Motherboard published The FBI Says It Can’t Find Hackers to Hire Because They All Smoke Pot by Max Cherney in May of 2014.
If you search for “marijuana FBI hiring,” the first two pages of results are a spate of articles dated in 2014, with State Marijuana Laws Complicate Federal Job Recruitment by Matthew Rosenberg and Mark Mazzetti (NYT), in 2015, being the only 2015 news.
By the third page of results you get a smattering of 2015 posts, mostly to the same effect as Rosenberg and Mazzetti, that the FBI in particular (3 years with no pot use) and many other federal agencies, have pushed their heads even further up their asses than before.
The one bright spot in government being the US Forestry Service that advertises its positions “are not drug tested.”
From the stories I read, there appears to be no hope that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies will adopt saner hiring strategies any time soon. Even if they did, there would be the legacy of prejudice against new hires who are allowed to smoke pot and the old hires who wish they had been smoking pot.
Hopefully private industry won’t continue to make the same mistake or at least exempt IT/hacker services from drug testing.
CEO/CIO’s need to ask themselves: Do you want to have the best hires and work or advance a social engineering fantasy of a kill-joy government drone?
What’s your call?