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Politics//Joe Garofoli

KAMALA HARRIS’ POSITION ON MARIJUANA HAS EVOLVED. NOW SHE SHOULD EXPLAIN HOW AND
WHY

By Joe GarofoliMarch 15, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris repeated her line that “nobody should have to go to
jail for smoking weed” Friday during a White House event on cannabis
legalization. Her position has changed dramatically since she was a prosecutor
in San Francisco.

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinal

The sight of Vice President Kamala Harris urging the reform of cannabis laws
Friday in the White House will prompt a lot of eye rolls from dubious
Californians old enough to remember when Harris was an anti-weed prosecutor in
her home state less than a decade ago.

When Californians voted to legalize cannabis for adult recreational use in 2016,
then-Attorney General Harris didn’t take a position. Six years earlier, she
actively opposed a different legalization measure. As San Francisco’s district
attorney, her prosecutors convicted more than 1,900 people for weed violations.
When reporters pointed out that her 2014 Republican opponent for attorney
general supported legalization, she laughed and said, “He’s entitled to his
opinion.”

How far she’s come.

Article continues below this ad

On Friday, sitting in the West Wing next to rapper Fat Joe, Kentucky Gov. Andy
Beshear, who has pardoned cannabis crimes in his state, and others who have
received federal pardons for weed possession violations, Harris repeated a line
she has used often in recent months: “Nobody should have to go to jail for
smoking weed.”

Now, Harris has an opportunity to redeem her past positions beyond Friday’s
White House cannabis photo op by telling the story of how and why she has
evolved on cannabis.

And if she does so genuinely, she could help her fellow former weed warrior,
President Joe Biden, win reelection by connecting with a lot of Americans who
are taking the same journey when it comes to reconsidering cannabis.

There are political benefits, too. Explaining that evolution could also boost
their standing with young voters and people of color who are unenthused about
supporting the Biden-Harris ticket. Their support could be a difference-maker in
the election. They overwhelmingly support legalization and reclassifying
cannabis from what the federal government considers it to be now: a drug as
lethal as heroin.

There is little to lose, as public opinion is on Harris’ and Biden’s side. Not
only do polls show that 70% of Americans support legalization, but 38 states
permit the use of medicinal cannabis while 24 allow adult recreational use.

Article continues below this ad

“Neither one of them should hide from the fact that in the past, they held
different positions. And I think it’s important for them now to explain why
they’ve changed their position,” said Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML,
a national cannabis reform organization. One of their members participated in
Friday’s White House event. “That would go a long way to sort of persuading some
of the perhaps more cynical members of the public, who remember the fact that
this wasn’t the way they spoke about marijuana a decade ago.”

If Harris explained why and how she’s changed, Armentano said, it would blunt
criticisms of “people who might say, ‘They’re just hypocrites’ or ‘They’re just
seeing which way the winds are blowing now, and that’s why they’re saying these
things,’ that this is just crass politics.’ ”

It’s easy to come to those conclusions because Harris’ cannabis history is
complicated and often contradictory.

Harris reflected public sentiment at the time she was elected San Francisco’s
district attorney in 2003, when only 34% of Americans supported legalization.

Prosecutors in her office won 1,956 misdemeanor and felony convictions for
marijuana possession, cultivation or sale between 2004-2010. Only 45 were sent
to state prison, according to a 2019 San Jose Mercury News investigation. (She
did, however, pioneer programs like Back on Track while district attorney. It
enabled low-level drug offenders to obtain a high school diploma and a job
instead of prison time.)

Not only did Harris oppose California’s 2010 ballot measure to legalize the
adult recreational use of cannabis, she co-wrote the argument against it that
appeared in the voter guide, calling Proposition 19 “flawed public policy and
would compromise the safety of our roadways, workplaces, and communities.”

She took no position when California voters backed legalizing cannabis for adult
recreational use, when she was on the same ballot running for Senate.

“Kamala Harris was certainly no friend to marijuana policy when she was attorney
general,” Armentano said.

Harris didn’t catch up to her home state voters on cannabis until 2018, when as
a senator she backed New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s federal legalization
legislation. The following year, when she was running for president, her
campaign attempted to fundraise off of her legalization position. On the email
pitch, she outlined her “pathway to legalization” for weed at the federal level.

