Pass a Drug Test With Home Remedies

So, the unthinkable happened - you've been notified that you'll be taking a drug test weeks, days, or mere hours from now, and the doobie's still in your mouth. Don't panic yet - depending on your test and the drugs in your system, there may be a home remedy that can improve your chances.

Steps

Understanding Your Odds Before Trying a Home Remedy

1. Know the basic facts about drug tests. Drug testing is commonly required as part of the hiring process. In the US, certain government agencies are required by law to practice drug screening, while private companies have more freedom in whether they choose to test. Drug tests test for presence of the drug's active chemical or one of its metabolites (chemicals the body produces when processing the drug.) Most commonly, drug tests search for these chemicals in your urine, blood (or another bodily fluid, and/or hair.
   • A variety of tests are available to employers, who can choose how carefully they want to screen by opting for a more-or-less thorough test. In the US, the most basic drug test is the one mandated by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for certain federal agencies. This test screens for five common drugs:
     • Amphetamines (methamphetamine, amphetamines, ecstasy(MDMA))
     • Cocaine (Powder and "crack" forms)
     • THC (marijuana, hash, edible cannabis products)
     • Opiates (heroin, opium, codeine, morphine)
     • Phencyclidine (PCP, angel dust)
   • However, employers commonly screen for other drugs. Drug testing can be expensive for employers - the more drugs an employer screens for, the more expensive the test. A company that is hiring a lot of people and testing all potential hires may not opt for comprehensive tests, which can cost upwards of $100 each.
   • The best way to improve your chances for passing any drug test, of course, is to abstain from drugs for as long as possible before your test.
2. Know the law. Ironically, the law offers drug and alcohol users several protections when applying for jobs. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has a couple provisions that could help you:
   • The ADA makes it illegal for any employer to test a prospective employee without first making a conditional offer of employment. That means no drug test can be required of you unless there's a genuine offer on the table. As not every applicant is offered a job, that lowers the chance that you'll be tested for a given position you've applied for. Additionally, the ADA prevents employers from withholding job offers based on the results of an alcohol test.
   • The ADA also says you can't discriminate against prospective employees on the basis of past drug-related problems. The good news is that if you had a problem with drugs in the past, they can't use that against you. However, they can reject your application if they believe you're a current drug user.
3. Know the "windows of detection" for the drugs you use. Several testing methods are available to employers. The most common are hair, blood, and urine tests. Each has a different window of time for which it can detect the presence of drugs. See the table below:

Approximate Detection Periods for Common Drugs

Drug	Urine Test	Blood Test	Hair Test
Amphetamines	1-3 days	12 hours	up to 90 days
Methamphetamine	3-5 days	1-3 days	up to 90 days
Ecstasy (MDMA)	3-4 days	3-4 days	up to 90 days
Cannabis	3-4 days for light users, up to 30 days for heavy users and users w/ high body fat	2-3 days for light users, up to 2 weeks for heavy users	up to 90 days
Cocaine	2-5 days (up to 10 days for heavy users)	2-10 days	up to 90 days
Morphine	2-4 days	1-3 days	up to 90 days
Methadone	7-10 days	24 hours	up to 90 days
PCP	3-7 days for light users, up to 30 days for heavy users	1 to 3 days	up to 90 days

