Kamala Harris Rolls Out National Marijuana Legalization Plan, Pledging To Make It ‘The Law Of The Land’

Vice President Kamala Harris is pledging to federally legalize marijuana, ensuring that access to cannabis is “the law of the land.”

If elected, she will “break down unjust legal barriers that hold Black men and other Americans back by legalizing marijuana nationally, working with Congress to ensure that the safe cultivation, distribution, and possession of recreational marijuana is the law of the land,” the Harris campaign said in a press release on Monday.

The Democratic presidential nominee’s cannabis plan is part of what her campaign calls an “opportunity agenda” aimed at winning the votes of Black men.

To that end, the campaign says Harris will “fight to ensure that as the national cannabis industry takes shape, Black men are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”

Last month, Harris made clear she still supports legalizing cannabis, which she previously pushed for as a senator but had not publicly discussed since becoming President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020.

“I just feel strongly, people should not be going to jail for smoking weed,” she said in an interview with the All the Smoke podcast. “And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail.”

“Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior,” Harris told hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, who are former NBA players.

“Actually this is not a new position for me,” Harris, who sponsored a federal cannabis legalization bill as a U.S. senator, said. “I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it. So that’s where I am on that.”

Until now, Harris had not made her position on marijuana part of her current campaign for the White House.

Also last month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said he thinks marijuana legalization is an issue that should be left to individual states, adding that electing more Democrats to Congress could also make it easier to pass federal reforms like cannabis banking protections.

“I think it’s an issue for the states on some of those, and that’s the way the states have done it,” Walz, who is Minnesota’s governor and previously served in Congress, said, dodging a reporter’s direct question about national cannabis legalization.

During that interview, Walz highlighted two incremental reform issues: medical marijuana access for veterans who receive healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as well as passage of federal legislation that would ease restrictions for banks that due business with marijuana companies.

If Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, he said, those matters might be easier to address.

“There’s work to be done nationally around the banking issue,” he said in the Spectrum News interview that was posted on September 14, “and I think that’s something that if we get a working Congress who actually wants to solve some issues—when we have the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate—then we can start to see if some of those things make sense.”

Harris, for her part, has spoken in favor of federal legalization in the past, for example at a closed-door roundtable event with cannabis pardon recipients in March. In her previous run for president, Harris also backed full federal decriminalization for simple drug possession.

Meanwhile former President Donald Trump said recently during his campaign for a second term that he now supports federal marijuana rescheduling and marijuana banking access.

“As President, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies, and supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens,” Trump posted to social media last month.

Trump also recently discussed the medical benefits of cannabis and said legalization would be “very good” for Florida, which will consider the reform at the ballot box in November’s election.

The Harris–Walz campaign, however, has accused Trump of lying about his support for marijuana reform—arguing that his “blatant pandering” runs counter to his administration’s record on cannabis.

Following Trump’s recent announcement of support for the Florida cannabis legalization ballot measure, the Democratic campaign has been working to remind voters that while in office, Trump “took marijuana reform backwards.”

In a memo from a senior campaign spokesperson, the Harris-Walz campaign accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” on cannabis, saying it’s one of the Republican former president’s “several bewildering ‘policy proposals’ that deserve real scrutiny.”

The posturing by the presidential candidates comes amid an ongoing process of moving marijuana to the less-restrictive Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) this spring recommended moving the drug to Schedule III, but the action has faced resistance from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has scheduled a hearing on the proposal for December 2—after the presidential election, raising concerns that the process will not be completed until after a new president is inaugurated.

Meanwhile, Trump also recently went after Harris over her prosecutorial record on marijuana, claiming that she put “thousands and thousands of Black people in jail” for cannabis offenses—but the full record of her time in office is more nuanced.

Trump’s line of attack, while misleading, was nonetheless notable in the sense that the GOP presidential nominee implied that he disagrees with criminalizing people over marijuana and is moving to leverage the idea that Harris played a role in racially disproportionate mass incarceration.

As president, Trump largely stayed true to his position that marijuana laws should be handled at the state-level, with no major crackdown on cannabis programs as some feared after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Obama era federal enforcement guidance. In fact, Trump criticized the top DOJ official and suggested the move should be reversed.

While he was largely silent on the issue of legalization, he did tentatively endorse a bipartisan bill to codify federal policy respecting states’ rights to legalize.

That said, on several occasions he released signing statements on spending legislation stipulating that he reserved the right to ignore a long-standing rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using its funds to interfere with state-legal medical marijuana programs.

Before Biden bowed out of the race, his campaign made much of the president’s mass cannabis pardons and rescheduling push, drawing a contrast with the Trump administration’s record. The Harris campaign so far has not spoken to that particular issue, and the nominee has yet to publicly discuss marijuana policy issues since her own campaign launched.