By Tom Angell

 

The nation’s top defense official says the U.S. military should ease hiring restrictions for people who have used marijuana and other drugs that the federal government considers to be illegal.

“It’s an important question and the answer is yes, we can be flexible in that regard, and we need to,” said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.

The Pentagon chief was responding to a hypothetical question at TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF event on Tuesday about whether someone who went to the Burning Man festival recently and sampled “goodies” should be eligible for a tech engineering job with the military.

“We are changing that in recognition of the fact that times change and generations change,” he said. “And by the way, laws change as respecting marijuana and so forth.”

“We need to, while protecting ourselves and doing the appropriate things to make sure that it’s safe to entrust information with people, we need to understand – and we do – the way people [and] lives have changed,” the secretary said. “Not hold against them things that they’ve done when they were younger.”

Carter’s use of the phrase “when they were younger” raises questions about just how recently he thinks someone should be able to use drugs and then get a military job. But the question from TechCrunch’s Matt Burns asked whether a person who imbibed “two weeks ago” should be eligible to be hired.

In any case, Carter isn’t the only top U.S. official to speak out about how hiring restrictions that hold past drug use against candidates can hamper the country’s ability to find the best people for important jobs.

FBI Director James Comey made headlines in 2014 by insinuating that his agency’s anti-marijuana policies meant he couldn’t hire otherwise qualified hackers to defend the nation’s electronic assets. “I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” he said.

Comey later walked the comments back in response to questions from members of Congress, saying that he didn’t have plans to change the agency’s drug policy anytime soon.

But a report last year by the Department of Justice’s inspector general highlighted that the ban on hiring people who have used marijuana recently is a continuing problem.

“We found that the recruitment and retention of cyber personnel is an ongoing challenge for the FBI,” a the report said. An agency official told the investigators that “the FBI loses a significant number of people who may be interested because of the FBI’s extensive background check process and other requirements, such as all employees must be United States citizens and must not have used marijuana in the past 3 years, and cannot have used any other illegal drug in the past 10 years.”

In 2014, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sent a memo to the heads of federal agencies reminding them that despite the growing number of states legalizing marijuana, use of the drug remains illegal under federal law. “Agencies continue to be prohibited from granting or renewing a security clearance to an unlawful user of a controlled substance, which includes marijuana,” he wrote.

Clapper cited a Reagan-era executive order which “expressly states that use of illegal drugs on or off duty by federal employees in positions with access to sensitive information may pose a serious risk to national security and is inconsistent with the trust placed in such employees as servants of the public.”

The executive order defines illegal drugs as substances falling under Schedule I or II in the Controlled Substances Act, meaning that if cannabis were reclassified to Schedule III or lower — or descheduled altogether — federal agencies would be more readily able to hire people who use it. After rescheduling is accomplished, agencies within the federal government would be able to amend their own marijuana and drug policies.

For example, Article 112a of the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that any member of the military “who wrongfully uses, possesses, manufactures, distributes, imports into the customs territory of the United States, exports from the United States, or introduces into an installation, vessel, vehicle, or aircraft used by or under the control of the armed forces” will be court-martialed.

It is unclear how Carter believes that policy should be amended in light of the growing number of state laws allowing for marijuana use.