I test your pee for all kinds of drugs. Ask a drugtester almost anything.

What about synthetic urine? I've used it 5 times and passed

Wow. Well, some clients do not order the validity tests, they only look for the drugs. This is to reduce costs I assume, because they cannot charge you the cost of the drug test. I do on occasion catch synthetic urine (I can recognize it because we use it too to make up our negative controls) when it fails the validity tests.

I have also passed several tests using synthetic urine like quickfix sold at headshops. I've had several friends do the same. I've passed the both the instant "dip stick" tests (easy to see how that can be done) and the ones where the sample is actually sent to a lab. I've been told that most employers don't spring for the type of expensive test which is capable of detecting the fake pee. Of course, it has to be the right temp, but I have found this obstacle quite easy to overcome using body heat and hand warmers. What does it mean specifically to fail the "validity" test? Have my friends and I just been extremely lucky or is it actually difficult to catch?

Well, if the client doesn't order the expensive test that can find the fake pee, then we won't find it. I guess you can just get lucky, but I would say the majority of our clients do order it. It probably depends on the size of the company you are applying to, whether they can afford proper screening.

So would you say that you would be capable of catching someone using synthetic urine more often than not?

It all depends on if the client ordered the proper tests. If they order it, we will almost certainly catch it. If not, it will slip on by. It's not our responsibility.

I have been a daily smoker of cannabis for over 15 years. I have taken to date 11 piss tests for various jobs, and I have never once popped, in some cases having smoked up until the day before. Every time I have done the same thing. No supplements, no gimmicks, I just spend the whole day before and the morning of drinking water non stop. If you do this the day of before you go, you will piss clean urine that is warm enough to register. but it doesnt have time to gather the elements of the drug in your system. Never failed once. Your feeling on this?

Yes that will work if the client doesn't ask for specific gravity or creatinine tests. Dilution can be dangerous for your health though, and is easy to catch with the right tests.

Hi OP. Are you able to test for LSD?

We do, but it is very rare that we are asked to. I test maybe one sample per day, out of the 15+ thousand that we receive each day. LSD is not very stable in urine. I'm guessing it is more commonly tested from blood.

does your job require you to be drug tested?

I was tested before I got the job, and there is the threat of random monthly tests for us. I was told they throw everybody in the company's name in a computerized hat each month, but I've never heard of someone getting randomed at my facility. It's not really worth risking it though, as the second you walk in the door the day your name is drawn, you get tested pretty much immediately. Any positive result would mean immediate termination for me.

1. Smoke up.
2. Test your own pee at your workplace when randomed.
3. Rinse and repeat.

Yeah, not that easy.

If a male uses his friend's pee who is of the opposite sex, can you guys tell? What if the male uses a pregnant female's pee?

We don't test for hormones. Generally this trick is defeated with a temperature test. If it isn't your pee coming out of your body, it probably won't be the right temperature and the sample will be rejected.

How can the temperature be accurate if the sample is shipped to you, sometimes from across the country like you said? Wouldn't the urine have cooled to room temperature by the time you test it?

We have a ton of collection site offices where the pee is actually taken. The temperature is verified there, then it is shipped to us.

Ah okay that makes sense.

What's the temperature range, out of curiosity?

No idea. I don't work with collections, sorry.

Which drug can you detect the longest after use?

Probably THC for a chronic user. It continues to leech out of the fat and into the urine for weeks. A first-time user might be clean after 2-3 days, but someone who uses every day will be positive for a long time.

how long is a "long time"? lol

Maybe a month.

What happens if you drop a sample?

This happens. I have to go into the store room and pour more out of the donor's bottle into a new tube. If we run out of urine...well... =/ Clients really don't like that.

I would imagine that makes for a pretty big "oh shit" moment. Thanks for your AMA!

Actually not really. Unless you drop a whole tray of 50, that would suck, but a single tube is just whatever.

Is it true that eating poppy seeds will make you test positive for opium/heroin? I ask because of that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry's friend uses Jerry's moms urine for a test, because she had a poppy seed bagel.

I believe there was a mythbuster's episode about this. Apparently you have to eat an obscene amount of poppy seeds, but yes it can cause a false-positive.

Do you know the identity of the person's pee you're testing? Or is it just something like 'test vial 4729a'?

Also, when you're running samples, do you hear cool csi science montage music in the background?

All of the vials have numbers and barcodes on them. There is no way to search the database by name to find that number. However, if I search a particular number I can find the associated name. If I wanted to find my friend's sample or something, it would be nearly impossible.

The testing room is actually quite loud. Lots of fan and the clicking and whirring of the machines doing their job. No cool montage :(

Are you personally for or against the legalization of marijuana?

