Trump Attacks Kamala: ‘She Jailed Thousands of Blacks’

Who would have thought that the U.S. presidential election would also play out on the cannabis front. 

Candidate and former president Donald Trump has said he disagrees with criminalizing people for marijuana and is trying to use Kamala Harris’ role as prosecutor to his advantage by blaming her for the incarceration of thousands of black people. 

“She was a bad prosecutor,” Trump said in a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham. “She put thousands and thousands of Black people in jail over marijuana. But when it came to big crime—murders and everything else—she was weak.” 

The accounts that Harris resolutely prosecuted people for cannabis on her previous job are not so new, however. Harris acted as the San Francisco District Attorney for seven years, before she was promoted to State Attorney General for California. The talk has dogged her since she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and it has been brought back to life once again now that she is really running for president after Biden dropping out of the race. 

What Trump Says Is Exaggerated and Misleading

Of course, it’s important to ask how many people have been put to jail because of marijuana during Harris’s time in office as top prosecutor. Trump said there are “thousands and thousands” examples, but how much is he pumping the story? 

The criticism arrives after allegations that the San Francisco District Attorney’s office under Harris’s leadership convicted over 1,500 people on marijuana-based charges. 

An investigative report by the Bay Area News Group presented data that says there were 1,956 convictions for minor and serious marijuana-related offenses from 2004 to 2010 or during Harris’ tenure, and the number of people who were actually sent to prison is 45. It is uncertain how many people were sent to county jail, however, so the total figure could be more than that. 

“Our policy was that no one with a marijuana conviction for mere possession could do any [jail time] at all,” Paul Henderson, who helmed narcotics prosecutions under Harris, told Bay Area News Group. 

In addition, the Washington Free Beacon has reported that at least 1,560 people were sent to prison for marijuana-related charges during Harris’ time as state attorney general between 2011 and 2017, where her role would have been more remote in those convictions. Most cases reportedly concerned sale or possession with intention to sell. 

During her time as San Francisco district attorney, Harris did express support for medical marijuana but she opposed recreational use. Anyhow, a lot of things have changed since then. Kamala recently sponsored a comprehensive federal legalization bill in the Senate and called for an end of marijuana prohibition.  

“During her time in the White House, the vice president has been an even stronger advocate for [ending] any cannabis prohibition and restoring or repairing the harms that it has caused than the president has been, and in many ways, has been a real leader on the issue, particularly as it relates to criminal justice reform,” Morgan Fox, political director of the cannabis legalization advocacy group NORML recently told USA TODAY. 

If Kamala Harris is elected, she would become the first US president to have openly supported federal marijuana legalization. 

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