Folio Weed — Kamala, Chameleon

Words by Shelton Hull

The emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the likely Democratic nominee for president in 2024 concludes one of the wildest political dramas in recent history — while setting the stage for more drama yet to come. She’s a woman, and she’s Black, so of course it has to be harder for her. That’s our system, and given the example of 2016, that will simply never change. 

Much like Obama in 2008 (a lifetime ago, in politics, and almost completely irrelevant to any contemporary analysis), she’s had her Blackness questioned or denied outright, and her value as a woman is viewed, by some, as contingent of her childlessness, a disgusting trope advanced by the alt-right that even caused the ex-wife of Harris’ husband to speak out in her defense. If you’ve ever been divorced, you know how unusual that is.  

But Folio Weed is a cannabis column, so today we’ll keep our focus strictly on that subject, and Harris’ own complex relationship with the plant. Much like Obama, Harris’ early life was shaped in part by cannabis, which both smoked in college. (Obama was famously a charter member of The Choom Gang during high school in Hawaii; he even thanked his plug in the yearbook, but not his mom, and I’m sure she was thrilled about that.) It’s unclear when Harris stopped, but if it came out tomorrow that she never actually did, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Most mainstream treatments of the subject use basically the same phrasing to say that she has “evolved” on the issue. That is true, and doubly so for the nation at large. Harris’ home base, the Bay Area of California, has led the way, going back 30 years to the first medical marijuana law in 1996. It was fully legalized there in 2016, which she opposed at the time. Much of the scrutiny on Harris stems from her record as a prosecutor and a U.S. Senator, which are actually two different records, as I will explain.. 

It’s been widely noted that the “ACAB” left now supports a former prosecutor, while the “Back the Blue” crowd is backing a guy with 34 felony convictions. Hopefully this means the end of both those concepts but probably not. The sad reality is that, like almost all prosecutors on all levels, Harris enforced the law, even though the law was stupid, as most would agree today. During her six years (2004-2010) as San Francisco district attorney, there were exactly 1,956 convictions for cannabis offenses, both misdemeanor and felony. Of those, only 45 went to state prison, but her policy, according to colleagues, was that simple possession got no jail time.

Harris was Attorney General of California from 2011-2017, approximately 1,560 people were sent to state prison, mostly for sale and distribution charges. During that time, as she began to pursue national office, she began speaking out in favor of medical marijuana and against some of the more punitive measures, all while opposed recreational use. She now stands firmly in favor of full decriminalization, even co-sponsoring a bill to that effect in 2019 with New York senator Jerrold Nadler. A year earlier, she co-signed Cory Booker’s revolutionary Marijuana Justice Act, which we’d previously covered in January 2018 and July 2019.

Whatever her early position on cannabis may have been, in 2024 Kamala Harris is about as liberal on the subject as you can be, while still winning elections. In fairness, even Trump has basically said that he doesn’t care. Both candidates would likely sign a federal decriminalization bill if it reached their desk, but at this point it seems fairly clear that neither house of Congress has the courage to move on this issue. As previously noted, the time to do it would have been in 2021, when Democrats held both houses of Congress, and the presidency. They didn’t even try, so it’s best to just forget about Washington, for the rest of the decade.

However, as things currently stand, the question is being decided on a state-by-state basis, just like Florida will in November. Given the current polling data, and considering that no state has rejected it at the ballot so far, passage is likely here, and in most other states where it’s being considered. Certainly, all the resistance is currently concentrated in the hands of Republicans, like DeSantis, who’s in the weird position of having to oppose something that will only benefit him and his state. The fear is not legalization but the surge in liberal voters who are responsive to this issue — of whom almost all will vote for Harris.