DISCLAIMERS: I am not asking how to beat drug tests, or advocating illegal drug use, etc.
Anyway, I saw a report on CNN (or was it Fox News?) about some high school student who did some undercover reporting involving an Army recruiting station. The gist of it was, he acted like a drug abuser who was interested in enlisting and the recruiter showed him where to get a bottle of potion that would enable him to beat the Army’s drug tests. He (the reporter) even showed the bottle to the news cameras.
Apparently some lawmakers are interested in banning these potions, so there must be some validity to them.
I stopped by my local headshop and, sure enough, saw several bottles of them. I looked at a label and saw that they don’t contain anything that I haven’t seen on the label of a bottle of Gatorade™. While I was researching, some guy came in behind me and bought a bottle. He bragged to the store clerk that he had beaten four drug tests at work using these potions.
So, uh, how do they work, exactly? Do they “flush” evidence of drug use out of your urine stream? Or do they infuse your pee with enough carbohydrates and other crap to confuse the test strips?
I hope the moderators won’t be too quick to lock this down. Subverting a drug test can, conceivably, have nothing whatever to do with breaking the law. At any rate, certain legal substances are now being tested for by some employers, and one can under certain circumstances consume controlled substances legally, and still quite reasonably not want a drug test to come up positive.
As a former certified Medical Review Officer (a whiz quiz MD) I must take exception to part of this. Any person who can produce a legitimate prescription for a drug which would cause a urine drug screen to be positive for that drug will have that drug test reported back as “negative for drugs of abuse” per federal statutes.
Of course, if you’re positive for heroin or cocaine, you’ll have a hard time demonstrating that you have a valid prescription for those (in the US at least).
Having said that, let me address the OP. How do drug test beating potions work?.
Some other totally unrelated (AFAIK) prescription drugs can cause false positives, too. I’m taking Protonix for acid reflux, and the info sheet I got with it says it can cause false positives for marijuana use in urine tests.
Are these potions something you drink, or something you try to pass off as urine? I’ve never been quite clear on that.
I’d suggest that SoP is considering the case that in this era of rapid international travel, you can legaly consume drugs which are legal in Country A and be tested and prove positive for drugs which are illegal in Country B. Holland is the obvious example, but also a British lady got caught for having taken some inappropriate medicine when she was tested in Saudi.
This is the simple answer. There are some things that can be done to beat (or increase the odds of beating) drug tests. However, this is not as simple as buying a product at a head shop. The trick involves having some general basic medical knowledge, along with knowing a lot about how drug testing works.
But even then, you might prefer to keep it on the down-low. Maybe you’re paranoid about having the potential employer mark you down as someone with expensive health problems, or who needs to leave early once a month for a doctor visit, and so on.
If you do show a 'script, does it have to be the actual copy from the triplicate? Or can you just show the bottle or vial with your name and the doctor’s name on it?
The issue should never get to the potential employer. The employer should just get a “test negative” result.
And the verification of the prescription could involve showing a valid prescription bottle, or providing the name of the dispensing pharmacy or the name of the prescribing doctor.
When a positive shows up, the testing moves on to more sophisticated techniques, like gas chromatography or even Mass Spectrophotometry. These weed out the false positives from the screening tests pretty effectively.
These tests and systems were designed to evaluate the fitness of commercial drivers and pilots to haul freight/passengers all over the place. Since careers were on the line, certain standards had to be met. And since powerful unions were advocating for these individuals, confidentiality has to be kept a very high priority.
But if your urine tests positive for THC, the test is confirmed with more specific assays, and you can’t demonstrate you have a valid prescription for Marinol, you will be SOL and the test will be reported as positive for THC. BTW, sensitivity is set high enough on the tests so that “secondhand smoke” will reliably NOT result in a positive test. So you can skip that argument.
You shouldn’t have to. those false positives should drop out when the sample is sent for more elaborate testing. If the lab refuses to do so, and is certifying you are positive for controlled substances on the basis of screening tests, they can lose their accreditation and hence their ability to charge for their work.
What about someone who has had recent nasal surgery involving cocaine? (A former AA acquaintance flunked a court-ordered drug screen after he’d had nasal surgery. He was on the way back to jail when the surgeon’s office faxed the report.)
Much to the dismay of several other former AA acquaintances.
Having managed a Health Food Store for several years, I can tell you how one of them claims to work. (IANAMD and I don’t know if what the product claimed is true, or just what they printed on the insert in order to sucker people into buying it.)
One product we sold was a large tea bag. It was used to brew a gallon of tea, with the instructions to drink the entire gallon starting two hours before the test, and to urinate several times before the test. It claimed that all traces would be flushed out with those urinations, and that by the time you took the test, you would test clean.
I have been told by doctors who saw the product in my store that it was bogus and would not work. That your body would still release detectable traces into the new urine, no matter how much tea you drank or how many times you urinated just before the test. But we sold a lot of it, often to repeat customers.
What was really scary was that, once a month, we would have a rush of MBTA bus drivers buying it! … They didn’t even try to hide who they were or why they were taking it. They wore their T uniform when they came in and said they needed to beat the test. (If you think that’s shocking, ask me about Inositol Powder sometime.)
Again, produce a legitimate scrip or a doctor’s testimony that the medication was given by an authorized provider, and there’s no problem.
Cocaine is a Schedule II drug like morphine and oxycodone, not a Schedule I like Heroin, LSD, and marijuana. There’s just not a lot of legitimate call for it outside of ENT and ophthalmology practices.
Is there any procedure for having a positive test result thrown out if you can show the drug was used in a country where it’s legal (as Quartz mentioned)?
Nope. Or at least not as of 4 years ago when I last did this sort of work. And I haven’t heard that things have changed.
The testing centers in the US operate under US regulations, testing for US agencies and companies. They’re not interested in figuring out what was legal/illegal in other countries.
In that case, isn’t it also accurate to say they aren’t interested in figuring out what was legal/illegal in the United States? After all, someone who uses marijuana in another country and then reenters the US several days later hasn’t broken US law.
