By
Democratic Senator Kamala Harris
is a front-runner in the race to become the party's top 2020
presidential nominee. She wants Medicare for all, dislikes President
Trump’s proposed border wall, and favors of a ban on assault weapons and on the sale of high-capacity magazines.
She recently announced her support for the Green New Deal in an interview
with MSNBC, but her stance on a different "green" issue—the
legalization of marijuana—hasn't always been so clear.
During her time
as California’s Attorney General, and later in the U.S. Senate, she's
changed her mind a few times. Below, a complete guide to her evolving
position on pot.
Early on, Harris approved of medical marijuana, but nothing beyond that.
In
2010, the year she was elected California attorney general, Harris
opposed an initiative to legalize marijuana, which would have "allowed
local governments to regulate and tax recreational marijuana two years
before Colorado and Washington passed their measures," according to The Los Angeles Times,
"Spending
two decades in court rooms, Harris believes that drug selling harms
communities,” her campaign manager, Brian Brokaw, told Capitol Weekly. “Harris supports the legal use of medicinal marijuana but does not support anything beyond that.”
Four years later, when the debate on the
legalization of marijuana was a big issue in the 2014 race for
California's attorney general, her opponent Ron Gold said in an interview that "it needs to be legalized" recreationally.
Harris
was told Gold's position on the issue by a local news station and asked
for her thoughts.
She paused for four seconds, nodded her head five
times, before laughing and responding with, "He's entitled to his
opinion."
In 2015, Harris called for the decriminalization of marijuana.
At the May 2015 California Democrats Convention
a year later, Harris called for an end to "the federal ban on medical
marijuana," but stopped short of talking about total legalization.
After
she was elected to represent California in the U.S. Congress in 2016,
Harris addressed the audience at a conference sponsored by liberal think
tank Center for American Progress, making the biggest pro-marijuana
statement in her political career thus far.
“Let
me tell you what California needs, Jeff Sessions. We need support in
dealing with transnational criminal organizations and dealing with human
trafficking, not in going after grandma’s medicinal marijuana,” she
said.
“While I don’t believe in legalizing all
drugs, as a career prosecutor I just don’t, we need to do the smart
thing, the right thing, and finally decriminalize marijuana,” she added.
In 2018, she signed an act to make marijuana federally legal.
In
2018, Harris added her name to Sen. Cory Booker's Marijuana Justice
Act "to make marijuana legal at the federal level," she explained on Twitter.
“Right
now in this country people are being arrested, being prosecuted, and
end up spending time in jail or prison all because of their use of a
drug that otherwise should be considered legal,” she said
in a press release. “Making marijuana legal at the federal level is the
smart thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. I know this as a former
prosecutor and I know it as a senator.”
Harris
also signed a joint-letter alongside Sen. Orrin Hatch last year
demanding Sessions stop blocking research efforts on medical marijuana.
“The
benefits of research are unquestionable,” they wrote in the letter.
“Ninety-two percent of veterans support federal research on marijuana,
and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs is aware that many veterans have
been using marijuana to manage the pain of their wartime wounds.
America’s heroes deserve scientifically-based assessments of the
substance many of them are already self-administering.”
In the lead up to the election, Harris has made it clear she believes all marijuana should be legal.
In her new book The Truths We Hold, Harris argues that all marijuana use should be legalized and that "nonviolent marijuana-related offenses" should be removed from people's records.
"We
need to legalize marijuana and regulate it," she writes. "And we need
to expunge nonviolent marijuana-related offenses from the records of the
millions of people who have been arrested and incarcerated so they can
get on with their lives."
Three weeks after announcing her candidacy for president, Harris appeared on the "The Breakfast Club," a New York-based radio show,
where co-host Charlamagne Tha God asked if she had ever smoked pot. "I
have. And I inhaled, I did inhale. It was a long time ago, but yes," the
California Democrat replied.
Realizing the
admission might "break news," Harris explained that she smoked a joint
in college while listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. However, as
someone pointed out on Twitter, Harris graduated Howard University in
1986 and UC Hastings College of the Law in 1989—years before Snoop or
Tupac released their debut studio albums.
Harris went on to tell Charlamagne Tha God that she
supports the legalization of weed. "Look I joke about it, half
joking—half my family's from Jamaica—are you kidding me," she said."I
have had concerns, the full record, I have had concerns, which I think,
first of all, let me just make this statement very clear, I believe we
need to legalize marijuana... Now, that being said, and this is not a
'but,' it is an 'and,' and we need to research, which is one of the
reasons we need to legalize it.
We need to move it on the schedule so
that we can research the impact of weed on a developing brain. You know,
that part of the brain that develops judgment, actually begins its
growth at age 18 through age 24."
"But I am
absolutely in favor of legalizing marijuana," she added. "We've got to
do it. We have incarcerated so many, and particularly young men and
young men of color, in a way that we have not for the same level of use
[among] other young men."
In a interview with Jamaica Global Online, her father Donald Harris called the remarks a “travesty” and accused his daughter of stereotyping.
“My
dear departed grandmother s(whose extraordinary legacy I described in a
recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents , must be
turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation
and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or
not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in
the pursuit of identity politics," he said. "Speaking for myself and my
immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves
from this travesty.”
No comments:
Post a Comment