For. But as it is currently illegal, I have no qualms about continuing to test for it.

How do you dispose of all the bio hazardous waste?

Most jobs have some room room for horseplay or Tom foolery, maybe on break?. What sort of things happen at your work between co-workers? Ever slip samples into co-workers apple juice?

For urine samples, we just pour them down the drain when we're done. Pee normally goes into the sewers anyways.

No laboratory ever allows horseplay. If I were to intentionally expose a co-worker to a sample I'd be immediately fired and possibly sued. Urine samples can contain infectious diseases, though it's not likely. Occasionally we get samples with blood contamination, and those are a real gamble.

Do you notify the person that is getting tested in such cases? Like "this looks bad, you should probably see a doctor"?

I wish I could. Some of the samples are from people who are clearly dying.

Explain "clearly" please.

Sometimes they are brown or black. Sometimes they are mostly blood. Sometimes the smell makes me want to throw up, like rotten eggs (bacterial infection) or just the stench of death.

What drugs have you done, if any? How did you get into this line of work? Do you feel like your job is a noble cause or just another paycheck?

I've actually never done any drug, unless you want to include ethanol. Some people in my lab have done quite a few.

This was the first job I could find out of grad school, after job searching for 3 months.

To me, it's a paycheck. While on the one hand it is nice to help catch people who are selling their narcotics prescriptions or driving trucks under the influence of X drug, I know that I also make people lose their job who maybe just made the wrong choice one time. It has its good and bad.

I am a chronic cannabis smoker of three years. I have smoked daily with varying amounts for at least the past 2 years. Will 30 days be enough to stay negative for trace amounts of THC?

Probably. I wouldn't be surprised if there was still some left in you, but you could expect to come in under the cutoff.

Generally, when a company is testing its employees, do they want people with any trace of a drug to be considered "positive," or do they have cutoff levels?

Every drug has a cutoff level. You can have some in your system and still be considered negative. It's pretty arbitrary.

Do you have a good sense of humor about handling other people's piss for a living?

Yeah. I'm a pretty open-minded and lewd person anyways. Pee smells bad, but after a couple weeks you don't notice it anymore. I got some on my face once. Just got an alcohol pad and wiped it off...

I work in a homeless shelter and we use dip tests with 5 strips. Lately we've been getting a lot of non-reactive tests. Any idea why?

They are probably throwing in additives like bleach, nitrates, perfume etc. These can interfere with the antibody associations.

What are some myths that are easily busted? For example, I've heard if you drink a lot of water, or certain liquids, the test results become very diluted.

Well this is true, dilution is probably the most popular method for beating the tests. It works, to a degree. We test most samples for how diluted they are, their specific gravity (we only test what the client has ordered. Not all test for everything). If a sample is too dilute, it is reported as such. This usually results in an observed collection the second time around, and depending on your employer may be considered tampering with the test.

Drugs and their metabolites are released from the body at a certain rate and there is very little you can do to change that rate. Many methods that are advertised to people as "drug-cleansers" or whatever are actually quite dangerous. Anyways, if you dilute your urine, it is possible to come in under the cutoff for the drug concentration. You just run the risk of being flagged as dilute, and judges can still bust you for violation of probation if there is any drug in your system, not just the cut-off amount set by SAMSHA http://www.samhsa.gov/

What things can mask the fact that you have diluted your urine? I know one prevalent test is creatine levels (eg. so if you load up with more it will appear at "normal" levels) are there any other substances that one could add to their attempts to beat the tests?

If you somehow get your creatinine and ion levels to be normal while still diluting the urine, you'll come out clean. The thing is, creatinine is a very difficult substance to obtain because it has 0 commercial value. As for specific gravity, you could try eating salty foods. Some people have died trying to dilute their urine because they did not maintain their salt balance. It is dangerous when attempted by uninformed amateurs.

How good are hair test?

Will 2CB give false positives for amfetamines?

Do you test on LSD?

Hair testing is being phased out. I've never performed it myself, but I would assume by that fact that hair testing isn't so great.

I don't know what 2CB is.

We do test for LSD, I've answered that somewhere in here. It's rare.

What was the highest number of positive results in one test and which drugs were that?

Well, the most positives usually come from the hospitals, and we are testing them for pain management. They are supposed to be positive.

For pre-employment stuff, you might get as many as 3 positives on a single sample. Usually if there is cocaine there is also THC. Same with amphetamines. It's also amusing to note just how positive some people are (we can tell how concentrated the sample is). I've had a few samples where I wonder how they even managed to pee into a cup.

What is the process like? How is the urine analyzed for traces of illicit substances?

