Senate votes to let people who’ve used marijuana work at intelligence agencies
marijuanamoment.net
marijuanamoment.net
Friends in the intelligence community have told me they have as many extreme, extreme alcoholics as the Navy does, and that's just fine, part of the "culture", but oh boy, cannabis is not acceptable. Not sure if it was always like that, or just recently because they have recruiting problems.
I also have friends at national labs watching this very enthusiastically, hoping it spills over to their sector, because they have difficulty recruiting PhDs who are willing to get randomly piss tested.
I use cannabis sometimes but it's more the principal of it.
It's a privacy violation and positive results don't actually mean you're intoxicated on the job. What people do in their free time is nobodies business so long as it's not harming other people.
Airline pilots? People operating dangerous machinery?
They do some kind of test that can pick up if you drank in the last couple days.
The way they assign shifts too causes the problems. If a shift pops up, they wanna take it, and that could happen at any time.
In any case I'd wager it's related to the hangover problem. You don't want a tired, distracted (by headaches or whatever), grumpy person moving 12000 tons.
But the real reason why cannabis was so heavy handed criminalized was because it was a "black, hippie, and anarchist" drug. https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-blac...
We might actually be turning that around, only after 90 years.
My hope is once its legalized fully, more effort can be put into researching and designing more sensitive tests until we have something that is equally as capable as breathalyzers are(which is questionable in and of itself, but I'll settle for equal treatment under the law for now rather than aiming for perfection).
With alcohol, breathalyzers provide an easy way to immediately detect the impairment.
https://www.faa.gov/pilots/safety/pilotsafetybrochures/media...
Nobody should be intoxicated on the job.
However if they smoked a joint yesterday they shouldn't lose their job today when it's already out of their system.
As long as they are rested and alert when on the job, there is zero reason to care what they do in their private time off.
I wonder if there has been any studies around marijuana impairment and vehicle operation?
Both are not ideal for people in positions of public trust.
I don't want my intelligence officers drunk OR high. Is that too much to ask?
The status quo endorses the former and demonizes the latter.
I could maybe see this for the highest leadership--the President, 4-star generals, people who are politically or functionally on-call 24/7. But for everyone else, the rule should be, don't show up to work impaired, either drunk or stoned or hungover. (Though I'm not sure how to deal with chronic pain conditions in that case).
If you're mopping the mess hall, you can probably go home and have a six pack if you want. Just not on the job...
You can call them whatever you like, I suppose.
I would certainly accept being "always sober" as a condition of employment if the job was one I really wanted.
I can't find the study, but I seem to remember that alcohol consumption follows the 80/20 rule. A small amount of alcohol consumers consume basically all the alcohol, with non-alcholics consuming very little. If you consume very little, it's probably not a big deal just to go without completely.
On the job? I agree with you.
Off the job? Do you mind if an inteligence officer who is not on duty let’s say on a fourth of july, bbq-s some burgers with his friends and family and then drinks four beers? Enough to be considered as impaired if they were to drive. But they don’t drive. They don’t babble about secrets. They talk about sports and then they sleep it off. Would you mind that?
And would you mind the same if it were a canabis joint instead of the beers?
Is wife swapping like less blackmailable escape than prostitutes? Clearance life hack.
I agree it's not "spreading" per se, but their numbers are respectable among proselytizing religions today. When Islam reached a 1.8% growth rate in the 2000s we were inundated with proclamations that it was the fastest growing religion in the world (eg: https://foreignpolicy.com/2007/05/14/the-list-the-worlds-fas...).
This article from 10 years ago reports that 56% of Mormon live outside the US and Canada at that time- https://www.deseret.com/2013/8/30/20524833/the-majority-of-m...
Mormon membership numbers of actual adherents are likely 20% to 40% of membership claimed based on "inactivity" rates (and people leaving).
Samoa is a big one I guess.
Mormonism deeply values work ethic and breeds a strong trust of authority.
You're taught at an early age questioning authority is a sin and doing what your leaders tell you is the right thing to do.
The end result is a group of people who are hard working, don't question leadership, and do what they are told.
If you aren't allowed to question leadership and are instead expected to do "what you are told", then all the experiments and horrors studies on group think are a reality at a dangerous level [1][2][3] What if you think an order is dangerous and have good reasons why?
