Workplace drug testing is an annoying reality of signing up with a major corporation. Those in charge can use drug tests to make sure nobody working on the premises has any trace of drugs or alcohol in their system. These tests can be beneficial when workplace accidents are potentially caused by someone under the influence. Regular mandatory testing feels like much more of a violation of workers’ rights.
When it comes to those mandatory employee tests, it’s no surprise that employees want to find a way to pass a workplace drug test even if they’ve taken drugs outside of work. The problem with urine testing is that you could be completely sober and professional at work but still have traces of marijuana or other drugs in your system from the weekend. It can take as much as three days for some substances to leave the body. Workers don’t want to have to explain a positive result and fear repercussions for choices made in their leisure time. So, understandably, many workers look for ways to cheat the system and pass the test. Some approaches have the potential to work when carried out properly, while others are doomed to fail. Here are some of the worst and best ways to pass a urine test at work.
The Worst Approach: Adulterating Urine Samples
This basically means that you can take a urine sample and alter its composition to try and mask whatever you don’t want testers to find. There are lots of so-called tips online that are best avoided. Some take about adding bleach and other chemicals to the urine sample to cleanse them. The belief is that this has to work if the drug molecules aren’t detectable. The problem is that it’s also really easy for testers to see that someone’s tampered with the urine. As soon as there is any sort of marker that doesn’t look right, they will get suspicious. There are recommendations that eye drops work, but tests are so sophisticated and get smarter all the time. Before long, those will be detected, too.
The other option for adulterating urine samples is dilution. This simply means drinking an excessive amount of water before a test in the hopes of diluting urine so much that there’s no trace of any drugs in there. It’s another approach that’s better in theory than practice. As with the chemicals, it’s pretty obvious when urine is hyper-diluted because of the concentration of uric acid and the color. Testers will immediately think it’s deliberately diluted and demand another sample.
The Better Approach: Duplicating Urine Samples
A better option is to try passing off a different urine sample as your own. This is one of the more common ways to try and pass a workplace drug test. Rather than mess with your own sample, you can hand over something that appears to be authentic. Drug testing agencies will say that this approach is doomed to fail because of the temperature of the sample. That’s why companies now offer a urine warmer with their synthetic urine samples to help keep the liquid at the right temperature.
The idea is that you can keep the sample at the perfect temperature to mimic fresh urine and hand that over to the officials. You do need to be precise here, as a couple of degrees the wrong way will be suspicious. Whether you do this with synthetic samples or someone else’s urine is up to you. There are pros and cons to each approach. With the synthetic urine, you have something you know has been engineered to pass these tests, which should be almost identical to every other clean sample sent out to customers. When you work with a legitimate company with quality samples and urine warmers as part of the package, you have a better chance of passing the test. The downside is that more sophisticated tests may reveal that something isn’t right.
The other option is to use real urine from someone else. There’s no way the testers can tell you that it’s not genuine urine, and with the warmer, you can pass it off as fresh. The hard part is finding someone willing to help who you can trust to give a completely drug-free and unadulterated sample. This isn’t as easy as you might think because of the different substances that trigger false positives. If any of them alert testers to potential substance use, and you can’t explain what it might be, you’ll get treated as though you failed the drug test. This means that the person providing the sample can’t be on prescription medication and can’t have taken Vitamin B supplements, painkillers, or antihistamines beforehand. Poppy seeds are out, too.
The Best Approach: Provide A Clean Authentic Sample
Of course, the best way to pass a workplace drug test is to provide a clean sample of your urine with absolutely no traces of any banned substances. That’s easier said than done, however. For a start, you have to be sure not to take any illegal drugs the company is looking for for at least three days before the test. If you can plan, be strict with yourself, and leave the drugs and alcohol until after a scheduled test, that’s OK. However, this isn’t going to work for those using medicinal marijuana or those who simply don’t want to see their rights violated. You may believe that what you do outside company time is none of their business. There’s also the fact that prescription medications could be a false positive anyway.
If you are not inclined to completely abstain from substances or risk your health by stopping taking medication, you’re left with two options. You’re either risking a positive result and explaining the findings or trying to use a duplicate or doctored sample. There are ways to pass a workplace drug test and avoid detection. The choice is up to you.
