what would the effects be to the recipient? I’m wondering less about hard drugs and more about alcohol, marijuana, codeine, etc. Let’s say someone’s on parole and they recieve blood from a regular pot user; if they have a drug test a couple days after the transfusion, would they test positive for marijuana? If it were alcohol, would the recipient feel the effects? I have never read anything about this in Red Cross material, but I imagine that the issue has come up before.
The stuff (pot or whatever) would be present in trace amounts in the unit of blood. These would then be transfered into the donor, but they would be diluted by the blood alread in the person. Also, most (all?) modern blood transfusion are red cells. Most of the plasma of the donor is seperated from the unit. This would further cut down on any trace element floating around in the donors blood. The only drug that we label our units for is asprin, so if the donor had taken an asprin, and told the collector, the unit would have a large red asprin sticker on it.