The Democratic Party made history this year by nominating a presidential candidate who supports marijuana legalization. And when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, she doubled that distinction.
Walz, who in 2023 signed a bill that legalized recreational marijuana in Minnesota, has a longer and more substantial record of supporting drug policy reform than does Harris, a latecomer to the cause. But both Democrats are bolder on this issue than their Republican opponents or President Joe Biden, who endorsed Harris after dropping out of the race in July.
As USA Today notes, “Harris has been criticized for aggressively prosecuting weed-related crimes when she was California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney, particularly given the racial disparities in punishment nationwide.” She opposed a California legalization initiative in 2010 as San Francisco’s district attorney; laughed at a question about legalization in 2014, when she was running for attorney general against a Republican who favored it; and declined, as California’s attorney general, to take a position on the 2016 initiative that legalized recreational use in her state.
As a senator in 2018, Harris finally took the plunge, saying “we need to decriminalize marijuana nationwide.” Later that year, she cosponsored a bill that would have repealed federal prohibition, and she introduced a similar bill in 2019.
Meanwhile, as a Minnesota congressman from 2007 through 2018, Walz repeatedly supported legislation aimed at preventing federal interference with state medical marijuana programs, beginning his first year in office. He thought that protection, which Congress ultimately approved in 2014, should be extended to state-licensed businesses serving recreational cannabis consumers. He also backed a bill designed to protect financial institutions that serve the cannabis industry.
Prosecutorial discretion is the only thing that shields recreational marijuana suppliers from the threat of federal criminal charges and asset forfeiture. When Jeff Sessions, former President Donald Trump’s first attorney general, rescinded a memo supporting such forbearance in 2018, Walz criticized him. Sessions is “dead set on overruling states that have legalized recreational or medical cannabis, including [Minnesota],” Walz complained. He promised to “keep fighting alongside the 83% of vets & caregivers who support legalizing medical cannabis nationally.”
By 2017, when Walz was running for governor, he had become a full-throated legalization advocate. “It’s time to create a system of regulation and taxation for adult-use marijuana in MN,” he wrote. In his first year as governor, Walz instructed state agencies to start preparing for marijuana legalization, saying he wanted them to “put all of the building blocks in place.”
The bill Walz signed four years later, after Democrats won control of the state Senate, allowed adults 21 or older to publicly possess two ounces or less of marijuana, share that amount with other adults, and grow up to eight plants at home. It imposed a relatively modest tax on marijuana sales, barred local governments from banning pot shops, and required automatic expungement of marijuana misdemeanors. As governor, Walz also supported legislation authorizing supervised drug consumption sites, eliminating legal barriers to needle exchange programs, and creating a Psychedelic Medicine Task Force.
During his 2020 presidential campaign, by contrast, Biden said he would “decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions,” but he never delivered on those promises. He also said he would “leave decisions regarding legalization for recreational use up to the states” but resisted repealing federal pot prohibition, the main obstacle to those decisions.
Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), likewise say states should be free to set their own marijuana policies but have not called for repealing the federal ban, although Trump supports rescheduling cannabis and marijuana banking reform. Vance, whose state legalized recreational marijuana by ballot initiative in 2023, has said “you don’t want people thrown in prison for having a dime bag” while expressing concern that “we haven’t quite figured out how this new regime coexists with not polluting our public spaces.” Trump voiced similar concerns when he endorsed Florida’s 2024 marijuana legalization initiative in August, noting in a Truth Social post that pot busts “ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars” while urging a ban on public use.
The bolder position staked out by Harris and Walz may be historic, but it is also a lagging indicator. By the time Harris came around, 66 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal, according to Gallup, and that number had risen to 70 percent by the fall of 2023.
