WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris urged black men to back her presidential candidacy Tuesday by pledging to legalize marijuana — despite overseeing more than 1,900 marijuana convictions as San Francisco district attorney between 2004 and 2011.
Harris, 59, made the statement as she prepared for an afternoon interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God — on whose program she claimed in 2019 she had smoked marijuana in college, inviting allegations of hypocrisy over her prosecutorial record.
“Kamala Harris will legalize recreational marijuana — breaking down unjust barriers that hold Black men and other Americans back and making sure Black Americans have opportunities to succeed as the marketplace takes shape,” she tweeted ahead of her 5 p.m. interview with Charlamagne.
Harris, 59, is trying to court younger black men ahead of the Nov. 5 election as polling suggests that the demographic may be drifting toward former President Donald Trump, potentially tipping the outcome in the Republican’s favor in close swing states.
Trump, 78, also supports marijuana legalization, at least on a state-by-state basis — endorsing Florida’s pending marijuana legalization ballot initiative last month and saying that people should not be jailed for using the drug.
“I believe it is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” Trump wrote on social media.
“We must also implement smart regulations, while providing access for adults, to safe, tested product. As a Floridian, I will be voting YES on Amendment 3 this November.”
Trump was the second president to preside over state-legal recreational marijuana markets, which were first authorized by ballot initiatives in Colorado and Washington state in 2012, and he did not move to shut down those markets or prosecute businesspeople operating in compliance with local rules.
Federal law still makes possession of marijuana illegal for any reason outside limited research and retiring President Biden, who wrote some of the nation’s toughest federal drug laws as a senator in the 1980s and ’90s, opposes pot legalization.
Trump on his final day in office freed seven inmates serving life in prison for marijuana — two of whom were locked up under the three-strikes system ratified by Biden’s 1994 crime law.
Biden pivoted to a more liberal stance during his 2020 candidacy, pledging to release “everyone” in prison for marijuana, but has instead provoked outrage from activists and federal inmates for leaving the nation’s roughly 2,700 federal pot prisoners behind bars and mass-pardoning people convicted federally of simple marijuana possession, of whom none were known be in prison. Most, if not all, federal inmates were convicted of dealing pot, not just possessing it.
Twenty-four states, three US territories and Washington, DC, already have legalized recreational marijuana under local law and more than a dozen others allow pot for medical purposes. Polling shows that roughly two-thirds of the public support recreational legalization.
Harris’ 2019 interview with Charlamagne resulted in significant blowback not only for alleged hypocrisy — but also because detractors accused her of lying about smoking pot in college while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg.
Those critics pointed out that Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986, five years before Tupac released his first album in 1991 and about seven years before Snoop Dogg released his first album in 1993.
“Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” the then-California senator joked in that interview, during her unsuccessful candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Harris’ father, Jamaica-born Stanford University economics professor emeritus Donald Harris, meanwhile, said he was outraged that his daughter had perpetuated stereotypes about his Caribbean homeland.
Her dad told Jamaica Global Online that “[s]peaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”
“My dear departed grandmothers… as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” Harris’ father wrote.
California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, the same year Harris was elected to the Senate.
