I think everyone knows that, least of all the person involved. We all have feet of clay (well, most of us it seems) and I'm sure he will have found out who his real mates are, I'm sure he has learned a sharp lesson from it and I'm sure that doing drugs didn't in isolation, make him a great bloke or a pratt. I certainly did when I went through my 4/5 years or so or rehab, consequently, I became far less judgemental. I called in to the Royal College of Defence Medicine this week whilst at QE2 hospital in Brum and never fail to be invigourated by the positivity and.. 'good' shown by people.
Loyalty shouldn't be misplaced, and I agree that he probably showed not a lot. And I'm glad for him, his mates, his pax and the Service that he got caught. I'm also sure that he of all knows it more than anyone. But this Christmas, lets spare a thought for his future and his circumstances, and especially those of his lad. I suspect his forthcoming battle will prove a far more reliable indicator of his mettle and his character than that seemingly demonstrated by him doing coke at some Xmas bash, trying to impress.
I first heard about this a few days after it happened and my initial, instinctive thoughts were vented against the person who (scuttlebutt) was alleged to have introduced the substance.. to my simple mind, that smacked (sorry
) of premeditated intent to undermine the ethos, all he wanted to do, from the sounds of it, wanted to impress after a few drinks too many. I have seen too much evidence of coke impact at different stages of the impact cycle at Canary Wharf and Shaftesbury Avenue to be outraged but I know (and the lives of Pax are to important to be trusted to my anecdotal evidence, sure) who operate for years with no discernible drop off in performance.
That is not me justifying it. I'm not condoning what he did at all, not at all.. I wouldn't want to fly with him for quite a few years. But would I completely shed any faith I had in him? No, because life isn't binary, it isn't black and white. The older I get, the harder I have to try to resist falling into the trap of viewing life through age induced polarising filters (all I have to work on now, is long, pompous posts). He screwed up, he will know that. Let's show some of the qualities of loyalty and esprit de corps that admittedly, he failed to, by making sure that even after screwing up, this guy has a track record of doing the biz and when all is said and done, is still one of us.
If you didn't like him before, you won't now. If you liked him before, you probably won't now. But it's more a measure of us about how we react and act. Good luck to him, I hope he turns it around.