The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is moving to develop new marijuana-related standards for pilots and air traffic controllers in light of the “operational risk” created by the Trump administration’s move to reschedule cannabis—which has furthered the “normalization” of the drug.
FAA’s Office of Aerospace Medicine is partnering with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to convene a series of meetings focused on the impact of marijuana consumption on air travel professionals, an effort aimed at informing approaches the agency might take to “evaluate, update, or refine their current policies for cannabis use, particularly for determining when individuals are fit for duty.”
Topics to be discussed during the four planned meetings set to take place this year and next year—which will not be open to the public—include drug testing, cognitive functioning monitoring and the length of impairment following cannabis use. Invited participants will include experts on impairment evidence, pharmacokinetics and detectability, operational risk translation and policy framing.
There is an “urgent need to establish clear, scientifically defensible, and operationally actionable fitness-for-duty standards for pilots and air traffic control specialists (ATCS) in the context of evolving federal cannabis policy,” NASEM said in a overview of the effort, which FAA is
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