“Nobody” should go to jail for “smoking weed,” Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday, despite having prosecuted nearly 2,000 cases of marijuana possession, cultivation, or sale as California’s attorney general.
Harris’s public flip-flop is likely due to the politics of a difficult reelection campaign in which the Biden-Harris ticket is losing to former President Donald Trump in 75 percent of 2024 swing states, polling shows.
Harris condemned prosecuting those who smoke flowers while speaking at a roundtable event about cannabis reform with musician Fat Joe and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D).
“I believe – I think we all at this table believe – nobody should have to go to jail for smoking weed,” she said. “And what we need to do is recognize that far too many people have been sent to jail for simple marijuana possession.”
As attorney general, Harris’s record of prosecuting those in the marijuana industry is complicated, as Yahoo reported:
Harris oversaw roughly 1,956 misdemeanor and felony convictions for “marijuana possession, cultivation, or sale,” according to Reuters. However, defense attorneys and prosecutors in Harris’ office told Mercury News that most of the people convicted during this period did not serve jail time. And convictions for marijuana did go down under Harris’ tenure as district attorney.
While Harris was a United States senator, she supported decriminalizing marijuana. In 2017, she signed Sen. Cory Booker’s legislation to decriminalize the flower at the federal level.
In a 2016 presidential debate, Harris took heat from former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard about the contradiction. “She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations,” Gabbard said. “And then laughed about it when she asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
