On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced her support for legalizing recreational marijuana use on a federal level.
The Democratic nominee for president announced her views on the subject during a guest appearance on the sports podcast “All the Smoke.”
“I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior,” Harris said.
The idea of legalizing marijuana is not “new” for her, she said.
“I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it,” Harris explained.
Harris also discussed how the criminalization of selling and using the drug has disproportionately targeted Black communities. Although Black people use the drug at the same rate as white people, they are arrested for marijuana-related offenses at a rate that is four times higher.
“We know historically what [criminalization of marijuana] has meant and who has gone to jail,” Harris noted.
Although Harris has expressed support for legalizing recreational cannabis use in the past years, she was ambivalent about legalization as recently as 2016.
As a U.S. senator in 2018, Harris, alongside Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), co-sponsored legislation that would have expunged past cannabis-related offenses and legalized the drug for recreational use. She expressed support for similar moves in 2020 as a candidate for president during the Democratic primaries.
In 2016, however, as a candidate for senator, she took no position on marijuana legalization, even as voters in her home state of California were considering passing a ballot initiative to legalize the drug. Harris also campaigned against a similar measure in 2010 as a candidate for attorney general, stating that she supported medicinal use of marijuana but not legalizing recreational use.
As a district attorney in San Francisco, Harris’s office oversaw nearly 2,000 convictions for marijuana use, although in most cases individuals were not sent to prison upon being convicted.
Despite this history, Harris’s current stance on cannabis legalization goes beyond President Joe Biden’s action on the issue — earlier this year, his administration announced a plan to reschedule cannabis from a Schedule I designation (the most strictly regulated drugs, which are considered to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”) to Schedule III, which are less regulated. However, that plan did not call for federal legalization.
Harris is also ahead of Republican candidate for president Donald Trump on legalization. While Trump has expressed that he will be voting for Florida to allow recreational use of the drug, he has not come out in favor of federally legalizing it, and has taken harsh anti-drug positions (including calling for the death penalty for drug dealers) that suggest he won’t be changing his mind on marijuana use at the national level anytime soon.
The vast majority of Americans support legalizing cannabis. A Gallup poll from last November, for example, found that 70 percent of voters backed full legalization of marijuana, while just 29 percent wanted the drug to remain illegal.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy