Actor Seth Rogen was Conan O’Brien’s first guest on his new late night talk show on TBS Monday night. During the course of the interview, Rogen and Conan discussed California’s Prop 19, and their brief conversation hints at some of the apathy among California smokers with respect to the marijuana legalization initiative.

CONAN: Now, I don’t want to make any assumptions about you. I know you, I don’t say I know you better than a lot of people in the business, but I’m guessing that you were disappointed that Proposition 19 failed.

ROGEN: Yeah, I was – the marijuana proposition. But the good news is, literally anyone on Earth can get a medical marijuana card.

CONAN: This state – that’s the thing that I couldn’t understand. This state, it was such a big question: will they legalize marijuana or not? And it looks like it’s a fairly easy thing to do, to get a medical marijuana card.

ROGEN: Yes, I have a medical marijuana prescription personally. I went in, they said, “what do you need it for?” I said, “I have a very specific ailment – it’s called, I ain’t got no weed on me right now.”

CONAN: “I ain’t go no weed on me.”

ROGEN: That’s how I worded it. And the lady said, “We actually have just the thing for that.”

This exchange really points to some, though of course not nearly all, of why Prop 19 failed. There are legions of California voters who already have easy access to marijuana that, for all intents and purposes, is “legal” in the minds of those consumers.

Of course, there are thousands of people in California and elsewhere that require medical marijuana just to get through their days. It’s why we worked hard in Oregon, South Dakota, and Arizona this year to help patients in those states get safe access to medical marijuana.

But it’s no secret that people like Seth Rogen and Snoop Dogg have medical marijuana cards, and can go to a store to buy marijuana, because they have the “very specific ailment – called, ‘I ain’t got no weed on me right now.’”

There’s much to be discussed about why Prop 19 did not succeed, and many of the reasons go well beyond the current culture of marijuana in California. Just Say Now just conducted a survey of our supporters about the campaign, and will soon prepare a report of our findings. Yet this video struck me as representative of some problem that exists to motivate the general public that already embraces, if not uses, marijuana, to support a legalization initiative when for all intents and purposes, marijuana is basically legal in the state.

UPDATE: On the other side of the medical marijuana issue, the Federal Government now allows the sale of “legal marijuana!” But only if you’re a pharmaceutical company.