Discussion here about similarities
Can drug screens distinguish between some taking prescription Adderall for ADD and someone using meth?
Here’s a drug screen manufacturer’s FAQ on false positives for Adderall and Ritalin. (Aside, fuck you Adobe for making what used to be a simple right click/select/paste, a gigantic pain in the ass.)
After much laborious unlocking and converting so that I could cut and paste, here’s what they say about Aderall and Ritalin:
Anyway, I’d take their claims with several large grains of salt, considering the difference between laboratory practice and field reality, not to mention any cross-reactivity that results in a positive test is likely to end the inquiry right there, and not trigger a further expensive test to clarify the results. Much easier to just go to the next applicant, IMHO.
I work in a toxicology lab, and I’ll note “drug test” and “drug screen” are not necessarily the same thing. Technically, a drug screen is an immunoassay test. (Short version, you pick a specific antibody for a specific drug. The drug you are targeting will be far more likely to attach to the antibody than other drugs.) Done in a lab by trained personnel, the false positive or negative rate is incredibly low but not quite zero. Done by a parent using a cheapo drug test from Walgreens, false positives and negatives are far more likely.
“Drug tests” in general use a wide variety of techniques. For a positive drug result to be useable in court, a client must test positive in two tests–one an immunoassay test, the other gas or liquid chromatography. The second test is definitive, as close to a 100% accuracy rate as scientifically possible. They are so good, that with a little prep, you can actually tell stereoisomers (exact same chemical structure, just different arrangement in space) apart.
Yes, but if you show the person watching you pee in the cup your Adderall prescription label, they’ll make a note of it, and you’ll be okay as long as the detected amount is within the range of your therapeutic dose.
Of course, if you don’t have a prescription and are buying it on the street to try to plausibly deny your meth habit, you’re still boned.
I’m on both, and yes - they’re pinging.
Not an administer of drug tests, but I would think that differentiating between the two is possible.
I drug test clients as part of my job, and the lab we use can differentiate between the two. Also worthy to note that methamphetamine is metabolized to amphetamine. Typically, tests that are positive for meth will also be positive for amphetamines due to that. My clients that are legitimately prescribed Adderall or the like will only have amphetamines show up on their results.