The only reason that "smoking pot" has potential for coercion is that the US government makes such a doggone huge stink about it. Homosexuality and mental health issues lie in the same category - if they didn't make a stink about it, being gay or whatever wouldn't be an issue, and nobody would be able to coerce anyone about it.

The NSA, at least, is not without imagination. They will have perceived the issue with making a stink about X causes X to be a handle for coercion. Therefore, the NSA wants pot smoking to be in issue they can disqualify people with, they want other arbitrary categories of actions to be disqualification issues. Why? My guess is control: mental health issues and sexual behavior outside of vanilla are pretty darn common. Finding such problems gives the NSA itself a handle on their own people, to coerce things from them.

And as far as "character" goes, haven't we heard enough about that in the past few years to realize that "good character" is just another form of racism/elitism, like "good breeding" or a "gentleman's C" grade at an Ivy League school?