Did you go to school with those people in high school who always seemed to party hard on the weekends, but if they ever had to take a drug test they always passed? Or you may have worked with people who did the same thing, completely blazed by 9pm Friday night, but sail through any drug test they encounter. Have you ever wondered how they did it?
It wasn’t through clean living, and it was unlikely through bribing the lab technician. In the early days of the internet some of the more popular ideas around passing drug tests included putting a few drops of bleach in your urine sample, using a friend’s pee or swapping out the urine for some strong green tea. You read up on the facts about the variety of testing on somewhere like Clear Drug Tests, but let’s try and clear up some of the myths and legends that abound about passing a urine drug test, and look at options that might actually work.
Blame Your G&T (or painkillers)
A report from 1989 found that quinine, usually found in tonic water (popular to mix with the alcoholic drink gin), can cause a urine drug test to show a positive result for opiates. Further reports found that other drugs such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (e.g. ibuprofen) can cause a urine drug test to show a positive result for cannabis. Unfortunately, the standard procedure for the majority of work places and sports organizations when a positive result is returned is to send the sample off to a laboratory for complete analysis (they will often also do this if they don’t trust a negative result). It’s worth noting that urine testing has been developed a lot since 1989, and even at that time it was incredibly rare set of circumstances that caused ibuprofen to be responsible for a false positive result.
Drink to Detox
Drinking lots and lots and lots of water is often suggested as a way to beat a drug test. This is one that technically can work – if you drink enough water you can dilute your urine to the point where nothing will be detected, not drugs, not urea. However, lab technicians also recognise what diluted urine looks like and will usually just have you wait an hour or so then retest. Or if they are using a validation test this actually picks up if the urine has been diluted (either before leaving your body or after).
Drinking Bleach
Let’s start by saying: do NOT try this! Seriously! Not only does it absolutely not ‘clean’ the pot, booze, coke, or whatever else you’ve taken, from your system, drinking bleach can cause some serious health issues, including stripping your entire digestive tract; which I’m pretty sure will be excruciatingly painful. There is no cleaning product on the market (or any combination of cleaning, laundry or detergent products) that will ‘cleanse’ your system. Do not try this, do not try any variation, and anyone suggesting that they have tried it and it really worked is lying (and if they’re lying about passing a drug test by drinking bleach, it’s probably more likely that you’re either lying about taking drugs or lying about having a drug test). Click here for proof on this one.
Blame Your Bagel
It is actually true that eating just a couple of delicious bagels covered in little poppy seeds can genuinely produce a false positive for opiates, and there have been many cases where respected members of society, police officers with perfect records, health workers, prison guards, have lost their jobs because of it. They all seem to have been reinstated after further investigation of follow-up testing, but despite being drug free they still had the fun of a positive test. Since mid-2000s the federal guidelines have increased the sensitivity for opiate testing to reduce and eliminate false positives, however private companies may not follow these guidelines.
Adding Bleach to the Urine Sample
Sticking with the bleach theme, there is also the idea that you can add about ½ teaspoon of chlorinated bleach to your urine sample and this will react with the urine and create a chemical reaction that will produce a negative drug test. Whether or not this will work no longer matters. The vast majority of drug tests given now use a urine specimen validity test (SVT) to check for adulterations to the urine. Even without this, lab technicians deal with urine day in and day out, they’re likely to be able to smell the bleach even before they test the pH level.
Using Someone Else’s Urine Sample
Well, technically, yes this will work. But, it’s not as simple as it seems. Firstly, modern urine tests do actually check for temperature, so you will need to ensure that you have kept the borrowed urine at body temperature. Secondly, urine only lasts for around 24hours out of the fridge (or freezer) so if you’re concerned about a random urine drug test, you’ll need to get a daily sample. Thirdly, are you 100% sure that your sample is clean? There’s the legend about the guy who got caught trying to use someone else’s pee in a drug test, because that person just happened to be pregnant. Although this story is the stuff of legends, there is the genuine case of a woman in Ohio who tried to beat a drug test by borrowing some urine, unfortunately that pee was tainted with drugs, so she ended up in prison for drugs and tampering: https://apnews.com/a2b3b80a0e40486db3755aee81b8293c.
Use Fake Pee
Actually, this one surprisingly has a bit of promise. Available in powered form you can just add to water, or in a liquid form, the fake pee is reputedly so close to human urine that it is virtually undetectable under standard testing. The main way that it gets picked up as fake is either because it sets off temperature alarms (most testing will now include a temperature strip and if the urine isn’t at about the right temperature for a human body flags will be raised and questions will be asked), or you have to give your urine sample under supervision – which means no privacy to switch samples over in a stall. Or you get caught smuggling it in to your test (which is an offence in most states), like the guy who fumbled the scissors trying to open his condom full of substitute urine and make such a racket the guards came in to check on him.