Good leadership needs to know what the ground-level knows, they need good input and questioning. Stalin killed anyone who opposed or questioned him, so all of the input and feedback was only positive feedback/intel to avoid being killed. Even when they were setting up one of the worst famines in recorded history [4].
Healthy societies aren't cults, and that is definitely a description of a cult.
I hate a Godwin-Law argument, but the damn Nazi's "did what they were told" [5], and those 'hard-working'-don't-question-leadership lemmings had a blind-eye to/assisted and/or murdered millions of people because they didn't have to deal with the burden of questioning and thinking for themselves. Fuck that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
[2] https://www.prisonexp.org/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown#Deaths_in_Jonestown
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
[5] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/how-the-nazis-defense-o...
We know what group-think does way beyond the experiment. We have a very well-documented history on it. Read Soviet and Nazi history, you'll see what it can do. It's almost universal in big groups of humans.
If a police officer told you to shoot another person, would you do it? If 3 police officers tell you to do it, would you do it? How many police officers will it take to make you shoot the person?
Has been throughout history!
It's not clear to me how these would have absolutely any relationship at all.
In other words, you need to have a slightly adventurous personality.
Perhaps for someone who is undercover and needs to fit in, sure, but I don't think that predisposes a personality to take drugs in their own time. For both alcohol and drugs I doubt it has any relevance to most intelligence roles.
How.. mundane.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/353645/nearly-half-adults-tried...
Think: DEA employee, vs. DEA criminal informant. The job of the DEA employee is not to infiltrate drug gangs. It's to organize and monitor the infiltration of drug gangs. The criminal informant wears the wire. The DEA employee sits in the black van outside, listening to the wire.
The most common position in the CIA is "analyst." The job of a CIA analyst is to sit there in a cubicle and read/listen to all the evidence gathered by agents (or spy satellites, or wiretaps, or whatever), gathering any "interesting" stuff into a report (with a further fan-in to "senior analysts" who map-reduce all those reports into "intelligence".) Unlike an operative, an analyst doesn't even get to speak with any agents — let alone head out into the field to recruit them.
gotta be able to hang out on both sides of the tracks, dig?
That was when they told him that his offer was rescinded for past use of marijuana. They said there were no exceptions to the rule, but it was the only reason he was denied.
Edit: marijuana use is now common enough that investigators will actually grill you and accuse you of lying if you say you've never used marijuana.
Edit:
Found it https://www.npr.org/2018/03/30/598253244/i-basically-ran-on-...
"GROSS: (Laughter) Right. So I thought this was really interesting. You had to get national security clearance for your job.
MASTROMONACO: Yeah.
GROSS: One of the questions you had to answer was a kind of detailed list of your drug use. And you'd smoked marijuana.
MASTROMONACO: Yes.
GROSS: You had to say how many times (laughter).
MASTROMONACO: Yes. That was...
GROSS: Yeah. So you handled it by saying unknown. How did you come to the conclusion that that would be your answer, an unknown number of times?
MASTROMONACO: Because - well, because I really feel strongly about not lying. And so when the FBI agent asked me for a number of times and she said, you know, 20? And I was like, no. She said, a hundred? I said, no. And then when she got up to 500, I was like, I'm not saying - I'm not giving you a number because who knows if they're going to go try and prove the number? So I just said, unknown. And apparently from her reaction, nobody had ever said that before.
GROSS: You write that you had to get randomly drug tested almost every month. Is that because you'd said unknown or does everybody have to do that?
MASTROMONACO: No. Most people get drug tested, like, once or twice that first year. But I was drug tested quite often because I was very forward-leaning about my drug use, very open-kimono, as we would say. And so, yeah, every - just about every month, you'd get an email that said, you know, you have 24 hours to show up for your test. And I would. And it was fine because I wasn't. So I had nothing to hide (laughter)."
So - financial stuff is their number 1 clearance issue I've heard. If you're deep in debt, or otherwise demonstrate poor control over your financial life.
Next up is being part of the LGBT community - if you're in the closet. I've heard they don't care about people being gay per se, just the secret aspect of it. Anecdotally, I had a govvie friend mention an FBI analyst who had a side hustle in gay porn. Totally OK.
Being open about drug use, as long as it's not the hard drugs, I could see someone getting a pass for.
He didn't get the job, not sure if that was why.
At some point they went cold on her, and then told her to reapply the following year (which she tried for a few years). She'll never know why it didn't work out.
