, gender, and religion are. Employers, under Prop 19, could make personnel decisions based on an employee or candidate's marijuana consumption only if they could demonstrate in court that marijuana "actually impaired" the employee's job performance.
It gets worse: California's largest employers include companies that for any number of reasons have drug-free workplace policies that Prop 19 would have made unlawful overnight. Some of those policies are contractually required by relationships with companies operating in states where cannabis is criminalized.
Maybe discrimination against cannabis users is as important a public policy issue as discrimination against African Americans or Muslims. But the smart political strategy probably would have been to make its use not a crime first.
The growers have a lot of money though, that can be directed (or not) to supporting lobbying groups/advertising. And when the vote is close, small groups can have an outsized influence.
Another important element in California, of course, is the Prison Guard unions - they are a very powerful and wealthy lobby, and are directly threatened by legalization efforts, though, with universal "medical availability" - their sun is waning.
California will eventually make the move though, it's inane to believe any state will, in the long term, allow legal nicotine, legal alcohol, but illegal cannabis, particularly now that there are states in which the results of legalized cannabis show that it's not a major threat to society - unlike alcohol and nicotine, which do a lot more damage.
The long term might be measured in decades, but not centuries.
It will be interesting to see how some of the more conservative states like Singapore (Death to Drug Dealers) will deal with this type of cognitive dissonance.
> The growers have a lot of money though, that can be directed (or not) to supporting lobbying groups/advertising.
They have neither the resources or the lobbyists that come close to what either the pharma or alcohol industries have. Maybe this will change when the markets in CO, WA, and AK mature.
