Vice President Kamala Harris continues to embrace policy positions completely at odds with her previous actions as an elected official. "I just feel strongly that people shouldn't go to jail for smoking weed," she said Monday during an appearance on the video podcast All The Smoke, a video podcast hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. "We need to legalize it."
Shockingly enough, the hosts did not follow up and ask Harris about her controversial record as attorney general of California, something she struggled to defend as a candidate for president in 2019. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), at least 1,974 individuals were imprisoned for marijuana-related offenses on Harris's watch.
That figure became a matter of dispute in the 2020 Democratic primary after then-congresswoman Tusli Gabbard attacked Harris's record as California attorney general during a debate. Gabbard cited a Washington Free Beacon report which found that Harris had sent at least 1,560 people to state prison for marijuana-related offenses between 2011 and 2016. The New York Times called it the "sharpest attack of the night." The Harris campaign called it a "lie."
A subsequent fact check by the San Francisco Chronicle, based on information provided by the CDCR, determined that the Free Beacon had undercounted the number of individuals sent to prison for marijuana convictions during Harris's tenure as attorney general. Even the new, higher figure of 1,974 was likely an undercount due to a California public safety initiative that rerouted many low-level, non-violent drug offenders to state jails, where they would not have appeared in state prison admission totals.
Gabbard's attack on Harris's criminal justice record was bolstered by a comment Harris made in February 2019, when she laughed about smoking weed in college and endorsed legalizing the drug because "it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy." Harris withdrew from the Democratic primary in 2019 several weeks after Politico said her campaign had "no discipline, no plan, no strategy."
The need for joy has become a central theme of Harris's presidential campaign in 2024, but critics have faulted the candidate for disavowing nearly all of the positions she previously endorsed and for refusing to answer challenging questions from legitimate journalists who aren't openly supporting her candidacy. Her interview on All The Smoke is unlikely to dispel this criticism.
Barnes has been arrested at least twice for suspected domestic violence and for threatening a police officer. Jackson is best known for defending anti-Semitism, as well as for climbing into the stands and punching a Detroit Pistons fan during the infamous "Malice at the Palace" brawl in November 2004.