I don't think that would effect his chances. All of our latest presidents have admitted or have been proven to do illegal drugs of some sort. Not to mention that the U.S. government has done some crazy things with drugs, especially LSD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

http://www.cracked.com/blog/five-fun-facts-about-the-cia-and...

As I understand it, getting a security clearance doesn't especially care about whether you've done anything illegal, it cares about:

1. Whether you're likely to voluntarily leak any secure information.

2. Whether someone who dug up some dirt on you could blackmail you into leaking secure information.

Or as the saying goes, it's fine to have a mistress, but having a mistress that your wife doesn't know about is a problem...

Having gone thru the sec clearance thing in the 90s, the third thing is if you have financial issues (like an expensive addiction with much income) and some foreign intelligence service can "help". So they're pretty interested in finances. Which wouldn't have been a problem for Jobs...

A friend in college wanted to be an FBI agent, so I got to hear alot about this.

I believed they polygraphed you about drug use, and I recall that they had a threshold number of "experimental" sessions with marijuana that were ok, as long as you disclosed them during the background check and polygraph.

The FBI still uses the polygraph? I would hope the FBI would be looking for the kind of people that know a polygraph is near worthless.

I remember an Australian talking about the various levels of clearance - confidential, secret negative (anything stand out in your history), secret positive (in-depth active examination of your history). He said that the process wasn't about finding dirt on you, it was about finding out if you had any dirt that could be leveraged against you. For example, if you were gay and being outed would be a problem, then that's leverage. If you didn't care and were clearly open about it, that's not leverage.

That harmonizes with my experience. I was interviewing for a "top secret" job with the US and spent some time studying the system and looking over the appeals rulings of the clearance process.

Generally, the key things were, "are you a crook? are you liable to be bribed/coerced?".

E.g. one chap was a transvestite, but the appeals court ruled that since his wife and minister knew, it wasn't something that could be leveraged against him.

If the record is public, then it actually provides a lot less leverage for blackmail than a history of secret use of LSD.