According to an FAA toxicology report, Nicholas Meleski, the commercial pilot in the June 26 hot air balloon crash that killed all five on board in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had THC (marijuana) and cocaine in his blood and urine samples.
Talk about Bad For Aviation:-[
It’s long overdue that the US shucks off the wrong-headed governance of those substances. It was dumb at the time and the whole war on drugs thing has done more harm than good. But there is an almost equally bad outcome that is coming at us in the rush to right old wrongs: somehow ignoring the fact that those drugs can affect your performance for days, weeks or months. Especially weed and most especially when faced with something unexpected. But those dumb laws also stifled basic research for literally generations. Until we know for certain what the effects are and how to correctly test for their presence, random alcohol and drug testing of pilots should be ramped up massively. Anywhere, anytime.
Nixon’s “War of Drugs” was lost last century, all it accomplished is to spend billions of taxpayer money and make foreign drug gangs rich and powerful. Cosmo is right.