THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, November 01, 2007

How to beat a drug test

Will Carroll had an interesting blog entry on the detectability of a set of drugs.  But he curiously did not cite his source because “I don’t want to make it any easier for this type of information to be found.” In fact, he made it incredibly easy for me to find it, as you can see right here.  Go to google and put in this:
how to pass a drug test F1 F2 F4 F5
And you’ll see a whole set of sites, each seemingly with the same list.  Thanks for the public service Will!

What I found interesting is that they roll the dice for “random” drug testing, by match the roll of the die to the last digit in your social security number.  Obviously, guys with a last digit of 7 are going to be tested far more (or at least far earlier) than anyone else, on average.  I think there is a limit to the number of random drug tests per player, so rolling a 7 one week likely precludes a 7 from rolling a second time.  A nice game of craps.