...You don't know me or how I feel about the subject, so you just got carried away for nothing.
...
Never for nothing my friend. Speaking one's mind in a reasonably clear and forthwith fashion is never for nothing.
Only the first paragraph of my response was aimed at you, and not as an attack, but the rest of my commentary was simply my feeling on the subject of "warning required" and "what should be". And admittedly, my first thought was related to jail and not background searches, because that's where I've been affected by an innocuous hobby.
I was pointing out more than anything, with my response to your warning, that it's idiotic to have to issue a warning like that to begin with (not that it WAS issued). It is sometimes difficult on a forum to either point that out, or understand, that a quoted comment is a trigger to an idea, a rant, or what-have-you, rather than an attack on the comment itself. I do apologize if it seemed it was personally pointed at you and your warning.
However, I do think you are a little exaggerated in your caution. I am a software developer who understands extremely well the capability that our government has to analyze and ferret out miniscule patterns from the detritus of our lives. While I haven't worked for the NSA or other branches of the government, I've done some pretty amazing things with analysis and searches and putting together the data to find patterns that are not so obvious to the unaided. I've been a tech guy all my life and have been a serious professional developer who has worked for fortune 500 companies and ran his own consulting business for the last 25 or so years.
It's not that they can't find it - it's rather related to who is going to use such systems and to what end. Given that more than one state in the US has made leaps forward to legalize marijuana usage, and that I believe it will spread farther now, I don't think pot smoking is going to be something held against people in the near future - no more than alcohol is currently. Ok, she maybe can't get a pilot's job (notice I didn't say license...) if she's an alcoholic, or fly the Space Shuttle (oh wait, no one is doing that any more! heh) but something tells me that's not her bent anyway.
I've also been the target of prejudice in this regard in the past. I like to think of myself as a person who likes to push liberty both personal and societal, and therefore have not let my past experiences cloud my vision of what I want to say. I won't hide. If anyone else has the pelotas to be out in front, I can only admire them - as long as they are doing it with an understanding of the consequences. Most people are smart enough to know what they are doing in that regard. If the young lady in question let slip such a comment, I think it must be because where she's from, there is not such a stigma attached to smoking pot, or she's brave and it doesn't necessarily scare her. She probably knows her societal limits a lot better than us, who are looking from outside her experience and point of view.
After a couple of arrests and a couple of nights in jail (never had enough for them to really come after me), with a record that's really easily searchable (just ask the immigration authorities here!), I have managed to "pay the bills" reasonably well.
Hell, even the FBI can't figure out what its response should be to such things as background checks in states where they've recently begun to legalize marijuana, at least as far as the growers themselves go. Their worry is that the industry won't be taken over by organized crime (rightfully so!), not even trying to make it a "federal case" any more, beyond that. The pot stigma is going away, after a freaking life time of idiocy.
I think people should come out into the open. The more the merrier