I know at least one person who was not intimidated by the lie detectors, and were able to conceal things which might have been an issue.
The FBI/DEA has/had stricter rules on drug use likely because part of the job could entail dealing with drug seizures.
True -- can't handle your money why would you deserve to handle the gub'mnts?
But also people massively in debt will get desperate and take bribes. And bribes work.
It is useful to explain a bit about the bureaucracy here: the clearance process consists of the investigation and the adjudication. These are two separate steps and often performed by different agencies. The investigation is often performed by OPM, but DoD switched to doing their own, the FBI always has, and it's acceptable to use private contractors (usually retired insurance investigators) up to the S level in some agencies. The adjudication is much more often performed by someone directly in the issuing agency, and agencies publish their own manuals to which adjudicators work. Although the general grounds for denial of a clearance are in statute, the exact rules of what conduct amounts to what grounds (in other words, the real rules of adjudication) are contained in these manuals.
https://www.dni.gov/files/NCSC/documents/Regulations/SEAD-4-...
In the present context, see "Guideline H: Drug Involvement and Substance Abuse," page 17 ff.
It depends. At least, it did when I went for clearance a decade ago.
a) I think recency as well as frequency mattered.
b) You had to be willing to stop.
I don't know how much (a) is still a thing but it was definitely back then. The other thing is it depends on your sponsor and who you get stuck with during the process - some people are going to care way more than others.
They kind of have done the first part, in effect, “marijuana” and “hemp” being legally distinct, and it being possible to get all the pharmacologically interesting bits for which marijuana is sought in forms that are legally “hemp”.
Correct on the first, wrong on the second. Stockpiling issues doesn't work in U.S. politics: it's how you get primaried.
The truth: there are enough Democrats in competitive districts where legalized marijuana would lose them the next general. It's a majority of the minority problem. Not anything strategic.
Also, if you go back say, 10 years, you'll see that most HN threads have very little politics in them, so yes, that has been the norm before.
They schedule drugs through Article 6 of our Constitution which makes treaties law of the land. Our ability to change drug laws in the US is outsourced to the UN. It's not a "Republican or Democrat" issue specifically. Though, the prison system that is increasingly private which makes money hand over fist on drug users and pushers certainly is an issue either political party could champion and change.
speaking pashto ain't gonna get you to SME L6 at a FAANG but could get you doing cool stuff as a contractor or full-on Fed.
and hate on the GS band but it's at least adjusted for inflation
It could generate more data to finally help prove that polygraphs, which largely rely on subjects believing they work, are pointless because so many people already know they don't.
Anyways, good on them for a step in the right direction.
I filled out the app and they asked "How many times have you consumed marijuana in the past year?" I answered honestly, "150 times".
They did not call me back.
About marijuana activists, he said:
> I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana, I mean one that just tears the ass out of them. You know, its a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, from an interview in 1994
Democracies shouldn't have giant unaccountable spy orgs.
All governments on the planet have giant unaccountable spy orgs.
Why should a democracy forgo one of the most effective tools the world has ever seen? Accountability is a strange word to use with any government agency. Most government bodies are only accountable to themselves.
"Everybody [all countries] plays the Great Game. You don't get to not play. Choosing to not play just means when you play you always lose."
Same is true for office politics, market research, academic publishing, etc.; "publish or perish" -- you play the game or you're not an academic.
They don't but there are definitely some bad, unaccountable people and parts to it though.
Individuals are generally accountable but it's going to look unaccountable when the nation also wants to do the things the spy org is doing.
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2016/04/02/consequences-lying...
It's a nice filter for the job
the point is that there are no surprises about a candidate, not that some guy they've known since 3rd grade will cover for them.
cuz their job won't involve talking to people they've known since 3rd grade
The main idea is to assess the ways in which an asset can get corrupted by outside influence. Agencies can work with people's various deficiencies and vices, after all it's what they do all day long. But they need to be able to qualify the risk represented by each of their people vs the other agencie's people.
No, don’t think “treason”, because lying on (even a national security related) job-related interview is nothing close to treason.
OTOH, lying to government officials about a matter within the jurisdiction is a felony even without invoking weird flights of fancy about treason.
That's hyperbole. According to the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3:
> Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
It's narrowly defined for the very reason that prior history had tons of abuses of a much broader definition to silence political enemies.
