he U.S. Navy’s only boot camp is in Great Lakes, Illinois, where hundreds of thousands of potential recruits visit for a 10-week training and evaluation how the process will work going forward. “If they fail that [cannabis] test and own up—‘Yes, I smoke marijuana’—we do an evaluation of the young person to make sure there’s not something else going on,” said Waters. “But we trust that through the process of boot camp that we have an opportunity to bring them along with our culture.” He added that the Navy recognizes that cannabis is legal in many states now, and the change was made to reflect that fact. Waters explained that the change was made in order to reduce the number of recruits who are immediately disqualified due to cannabis consumption. In an example, he said if there are 40,000 boot camp recruits, then having 4,000 of them disqualified from attending boot camp because of cannabis “is really, really unhelpful and so we want to try to continue to work on that.”
