As president, Obama did his best to laugh off questions about marijuana. His own experience with weed had been positive, having spent his high school years hanging out with the "Choom Gang," a bunch of his stoner buddies in Hawaii. A young Obama coined the term "roof hits" to describe the act of sucking in pot smoke floating near a car roof, and was known to hog extra hits from a joint by jumping around a circle of smokers, snatching the weed and saying, "Intercepted!"

The Drug Enforcement Administration and federal prosecutors, however, found nothing funny about it. "I believe there's this notion out there that the marijuana industry is just full of organic farmers who are peacefully growing an organic natural plant and that there's no harm associated with that," U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag told San Francisco public radio station KQED last March. "And what I hear from people in the community is that there is harm." Marijuana, Haag said, could stunt brain development in children and act as a gateway drug to other substances. It may also, she warned, lead to armed robberies at dispensaries and grow operations, putting innocent bystanders at risk.