Could Kamala Harris end the war on weed?

Kamala Harris is the Democrats’ new hope for keeping Agent Orange out of the Oval Office. It’s probably for the best. Many younger, more progressive voters saw president Joe Biden as a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone era. Among other things, Biden was an old-school drug warrior who co-wrote the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which made the penalty for handling crack rocks a hundred times more severe than powder cocaine; the 1994 Clinton Crime Bill, which massively expanded the prison-industrial complex; and, in 2002, he proposed the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, which would have held party organisers liable for drugs consumed on their premises (this had the side-effect of keeping safety teams off-site, as doing otherwise would implicitly admit that their guests swaying to techno with pacifiers in their mouths were indeed illicitly inebriated).

But recently Biden seemed to have lightened up, at least when it comes to cannabis: in May, he announced plans to downgrade it from its strict Schedule I, the same category as heroin, to the less restrictive Schedule III.