Drug Testing and the Demise of National Security

Not long ago, FBI Director James Comey stated that he is “grappling with the question” of how to staff the some two-thousand cyber security analyst positions the FBI has open, when many of the people qualified to do such work “…want to smoke weed on the way to the interview.” He was suggesting that if the FBI would relax their cannabis-use policy for new hires, they could fill these spots. Later, when more scrutinizing eyes were watching him, Comey retracted his statement with a predictable, boring anti-weed declaration. It was a political apology, not a real one. I believe Comey meant what he said.

I believe we, as a nation, are as addicted to workplace drug screenings as we are to standardized testing in our schools and both deliver the same mixed results. I won’t bemoan the many, many flaws in conventional drug testing, nor will I get into the outright hypocrisy of denying employment to pot-users while showing no such scrutiny to alcohol users. If you haven’t heard those arguments ad nauseam, I know I have certainly made them.

This is clearly becoming a larger problem when it’s affecting national security. I, for one, want the top-tier, hot shit cyber-gurus to be working for our security agencies. The fact of the matter is that many, if not most, of the brightest hackers are commonly found among the counterculture crowd, often existing on the fringes of normal society. A lot of these people smoke weed.

The FBI needs smart hackers to combat cyber crime and these bright-minded folks are applying for the jobs. What happens if they don’t pass the drug screening? They go work for Google, Microsoft or Facebook (all of which have no drug screening) and make triple what the FBI would have paid!

Do the feds think it’s merely coincidence that the most prosperous tech giants are those that do not screen for narcotics? Look, if your substance use (whether its weed, coffee, Twizzlers or whatever) is making you suck at your job, then you’ll have to make adjustments or get fired. But so long as there is no detriment to your productivity, who the hell cares what you do in your off time?

The workplace should be a meritocracy wherein your actual functionality at the job is what gets evaluated and that’s it. The government is actively ensuring that they are attracting mediocrity. It is a clear mark of intelligence to seek novelty. Our brains are active, information-seeking organisms. It is no coincidence, then, that drug use is often attributed to those with higher intelligence.

Experiencing the world through drug-colored glasses creates that sense of novelty and encourages some very outside-the-box thinking, which seems highly useful when fending off cyber criminals who do not play by established rules. I’m not saying that you have to be a drug addict to be good at something, I’m just saying that if you are good at something and also happen to smoke weed, should it really matter?

I’d also wager that most high-level government officials (maybe even the President) have a bottle of some too-expensive booze in their desk drawer. Hell, it may have even been given to them as a hiring gift. And I really don’t think that bottle of scotch in your drawer is a problem, unless it is.

I used to run into this crazy drug-screening nonsense when I was a chef. I worked at a large hotel and they suddenly decided to institute a drug-screening policy for new and current workers. It was probably some directive that came down from corporate so they could keep their insurance (or something along those lines). I sat down with my boss and said, “Just a heads up, you’re going to lose most of your kitchen staff as a result of this policy.” He laughed and kind of blew me off, but nearly all of us began looking for new jobs immediately.

The thing that really bothered me was that we were a really great team and we were crushing it as a restaurant. Profits were up and turnover was down. Adding this policy effectively ruined the restaurant. Now the food is awful and the staff are a bunch of straight-laced, boring prudes with all the culinary creativity of the Hamburger Helper glove. Again, I’m not stating that every talented, creative person around is on drugs, just that if you kick ass at your job, why would anyone feel the need to scrutinize you in the first place? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

If your job is something you can do well while stoned or recently stoned, then good on you. If your job requires your focus and sobriety while you’re performing the job, then do what’s necessary to be successful. But if getting stoned at night, in your own home, on your own time is an automatic write-off from the public job sector, then we are limiting the amount of creativity and innovation that gets into the system and that system will fail.