Now, she is talking about cannabis reform on the campaign trail, often through a
criminal justice lens. In January, Harris announced a new federal rule that
would make people with criminal records, even those not related to cannabis,
eligible for Small Business Administration loans.

Last month while campaigning in South Carolina, Harris was asked what her ticket
meant for young Black men. Along with talking about high-speed internet, Harris
mentioned what “we have done to pardon tens of thousands of people for simple
marijuana possession under the federal law” and then invoked her line that
nobody should be jailed for smoking weed.

“These are some of the things that we have done that I think really do resonate
with young people, with Black voters and young Black voters, with young Black
men,” Harris said. “And there’s more to do.”

On Friday, Harris said that “the promise of America includes equal justice under
the law. And for too many, our criminal justice system has failed to live up to
that core principle. And I say that with full knowledge of how the system has
worked, including my experience as a prosecutor.”

It is the closest Harris came Friday to acknowledging how she has evolved on
marijuana.

Biden, too, has come a long way after a lifetime of supporting harsh punishments
for drug dealers and users. Booker, his 2020 Democratic presidential rival,
called him the “architect of mass incarceration” for his support of a 1994 crime
bill toughening sentences for many federal crimes.

In 1989, Biden, then a Delaware senator, appeared on national television to
offer a rebuttal to President George H.W. Bush’s plan to crack down on the
nation’s drug problem.

“The president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to
meet the crisis at hand,” Biden said. Biden called not just for tougher
penalties for drug dealers but also to “hold every drug user accountable.”

As he prepared to run for president in 2019, Biden acknowledged his history in
accelerating the war on drugs and mass incarceration, saying, “I haven’t always
been right,” on criminal justice issues. “I know we haven’t always gotten things
right, but I’ve always tried.”

Since he became president, Biden has tried harder than any president to change
cannabis laws.

He has issued blanket presidential pardons granting clemency to people convicted
of simple marijuana possession, use and certain related federal offenses. In
2002, he urged the nation’s governors to pardon state-level weed offenders,
which quickly led the governors of Kentucky and Oregon to pardon tens of
thousands of convictions. Other states then followed suit.

Biden’s pardons of people with federal marijuana convictions apply to an
estimated 6,557 people, according to an analysis by the U.S. Sentencing
Commission.

And while cannabis activists were thrilled to hear Biden say in this month’s
State of the Union speech that no one should be jailed just for using or
possessing marijuana, Biden incorrectly described his work as “expunging”
records. He has pardoned drug crimes, not expunged records, which involves
sealing past convictions from public view.

The most important thing Biden has done to reform cannabis laws was to order an
administrative review of reclassifying cannabis from the Schedule 1 category of
controlled substances.

The Department of Health and Human Services recommended last year that cannabis
be placed in the Schedule 3 category, where it would be considered more like a
medicine. The Drug Enforcement Agency, however, has not yet responded to the
recommendation and it might not for years. Advocates have asked the DEA to
reclassify cannabis five times before, and it has frequently taken several years
for the agency to respond.

“I cannot emphasize enough that they need to get to it as quickly as possible,”
Harris said Friday. “And we need to have a resolution based on their findings
and their assessment.”

While Biden and Harris are moving ahead on cannabis reform, Congress lags
behind. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer promised to put a cannabis reform
bill on the floor of the Senate three years ago. That still hasn’t happened.

So for now, the administration is using its massive public megaphone in
unprecedented ways. Three decades after Bill Clinton denied inhaling while
smoking pot, it is mind-blowing to hear a sitting vice president say that nobody
should be in jail for smoking weed.

“There is significance on who is delivering the message,” Armento said. “You
have politicians who have evolved over time to come to this position, very much
like many of the American people that they represent, have evolved over time.
They go from folks who may have supported the war on drugs or criminalizing
marijuana to having evolved their policies to say we need a new approach.”

Reach Joe Garofoli: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @joegarofoli

March 15, 2024
By Joe Garofoli

Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering
national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in
Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the
host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here:
bit.ly/2LSAUjA

He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey
Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he
discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the
word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking
politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He
is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go
Steelers!

He can be reached at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.

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