When the final votes were counted, Californians said “no” to legalizing marijuana and defeated Proposition 19, with a majority vote of 53.8 percent.
If approved, Proposition 19 would have legalized various marijuana-related activities in California, allowing local governments to regulate and tax commercial production and sale of marijuana to people 21 year old or older. The measure would also have prohibited people from possessing marijuana on school grounds, using it in public or providing it to anyone under 21-years-old.
Many who supported Proposition 19 said it would have saved state and local governments tens of millions of dollars annually on the costs of incarcerating and supervising certain marijuana offenders and had the potential for generating major tax benefits and revenues to state and local government, related to the production and sale of marijuana products.
Supporters of taxing cannabis say that, it could have generated up to $1.4 billion in revenues from the untaxed domestically grown cannabis market, estimated to be about $14 billion and helped ease some of California’s major fiscal problems.
