Law of Unintended Consequences

Imagine this scenerio.
A company with 100 employees decides to go smoke free.
The only way to identify the smokers is to use a drug test.
The only test for nicotine that I have heard of is only 95% accurate.

Let us say that 20% of the people smoke,the test will identify 19 of them.

Of the 80 nonsmokers,4 will have a false positive and be singled out,wrongly, for corrective action.

When the 4 falsely accused nonsmokers and their friends hear the 1 missed smoker ragging them about the stupid test, the company is going to have serious labor problems.

It would be too much to hope for that one of the false positives would be the person that pushed for the nonsmoker policy.

Gary K.

Good point Gary -- That hadn't occurred to me. Anytime you introduce testing, you introduce error. Oh what fun!