this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Kamala Harris signals she'll go further than Biden on marijuana legalization "we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior" (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/politics
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I haven’t heard that, do you have a source?

I went looking for one, and it seems not as cut and dried as I thought.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/kamala-harris-record-marijuana-prosecutor-173249390.html

But it is fair to talk about Harris’ complex relationship with marijuana.

As a senator, Harris championed marijuana decriminalization and eventually legalization. She signed Senator Cory Booker’s marijuana legalization bill in 2017, and she also introduced her own bill to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level.

But as an attorney general, her record is much more complicated. 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.

At the end of the day, calling Harris out on her previous role in convicting folks for marijuana crimes isn’t entirely unfair. But it’s also pretty misleading to pretend that she pulled a switcheroo on the issue just in time for the midterms.

This article spins it slightly differently, IMO, but still not solidly stating what I believed to be true. Bold added by me.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/five-takeaways-from-kamala-harris-s-all-the-smoke-podcast-interview/ar-AA1rumR4

As district attorney in San Francisco, however, she had enforced cannabis laws and opposed legalized use for adults. She defended its usage for medicinal purposes, but her prosecutors convicted over 1,900 people on cannabis-related charges. When she was running for reelection as attorney general, she opposed legalizing marijuana for recreational use, which was supported by her GOP opponent.

That aside, it remains true that at this point it's nothing but a campaign promise.