The Jamaican dad of California Sen. Kamala Harris is furious with recent comments his daughter made.
The Democrat presidential candidate spoke to “The Breakfast Club” on February 11 and extolled the virtues of smoking marijuana.
“I think it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy,” she said about smoking marijuana.
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Hear what #KamalaHarris thinks about legalizing marijuana 💬 pic.twitter.com/YGZlCAKUZ0
— The Breakfast Club (@breakfastclubam) February 11, 2019
The hosts of the show asked her if she herself had ever smoked marijuana.
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“I have. And I inhaled — I did inhale. It was a long time ago. But, yes,” she said.
“They say you oppose legalizing weed,” one of the hosts said.
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“That’s not true. And look I joke about it, half joking — half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me,” she said with a laugh.
“No, I do not — no, no. I have had concerns, the full record, I have had concerns, which I think — first of all, let me just make this statement very clear, I believe we need to legalize marijuana,” Harris said.
“Now, that being said — and this is not a ‘but,’ it is an ‘and’ — and we need to research, which is one of the reasons we need to legalize it,” she said.
“We need to move it on the schedule so that we can research the impact of weed on a developing brain,” she said.
You know, that part of the brain that develops judgment, actually begins its growth at age 18 through age 24,” she said.
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“But I am absolutely in favor of legalizing marijuana. We’ve got to do it, the Democrat said.
“We have incarcerated so many, and particularly young men and young men of color, in a way that we have not for the same level of use (among) other young men,” she said.
But her father did not like her use of her Jamaican heritage as a punchline to look hip.
“My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family 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, Donald Harris, a Stanford economics professor said in a statement to Jamaica Global Online.
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“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he said.
That is about as brutal of a statement you could get from a candidate’s own dad about their kid.