Pubdate: Tue, 07 Aug 2007
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A03
Copyright: 2007 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer
Cited: Marijuana Policy Project http://www.mpp.org
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Marijuana+Policy+Project

FBI BOWS TO MODERN REALITIES, EASES RULES ON PAST DRUG USE

Policy Change Comes as Agency Struggles to Fill Openings

The buttoned-down FBI is loosening up: Under a little-noticed new 
hiring policy introduced this year, job applicants with a history of 
drug use will no longer be disqualified from employment throughout the bureau.

Old guidelines barred FBI employment to anyone who had used marijuana 
more than 15 times in their lives or who had tried other illegal 
narcotics more than five times.

But those strict numbers no longer apply. Applicants for jobs such as 
analysts, programmers or special agents must still swear that they 
have not used any illegal substances recently -- three years for 
marijuana and 10 years for other drugs -- but they are no longer 
ruled out of consideration because of more frequent drug use in the past.

Such tolerance of admitted lawbreaking might seem odd for the FBI, 
whose longtime director J. Edgar Hoover once railed against young 
thugs filled with "false courage from a Marijuana cigarette."

But FBI officials say the move is simply an acknowledgment of reality 
in a country where, according to some estimates, up to a third of the 
population has tried marijuana at some point.

The loosened standards also come as the FBI struggles to fill the 
jobs it has -- particularly in the areas of counterterrorism and 
intelligence, which draw from a more varied pool of applicants than 
traditional agent positions.

"One of the things we came to realize was that our drug policy was 
largely out of step with the rest of the intelligence community and 
much of the law enforcement community," said Jeffrey J. Berkin, 
deputy assistant director of the FBI's security division, which 
implemented the new guidelines. "We're going to focus less on a hard 
number and more on a whole-person approach. . . . The new policy just 
allows us a little more flexibility than the old policy."

Even with the new, looser standards, the FBI's drug-use policy is 
still among the toughest in federal government and stricter than 
those of most private companies, Berkin and outside experts note.

The CIA, for example, requires only that applicants have not used 
illegal drugs within the past 12 months, although "illegal drug use 
prior to 12 months ago is carefully evaluated during the medical and 
security processing," according to an agency advisory.

Even the Drug Enforcement Administration leaves open the possibility 
of hiring employees who admit to "youthful and experimental use of marijuana."

"Such applicants may be considered for employment if there is no 
evidence of regular, confirmed usage and the full-field background 
investigation and result of the other steps in the process are 
otherwise favorable," according to the DEA's Web site.

At the FBI, the new rules allow the bureau to consider "all relevant 
facts, including the frequency of use," in deciding whether someone's 
drug history should bar a candidate from becoming an FBI employee.

"Someone who was actually an addict is probably not going to satisfy 
our needs," Berkin said. "Our standards are still very high. The 
level of drug history would still have to be something that we would 
characterize as experimental."

Mark A. de Bernardo, executive director of the Institute for a 
Drug-Free Workplace, a nonprofit group, said he applauds the FBI for 
dropping its numerical measures, in part because such requirements 
could run afoul of disability discrimination laws.

"Someone who may have engaged in illicit drug use 20 years ago -- to 
say that person can never work at the FBI, that they can never be 
rehabilitated, would be not only inappropriate but possibly illegal," 
de Bernardo said. "I don't think this is sending a weaker message; I 
think the message can be just as strong, which is that we expect you 
to be drug-free."

Under the FBI's previous policy, many job applicants who, for 
example, had experimented with marijuana in college often had 
difficulty recalling precisely how many times they may have used the 
drug, according to FBI officials and others. Even the definition of 
what constituted a single use -- one joint? a whole night of 
partying? -- was open to debate.

"We found it was difficult to draw a meaningful distinction between, 
for example, 15 uses of marijuana or 16 uses," Berkin said. "It was 
very arbitrary."

Such uncertainty frequently led to problems on polygraph tests, which 
the FBI administers to all new employees. You cannot be hired if you 
are deemed to have failed the polygraph test.

"It was the drug question that was tripping up the most people," said 
Mark S. Zaid, a Washington defense lawyer who handles many employment 
disputes involving the FBI and other intelligence agencies. "They 
realize they were losing good people."

Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy 
Project, which advocates looser restrictions on marijuana use, called 
the policy change "a small step towards sanity" by the FBI.

"What it really does reflect is a reality that lots and lots of 
people in this society have used marijuana -- some of them have used 
it a fair amount -- and have gone on to become capable and effective 
citizens," Mirken said. "Are we really going to stop all those folks 
from serving our country?"

Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House's Office of National 
Drug Control Policy, said there is no set standard governing past 
drug use for prospective federal employees. But Lemaitre and others 
said the FBI's new policy reflects a broader trend.

"Increasingly, this is less about someone who smoked pot a couple 
times when they were a kid in college and more about 'Do you have a 
drug problem now and are you lying about it now?' " Lemaitre said. 
"That's the shift you're seeing in both the private and public sectors."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake