Vice President Kamala Harris announced on October 29, 2024, that she would legalize recreational marijuana across the nation if elected president. Taking to social media, Harris said she’d “break down unjust legal barriers” and make sure “opportunities for all Americans” exist in a sector where often inequality emanates from. Her “opportunity agenda” encompasses the legalization of cannabis, but also repairing the racial and economic injustices due to its criminalization, particularly in Black and minority communities.
Harris’ policy agenda has three keynote points, including federal recreational cannabis legalization, as well as social equity and a call to build economic opportunities inclusively within the cannabis industry.
Legalizing marijuana would align federal law with a fast-growing national trend-anti-prohibition laws in more than 20 states currently allow recreational use of cannabis. Equally important, her plan would attempt to establish equity in hopes of repairing the harm caused by decades of arrest and conviction on vulnerable populations due to cannabis use. Harris’s opening doors to minority entrepreneurs into the legal cannabis market includes guaranteed access to capital, licenses, and systems for support.
Harris stressed in an accompanying statement that there has been an imperative need to destroy the legal framework that perpetuated racial disparities. “Communities of color have disproportionately suffered from marijuana-related convictions-Black Americans, in particular,”
Harris wrote. “My administration will make sure that those who were victimized by these policies have access to new economic opportunities emerging as a result of these changing laws respecting cannabis.
This is quite a far cry from the great number of cannabis-related convictions she oversaw as district attorney of San Francisco. Of course, that was just the beginning; along the way, her views changed. As a U.S. senator, Harris in 2019 cosponsored the MORE Act-a federal decriminalization bill sponsored through Congress by which select cannabis-related offenses have to be expunged from criminal records, with co-reinvestments into communities made on tax revenues derived therefrom, who have disproportionately suffered at the hands of the war on drugs.
She thrusts into light, not only social justice benefits of the drug’s legalization but also the economic potential. A fully legal cannabis industry, by estimate, would create north of a million jobs across the United States while hauling in as much as $128 billion in tax revenue over the next decade. Harris wants a regulated market, focusing on safety, with a critical accessibility quotient-mostly for Black entrepreneurs and under-resourced communities.
His running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, is also in favor of cannabis reform but wants to adopt it incrementally, as one of the steps. Walz focuses on protection for cannabis businesses: banking became one of the most serious problems of the licensed cannabis business because of the partial absence of an opportunity to provide financial services. Together, Harris and Walz offer a unified stance on the need for reform, though with differing pace and approach. That is in contrast, for instance, to their Republican opponent, Donald Trump, who supports the rescheduling of cannabis to a lower drug schedule yet does not go as far as to support full federal legalization. Trump’s would make it easier to study and bank with cannabis without offering a clear pathway to nationwide legalization, placing Harris and Walz’s platform as more progressive on marijuana policy.
Harris’s pledge has been taken by various reactions from the members of the public and groups.
The plan immediately gained the impassioned support of a majority of criminal justice reform advocates and proponents of social equity, who view the measure as overdue to amend the damage caused by draconian drug laws. “Harris’s dedication to equity in the cannabis industry is a landmark turning point,” a spokesperson for the Drug Policy Alliance said. “This goes beyond legalization; it’s accountability-healing from devastation wreaked on communities of color.
Yet some have questioned Harris’s motive simply because she is a hard-nosed district attorney who has led countless cannabis prosecutions. According to these critics, Harris’s flipping on the issue of cannabis reform was more a matter of political calculus than one of principle, while Harris herself says any evolution in her thinking simply reflects a deeper understanding, acquired over time, of the effects which cannabis criminalization has produced.
Harris’s proposal is in line with building momentum across the U.S. toward legalization. Today, a majority of Americans concurrently support recreational cannabis use, and the legal marketplace continues to expand across those states in the country where legalization has taken place. Passed, her policy would create a consistent regulatory atmosphere across the nation, thereby reducing much of the heft from the black market and improving overall public safety.
Yet, legalization offers some poignantly significant economic benefits: the cannabis industry opens up job creation, and it leads to other new sources of infrastructure revenue, education, and community programs. Harris’s plan wants to encourage Black entrepreneurship and other underrepresented groups by affording them much-needed access to forgivable loans and mentorship opportunities that would afford them more equitable representation across the marketplace. Harris’s marijuana policy might light quite a transformational impact on several dimensions, from lowering incarceration rates to planting social equity. Harris prioritizes the most affected with the goal of fairness and equity in the legal system. The prospect of legalization is also a potential economic boon that positions opportunities in emerging growth industries for communities who have long been shut out of them.
