And there’s not a whole lot of variation from one country to another. IIRC, cannabis is still technically illegal.
On the other hand, certain coca preparations are legal in certain South American countries; I’ve heard of coca toothpaste and coca tea. It seems patently unfair that a person coming from a visit to one of those countries should be penalized for doing something that was legal there. One can understand that it would be difficult for testers/employers to make such an exception. But I suspect that a large part of the motivation for drug testing is not to weed out prospects who “break the law”, but rather those who would use recreational drugs whether they be legal or illegal.
Ah, so that’s what Ethan Hawke used in the movie Gattaca.
There’s a certain homemade product that’s quite effective in beating a pee test, I won’t give any specifics of course but you can buy all the necessary ingredients, including utensils, in the baking supplies aisle of your local supermarket. How it works, at least from how I understand it, is that it forces all the drug traces from your bloodstream into your fat cells. (Interesting side effect: if you work out later, you get high.) It’s not 100% effective; a friend of mine recently tried it and flunked a piss test anyway. However, (1) we’re not sure if he prepared the formula correctly, and (2) this guy smokes so much weed, his urine is probably pure THC.
Yes, it’s true you can test positive for heroin if you eat a couple poppyseed bagels just before the test…Mythbusters confirmed it!
During the most recent Amazing Race, they went to a Peruvian city that was 11,000 feet above sea level, and the contestants were given a local tea that fights altitude sickness. Accoring to Phil Keoghan, the tea is coca-based, and while it doesn’t get you high, it would definitely make you fail a drug test.
Oh, and the downside to a lot of these test-busting products is they involve specific chemicals that are also tested for in the drug screen. Gold Seal used to be a popular potion, until the drug screeners got wise and failed anyone testing positive for Gold Seal, since there’s no reason that would show up in your urine UNLESS you were trying to beat the test. (That’s the glory of the “homemade formula” I mentioned earlier – all the ingredients are food products so common, they won’t raise eyebrows.)
Last time I joined one of these conversations it wound up in the Pit. Hope that doesn’t happen again.
Anyhow, moist of the cheater potions I heard about when I worked for a drug rehab facility worked on the “flush it out with urine” theory. This involved consuming gallons of fluid. Truthfully, plain water would have been as effective.
It is possible the produce urine so dilute as to sneak by the cruder tests. There are tests, however, that will still detect drug traces even in highly dilute body fluid. And many companies and industries will count a highly dilute urine sample as a positive under the assumption you were trying to cheat.
The thing about golden seal was that the formulations had something that would essentially dye your urine yellow so it didn’t look quite so dilute (usually - the herbal varieties, being herbal, varied in potency)
And Og know what else they’re putting in those “potions” - some of that stuff isn’t good in high doses.
He flunked because it doesn’t work.
You can’t take a water-soluable substance (which many drug traces are) and magically convert them to fat-soluable. Nor would you get high by working out later - what the drug tests look for, and presumably what this potion of yours is supposed to hide, are not the drugs themselves but the inactivated breakdown products. Not the drugs but what your body converts the drugs into.
I’m a probation officer, and I can assure you that the potions do not work. As was pointed out, every one of those potions just gets you to drink a lot of fluids, which dilute your urine so much that conceiveably, if the level of drugs in your system is very low, it may push it below the cutoff level and be reported negative. But if you are using regularly it’s not going to work at all. I’ve had countless people fail the test and later tell me they used various potions.
And, if the governor signs the legislation on his desk, possession of a Whizzinator while taking a court-ordered drug test will be a crime in Indiana on July 1.
There is one sure fire way of not failing a drug test. Do not take it. Although I am currently self employed, years ago I had a chance to take a fairly decent job offer that involved a drug test. I turned the job down on philosophical grounds. To me, what I did away from work was none of my employers business. I was contacted about a week later and offered the job sans drug test. </slight hijack>
Or even whether you broke the law or not. The despicability with which non-therapeutic drug use is regarded in many quarters is, IMO, as much cultural as it is legal.
This is an article about testing methods the effectiveness of various techniques for cleaning urine. I’d be interested in QtM’s comments about its accuracy.
I believe these are the regs that **QtM **is talking about. They speak of “legitimate medical explanations,” not legal use. So the fact that a drug discussed in the regs was legal for the employee to use is probably irrelevant. More important, if the positive result led to the the employee’s termination, the employee is probably out of luck based on general principles of employment law.
This sort of thing makes me absolutely sick. By an odd coincidence, I’m on a prescription for hydrocodone syrup (HC is the narcotic part of Vicodin) right now. The fact that there’s anyone on this earth that would put me in jail for that and ask questions later is highly disturbing…I’ll stop now since this isn’t GD or the Pit.
It’s important to note that this happened in Dubai. A year ago, I knew nothing about Dubai. After reading the web logs of Dubai residents and various articles from Dubai’s newspapers, I can say that Dubai is the bureaucratic nightmare imagined by Kafka and Orwell but run by the Three Stooges.
This case should not be viewed as exemplifying Dubai’s drug policies. It is just another example of the incompetence and mindboggling redtape seen in every aspect of Dubai’s government.
That’s a good point - sometimes the issue isn’t legality, it’s use and safety.
As an example - it’s perfectly legal for, say, an airline pilot to drink alcohol on his own time, however, it is illegal for him to do so within 8 hours of taking the controls. Alcohol is legal - flying under the influence is not. Likewise, NyQuil is legal, but again, a pilot would have to wait a considerable period of hours between using it and flying. Those are strictly over-the-counter items. If a pilot develops a health problem that requires him/her to take ANY substance incompatible with flight then they can’t legally fly until they no longer need it and no longer take it, and may be subjected to drug tests to prove this item is no longer in their system. They won’t go to jail for a legal prescription, or even for over-the-counter cold and flu medicine… but they could still be suspended from work or lose thier job over it.
This also applies to people like truckers and bus drivers.
And, I know this is a totally crazy thought on some level, but I sometimes think some of the people using those “potions” don’t use drugs at all - but they buy that stuff so it looks like they use to their peers out of some misplace bizzaro machismo. Sort of like someone who pretends to drink vast quantities of alcohol to fit into a crowd but is really bribing the bartender to make tonic-and-tonics instead of gin-and-tonics.
However, the issue with certain drugs is nearly always just the use itself. For example, cannabis can cause a positive result on a drug test weeks after the last use, when there’s no possibility of impairment.
But there really isn’t much of a way to challenge a false positive, is there? If the lab says you’re positive and reports the result to the employer, you’re hosed. You might never even be informed that you came up positive. Employers are not particularly interested in your rights, and there’s no appeals process for rejection from a job. Or so I’ve read.
Addressing the OP, there is probably no chemical formulation that will help you beat a drug test. There are things you can do to improve your chances, but these involve things like ensuring that your urine is diluted and naturally colored. And of course abstaining from The Drugs for a period of time.
There is a notification procedure and a procedure for testing a split specimen the employee’s request, at least under the DOT regs.
Unless you are in a union, your state has an unusual law, or you have a term employment contract, your employer can fire you based on a bad drug test, with virtual impunity. (I say virtual because even a frivolous lawsuit costs the employer money and you also might be able to collect unemployment compensation).
As I read Subpart H and the definitions provided in the regs, a job applicant would have the same right to request a split specimen test. The definition of employee includes applicants.