Trying Home Remedies

Urine Test Remedies

1. Get by with a little help from your friends. Unless you're being ordered by the court, an ordinary employer cannot watch you give a urine sample. This gives you the opportunity to take advantage of the safest, most effective way of passing a drug test: use the urine of a drug-free friend.
   • Make sure it's relatively fresh. If you're not going to use it for a couple of days after collection, keep it in the fridge.
   • Be sure to bring it up to body temperature before giving the sample. The best way to this is to wear it against your skin for a few hours before you have to give the sample. Try taping a bag to your thigh for easy access when making your sample.
   • If you're a woman, you can try keeping a tied-up condom full of clean urine in your vagina, discretely puncturing it with a nail when you need to deposit your sample.
2. Use a synthetic urine substitute. For sale on the internet are a variety of synthetic urine substitutes, both powdered and liquid. These substitutes are manufactured in a laboratory. They are typically used by warming them up and keeping them in a small bottle, then depositing in place of your own urine.
   • These can be detectable if the lab decides to test for them, so use with caution.
3. Drink a lot of water. One commonly-reported home remedy is that drinking massive amounts of water a few days before—or on the day of their test—can expel traces of the drug from the urinary tract. This is unlikely - much more likely is that it will merely dilute the chemicals tested for in your urine. Since most tests have minimum concentrations needed to register a positive, this method may actually provide a small benefit.
   • Note that some tests now test for creatine metabolites in your urine. If the concentration of this naturally-ocurring metabolite isn't high enough, they'll suspect you're trying to dilute your urine. To counteract this, consume lots of red meat or creatine powder starting 3 days before the test. This will build up your creatine levels so that you're less likely to be caught diluting.
   • Sometimes urine tests will even take into account the urine's color. A very light or clear urine signifies a possible attempt at dilution, while a more yellow urine is considered normal. An hour or two before your test, consider taking 50-100 mg of B2 or B12 complex vitamins to help give your urine a yellower color.
   • Don't go overboard. Drinking truly massive amounts of water can result in water poisoning, a potentially fatal condition. Trust your body - if you feel uncomfortable, stop drinking.
4. Diet and Exercise. If your drug of choice is marijuana and you're overweight, losing fat well in advance of your test can help your chances. The metabolites of THC, the active chemical in marijuana, are stored in your fat cells. For this reason, people with high body fat levels are have a longer detection period for marijuana. The higher your body fat, the longer marijuana will be detectable in your system. Lowering your body fat through diet and exercise can give marijuana users a long-term advantage when taking drug tests.
   • If a test is imminent, don't try to starve yourself to better your chances. Weight loss takes time - the amount of body fat you'll need to affect your chances of passing a drug test is virtually impossible to lose in a week or two. You're most likely to just make yourself miserable without improving your chances.
5. Take a diuretic, like cranberry juice. Diuretics are substances that stimulate you to urinate. Some home remedy sources suggest that, by stimulating urination, diuretics help to "flush" a user's system of drug metabolites. However, this method isn't well-supported by scientific evidence. Claims that cranberry juice can "flush your system" are unfounded.
   • A slightly better use of a diuretic may be to use it in conjunction with the dilution method above to stimulate generous urine production.
   • Other common diuretics are coffee, herbal tea, beer, and iced teas.
6. Know which remedies won't work. Many home remedies simply don't work, even if they're advertised as miraculous. These methods have no effect on your test results. Don't waste any time or money:
   • Taking niacin. There is no scientific evidence that niacin helps you beat a urine blood test. Additionally, high doses of niacin can result in itchy skin reactions (and, at very high doses, liver damage.)
   • Adding vinegar, ammonia, or bleach to your urine. These chemicals are acids and bases, so they'll change your urine's pH level, but aren't definitively known to eliminate drug metabolites. Additionally, your tester may be able to tell that you've tampered with your test from the smell, appearance, and/or chemical composition of your urine.
     • Never drink bleach. It's toxic and can kill you.
   • Adding Visine to your urine. In the presence of Visine, false-negative results were obtained only for THC metabolite 9-carboxy-THC for the EMIT-d.a.u. and TDX urine cannabinoid assays. Visine also decreased 9-carboxy-THC as measured by the Abuscreen assay. At low concentrations of Visine, false-negative cannabinoid results were attributable to the benzalkonium chloride ingredient of Visine. The added Visine was not detectable by routine urine analysis and had no effect on the activity of the glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase-drug conjugate used in the EMIT-d.a.u. assays. Moreover, analysis by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry showed no chemical modification or loss of 9-carboxy-THC in the Visine-adulterated urine specimens. However, Visine did increase the adhesion of 9-carboxy-THC to the borosilicate glass specimen containers. Results of ultra-filtration studies with Visine suggest that 9-carboxy-THC partitions between the aqueous solvent and the hydrophobic interior of benzalkonium chloride micelles, thereby reducing the availability of 9-carboxy-THC in antibody-based assays.
   • Taking goldenseal. Goldenseal is an herb whose root is used to make herbal medicines. It won't effect the results of a urine test. This misconception comes from pharmacist John Uri Lloyd's novel Stringtown on the Pike , where the herb is used to thwart a test for the poison strychnine.
   • Taking pectin. Pectin is a naturally-occurring chemical found in plants often used in the production of jams and jellies. Anecdotal stories claim that pectin coats the walls of either the stomach or the bladder, preventing the passage of drug metabolites. Neither claim is supported by scientific evidence.
   • Add salt to your urine. Salt will have no effect on the levels of drug metabolites in your urine. This method also has glaring defects, such as the fact that, if undissolved, salt will sink to the bottom of your sample, where it's easily observed. Use common sense and don't blow your chances by sprinkling salt in your sample.

