With President Joe Biden’s announcement that he’s dropping out of the 2024 presidential election and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, uncertainty and nervousness is rippling through the canna-sphere. Cannabis advocates are now taking a much closer look at her stance on drug policy reform and are finding that although she’s taken a hard-nosed, tough-cop approach toward weed in the past, she’s seemingly flipped on the issue in recent years.
This might be good news for anyone who has been concerned over the current administration’s milquetoast approach to marijuana reform. President Joe Biden was initially reluctant to support cannabis law reform as recently as 2019 — during the last presidential race. He called it a “gateway drug” in 2010 when he was vice president, harking back to golden years of the War On Some Drugs.
More recently the Biden administration has been pro-marijuana — at least on its surface. But the pro-reform comments from Biden and Harris over the last four years hasn’t resulted in much more than superficial progress.
Biden has made it a point to repeatedly bring up marijuana pardons that he issued in 2022 as proof that the administration is following through on its reform promises. However, those pardons didn’t free federal prisoners and didn’t actually expunge any records, making them mostly performative.
Even the administration’s move to reschedule marijuana — which has repeatedly been criticized as politically-motivated by stakeholders on both sides of the fence — seems like it could be more beneficial to pharmaceutical interests than current cannabis industry stakeholders.
But Harris has been notably more vocal in her support for reform than Biden. The administration’s failed campaign promise to decriminalize the drug originally came from Harris.
Harris also introduced the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act as a U.S. senator. This legislation aimed to decriminalize and tax marijuana at the federal level, expunge marijuana convictions and allocate tax revenue to trust funds.
She also cosponsored the Marijuana Justice Act, which U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced. It would have removed cannabis from the list of controlled substances, decriminalizing the drug at the federal level. Harris also co-sponsored the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would allow banks and financial institutions to do business with weed companies without the threat of federal prosecution.
As a senator, Harris also signed a number of letters encouraging lawmakers to push various legislative moves that would have supported cannabis businesses, including requests to grant small weed businesses access to federal loans and COVID-19 relief funds, calling for an end to no-knock raids and halting the Department of Justice from blocking marijuana research.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of Harris’ evolution in thinking is her reported call for the full legalization of cannabis during a meeting with pardon recipients in March, according to participant Chris Goldstein.
Her shifted stance is notable, considering Harris has a different history with weed dating back to her time as California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, when she prosecuted marijuana-related offenses. While she supported medical marijuana use during her time in California, she opposed a 2010 measure to legalize recreational marijuana in the state.
During her time as attorney general, more than 2,000 people were incarcerated in California for marijuana-related offenses. Critics say these incarcerations disproportionately affected people of color. However, others have argued her record as a prosecutor may have been overstated, suggesting that while her office was responsible for those incarcerations, she did not personally target simple marijuana users.
During a speech at The Commonwealth Club in 2010, Harris referred to people serving time for selling drugs, saying, “I don’t feel sorry for you and I’m not going to forgive you for committing a crime.”
But the Vice President has clearly taken a different stance in recent years. On April 20, the cannabis holiday known as “420,” Harris posted on X, that, “Nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed.”
“We must continue to change our nation’s approach to marijuana while reforming the justice system so it finally lives up to its name,” she wrote.
During an appearance earlier this year on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Harris once again voiced her support for cannabis law reform and criticized the old way of thinking.
“There was a time when people would say, ‘marijuana is a gateway drug.’ And these were failed policies,” she told Kimmel. “The resources should be better directed and will be better directed to deal with opioid addiction and what we need to do around fentanyl.”
Yet even with her apparent support of reform, a Harris presidency will not guarantee decriminalization or legalization. The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) most recent draft of the party platform is silent on changing the legal status of weed. It highlights the presidential pardons and calls on party members to “take action to expunge federal marijuana-only convictions,” but makes no mention of decriminalization or legalization. This is particularly notable, because the party’s 2020 platform called for full decriminalization.
In the meantime, advocates are waiting to see who Harris will choose as her running mate. Many of the proposed names belong to lawmakers and leaders who have supported weed reform in the past, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
Kelly has signed various versions of the SAFE Banking bill and has voiced reserved support for federal decriminalization. Shapiro has been vocally pushing for recreational legalization in his state. Beshear signed a bill legalizing medical cannabis in his state last year and took part in the talks with pardon recipients alongside Harris. And Cooper has repeatedly called for marijuana decriminalization in his own state and the nation at large.