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."