Walz, Like Harris, Supports Marijuana Legalization—but He Beat Her to the Punch

The Democratic vice presidential nominee has a long record of supporting cannabis reform.

Vice President Kamala Harris' selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Marijuana Moment's Kyle Jaeger notes, means that "the ticket now consists of two candidates who support marijuana legalization"—a "historic first." Walz actually arrived at that position before Harris did. His record as a congressman from 2007 through 2018, a period when Harris was still laughing at the very idea of legalization, includes several votes in favor of marijuana reform, and he ran for governor in 2017 on a promise to "create a system of regulation and taxation for adult-use marijuana."

As governor, Walz signed a bill legalizing recreational marijuana. He also supported legislation authorizing supervised drug consumption facilities, eliminating legal barriers to needle exchange programs, and creating a Psychedelic Medicine Task Force.

Beginning in 2007, his first year in Congress, Walz repeatedly supported legislation aimed at preventing federal interference with state medical marijuana programs. Those bills included the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, which Congress finally approved in 2014 and has renewed every year since. That spending rider prohibits the Justice Department from using appropriated funds to "prevent" states from "implementing" their medical marijuana laws. As interpreted by the courts, it bars federal prosecution of state-licensed medical marijuana providers.

The same year that Congress approved that restriction, which was also the year that Minnesota legislators approved medical marijuana, Walz voted for an amendment aimed at protecting financial institutions that serve state-licensed cannabis suppliers. He also thought the protection offered by the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment should be extended to businesses that serve the recreational market. In 2015, the year after the first recreational pot shops opened in Colorado and Washington, Walz supported the McClintock-Polis Amendment, which would have barred the Justice Department from targeting those businesses as well.

Without that protection, prosecutorial discretion is the only thing that shields recreational marijuana suppliers from the threat of 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 When Jeff Sessions, former President Donald Trump's first attorney general, rescinded a memo supporting such forbearance in 2018, Walz criticized that decision. 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 advocate of legalization. "It's time to create a system of regulation and taxation for adult-use marijuana in MN," he said. Harris did not come out in favor of legalization until the following year.

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, when she was the San Francisco 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 finally legalized recreational use in her state. But as a senator in 2018, she 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.

That year, his first as Minnesota's 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 he signed four years later, after Democrats won control of the state Senate, allowed adults 21 or older to possess two ounces or less of marijuana in public, share that amount with other adults, keep two pounds or less at home, and grow up to eight plants, four of which are mature. Those provisions took effect in August 2023.

The Adult-Use Cannabis Act also established an Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) to license and regulate commercial production and distribution. Marijuana products are subject to a 10 percent retail tax, in addition to standard state and local sales taxes (which total about 8 percent in Minneapolis, for example). Local governments are allowed to regulate retailers and cap their number but are not allowed to ban them entirely.

Minnesota's first recreational dispensaries opened last summer on tribal land. The OCM says "the process for general licenses will be announced soon."

Minnesota legislators addressed an issue that was neglected in early recreational marijuana laws, requiring automatic expungement of marijuana misdemeanors. In May, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS) announced that it had expunged 57,780 records "almost three months ahead of schedule." Those records "are no longer visible to the public in the Minnesota Criminal History System (CHS)." The department said it would "provide a by-agency list of records expunged in the CHS to local criminal justice agencies, so that they can expunge related records in their own systems."

The Adult-Use Cannabis Act also created a Cannabis Expungement Board, which is charged with reviewing marijuana felony cases for resentencing under current law or expungement. "Because each record must be considered individually," DPS said, "this process could take several years to complete."

Walz highlighted the expungement provisions when he signed the bill. "This has been a long journey with a lot of folks involved," he said. "What we know right now is prohibition does not work. We've criminalized a lot of folks who are going to start the expungement process on those records."

Walz's drug policy record probably would not make much difference in a Harris administration, especially since Harris already supports legalization, along with expungement of federal marijuana records (both of which require congressional action). But it is a belated sign of the times that both slots of a major party's presidential ticket have been filled by politicians who have joined a large majority of Americans in opposing marijuana prohibition.

Neither Trump nor his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), has been willing to go that far. Both Trump and Vance have said states should be free to legalize marijuana, but they also have expressed distaste for the policy. Vance, who voted against marijuana banking reform in committee last year, later claimed it "would have opened up access to banking resources for fentanyl traffickers and others."

In an interview last May, Vance, whose state legalized recreational marijuana by ballot initiative last November, allowed that "you don't want people thrown in prison for having a dime bag," which "mercifully doesn't happen most of the time in this country." But he added that "we haven't quite figured out how this new regime coexists with not polluting our public spaces." He said "a big frustration that I have" is that "you take your kids downtown Cincinnati to go to a restaurant, and you walk by, like, five people who are stoned. It smells terrible. I don't want that." Vance suggested that "we just need a different cultural sensibility that if we're going to go into this more open regime, people have to actually take some responsibility and not do it around, y'know, 6-year-old kids."

That seems reasonable enough. Vance's objections seem mild compared to those voiced by Trump, who has said marijuana legalization "is bad," claiming it had caused "some big problems" in Colorado. He nevertheless added that "if they vote for it, they vote for it."