drug/alcohol testing policy: effective?

"Chip Jones" wrote in message
k.net...
[...]
This guy I know started smoking cannabis in college. He enjoyed it so
much
and so often that he started losing control of the direction his life was
going in. As you might expect, he soon saw falling school grades, low
energy, no motivation, etc., the classic results of habitual pot use.

Those are the classic results of ANY lifestyle abuse. Any number of other
things can have the exact same result. Computer games, pornography, and
even scientific research have all been known to cause the exact same kind of
"drop out" behavior. Last I checked, none of those things are disallowed
for pilots.

More importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that *generally* habitual
pot use leads to the things you describe. Certain individuals are
susceptible to falling into a rut like that, but lots of habitual pot users
have no such problems, just as lots of habitual computer gamers, scientists,
and porn aficionados have no such problems.

You are trying to extrapolate to all people based on your knowledge of a
single individual. There's just no basis for that kind of extrapolation,
and it would be absurd to make rules based on a single individual.

[...]
Somewhere along the way, this guy realized just how damn bad drugs are for
building a person's character.

Drugs aren't meant to build character. Why would you expect them to be?
And more importantly, there are plenty of other legal activities that are
similarly not useful for "building a person's character". Why should
everything a person does be good for building a person's character, and what
possible justification does our government have for mandating that a person
engage only in things that are good for building character?

Like every controller I know, this guy would
tell you that people who make their living in aviation safety related
fields, say pilots who fly under Part 121 or Part 135, or mechanics, or
air
traffic controllers, should be randomly drug tested *often*. It's an air
safety thing.

It's not a safety thing. It's a money thing. Even before drug testing,
it's a pretty sure bet that more pilots flew while drunk than while high on
pot. And yet, what testing is being sold? Drug testing.

If it were really a safety thing, the focus would be on alcohol abuse.

You don't want unmotivated, low-energy, maybe high-as-a-kite
folks playing around with airplanes that will be carrying passengers.

I don't want drunk pilots playing around with airplanes that will be
carrying passengers either. But no one seems to be cracking down on that.

The
problem with drugs is that you can't always know when a person is high, or
when drug use is affecting critical safety skills like judgment or
coordination.

This is true of the drug known as alcohol as well.

No matter what the rate of positive on a random test is among
this group of aviation professionals, the air safety goal has to be zero
tol
erance for drug use.

Drug use while flying, yes. Drug use generally? No...it has nothing to do
with air safety whatsoever. Drug testing does not distinguish between the
two.

Random testing in the field of professional aviation is a necessary evil.
I
firmly believe that even if we completely legalize pot someday for the
masses, we will still have to maintain a zero-tolerance random drug
testing
policy or else air safety will suffer.

There is absolutely no evidence to support your theory, and plenty of
evidence in contrary to it.

Pete