> Drug tests generally produce false-positive results in 5% to 10% of cases and false negatives in 10% to 15% of cases, new research shows.
Lots of innocent people were probably jailed because of that. Afaik, most countries still relies on these tests to at least detain people. The system will implement something (anything?) as long as it is "good enough" or appear to fix the problem.
> Lots of innocent people were probably jailed because of that.
Efforts to increase the accuracy of the tests have downsides too, since the tests are already too sensitive. Lots of people have lost their jobs due to erroneous true positive results from eating something like a poppyseed bagel.
The test result is erroneous because no drugs were used, but a true positive because the trace amounts detected from the poppy seeds were actually present.
Improving the test can't fix this.
Most often, some tests have high sensitivity (no false negatives) whilst others have high specificity (no false positives). (Rarely both.)
So, for example, this is the reason why a positive RT-PCR test has more weight than a negative test because of the test’s high specificity but moderate sensitivity.
Lumping together false positive stats (for low-specificity tests) with false negative stats (for low-sensitivity tests) is misleading at best.