For national security positions; absolutely. Those questions are due to the potential for coercion as well as character determination. As far as Europe, MI6 definitely asks those questions. Not sure about DGSE in France though. If you answer in a way that's "negative" that doesn't hurt you as much as lying. If everyone knows about your transgressions, there is less leverage for cohesion by a foreign agency. But if you're keeping a secret, that's exceptional leverage that can be used to blackmail you into betraying secrets.
You hit on a great point. The possibility to be coerced is pretty much the single biggest part of the entire security investigation. It includes being coerced because:
-Financial debt, so all of your finances are inspected
-Family connections, so all of your family is investigated
-Marital affairs, so you're asked about it during the poly
-Pirating software, again asked about it on the poly
...and all sorts of other things. The big thing you hit on is that this isn't very painful unless you try to hide it. If you try to hide something and it comes out in the investigation, you'll almost certainly be disqualified.
One thing I learned in the briefings I saw after getting my clearance was that the single biggest motivator for betrayal was a thrill-seeking narcissistic personality, followed closely by political agendas. Financial (including bribery/blackmail) and romantic blackmail concerns were so tenuously correlated as to be laughable to suggest they are meaningful as a potential exploitation.
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?
The coercion justification is really bizarre though. The only reason anyone could coerce you because they know you smoke pot is because it's a big deal to the NSA, so the NSA asks because they know that because of their self-imposed policy it creates the possibility for coercion.
If instead they just decided that if they found out one of their employees smoked pot that they wouldn't care the coercion potential would magically disappear overnight.
But I guess that's too logical for the government to consider.
