drug/alcohol testing policy: effective?

"Jim Fisher" wrote in message
news [snipped]

Quitting something that is bad for you because of rules that were imposed
on
me was a bad idea? I'd bet a whole dollar that there's a jillion former
pot-heads flying today who quit because of drug testing.

I'll betcha there are a bunch of ex-pothead controllers out there too who
quit for the same reasons. I'm pretty close to one of them, but he'd never
admit his past sins on a public forum for fear of losing his federal job.
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. It
was fun (he says), but it was a dead end. To steer his ship down a
straighter, narrower channel, this guy walked into a recruiting office and
enlisted in the Marine Corps. The Marines drug test with a zero-tolerance
policy. The he used his Marine Corps experience to get an FAA job as a
controller. The FAA drug tests too, with a zero-tolerance policy.

Somewhere along the way, this guy realized just how damn bad drugs are for
building a person's 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. You don't want unmotivated, low-energy, maybe high-as-a-kite
folks playing around with airplanes that will be carrying passengers. 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. 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.

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.


I'd bet a dollar a lot of them are reading this right now but are too
chicken to admit it.

I'll bet you're right on the money, Jim.

Chip, ZTL