President Donald Trump says he’s never smoked pot in his life. One potential rival in the 2020 election makes no such claim. On the contrary ... “ ‘I did inhale. It was a long time ago, but, yes, I just broke loose.’ ” That’s how presidential hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris, poking fun at Bill Clinton’s famously laughable denial, answered when WWPR’s host Charlamagne Tha God asked whether she’s ever smoked marijuana.<doc-sep>Allen Abel: Donald Harris's rebuke over 'pot-smoking joy seeker' stereotype is one thing the Democratic presidential contender is disinclined to talk about. Another is her time in Canada. Updated on Feb. 19, 2019 at 12:40 p.m. ET to include response from Kamala Harris and details of later appearances Eighty-nine weeks from the White House, front-running, formidable and fierce, yet publicly scorned as a “travesty” by her own father, Kamala Harris, hyper-ambitious presidential candidate and former unwilling Quebecker, paces the old stone cathedral. We’re at South Church, founded in 1713 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on the Atlantic’s snow-flogged shore, but it could be anywhere in the 50 American states; anywhere that there are cameras and dollars and votes to be pocketed and rivals to be slandered and slain. Hundreds of New Englanders cram the prayer hall, the home of a Unitarian Universalist congregation that is based not on a single Saviour, but on “Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life.” Like South Church, the campaign to confront Donald Trump in the 2020 election offers—at this ridiculously early but already fraught and frantic stage—a deity to suit every desire. At least two dozen Democrats already have, or soon will, enter the contest. In June, they will begin to debate each other on stages as wide as wheat farms. Next February—that’s still a year away!—the first intra-party primary elections and arcane county caucuses will begin to winnow the crop. So here we go. Senators, congresswomen, mayors, governors, billionaires—Beto, Bernie, Bloomberg, Biden; Amy, Kirsten, Tulsi, Pocahontas; Hickenlooper, Inslee, Buttigieg, Bullock—all are in it now, or soon will be. Just as it was with the Republicans in 2016, she or he who talks loudest and most profanely is most likely to be heard above the Democratic din. At every whistle stop, in every city and hamlet, the raw odours of vanity and conceit assault the nose. But also, this time, there are coos of love and healing in the air. Here’s another metaphor—imagine a round of pool with 25 multi-coloured balls on the baize and only one corner pocket. Charge the ablest players half a billion dollars to ante up. Estimate the trillions of permutations of rebound, ricochet, angle, scratch and spin. And then try to run the table while an orange-skinned shark—call him Fifth Avenue Fats—leans over the rail, licking his lips, chalking his cue, eager to eat the winner. Back to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Kamala Harris, a first-term U.S. Senator and former San Francisco prosecutor and state attorney general—“the best-looking attorney general in the country,” Barack Obama once called her, a career-ending slur for anyone else in these touchy times—is on her first campaign visit to the Granite State, a sliver of bedrock, ski slopes, and escaped Bostonians whose “first in the nation” primary gives it a numinous status among this country’s peripatetic career politicos. (Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada also are in the early-state recipe, with Harris’s behemoth California to join them in February balloting for the first time in 2020. Advantage, Kamala?) The senator’s stump speech, which she will give from 20 to 50 times a week for the next 21 months, should she last that long in the race, is heavy on her prosecutorial experience and her eagerness to take on a divisive, calamitous incumbent. Even at the pulpit, she never invokes the homilies of her multiple religious roots, or gives thanks for the support of her husband of four and a half years—a California attorney of the Jewish faith—or mentions his two college-age children by a previous marriage: a son named for John Coltrane, a daughter for Ella Fitzgerald. Domesticity, her culinary skills, the multi-cultural and bi-national aspects of her life—none is touched today. Eighty-nine weeks from the White House, the business of the campaign already is serious business. “I plan on prosecuting the case against people who do not tell the truth,” she says to a roaring, whooping, left-leaning clientele that has been waiting in the fluffing snow for hours, snaking around Portsmouth’s preciously curated shops and its handy-crafty market-stalls, with the first balloting still a spring and a summer and an autumn and another winter away. Then (on the need for a single-payer, government-run health care program): “The system is immoral.” And (on gun control): “We should never bow down to those who have a love of money while people are dying in the streets.” And: “We are looking at an America today where American values and American dreams are under attack.” But there is much more about Kamala Harris to be said, and told, and learned. As with all of our lives, there are conflicts and complications, secrets and mysteries. But unlike all but two dozen of us on this planet, she yearns to be President of the United States, and she may well succeed. “I am a proud daughter of Oakland, California,” Harris said in January, when she formally announced her candidacy at Howard University, her “historically black” alma mater in Washington, D.C. That she considers herself to be African-American is beyond dispute—“I was born black and I will die black,” she told a radio interviewer a few days ago. Crucial to her candidacy will be her defence of her record of filling the penitentiaries of the Golden State with legions of young African-American men. But the annals of American politics reveal that personality and personal history will triumph over policy every time. So it matters deeply to the voters of all the nation’s Portsmouths not only what Kamala Harris says, but who she is. Again: “I was born black.” Yet Sen. Harris’s mother, née Shyamala Gopalan, was a Brahmin Hindu born in Chennai (Madras), the oceanside megalolopolis of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu; and her father, raised in Brown’s Town, educated in Port Antonio and at the University of the West Indies, is as Jamaican as the sun and the sea. (Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris died in 2009 at the age of 70.) Just as Barack Hussein Obama is the mixed-race descendent of tribal Kenya and sunflowery Kansas, Kamala Harris, potentially Obama’s successor’s