Federal Job Candidates Advised to Lie About Marijuana Use

The federal government drug tests potential employees for certain positions.  Young people who want those positions, and who use drugs, need to game the system to avoid having the feds find out.  That's the take from a piece in the New York Times:  State Marijuana Laws Complicate Federal Job Recruitment:

    For all the aspiring and current spies, diplomats and F.B.I. agents living in states that have liberalized marijuana laws, the federal government has a stern warning: Put down the bong, throw out the vaporizer and lose the rolling papers.

    It may now be legal in Colorado, in Washington State and elsewhere to possess and smoke marijuana, but federal laws outlawing its use — and rules that make it a fireable offense for government workers — have remained rigid. As a result, recruiters for federal agencies are arriving on university campuses in those states with the sobering message that marijuana use will not be tolerated.

    So members of a new generation are getting an early lesson in what their predecessors have done for as long as there has been espionage, diplomacy and bureaucracy. They are lying and, when necessary, stalling to avoid failing a drug test.

    As any regular marijuana smoker will tell you, it usually takes about two weeks for evidence of marijuana use to disappear from urine, a urine sample being the method by which drug use ordinarily is tested.

    “Delaying something is part of what a good diplomat is supposed to know how to do,” said John, a young American diplomat who lives in Washington, D.C., where marijuana use became legal this year. “If you can’t put off a test for two weeks, I mean, come on.” He spoke on the condition that only his first name be used in an effort to avoid losing his job.

I suppose it's bound to come to this.  In a culture where we expect the country's leaders to lie to us, we probably can't expect to get honesty from the ordinary folks.  Of course the key to successful lying is to make sure you deny it in public:

    Based on interviews with a handful of federal workers living here, John’s marijuana-smoking story is not unique. One recent federal hire with a security clearance said he and many of his friends believed that the government was basically asking them to lie when applying for jobs. The hire, a university graduate from a Western state with liberal marijuana laws, was adamant that neither his name nor the agency where he was about to start working appear in print.

Then there's this, which is particularly appalling:

    Now, [a State Department] official owns his home here in Washington, [D.C.,]where it is legal to grow up to six plants, though only three can be mature at any given time. If discovered, he said, he would claim that the plants belonged to his wife, who does not work for the government.

This has got to be reassuring to foreign leaders who have to decide whether to believe what an American State Department official says.