Ideal Mitigation Time For Drug Acquisition

SECURITY CLEARANCE Q&A
1

TS/SCI applicant with the DoD/IC for a first-time clearance. Could never find insight on this topic so I’m asking myself.

I’m aware the general wisdom is that as long as you aren’t going for law enforcement, one year of abstaining from drug use is good enough. But what about other drug activities?

I have three instances of helping friends get drugs while I was in college. Basically every interaction was a “favor for a friend” thing going like:

  1. “Do you know where I can get this.”
  2. “Yeah I know a guy who has this.”
  3. They pay for the drugs, but I acquire it and give it to them.

Last incident was over 20 months ago. I did this once each for shrooms, MDMA, and adderall. Everything is fully disclosed on my e-QIP in great detail along with drug use with an equal amount of time for abstinence. No other red flags. Spare me a lecture because I know this makes my case a lot more difficult and the recency might be cutting it too close. I regret it, take full responsibility, and am actively mitigating.

I’m currently being processed so I don’t see a point to withdrawing especially when I already sent everything in. I’ll let them tell me no. I’m mostly just curious what would’ve been an “optimal” amount of time to mitigate this. 3 years? 5 years? Or is this already a workable case?

2

Interesting question. Sounds like you’re neither purchasing nor selling in these scenarios, but more like brokering, I guess… It still seems like it should be falling under some kind of problematic drug aspect, but I am curious to know what others have to add from the “investigative side”.

3

The full question (23.2) on the SF86 reads "in the last 7 years have you been involved in…trafficking, production, transfer, shipping, receiving, handling or sale of any drug…

So in my BI opinion, you were involved in the handling, receiving and possibly transfer of a drug.

Your last incident was over 20 months ago. Your BI should ask you for dates of these incidents, how many times it occurred, (you do mention 3 times in your post) the drugs involved each time, etc. etc. They will also ask you if you continue to associate with these persons. I don’t know what an optimal amount of time would be, obviously the longer the better.

All you can do at this point is wait and see. And of course, continue to abstain. Best of luck to ya! : )

4

Yeah, FWIW, “Drug Trafficking” includes possession and distribution. Here is an interesting CJ article. 3 years old but probably still valid:
Drug Involvement and Security Clearances