When Harris was attorney general of the state of California, by reputation one of the most lawless, offender-friendly, drug-loving places in America, drug arrests actually\u00a0increased.\u00a0<\/i>This increase was\u00a0despite a law signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that made petty marijuana busts punishable only by fine. And when she was asked in 2014 if marijuana legalization was a good idea, Harris\u2019s non-answer was a volley of laughter.<\/p>\n
But now, Harris claims to be a proponent of federal legalization. What changed?<\/p>\n
When Harris was the district attorney in\u00a0San Francisco<\/a>, by reputation (if not quite by reality) one of the country\u2019s most liberal places, her office\u00a0wrote a brief<\/a>, filed in court cases for years afterwards, that argued that the law forbid all marijuana sales. In essence, Harris\u2019s people went before judges to declare the day-to-day activities of legal medical marijuana dispensaries in her then-adopted hometown were\u00a0all criminal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Early in her tenure as AG, when the Justice Department run by her personal friend President Barack Obama shut down and attempted to prosecute dispensaries and other medical cannabis California had awarded business licenses to and continued to collect taxes from, Attorney General Harris stood by and did \u2014 well, pretty much nothing.<\/p>\n Compare Harris\u2019s practiced centrism in 2011 to 2012\u00a0to the\u00a0swift and immediate reaction<\/a>\u00a0from her successor, Xavier Becerra, when Jeff Sessions made a similar but ultimately empty gesture. (Becerra immediately released a statement saying his office would stand behind the state\u2019s legal cannabis industry.)<\/p>\n During the early 2010s, Harris\u2019s affronts, failures and non-actions so incensed the cannabis industry and the marijuana legalization movement \u2014 both of which supported Harris during her razor-thin victory in the 2010 attorney general election \u2014 that in 2014, some\u00a0campaigned in support<\/a>\u00a0of her long-shot Republican challenger.<\/p>\n This is to say that Harris\u2019s record shows her to be both a participant and an observer of the\u00a0War on Drugs<\/a>. When she was in a position to do so, she did nothing to change the status quo. In fact, she did things to preserve it.<\/p>\n But now that Harris is a junior U.S. senator from California and will almost certainly run for president of the United States, she has discovered she doesn\u2019t actually like or support any of the above.<\/p>\n That is, Kamala Harris (or her advisers) found that it\u2019s good to disavow the record she has spent much of her career amassing \u2014 the record she used to become a senator \u2014 and to love and support marijuana legalization and hate the drug war, even if she can\u2019t stop trying to\u00a0laugh the issue away<\/a>\u00a0when convenient.<\/p>\n It\u2019s past time America legalized marijuana and regulated it. But when doing so, we need to expunge nonviolent marijuana-related offenses from the records of millions of people who have been arrested and incarcerated so they can get on with their lives.<\/p>\n \u2014 Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 10, 2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n At the time of this writing, Harris\u00a0is widely expected<\/a>\u00a0to announce her candidacy for president of the United States on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in\u00a0Oakland, California<\/a>. That would follow nearly to the letter the blueprint laid down by Obama, who declared his candidacy in 2007 back at the Illinois State House, where he had made his bones.<\/p>\n Harris has for most of her career successfully had it both ways, as Jacobin\u00a0observed<\/a>\u00a0back in 2017. She posed as progressive on gun control, but delayed taking action on seizing guns from violent Californians breaking state gun control law. She secured a massive settlement from banks and mortgage companies whose malfeasance led to one of the greatest transfers of wealth in modern history, but failed to prosecute any of the individuals or companies involved.<\/p>\n There is reason to believe that Harris will behave similarly on marijuana, and that drug policy reform is merely another thing she\u2019s calculated to be a political boon. We know this because it\u2019s in her record.<\/p>\n Harris may yet surprise and astound. And a President Harris would surely be preferable to the\u00a0status quo<\/a>\u00a0when it comes to cannabis reform. But Candidate Harris so far has shown her support for marijuana to be almost entirely a calculated marriage of convenience. She needs to work harder and do more to demonstrate her sincerity \u2014 on this, and on much else.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, which candidates do you trust when it comes to drug policy?<\/p>\n The post Now That Kamala Harris Wants to Be President, She Really Likes Cannabis Legalization<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When Harris was attorney general of the state of California, by reputation one of the most lawless, offender-friendly, drug-loving places in America, drug arrests actually\u00a0increased.\u00a0This increase was\u00a0despite a law signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that made petty marijuana busts punishable only by fine. And when she was asked inContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6814,6418,148,50,4211,687,81,7040,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32065,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32064\/revisions\/32065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Kamala Harris, Progressive Candidate?<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Now That Kamala Harris Wants to Be President, She Really Likes Cannabis Legalization<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"