Not to derail this wonderfully passionate "drugs are wonderful"/"drugs are the devil" discussion, but it brought to mind an interesting difference in basic operational safety principles. So, if you will allow me to go off on a tangent for a moment, you may find this interesting.
When I was the Ops Engineer at RBS, I was assigned to be the liaison for a Japanese visitor, a former Ops Manager from a plant outside of Tokyo, who was spending a few months benchmarking our power plants prior to going back to serve as the plant manager. He was a perfectly charming little fellow, who not only wished to learn from how we did things, but to share their wisdom on operating principles.
One day, he asked me if we did "point and call." While his English was much better than my Japanese, his thick accent made it hard to always understand his questions. After much discussion, he conveyed to me that "point and call" was the process of pointing to a switch or button prior to actuating it, then clearly stating the proposed action, then, upon acknowledgement of the action, actuating the switch or button. Being a good ex-squid, I immediately answered an emphatic "yes." In return, he asked "why?". I immediately answered: (1) to assure clear communication of actions and the state of the plant; (2) to minimize human performance errors due to actuating the wrong component; and (3) to give someone else the opportunity to catch a wrong action before you take it. He nodded his head and said "no." His answer was "To slow you down." He conceded that "point and call" did all of those things that I listed, but its primary purpose was to slow down the operator's response to transients.
His outlook was that the plant was designed to protect itself, and all that an immediate operator response could do was screw up the plant's designed response to the transient (e.g., TMI). In exciting situations it is easy to speed up your actions beyond your capacity to check your work. His point was, that with nuclear plant design, reactor protection functions and all, it is better for the operator to do nothing than it is for him to do the wrong thing. Therefore, his primary purpose for "point and call" was to slow the situation down [for the sake of being slow]. I found his perspective to be interesting, but, until you all began talking about the importance of operator reaction time, I didn't understand what bothered me about it. It's that the Navy program credits immediate operator actions for reactor safety far more than is credited in commercial plants.
Anyway, back to your drugs or no drugs discussion, but to quote from one of my favorite albums: "I don't need no arms around me, and I don't need no drugs to calm me. I have seen the writing on the wall. Don't think I need anything at all."
MGM
