Joe Rogan is disputing claims from former Vice President Kamala Harris that he “lied” when he claimed she refused to talk about marijuana with him ahead of the 2024 election.
In her book “107 Days,” the title of which is a reference to the limited time she had to campaign for the presidency after former President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, Harris discussed the controversy over plans to join Rogan on his podcast in the run-up to Election Day last year.
Shortly after the election that cemented President Donald Trump’s second term, Rogan alleged that Harris “didn’t want to talk about marijuana legalization” when she was invited on the show.
Rogan, who ultimately endorsed Trump shortly before the election, said he thought the alleged refusal to discuss cannabis “was hilarious.”
But Harris said in her book that wasn’t the case, prompting pushback from Rogan in an episode of his “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that was released on Wednesday.
“They never wanted to do the whole thing. They wanted to me do like a 45-minute thing in a different place,” Rogan said. Harris’s campaign team “did say there’s some things that she didn’t want to talk about, and then they denied that.”
That conflicts with Harris’s retelling of the story in her book, which was published last month.
The then-vice president’s team “suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto,” Harris wrote in the book. “Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration and abortion.”
In the months since the botched interview scheduling, Rogan “has lied on his show, claiming we pushed for tight topic restrictions,” and he “even claimed that the very topics we had suggested were ones we’d refused to discuss,” Harris said.
No interview ultimately materialized due to scheduling conflicts and Rogan’s unwillingness to do the podcast remotely outside of his studio in Austin, the former vice president said. And on a day that the Democratic candidate’s team pitched in October of last year, she said she was advised that Rogan was taking a “personal day,” only later to learn that he was interviewing Trump that day.
But on an earlier episode of his podcast where he addressed the Harris interview controversy, comedian Adrienne Iapalucci asked Rogan why the then-vice president wouldn’t want to talk about marijuana.
After all, Harris had reaffirmed her support for cannabis legalization on the campaign trail, sponsored a bill to end federal prohibition during her time in the Senate and would presumably benefit from highlighting her advocacy for the bipartisan issue in the run-up to the election.
The campaign’s contention, Rogan said, was “because of her prosecuting record” in California. Harris has faced criticism over her role as a San Francisco district attorney and state attorney general, with opponents frequently pointing to data on cannabis arrests that took place under her leadership.
“She put a lot of people in jail for weed—1,500 apparently,” the podcaster said.
Harris also briefly addressed that issue in her new book, saying her prosecutorial record “had been mischaracterized.”
“When I became a district attorney, this country was in an even worse place than it is now on criminal justice. I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it,” she wrote. “I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses.”
During the campaign, Trump had also gone after Harris over her prosecutorial record on marijuana, claiming that she put “thousands and thousands of Black people in jail” for cannabis offenses—but the full record of her time in office is more nuanced.
Data from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office that was featured in an investigative report from the Bay Area News Group showed that there were 1,956 convictions for misdemeanor and felony marijuana offenses from 2004 and 2010 when Harris led the office. But the number of people who were actually sent to state prison was 45. That said, it’s unclear how many people were sent to county jail, so the total figure may be higher.
Harris received criticism from the cannabis reform community over a video her office posted in early 2024 that prematurely claimed the Biden administration had “changed” federal marijuana policies.
Trump, for his part, endorsed federal rescheduling of cannabis as well as an ultimately failed Florida marijuana legalization ballot measure in the weeks before Election Day last year. Since he took office, however, the marijuana rescheduling process initiated under the Biden administration has remained stalled—though the president suggested in late August a decision on the matter will come within weeks.
Image element courtesy of Joe Rogan.
Marijuana Moment is made possible with support from readers. If you rely on our cannabis advocacy journalism to stay informed, please consider a monthly Patreon pledge.
