Kamala Harris Would Be First Major Presidential Nominee to Back Marijuana Legalization

    Voters this November will likely see the first major party presidential candidate who supports marijuana legalization at the top of the ticket, with Vice President Kamala Harris now expected to receive the Democratic nomination after President Joe Biden made the historic announcement that he is exiting the race.

    Unlike Biden, Harris backs a complete end to federal cannabis prohibition. She’s called for legalization as recently as March 2024, in a closed-door meeting with marijuana pardon recipients. And during her time in the Senate, Harris sponsored a comprehensive legalization bill in addition to other incremental reform measures.

    But this wasn’t always her position. She has undergone a significant evolution on the issue, as she oversaw cannabis cases as a prosecutor and campaigned against a marijuana legalization ballot initiative in California while running for state attorney general. She was openly dismissive of the reform, at one point laughing off a reporter’s question about the potential policy change.

    More recently, however, Harris has framed legalization as a key criminal justice issue, calling prohibition a failed policy that has disproportionately impacted minority communities.

    As vice president, Harris has repeatedly touted the administration’s moves to issue mass pardons to people with federal cannabis possession convictions and direct a scheduling review that’s led the Justice Department to recommend reclassifying cannabis. She also privately called for broader reform.

    Put simply, if she ultimately secures her party’s presidential nomination, Harris will be the most marijuana-friendly major party presidential nominee in United States history.

     

    Legislation and Policy Actions: Biden-Harris Administration

    Harris has made much of the administration’s cannabis clemency efforts, applauding the president’s mass pardon of thousands of people with federal marijuana possession convictions.

    She’s also embraced the scheduling review Biden directed in October 2022, which ultimately led the Justice Department to recommend moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

    “This issue is stark when one considers the fact that on the schedule currently, marijuana is considered as dangerous as heroin.”

    In March, Harris hosted a group of pardon recipients at the White House for a roundtable event promoting the clemency action. And she called the the Drug Enforcement Administration to follow through on rescheduling “as quickly as possible,” while privately reaffirming her belief that “we need to legalize marijuana.”

    “This issue is stark when one considers the fact that on the schedule currently, marijuana is considered as dangerous as heroin,” she said at the time. “Marijuana is considered as dangerous as heroin and more dangerous than fentanyl. Which is absurd. Not to mention patently unfair.”

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    Previous Quotes and Social Media Posts

    Harris has talked quite a bit about marijuana in speeches and on social media.

    When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Cole memo, which provided guidance on federal marijuana enforcement priorities, she said the Justice Department shouldn’t be focused on “going after grandma’s medicinal marijuana.”

    “This administration and Jeff Sessions want to take us back to the dark ages,” Harris said at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference in 2017. “Sessions has threatened that the United States Department of Justice may renew its focus on marijuana use even in states like California, where it is legal.”

    “Well, let me tell you what California needs, Jeff Sessions,” she said. “We need support in dealing with transnational criminal organizations, dealing with issues like human trafficking—not going after grandma’s medicinal marijuana. Leave her alone.”

    Harris hadn’t signed onto any marijuana reform legislation at the time she was going after Sessions. But she was using the battle to solicit signatures on a petition, a common tactic that politicians use to build email lists that they can later use for fundraising. Several House members pressured her and then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to take stronger action by blocking Justice Department nominees until the Cole memo was restored.

    The senator has repeatedly called for federal cannabis decriminalization, characterizing existing laws as “regressive policies” that have “ruined” many lives.

    “As states moves toward legalizing marijuana, let’s remember how many lives have been ruined because of our regressive policies. We must focus on restorative justice.”

    “We need to decriminalize marijuana,” she said in 2018. “We have a problem of mass incarceration in our country. And let’s be clear, the war on drugs was a failed war. It was misdirected.”

    She has also criticized the federal government for blocking military veterans’ access to medical cannabis.

    “As states moves toward legalizing marijuana, let’s remember how many lives have been ruined because of our regressive policies,” Harris wrote. “We must focus on restorative justice.”

    In a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Harris said “I started my career as a baby prosecutor during the height of the crack epidemic—not all drugs are equal.”

    “We have over-criminalized so many people, in particular poor youth and men of color, in communities across this country and we need to move it on the schedule,” she said. “Plus we need to start researching the effect of marijuana and we have not been able to do it because of where it is on the schedule.”

    Harris congratulated Canada on its national legalization of marijuana in 2018.

    Curiously, however, Harris has had a habit of referring to the drug war in the past tense—as if it isn’t the case that hundreds of thousands of people in the US are still being arrested for cannabis and other drugs every year.

    “The war on drugs was a failure,” she said in 2017. “It criminalized what is a public health matter. It was a war on poor communities more than anything.”

    She also accused Sessions of “resuscitating” the drug war.

    During her time as a prosecutor, Harris said she “saw the war on drugs up close, and let me tell you, the war on drugs was an abject failure.”

