Little bit of a straw man there. Nobody said they weren't different things.
The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.
So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...
In CA, it's cheaper to buy illegal marijuana than going to one of the licensed stores, for a whole variety of reasons.
That "market arbitrage" opens the door for a lot of things to occur - all things proponents of legalization promised would go away.