Hitting the hard news Sunday on Meet the Press was NBC's David Gregory asking the "big" question, "Should marijuana be legalized in the United States?"

With a panel consisting of The Washington Post's Nia-Malika Henderson and The New York Times' David Brooks, Gregory wanted predictions on legalizing the drug. "Do you think it's moving in that direction?" he asked.

Brooks: Everybody says that, but if you look over history, the regulation of things like opiates, smoking, public drunkenness -- it's really ebbed and flowed a lot. And so it's not always just allow more and more freedom. Sometimes there's restrictions. You can't smoke the way you used to, you can't use opiates the way you used to, public drunkenness is much less acceptable.

Gregory still wondered if legalization could move forward with prohibition for those under 21.

As he turned to Henderson, she thought that was possible, but was more interested in the racial disparities in the drug prosecutions of blacks:

I think one of the things about this debate, at least one of the thing that's driving it too, is what we know is true about drug prosecution -- is that there's a great deal of racial disparities between blacks and whites and class disparities. So I think that's one of the interesting ways where you're going to have a lot of strange bedfellows around this issue.

Gregory concluded by noting with interest that Republicans are not totally against the legalization of marijuana.

And as he does every Sunday, Gregory signed off, "If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press."