Kamala Harris Blames Marijuana Rescheduling Delay On DEA ‘Bureaucracy,’ While Defending Her Own Prosecutorial Record

Vice President Kamala Harris says part of the reason for the delay in the administration’s marijuana rescheduling effort is federal bureaucracy that “slows things down,” including at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, briefly addressed the rescheduling process during a town hall hosted by Charlamagne tha God of the radio show The Breakfast Club. She also pushed back against claims that her pro-legalization position runs counter to her record as a San Francisco prosecutor and California attorney general, saying those assertions are “simply not true.”

Just one day after rolling out a plan to end federal cannabis prohibition, the vice president was asked about the more modest reform of rescheduling—a proposal that the Justice Department formally put forward earlier this year after receiving a recommendation from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

She said that the process of reclassifying marijuana has been slower than the administration would like because “we had to work with the DEA.”

“There’s a certain level of bureaucracy that exists in the federal government that slows things down,” Harris said. “But essentially to bring down how weed is classified—how marijuana is classified, to make it classified as a lesser harm—that took some time. There’s a whole process around that, but that’s the work that we have done, in addition to work that we have done writ large on criminal justice reform.”

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“As vice president, I have been a champion for bringing marijuana down on the [CSA]. So instead of it being ranked up there with heroin, we bring it down,” she said. “My pledge is, as president, I will work on decriminalizing it, because I know exactly how those laws have been used to disproportionately impact certain populations, and specifically Black men.”

The vice president in March also expressed some frustration with the bureaucratic process of rescheduling marijuana, prior to DOJ’s formal recommendation, calling on DEA to expediently finish the job. She also privately promoted her pro-legalization message during a roundtable event that day with presidential marijuana pardon recipients.

While DOJ has recommended rescheduling, the proposal has faced resistance from DEA, which has scheduled a hearing on the proposal for December 2—after the presidential election, raising concerns that the process will not be completed until after a new president is inaugurated.

Separately, Harris was asked about criticism about her record as a prosecutor who oversaw certain cannabis-related prosecutions. Charlamagne said “one of the biggest pieces of misinformation” and “one of the biggest allegations against you is that you targeted and locked up thousands of Black men” over marijuana.

“It’s just simply not true,” she said. “What public defenders who around those days will tell you is I was the most progressive prosecutor in California on marijuana cases and would not send people to jail for simple possession of weed.”

Former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee, separately went after Harris over her prosecutorial record on marijuana in July, claiming that she put “thousands and thousands of Black people in jail” for cannabis offenses—but the full record of her time in office is more nuanced.

That criticism has typically been based on an allegation that the San Francisco District Attorney’s office under Harris’s leadership incarcerated more than 1,500 people on cannabis-related convictions.

But that lower figure is still misleading. Data from the office that was featured in an investigative report from the Bay Area News Group showed that there were 1,956 convictions for misdemeanor and felony marijuana offenses from 2004 and 2010 when Harris led the office. But the number of people who were actually sent to state prison was 45. That said, it’s unclear how many people were sent to county jail, so the total figure may be higher.

Trump’s line of attack, while misleading, was nonetheless notable in the sense that the Republican nominee implied that he disagrees with criminalizing people over marijuana and is moving to leverage the idea that Harris played a role in racially disproportionate mass incarceration.

Meanwhile, after weeks of silence on cannabis reform since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris last month said “we need to legalize” marijuana “and stop criminalizing this behavior.”

Her campaign on Monday said that, if elected president, she will “break down unjust legal barriers that hold Black men and other Americans back by legalizing marijuana nationally, working with Congress to ensure that the safe cultivation, distribution, and possession of recreational marijuana is the law of the land.”

The nominee’s cannabis plan to “legalize marijuana at the federal level to break down unjust legal barriers that hold Black men and other Americans back” is part of what her campaign calls an “opportunity agenda” aimed at winning the votes of African-American men in particular.

To that end, the campaign says Harris will “fight to ensure that as the national cannabis industry takes shape, Black men—who have, for years, been over-policed for marijuana use—are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”

In contrast, the VP’s new plan says that the Trump administration “threatened federal prosecutions for marijuana in states where marijuana use is legal, continuing the unjust and disproportionate use of marijuana possession laws to put Black Americans behind bars.”

That appeared to be a reference to his first attorney general’s removal of Obama-era enforcement guidance that generally directed prosecutors to respect state cannabis laws. There was no large scale crackdown on state-legal marijuana businesses in the wake of that move, however.

“I just feel strongly, people should not be going to jail for smoking weed,” she said in an interview with the All the Smoke podcast. “And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail.”

“Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior,” Harris told hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, who are former NBA players.

“Actually this is not a new position for me,” Harris, who sponsored a federal cannabis legalization bill as a U.S. senator, said. “I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it. So that’s where I am on that.”

Also last month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said he thinks marijuana legalization is an issue that should be left to individual states, adding that electing more Democrats to Congress could also make it easier to pass federal reforms like cannabis banking protections.

“I think it’s an issue for the states on some of those, and that’s the way the states have done it,” Walz, who is Minnesota’s governor and previously served in Congress, said, dodging a reporter’s direct question about national cannabis legalization.

During that interview, Walz highlighted two incremental reform issues: medical marijuana access for veterans who receive healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as well as passage of federal legislation that would ease restrictions for banks that due business with marijuana companies.

If Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, he said, those matters might be easier to address.

“There’s work to be done nationally around the banking issue,” he said in the Spectrum News interview that was posted on September 14, “and I think that’s something that if we get a working Congress who actually wants to solve some issues—when we have the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate—then we can start to see if some of those things make sense.”

In her previous run for president, Harris also backed full federal decriminalization for simple drug possession.

Meanwhile,  Trump said recently during his campaign for a second term that he now supports federal marijuana rescheduling and marijuana banking access.

“As President, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies, and supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens,” Trump posted to social media last month.

Trump also recently discussed the medical benefits of cannabis and said legalization would be “very good” for Florida, which will consider the reform at the ballot box in November’s election.

The Harris–Walz campaign, however, has accused Trump of lying about his support for marijuana reform—arguing that his “blatant pandering” runs counter to his administration’s record on cannabis.

Following Trump’s recent announcement of support for the Florida cannabis legalization ballot measure, the Democratic campaign has been working to remind voters that while in office, Trump “took marijuana reform backwards.”

In a memo from a senior campaign spokesperson, the Harris-Walz campaign accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” on cannabis, saying it’s one of the Republican former president’s “several bewildering ‘policy proposals’ that deserve real scrutiny.”

As president, Trump largely stayed true to his position that marijuana laws should be handled at the state-level, with no major crackdown on cannabis programs as some feared after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Obama era federal enforcement guidance. In fact, Trump criticized the top DOJ official and suggested the move should be reversed.

While he was largely silent on the issue of legalization, he did tentatively endorse a bipartisan bill to codify federal policy respecting states’ rights to legalize.

That said, on several occasions he released signing statements on spending legislation stipulating that he reserved the right to ignore a long-standing rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using its funds to interfere with state-legal medical marijuana programs.

Before Biden bowed out of the race, his campaign made much of the president’s mass cannabis pardons and rescheduling push, drawing a contrast with the Trump administration’s record. The Harris campaign so far has not spoken to that particular issue, and the nominee has yet to publicly discuss marijuana policy issues since her own campaign launched.

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Photo element courtesy of California Attorney General’s Office.