In yet another bid to prove she’s down with the kids, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. sat down with “The Breakfast Club” — the Charlamagne tha God version, not the Molly Ringwald one — to dish on everything from running for president to pot.
“Half my family is from Jamaica, are you kidding me?” Harris joked when the morning show hosts challenged whether she favors marijuana legalization. She conceded she has in fact lit up while listening to Tupac and Snoop Dogg during college before adding, “and I inhaled,” a subtle swipe at Bill Clinton’s equivocation on weed.
Unfortunately for Harris, this timeline doesn’t work. She says she got stoned to Tupac and Snoop during college, but Tupac didn’t drop his debut solo album until the end of 1991. Snoop didn’t do so until two years after that. By that time, Harris, who graduated from Howard University in 1986, was already years deep into her career as an anti-marijuana deputy district attorney in Alameda County.
So unless she was lighting up while she was cracking down on marijuana users, her story looks a lie, one reeking not of weed but of desperation to appear as hip and with it as a young Barack Obama once was.
Americans don’t mind youthful indiscretions, and they’ve warmed to pot legalization, but liars are another matter. Harris seems determined to frame herself as a pro-weed candidate, but as district attorney of San Francisco and as California attorney general, she was quite the opposite.
Harris opposed Proposition 19 in 2010, which would have legalized recreational marijuana. “Spending two decades in court rooms, Harris believes that drug selling harms communities,” her campaign manager told local reporters at the time. “Harris supports the legal use of medicinal marijuana but does not support anything beyond that.”
But her opposition to marijuana didn’t just inform her campaign policies. As California’s attorney general, she also allowed the federal government to crack down on legal medicinal dispensaries. She refused to join other states’ efforts to remove marijuana from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most dangerous substances, leading the marijuana lobby to back a pro-pot Republican candidate during her re-election.
As much as Harris may try to bill herself as smart on crime rather than tough on crime, Harris increased convictions of drug dealers from 56 percent to 74 percent within just three years while she was a district attorney. Harris also tightened loopholes in bail and drug programs, resulting in more prison time for drug offenders.
Now, Harris says she wants to legalize marijuana. Her reasoning is not that it’s none of the government’s business to control what substances adults wish to consume but that it “gives a lot of people joy.” Riveting, Sen. Marie Kondo.
People might agree with the opinion she’s chosen to hold in public now. But the flagrant hypocrisy and dishonesty with which Harris explains her history may be a bridge too far for people to accept.
