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Comment by falk | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that would effect his chances. All of our latest presidents have admitted or have been proven to do illegal drugs of some sort. Not to mention that the U.S. government has done some crazy things with drugs, especially LSD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

http://www.cracked.com/blog/five-fun-facts-about-the-cia-and...

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As I understand it, getting a security clearance doesn't especially care about whether you've done anything illegal, it cares about:

1. Whether you're likely to voluntarily leak any secure information.

2. Whether someone who dug up some dirt on you could blackmail you into leaking secure information.

Or as the saying goes, it's fine to have a mistress, but having a mistress that your wife doesn't know about is a problem...

Having gone thru the sec clearance thing in the 90s, the third thing is if you have financial issues (like an expensive addiction with much income) and some foreign intelligence service can "help". So they're pretty interested in finances. Which wouldn't have been a problem for Jobs...

A friend in college wanted to be an FBI agent, so I got to hear alot about this.

I believed they polygraphed you about drug use, and I recall that they had a threshold number of "experimental" sessions with marijuana that were ok, as long as you disclosed them during the background check and polygraph.

The FBI still uses the polygraph? I would hope the FBI would be looking for the kind of people that know a polygraph is near worthless.

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