Tulsi Gabbard Slams Kamala Harris’ Record on Cannabis Convictions

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]A[/dropcap]t the second Presidential Democratic Debate held in Detroit, Michigan on July 31, presidential hopeful Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard delivered a blistering attack on Sen. Kamala Harris’ record on cannabis as a state prosecutor. 

Sen. Harris served as the 27th District Attorney of San Francisco, California from 2004 to 2011 and also as 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 until 2017. As a state prosecutor, she was known to be tough on crime—including the way she handled cannabis-related convictions. She opposed Proposition 19 in 2010 to legalize cannabis in California, but shifted in her views by 2015. More recently, Sen. Harris unveiled a plan to decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. 

“I want to bring the conversation back attention to the broken criminal justice system that has disproportionately [and] negatively impacted black and brown people all across this country today,” said Gabbard. “Now, 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.” 

“There are too many examples to cite,” Gabbard said, raising her eyebrows and glancing downward at her notes. “She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” For some background, Harris joked in a recent interview that she smoked cannabis while in college.

Still, Gabbard wasn’t quite done with Harris, saying “she blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.” 

Sen. Harris did fire back, however, saying, “I did the work of significantly reforming the criminal justice system of a state of 40 million people, which became a national model for the work that needs to be done. And I am proud of that work.”

With over a year of debates ahead of us, anything can happen at this point in the election. Time will tell who will faceoff with President Trump in 2020.