Sure. I don't know what kind of anesthesia group you're accustomed to, canceling (adults) over some sniffles.
I generally don't ask them what prompted them to make their decision, since, as I've said before, I try to work with Anesthesia and not against them. So if I'm in holding and some anesthesiologist comes up to me and says "hey, your next guy has an URI, I'm thinking about cancelling them," I just say "sure." I'm just out and my case load isn't that large, so it's not a big deal to me -- I'm not trying to cram some guy into a schedule that's packed for six months. Additionally, one thing you guys as anesthesiologists aren't taking into account is that, from a surgery standpoint, if you implant something (e.g., mesh) in a patient who can be argued has an "active infection" and it becomes infected, then it's hard to justify why you went ahead. The reality is they probably had nothing to do with each other, but reality has nothing to do with criticism either from other surgeons or from lawyers. (You may or may not know this, but surgeons enjoy lecturing people about how they'd do things perfectly in retrospect. It's not worth that hassle to me.)
Regardless, it's odd how this discussion went from "a guy who is obviously and visibly stoned" to "a guy who has the sniffles." Even if you'd do the latter, that wouldn't mean that you'd do the former. If someone wants to do the former case, that's fine with me, too. Honestly, I don't really care who does any case -- to me, it's tiresome how people try to get involved in other peoples' cases and I always give people the benefit of the doubt even when their cases turn into disasters. (By the way, it's fascinating to me how people I give the benefit of the doubt to in real life have had no problem turning around and criticizing one of my cases, but oh, well.) Physicians have enough to deal with without some douchebag physician playing backseat driver. However, my personal feeling is that if someone is high, then they're going to present me with problems post-op, such as withdrawal. Is that the end of the world? No. Is it avoidable? Yes. So I choose to avoid the avoidable. Does that make me "weak"? I actually don't care if it does, lol. I'm just some guy at a rural hospital, not some high-powered academic institution, and I'm just trying to get people the surgeries they need and then hopefully bail out of this place as soon as possible. I'd like to think I do the right thing for the community, however.