Originally Posted by
glekichi
Not to condone the actions at all, but was he actually under the influence of the drug? Story reads like he had plenty of time to sleep it off. The test on arrival back home would have shown recent use but not impairment.
There is no clear consensus on the boundaries between impairment and just having traces in your system. An overview of European traffic laws (see here:
https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publica...riving/html_en) shows that some countries specify a limit over which impairment would be present, others simply state that the presence of the drug implies impairment. This note from the link above describes the issue:
In general, countries may either operate policies of “zero tolerance”, in which any trace of drug found is penalised no matter what the effect on the driver; or “impairment”, when drivers will be punished only if their driving skills were obviously affected. This is due to lack of scientific agreement up to now about what levels of concentration of the drug in the body may show impairment, and lack of suitable equipment for roadside testing. As science starts to converge on approximate levels of impairment, laws have started to specify blood-drug levels above which a driver will be considered guilty, but these may still fit the existing typology; a low threshold may be considered “zero tolerance” while a higher threshold may be considered 'impairment'.
I would need to look up the specifics but I suspect that within aviation the approach is still 'zero tolerance' on the drugs front. There is also an argument that just taking the risk of having drugs in your system when turning up for a flight shows a level of irresponsibility that is not acceptable. The effects of drugs, with its various options and use cases and on different persons is not understood well enough to be more specific, which leaves a grey area. Because of that, I would say that a zero tolerance approach is the way to go here.