A few thoughts: - CA is just a much bigger state. You have a more diverse population, more diverse interests. Everything gets harder with scale. For example, i

A few thoughts: - CA is just a much bigger state. You have a more diverse population, more diverse interests. Everything gets harder with scale. For example, in many CA counties, growing became illegal where it was previously medically legal. I talked with farmers in Nevada County who couldn't grow anymore. Farmers in Humboldt loved this and tried to create Agricultural Associations (I forget the specific legal name). These were legally mandated dues you would have to pay if you were a farmer and then Humboldt tried to give themselves all the board seats and solidify their position over Nevada County. I'm going a bit deep into the weeds here but I'm trying to demonstrate how complicated and messy the interests are with larger states. CA is also actively preventing the hemp industry from developing in the same. Cannabis seems to be the industry pushing hardest against hemp in CA. Crazy, right? - The laws were poorly written. Too much was left up to counties. Counties that were frankly totally unprepared for writing regulations and enforcement. The equivalent is dry alcohol counties. - The underground market was much more developed in CA than in CO prior to legalization. CA/OR/WA supplied much of the US. Even supplying itself, CA developed complex supply chains before legalization. These don't just go away. - The culture. Smoking weed in CA seemed much more widely accepted when it was illegal than it did in CO. For actual people, most didn't really notice when weed became legal. If you wanted to smoke it, you were probably already smoking it. Of course, it was a huge delta for the industry but the average person doesn't care much. As an example, I used to work in the tech industry as a software engineer. One time a coworker visited from another office out of town, bought some weed, had some left over, and gave it to me by leaving it on my desk overnight. I came in the next morning, my room and desk smelled like weed. I made a joke about it and no one cared. I've smoked weed with my boss's boss on the roof of the office building. When I started a cannabis company, I visited my old office and brought samples. People went outside to try it at like 11am. The culture is just so insanely different.