Obama Evolves on Marijuana - NYTimes.com In 2010, the White House's National Drug Control Strategy memo included a reminder that the Obama administration "firmly opposes the legalization of marijuana or any other illicit drug." The 2013 update of that memo reiterated that the administration rejects legalization. But President Obama himself appears to be "evolving" on this issue. In an interview with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, published in this week's issue, the president said he wouldn't "encourage" pot-smoking and that he thought it was "a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy." Yet he admitted - as he has in the past - that he smoked as a kid, and said he thought it was less dangerous than alcohol "in terms of its impact on the individual consumer." He also mentioned the fact that prohibition disproportionately hurts minorities. "Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do," he said. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties. He added that, "we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing." That's a pretty strong endorsement of decriminalization; but he went even farther, saying the legalization experiments in Colorado and Washington should "go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished." In this he's out of line with the Justice Department, which is taking a "trust but verify" approach to Colorado and Washington - promising not to sue, for now, without in any way endorsing the experiment or acknowledging its importance. President Obama did express concern that, after marijuana legalization, "you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues." Still, like when he "evolved" on gay marriage, he seems to have outpaced official government policy. Will the next National Drug Control Strategy memo reflect the change?