successor, is every bit as not-really-a-real-American as her desperate opponents may choose to make her out to be. Will that matter? (For a few days in January, an asinine and racist “birther” conspiracy against Sen. Harris circulated on the Internet’s extreme right wing—namely, that since her mother was from India and her father was from Jamaica and neither of them had lived in the United States for five full years before Kamala’s birth, she could not be a “natural-born citizen” as required of the president and vice-president by the U.S. Constitution. This was patently and crudely false—Harris’s birth in California swaddled her in American citizenship the instant she drew her first breath. President Trump often has ranted against “birthright citizenship” to enflame his base, but The Donald’s nativist ravings carry no weight in law; at least not yet.) So far in the 2019-2020 campaign, there has not been much in the way of personal slander. None of the six or seven or eight sitting senators in the race has torn a colleague to shreds. (“That will come later,” Sen. Lindsey Graham coyly predicted to a Maclean’s reporter in Washington last week.) But when Sen. Harris sniggered on New York City radio program that, like the sky-high Honolulu stoner Obama, she had thoroughly enjoyed marijuana—and that, unlike Bill Clinton, she had inhaled—she explained her behaviour by saying, “Half my family’s from Jamaica! Are you kidding me?” Her father exploded. Donald Harris, 81, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, divorced from Shyamala Gopalan since 1972, offered this comment to the website Jamaica Global Online, whose editor, Ian Randle, shared it exclusively with Maclean’s: My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.<doc-sep>She brought her daughters home to India for visits, she cooked Indian food for them, and the girls often wore Indian jewelry. But Harris worshiped at an African American church, went to a preschool with posters of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman on the wall, attended civil rights marches in a stroller, and was bused with other black kids to an elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood. When it was time for college, she moved across the country to Washington to attend the historically black Howard University.<doc-sep>
Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, who launched her presidential campaign last month, said Monday morning that she smoked marijuana in college, wants it legalized and remembers what it felt like to be high. 'I have. And I inhaled. I did inhale. It was a long time ago, but yes. I just broke news!' Harris said through a cascade of laughter on New York City's hip-hop radio program 'The Breakfast Club.' 'You know, I joke about it – half joke – but half my family's from Jamaica! Are you kidding me?' Sen. Kamala Harris said Monday morning during a New York City radio interview that she smoked marijuana in college Harris is the first 2020 presidential candidate to say she has smoked weed and call for its nationwide legalization Harris said her pot delivery method of choice in her college years at Howard University was a joint 'It was a joint,' Harris recalled, saying that she remember what it felt like to be high on the drug. 'Listen: I think it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy!' she laughed later in the interview. Harris said she has long been an advocate for states legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes, and now wants it legalized in general. 'I think we need to legalize marijuana,' she said Monday, adding that 'we need to move it on the schedule so that we can research the impact of weed on a developing brain.' 'Not all drugs are the same,' she insisted, while suggesting that criminalizing weed has disproportinately affected black men in America's criminal justice system. Bill Clinton famously claimed in 1992 that while he had experimented with weed in college, he 'didn't inhale' it Barack Obama proudly declared during his first presidential campaign that he had smoked pot in his youth and inhaled because 'that was the point' Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (right) said during a September 2015 presidential primary debate that he had smoked pot, later tweeting: 'Sorry Mom'; President Donald Trump has said he never partook of drugs or alcohol other than communion wine 'We have incarcerated so many, particularly young men – and young men of color – in a way that we have not for the same level of use, other young men. And we've got to deal with that,' she said. Recreational marijuana use is legal in 10 states and the District of Columbia. Thirty-three states have legalized medical marijuana. But the drug is still illegal under federal law – turning the pot trade into a volatile cash-only business that can't use FDIC-insured banks for deposits. It has been nearly 29 years since presidential candidate Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked weed but insisted that he 'didn't inhale.' More than a quarter-century later, Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, said he was a regular pot smoker but stopped during the campaign: 'I want to be completely on top of my game, all cylinders.' President Donald Trump has softened his 1990s-era view that states should legalize marijuana. He has said he has never taken an illegal drug or drunk alcohol, with the exception of communion wine. His predecessor Barack Obama was famously open about his drug use, recalling in a memoir his teenage friendships in a group he called 'The Choom Gang.' 'I inhaled frequently. That was the point,' he told NBC News in 2006. Top 2016 Democrat Hillary Clinton continues to insist, despite her interactions with the 1960s counter-culture, that she hever smoked marijuana; Bernie Sanders (right) was never is denial 2016 Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson, a former New Mexico governor, is a regular pot user but paused his smoking in order to be sharp on the campaign trail Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed in 2016 when she ran against Trump that despite surrounding herself with counter-culture figures in her twenties, she has never smoked marijuana. 'I didn’t do it when I was young,' she said in a 2014 town hall. 'I’m not going to start now.' Other presidnetial hopefuls have admitted toking in the past, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. After letting the cat out of the bag during a 2015 primary debate, he tweeted: 'Sorry Mom.' Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign told DailyMail.com in 2016 that 'when he was a teenager, he foolishly experimented with marijuana. It was a mistake, and he's never tried it since.'