Montgomery County has a request that deserves to be granted.
The Montgomery County proposal is even more modest; the chief is asking only that any marijuana use more than one year before a recruit’s completing the police academy no longer be an automatic disqualifier. That would allow prospective officers to stop smoking weed right when they decide to try for the force — instead of punishing them for experimenting before they knew they wanted to be cops.
These changes make sense. Today, in places such as Maryland, smoking weed is no more a crime than sipping a beer. Excessive consumption of either THC or alcohol, to be sure, might be a reason someone ought not to serve as a police officer. But to reject aspiring law enforcement agents because they ingested a legal substance once or twice is a good way to miss out on new talent — and furthers a stuffy image of police departments that discourages many from applying in the first place.
A Fairfax County major, speaking of that department’s marijuana policy, noted to PERF that “people with a little bit of life experience can be more successful” in their law enforcement roles than people with none. It might be riskier for police departments to fail to change their marijuana-use policies than to loosen them.
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