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Comment by Daniel_Newby | Hacker News Reader

All questions are legal to ask. What's illegal is discriminating on the basis of certain answers. The reason not to ask is to avoid being the target of a witch hunt.

This is why competent background checks are conducted by a security officer who produces nothing but a list of disqualifications along with the factual evidence to back them up. ("The candidate appears to engage in the unlawful use of mind altering drugs. [Facebook photo of bong use attached.]")

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raganwald did specifically mention Ontario, where even asking the question is illegal. It's against the Ontario Human Rights code to ask any question on a written or oral application that classifies someone on a discriminatory ground.

(IANAL, and this is not legal advice.)

You'd have to be a really shitty security officer to leap from bong to illegal drug use. There's a reason it's legal to sell bongs, because they have lots of other uses than illegal drugs. Also, many of the drugs used in bongs are legal to use in many different circumstances.

The laws in Ontario are written this way to prevent exactly this sort of idiocy. That's why you don't even ask these things because it's irrelevant to the job.

If illegal drug use doesn't disqualify the President of the United States from his job why should it exclude anyone else?

Bongs ("drug paraphernalia") are in fact illegal in many jurisdictions.

> There's a reason it's legal to sell bongs, because they have lots of other uses than illegal drugs.

Just out of curiousness - what do you mean?

Bongs can be used to smoke legal drugs, and there are a number of subtly different devices (like a shisha) for smoking tobacco.

Setting aside tobacco ('cos, let's be honest, no-one smokes tobacco with a bong, regardless of what head-shops say), there's also "legal highs" - synthetic cannabis analogues (K2/Spice/etc) and Salvia, for instance.

A lot of bongs are re-purposed chemistry apparatus, too. Not that having chemistry apparatus in your student flat is gonna look much better to a prospective employer than a bong. :P

A quick google search will tell you that's flat out wrong - there are interview questions that are illegal to ask in pretty much the entire first world, pretty much anything directly pertaining to legally protected statuses/classes.

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