President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have declared that individuals should not face incarceration for using or possessing marijuana, even though Harris has historically overseen nearly 2,000 marijuana-related convictions.
These statements follow the Department of Justice’s recent initiative, announced Thursday, to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III drug.
Currently, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) lists marijuana as a Schedule I drug alongside heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and methylenedioxymethamphetamine, commonly known as ecstasy.
“No one should go to jail for smoking weed,” Harris expressed in a post on X on Thursday. “We have pardoned tens of thousands of people with federal convictions for simple marijuana possession.”
No one should go to jail for smoking weed.
We have pardoned tens of thousands of people with federal convictions for simple marijuana possession.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) May 16, 2024
Similarly, Biden wrote in another post on X, “No one should be jailed for simply using or possessing marijuana.”
No one should be jailed for simply using or possessing marijuana.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 17, 2024
Data from the Bay Area News Group shows that as the district attorney of San Francisco, Harris oversaw nearly 2,000 marijuana-related convictions, as reported by the Mercury News in 2019.
During a Democrat primary debate in July 2019, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-HI) criticized Harris’s prosecutorial record.
“Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor, and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record,” Gabbard commented.
Gabbard noted that there were “too many examples to cite” and asserted that Harris had “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations.” The figures Gabbard referenced originated from an article by the Washington Free Beacon, which cited data from Harris’s tenure as California’s attorney general.
According to the Free Beacon article, “at least 1,560 people were sent to state prisons for marijuana-related offenses between 2011 and 2016.” However, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the San Francisco Chronicle that the number was closer to 1,974.
The Mercury News elaborated:
During the last presidential debate in July, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard criticized Harris over marijuana convictions, stating that she “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” Gabbard was referencing figures for the entire state of California while Harris was attorney general, even though most marijuana cases are prosecuted by county district attorneys. However, as San Francisco DA from 2004 to 2010, Harris had significant discretion in prosecuting marijuana cases in the city.
The outlet continued, explaining that data from the San Francisco district attorney’s office showed that under Harris’s tenure, “her attorneys won 1,956 misdemeanor and felony convictions” related to marijuana cultivation, possession, or sales.
Gabbard’s criticism came months after Harris admitted in a February 2019 interview that she had used marijuana, followed by laughter.