Blood Test Remedies

1. Know the testing window for blood tests. Blood tests usually have very short detection windows, as blood tests usually search for the presence of the drug itself in your system rather than one of its metabolites. They're often administered right after an accident to determine whether you're under the influence of any substances.
   • Blood tests administered after an accident will almost always screen for alcohol as well, which is usually only detectable by a blood test for a day or less.
   • Because of this, the best, easiest way to pass a blood test is to refrain from drugs and alcohol for a day or two before your test. For many drugs, that's as long as it will take for traces of the drug to leave your system.
   • Blood tests are the most expensive form of drug testing. Because of this and the method's short detection period, you're unlikely to be required to pass one as part of a hiring process.
2. Know that blood tests are commonly given in conjunction with urine tests. The blood test is used to assess drug or alcohol use at the time of the test, while the urine test is used to search for drug use in the period leading up to the accident. See Method Two above for urine test remedies.
3. Know the differences between different methods of ingestion. Drugs sometimes can be taken in more than one way, which can affect the observable levels of the drug in the bloodstream. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, for instance, peaks at very high levels within an hour after smoking marijuana. However, if you eat a marijuana "edible," you'll have a much lower and more gradual curve for your blood THC levels, peaking about four hours after ingestion.
   • Generally, ingestion methods that get you high faster, like snorting, smoking, and injection, have higher, earlier blood concentration peaks than "slower" methods, like oral ingestion.
   • Knowing this, you can plan your drug use so that you avoid longer-acting ingestion methods in the days before your test.
4. Consider a commercial remedy, knowing the risks involved. A variety of herbal supplements are available for sale online which claim to "detoxify" your blood, improving your chances for passing a test. These claims are made on the basis of no scientific evidence. Pursue these pricey options with heavy skepticism.
   • Homemade combinations of herbs suffer from the same problems - none are supported by scientific evidence. Additionally, since they are made at home and are not subject to quality testing, they may be impure or improperly-dosed. Use great caution with so-called "home remedies."

Hair Test Remedies

1. Know the testing window for hair tests. Of all the testing methods, hair tests generally have the longest detection period. For the most-commonly tested drugs, a hair test will be able to detect use up to 90 days in the past, depending on frequency of use.
   • However, because hair tests search for the presence of drug metabolites in the part of the hair above the scalp, there is a several-day window after taking drugs in which metabolites are present in the base of the hair under the skin but not in the portion above the skin. Thus, hair tests can miss drug use if it's within the last 5-7 days/
2. Consider cutting your hair. Hair tests typically cut a small {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}} sprig of your hair from the back or side of your head, as close to the root as possible. This hair length tests for use in about the last 90 days. If your hair is shorter than this, your sample will theoretically allow for a shorter period of detection.
   • However, this can backfire. If your head hair is too short, a tester may choose to look for a sample from a different location on your body (armpit, chest hair, etc.) Because body hair grows more slowly than head hair, a {{safesubst:#invoke:convert|convert}} sample of body hair can represent an even longer detection window than a sample from the head.
3. Try a dubious hair treatment. Know that most testing agencies do not test for adulterants in hair tests because there are no adulterants that are known to affect a hair test's results. So, your home remedy isn't likely to be detected, but there's also very little (if any) evidence that it will work.
   • Buy a shampoo treatment. A wide variety of hair treatments advertised as improving your chances for beating a drug test are available online. These can be very expensive, and none have been scientifically proven to work. If you want to try one, choose one with a money-back guarantee.
   • Try an improvised hair wash. See our guide on passing a hair test for one common home recipe for your hair. All home remedies for beating a hair test are supported only by hearsay. None have been proven to work in a scientific setting.

Tips

• Use 3 tbsp of baking soda in a glass of water. It tastes nasty but it will help clean you out your system more quickly.
• Very few (if any) home remedies are scientifically verified. Don't get too emotionally invested in a given remedy working.
• The best way to pass a drug test is, of course, simply to quit using drugs long before the hiring process.

Warnings

• Don't try any remedy that requires you to consume something dangerous. Ingesting household cleaners, for instance, can kill you. The only job you'll qualify for then is pushing up daisies.
• Attempting to cheat a drug test may be a crime with associated criminal/civil penalties, depending on where you live. Consult your local laws if you're unsure.

Related Articles

• Pass a Corporate Drug Test
• Pass a Drug Test
• Pass a Drug Test for a Job
• Pass a Drug Test on Short Notice

Sources and Citations

• Drugs Testing Book - Research source for the information provided in this article
• Definitive Guide - Research Source

See also

• Drug Test Yourself
• Tell if a Person Is Using Cocaine
• Pass a Drug Test on Short Notice
• Pass a Drug Test
• Report Illegal Drug Activity
• Pass a Urine Drug Test
• Detect Drug Use
• Understand Why People Use Drugs
• Tell if Someone Is High
• Get Pot Out of Your System

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• Pass a Hair Follicle Drug Test