To do that you need engineers who can hold a security clearance. To hold a security clearance you can't violate federal law despite what your state laws say is legal. I think this is about more than warehouse employees.
I wouldn't be surprised if these agencies continue to disallow clearances due to legal drug use. Depending on the level of clearance, alcohol use, poor finances, multiple passports, and having contacts with foreign nationals from certain countries - all legal activities - are reasons for a clearance being denied.
So, admission to responsible weed usage and responsible alcohol usage will get different results.
I have a clearance and almost all of my coworkers talked openly about drinking too much on occasion, but no one would say they touched weed
A breathalyzer test can determine if you are under the influence of alcohol _at this moment_. No such test exists for weed. The only way to prove someone is not high is to do the usual urine test, which returns positive if you've smoked at all in the past ~month.
It's a liability thing. If a "weed breathalyzer" is invented and employers can prove that you are sober when reporting to work, I think smoking in the evening will become much less of an issue.
A rather good example of this process is the whole "space race" where the Germans pioneered space travel technology, which ended in a kind of collapse of the whole knowledge base to the point that the USA was hitching a ride on Russian rockets just to get to an aging space station, and where space travel had to essentially be rediscovered by SpaceX, etc. I don't think people quite understand what happened in that 1955-2010 period where the "advanced society" of today stumbled upon the ancient technology of the 1955-1960s when men with straight edges and graphing paper put men on the moon and brought them back home and couldn't figure out how exactly they did it … something that has still not been replicated.
But that is all clearly falling by the way side as the US system crumbles and decays from being extremely unhealthy with a kind of civilizational or at least societal and cultural cancer that has clearly metastasized at this point.
That is kinda the point. At this point I'm very accustomed to not getting drug tested for jobs, and I'm not willing to give that up. I don't even smoke that much; I'd be willing to give it up for the right reason, but defense contractor clearance wouldn't cut it.
It's not about following the law. They don't want to give clearance to people who could get into situations where they could be bribed or taken advantage of and misuse of a clearance is used to wipe away a debt.
They're going to talk to the three friends you listed on your SF-86 and your former landlords at the address listed. Many people seem to think that SSBI investigations consist of, like, the Stasi slapping people around in basements trying to find out what people are hiding. Far from it. If you don't have an arrest record and were discreet about your prior drug use (ie not putting it on social media) and your friends have common sense, you have little to worry about. The process is a lot more about confirming that you lived where you said you did / had no contact with foreign agents than it is about uncovering prior drug use. Anecdotally, it is very common for people to get a waiver for "occasional experimentation with marijuana in high school" when in fact they were enthusiastic recreational drug users for years. As far as drug use goes, SSBIs are essentially a Potemkin process. Given the extent to which selective amnesia is prevalent among SCI applicants, I think it would make sense to reform the process so that applicants can be fully transparent and forgiven for their past transgressions as long as they piss clean.
No? They'll branch out and talk to anyone tangentially related to you for only small reasons.
Yeah, quite literally.
>To hold a security clearance you can't violate federal law despite what your state laws say is legal
Exactly. If you are a federal employee, you cannot simply use marijuana because the state made it legal. Earlier this year, the Office of Personnel Management "reiterated that the mandates of Executive Order 12564, Drug-Free Federal Workplace, prohibiting the use of illegal drugs on or off duty remain in effect for all federal employees."