When the samples enter my lab, they are loaded onto automated machines that take small amounts of urine for each test. This is mixed with an antibody/enzyme mixture that is designed to change colors depending on whether or not there is drug present. This process takes about 15 minutes. The data is reviewed and then compared to control samples to make sure the machines are operating correctly and we aren't reporting false results. Any positive samples are moved to a confirmatory stage (if the client so chooses) which generally uses mass spectroscopy to confirm the presence of a drug. Not all clients do confirmation for positives, but they cannot take legal action against an employee if they don't.

So that's why you have to fill up the cup to a certain volume then... For some reason I always assumed that they used something like PH test strips that only needed to be moistened and it was silly to collect as much as they did. Thanks

The preliminary tests require very little urine, as little as 20 microliters. However, due to the way the confirmatory tests work, they require as much as 2 mililiters.

Thank you for doing this AMA, you're awesome.

I work a job where I have to go into a lot of different houses each day, and some of them are kind of cloudy/stinky when I go in. Chemically speaking, is there a threshold for a regular "user" versus someone who is just regularly "exposed"? Thanks again, I just hate my job and want to pass a piss test at my next potential employer, only I'm not sure that I will, considering what I encounter on a daily basis...

Occasional second-hand exposure shouldn't flag you positive.

What is the most common drug you find people using? (Other than THC?)

Edit: Typo

Hmm, probably amphetamines.

Have you ever accidentally spilled a sample?

Yes. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/197xia/i_test_your_pee_for_all_kinds_of_drugs_ask_a/c8ln2ug

You said you don't test for steroids but do you test for any kind of performance enhancing drugs?

Have you had to testify in support of your testing process?

What controls are there to make sure the labs don't get lazy? Do they send known samples through to audit you?

1) No

2) We have higher-ups who testify for us, but occasionally we do have to testify ourselves. I have not.

3) Every batch has a random positive sample put in it. We have to catch it or the batch fails.

What's the youngest age of someone who has tested positive for a drug? Which drug?

I don't have that information.

What drugs do you test for?

Amphetamines, methadone, cocaine, PCP, propoxyphene, methaqualone, opioids, barbiturates, THC, and benzodiazapenes are probably our biggest tests. Most pre-employment screens order those. We also test things like fentanyl, buprenorphine, oxycodone, cotinine, ethanol, carisoprodol, tapentadol, LSD, ambien, synthetic cannabinoids, and dextromethorphan. Not all of those drugs are illegal. Strangely enough we don't test for psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Addiontally, we have another battery of tests to ensure that the sample has not been tampered with. The tests that are performed depend entirely on what the client has ordered.

How come no lsd? ( or one of these are a component in it and I am dumb)

Also do you get drug tested??

I listed LSD (but I misspelled it, derp), although we only get maybe 3-5 requisitions for it per week. Easily our least-tested drug. I guess nobody takes it anymore. In the 5 months I've been working there I've only seen 2 positives for it. Part of the problem is that it breaks down in the urine in a couple days so it's hard to catch.

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Tobacco is tested under cotinine. For ethanol, we just test the urine for it and if it's positive, it's positive. We report that back to the client and they decide what to do with it. Some people are contractually obligated under their company to never drink alcohol, so that could be why they are getting tested.

I'm not responsible for contacting clients with results, I only input positives and negatives into the database. I'm not sure if they tell clients any more than that.

Does your job ever piss you off?

Har Har Har.

Actually no, it's pretty low-stress.

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Oxy is not commonly tested, no. That's more common in oral sample screening.

Educational background?

BS and MS in Biology.

Do you know anything about STD urine tests? If you get an STD from skin to skin contact (IE open wound on finger), would a urine test still be able to detect?

No clue about that, sorry.

I've always been told that an individual cannot be tested for "spice" or synthetic marijuana and bath salts. Is this true?

Oh they most certainly can. Certain formulations of those things may not be illegal, but we can definitely test for them.

What is the specific chemical you test for with regard to THC? Is it delta-9-THC or 11-OH-THC?

D9THC

can you detect if someone uses synthetic urine?

Yes, it will not contain creatinine, which is a natural byproduct of muscle metabolism that all people produce.

My friend has passed 3 drug tests using fake urine. Explanation for that?

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/197xia/i_test_your_pee_for_all_kinds_of_drugs_ask_a/c8lnxql

What percentage of samples test positive on average, would you guess?

For your average pre-employment screen, maybe 1-2 every 50 samples will have a positive for something. Most often THC, but we do see everything.

What would happen if I went to a drug test and couldn't pee.

I don't work on the collections side, but I assume they'd just have you wait around until you could do it.

Does going to a sauna or a steam room have any affect at all?

Maybe for THC if it's making you burn fat, but otherwise nope.