    “I’ll tell you what standing up for the people also means. It means challenging the policy of mass incarceration by recognizing the war on drugs was a failure.”

    “It offered taxpayers a bad return on investment, it was bad for public safety, it was bad for budgets and our economy, and it was bad for people of color and those struggling to make ends meet,” she said.

    “I’ll tell you what standing up for the people also means,” Harris said in 2015. “It means challenging the policy of mass incarceration by recognizing the war on drugs was a failure. And Democrats, on that point, let’s be clear also: Now is the time to end the federal ban on medical marijuana. It is.”

    During a speech announcing her 2020 presidential candidacy, Harris said, “Once and for all, we have got to call drug addiction what it is: a national, public health emergency. And what we don’t need is another war on drugs.”

    Before Harris backed full legalization or federal decriminalization, she was supportive of rescheduling cannabis under the CS. Asked about the policy in 2016, she said “I would work to remove marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II.”

    “We need to reform our criminal justice system and changing the marijuana classification and drug sentencing laws are part of that effort.”

    At a debate that year, she predicted that California voters would approve full legalization via a ballot measure (which they did) and reiterated that “we have to do is move [marijuana] from Schedule I to Schedule II.”

    “We have incarcerated a large number of predominantly African American and Latino men in this country for possession and use at a very small scale of one of the least dangerous drugs in the schedule,” she said.

    It is worth noting that Harris did not publicly endorse California’s successful 2016 cannabis legalization ballot initiative, though it is unknown how she personally voted on the measure.

    Two years earlier, Harris told BuzzFeed that while she wasn’t ready to back the idea of legalization, she was “not opposed” to it and that there was “a certain inevitability about it.”

    Harris’s overall evolution on cannabis can be neatly summed up with two videos.

    “It would be easier for me to say, ‘Let’s legalize it, let’s move on,’ and everybody would be happy. I believe that would be irresponsible of me as the top cop,” she said. “The detail of these things matters… I don’t have any moral opposition to it or anything like that. Half my family’s from Jamaica.”

    Harris’s overall evolution on cannabis can be neatly summed up with two videos. The first shows her being asked about marijuana legalization in 2014 in light of her Republican opponent for attorney general supporting it. She dismissively laughs off the question.

     

    The second shows Harris during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing pressing President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee, William Barr, on whether he’d use Justice Department funds to go after marijuana businesses acting in compliance with state law.

     

    Harris even attempted to crack her own marijuana joke during a recent appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, though the late night host didn’t seem especially amused.

    In her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, she took her message in support of legalization a step further. Not only should we “legalize marijuana and regulate it,” but we should also “expunge nonviolent marijuana-related offenses from the records of millions of people who have been arrested and incarcerated so they can get on with their lives,” Harris wrote.

    “We also need to stop treating drug addiction like a public safety crisis instead of what it is: a public health crisis,” she also wrote, suggesting she may be in favor of broader drug policy reforms. “When someone is suffering from addiction, their situation is made worse, not better, by involvement in the criminal justice system.”

    Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign website hosted a petition to legalize marijuana.

     

    Personal Experience With Cannabis

    Harris revealed in a radio interview in February 2019 that she smoked marijuana in college while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg, saying, “It gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy in the world.”

    But that sparked a small controversy, with several people pointing out that neither artist had released their debut albums prior to Harris graduating. She conceded in November 2019 that she “definitely was not clear about what I was listening to” while consuming cannabis.

    In a separate interview in 2019, the senator said that she knew people who benefited from using medical cannabis.

    Harris said during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in June 2024 that she was shocked to learn there’s a strain of cannabis named after her, but she’s not planning to try it anytime soon.

     

    Marijuana Under a Harris Administration

    If Harris secures the Democratic presidential nomination and goes on to win the election, that would mark a paradigm shift, with the first president to take office who openly supports legalizing marijuana.

    While she didn’t always hold that position, she became a vocal supporter of reform in the Senate and extended that to her time in the White House. As the former sponsor of a legalization bill, she’s also dedicated significant time to learning about the nuances of cannabis policy issues. For all intents and purposes, a Harris administration would likely be a boon for the reform movement.

    Of course, the president is limited in what they can unilaterally achieve, so the prospect of legalization may hinge on the composition of Congress. If Democrats manage to retake the House and keep the Senate, however, it stands to reason that federal marijuana policy could meaningfully shift with a pro-legalization president.

    This stands in contrast to the prospect of a second Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump has signaled support for states’ rights to set their own cannabis laws, but he hasn’t backed total legalization. His recently announced vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), holds similar views, and he also voted against a bipartisan marijuana banking reform bill in September 2023.

     


     

    Photograph of Vice President Harris in 2021 by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service via Picryl/Public Domain

    This story was originally published by Marijuana Moment, which tracks the politics and policy of cannabis and drugs. Follow Marijuana Moment on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for its newsletter.

    • Kyle is Marijuana Moment‘s Los Angeles-based associate editor. His work has also appeared in High Times, VICE and attn.

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