Don’t Go To Las Vegas’s New Immersive Sphere Arena While High On Drugs, Kamala Harris Tells Howard Stern

Vice President Kamala Harris has some advice for anyone planning to visit the new Las Vegas arena known as The Sphere: Don’t go there while high on drugs.

During an interview on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday, Harris talked about seeing the band U2 at the immersive entertainment complex, which features 360 visual effects and special auditory technology. She asked Stern if he’s visited the arena since it opened last year. He said he hadn’t, joking that he’s “troubled by it.”

Here’s how the rest of the conversation went: 

Harris: “Well, let me just say, basically, everyone should go in with a clear head.”

Stern: “Isn’t it too much?”

Harris: “But that’s why I’m saying that. Like definitely go in—”

Stern: “You mean don’t be high.”

Harris: “Correct. Because it’s a lot. There’s a lot of visual stimulation.”

For weeks after becoming the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, Harris was curiously silent on the politics or culture of marijuana considering that she sponsored legalization legislation during her time in the Senate and embraced the reform during a private roundtable with cannabis pardon recipients in March.

But the light conversation with Stern is the latest example of the vice president seeming to become more comfortable talking about drugs. And while she didn’t suggest her advice against getting high at The Sphere was based on personal experience, she has previously discussed using cannabis in college, saying it brings people “joy.”

Late last month, for the first time since becoming the party’s presidential nominee, she also reiterated her support for marijuana legalization.

“I just feel strongly, people should not be going to jail for smoking weed,” she said in an interview with the All the Smoke podcast. “And we know historically what that has meant and who has gone to jail.”

“Second, I just think we have come to a point where we have to understand that we need to legalize it and stop criminalizing this behavior,” Harris told hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, who are former NBA players and one of whom later admitted that he smoked cannabis before the interview.

“Actually this is not a new position for me,” she said. “I have felt for a long time we need to legalize it. So that’s where I am on that.”

Meanwhile, last month Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said he thinks marijuana legalization is an issue that should be left to individual states, adding that electing more Democrats to Congress could also make it easier to pass federal reforms like cannabis banking protections.

Meanwhile former President Donald Trump said recently during his campaign for a second term that he now supports federal marijuana rescheduling and marijuana banking access.

“As President, we will continue to focus on research to unlock the medical uses of marijuana to a Schedule 3 drug, and work with Congress to pass common sense laws, including safe banking for state authorized companies, and supporting states rights to pass marijuana laws, like in Florida, that work so well for their citizens,” Trump posted to social media earlier this month.

Trump also recently discussed the medical benefits of cannabis and said legalization would be “very good” for Florida, which will consider the reform at the ballot box in November’s election.

The Harris–Walz campaign, however, has accused Trump of lying about his support for marijuana reform—arguing that his “blatant pandering” runs counter to his administration’s record on cannabis.

Following Trump’s recent announcement of support for the Florida cannabis legalization ballot measure, the Democratic campaign has been working to remind voters that while in office, Trump “took marijuana reform backwards.”

In a memo from a senior campaign spokesperson, the Harris-Walz campaign accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” on cannabis, saying it’s one of the Republican former president’s “several bewildering ‘policy proposals’ that deserve real scrutiny.”

The posturing by the presidential candidates comes amid an ongoing process of moving marijuana to the less-restrictive Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) this spring recommended moving the drug to Schedule III, but the action has faced resistance from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has scheduled a hearing on the proposal for December 2—after the presidential election, raising concerns that the process will not be completed until after a new president is inaugurated.

Meanwhile, Trump also recently went 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.

Trump’s line of attack, while misleading, was nonetheless notable in the sense that the GOP presidential nominee implied that he disagrees with criminalizing people over marijuana and is moving to leverage the idea that Harris played a role in racially disproportionate mass incarceration.

As president, Trump largely stayed true to his position that marijuana laws should be handled at the state-level, with no major crackdown on cannabis programs as some feared after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Obama era federal enforcement guidance. In fact, Trump criticized the top DOJ official and suggested the move should be reversed.

While he was largely silent on the issue of legalization, he did tentatively endorse a bipartisan bill to codify federal policy respecting states’ rights to legalize.

That said, on several occasions he released signing statements on spending legislation stipulating that he reserved the right to ignore a long-standing rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using its funds to interfere with state-legal medical marijuana programs.

Before President Joe Biden bowed out of the race, his campaign made much of the president’s mass cannabis pardons and rescheduling push, drawing a contrast with the Trump administration’s record. The Harris campaign so far has not spoken to that particular issue, and the nominee has yet to publicly discuss marijuana policy issues since her own campaign launched.

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