Granted, lying to federal officials is almost certainly a crime, and not one you'd like to have on your record. But treason it is not.
Tbh, I kind of liked the idea that decriminalization and liberal attitudes were starving them for talent.
Are you claiming the US shouldn't help Ukraine know where the missiles being shot at their civilians are coming from?
Meanwhile all that capability gets turned against us, surveilling US citizens instead.
They have a history of attacking American citizens for constitutionally protected acts like anti-war activism.
Has the intelligence community, regardless of agency, actually prevented any recent wars? Or why do you believe that "spying prevents war"?
They absolutely did foresee it, we spent months announcing everything Russia was going to do before they did it. It's actually a brand new strategy Biden tried; usually we'd keep everything to ourself to protect how we got the info.
But it didn't prevent it because nothing would have except assassinating Putin. That would be pretty destabilizing too!
The director of the CIA went to Moscow and tried to get the Russians to see sense. Ah well. I guess having intelligence is not the same as acting intelligently.
If spying prevents war, it's not working. LOL...
What's your counterfactual?
Even when we're not actively sending troops, we're busy making enemies for the next war...
there is no "making enemies for the next war" -- they were always enemies
It’s worth remembering that this war actually started close to a decade ago and not in 2022.
Based on that it does sound like the US got involved around the time Russia invaded.
Nobody trusts U.S. intelligence agencies anymore, bro. Whatever.
The US isn't in war. No declarations have been made. No draft is required. No war shortages exist.
Today it's Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan, and then what, back to the Koreas and the Middle East? Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore. Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.
I guess as long as it's not Americans in body bags, we're in the clear? The world is our mercenary. But even that won't last long, I'm willing to bet. The world's not getting any stabler, and our competitors aren't just sitting idle.
More American private military contractors died in Afghanistan than American military. I don't think anyone noticed.
So I'd amend that to "American troops in body bags".
I'm a bit confused on how you think the USA got Ukraine to do the fighting considering Russia invaded (did USA pay off Russia to invade?). But regardless, yes Ukraine is at war and USA is not. It's just like if I drove to the dry cleaners and had them wash something. I didn't wash it; I'm not a dry cleaner. Playing the dry cleaners money or etc doesn't change that fact.
> Our constant involvement in cyclical non-wars sure doesn't feel the same as "peace" to me. Maybe that word just doesn't mean what I think it does anymore
I mean my whole argument is that you're using war to describe something that isn't so I guess this makes two of us.
> Or maybe we have our tentacles in so many places that warmaking and peacemaking have become indistinguishable.
Yes, because the USA is not at war. Russia warmakes with Ukraine so Ru & UA are at war and efforts by other countries China/USA/etc would likely be peacemaking efforts because China/USA/etc aren't at war. If USA declared war on Russia then it'd be a warmaking effort.
> The world is our mercenary.
Which countries did the USA hire to fight another one? That's also a word not being used correctly.
> No draft is required.
The draft was re-instituted during Vietnam, so the presence of selective service isn't an indicator for being "in a war". To this day every adult male of draftable age is only an itchy trigger finger away from being called up
> No war shortages exist.
the powers-that-be have been placing a good amount of blame for "supply chain issues" on the war in Ukraine. "Supply chain issues" being newspeak for "shortages".
And "supply chain issues" obviously aren't the same thing as "shortages"; a traffic jam at the port is a supply chain issue.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/259216899/Iraq-October-2002-NIE-o...
My goodness.
Legal in your state, eh who cares.
Working for FBI/CIA/NSA.. most people don't care for state level repercussions. But KGB threatens (oh they would for funsies) to reach over to talk to CIA that you're in violatoin.. bang loss of job, questioning of your prior work, legal consequences (you lied to get the job), etc...
That's the threat.
Current use = you're fired + lose your security clearance.
Sure, I don't think most people are going to pick "here's the nuclear codes Mr. KGB agent, just don't tell them about the weed!", but it's enough of an opening to convince some people to divulge some information that they shouldn't.
Add on a few more vulnerabilities - maybe they're struggling a little financially and their job skills don't translate well outside their current government role, and just the threat to their job security can be something significant.
-----
Obviously, federal legalization would basically solve this issue.
Being super honest I answered: Yes, I spend more money than I plan on when going out frequently. (Limiting to 20$ of drinks, and it ends up being 25..this was more than a decade ago and I was fresh out of school)