This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 12, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ohio's ballot initiative aimed at ending marijuana prohibition failed on election day,

and that was perhaps for very good reasons.

The tone deaf marketing and the cronyism baked into the initiative seemed to combine to

give voters second thoughts.

Morgan Fox is communications manager at the Marijuana Policy Project.

We spoke this week.

So in the Ohio ballot initiative, what were some of the key problems both with the initiative as a structural matter and the marketing of it that caused voters there to turn it back?

Well, I think that the number one problem that they faced

was that this was an off-off-year election between a presidential election and a

midterm election. These normally have much lower turnout and the people that do

show up tend to be older and more socially

conservative groups that demographically have far lesser support for legalizing marijuana

in any form. I think that a lot of people were made very uncomfortable by the advertising that was done with the campaign

predominantly the marijuana mascot who looked like a superhero with a butt of marijuana for a head

You know this not only opened up the opportunity for opposition forces to

claim comparisons to Joe Camel and Big Tobacco 2.0, but it also really upset a lot of activists who had been working for decades

to try to professionalize the marijuana policy movement.

But by far the most divisive thing was the structure in the ballot language that would have granted

sole constitutional cultivation rights to ten groups.

This would not have been very easy to change since it was in the state constitution.

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