How Long from Toke to Yoke? The FAA Wants To Find Out

Aviation has a bright-line rule for alcohol: no drinking within eight hours before flying, the well-known “bottle to throttle” standard. For cannabis, no such number exists, and the FAA is now trying to find one, or something close to it. “Toke to yoke,” if you will.

The agency’s Office of Aerospace Medicine is sponsoring a project, run through the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, built around a critical question: after someone uses cannabis, how much time has to pass before they’re no longer impaired? According to the project’s federal filing, the FAA currently has no validated criteria to answer that question.

The urgency traces to this year’s federal cannabis rescheduling, which moved certain marijuana products from Schedule I to Schedule III. That shift created what the FAA calls a “dual-status regulatory environment.” Cannabis is less restricted at the federal and, in many cases, state level, but DOT drug testing and FAA medical certification rules for pilots and air traffic controllers haven’t changed.

According to the agency, this mismatch risks normalizing use among pilots, complicating disclosure, and leaving regulators without a clear standard for when someone has actually stopped being impaired.

Notably, the FAA isn’t funding new research to answer the question. Citing the timeline pressure, the agency said it can’t complete new primary studies fast enough, so it’s instead asking the National Academies to convene a four-part series of closed “meeting of experts” sessions in 2026 and 2027 to interpret evidence that, in some cases, is decades old. Unlike a formal consensus study, these meetings won’t produce a public report.

Simulator studies of licensed pilots dating to the 1970s and 1980s found measurable flight-performance deficits as long as 24 hours after a single moderate dose of THC, with most pilots reporting no awareness that they were impaired at all. More recent research on medical cannabis has found impairment duration varies by dose and tends to shrink with regular use, complicating any single elapsed-time threshold.

The FAA is hoping the expert sessions will translate that body of evidence into screening, certification, and return-to-duty guidance, with policy development to follow 12 to 18 months later.