Last updated : November 18, 2024
If you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, Tooth Fairy, or Odin, then you might believe some of the myths about drug testing—and there certainly are a lot of them! Mostly, they come from a combination of fear, pseudoscience, and wishful thinking on the part of drug users who try to get away with circumventing their employer’s drug free workplace policy. Here’s the thing; drug testing isn’t some nefarious scheme to hunt you down and fire you. It’s a program meant to ensure that you will be a productive employee who can contribute to a safe workplace.
Hopefully, if you realize that the myths about drug testing are completely bogus, you won’t be as likely to use drugs, which means you’ll have greater career opportunities.
Myth 1: Drinking Lots of Water Will Help Pass Your Drug Test
On the surface, this one seems plausible, after all, dilution should theoretically make it more difficult to detect drug metabolites, right? Well, not quite, because while the lab is looking for drug metabolites, they’re also measuring creatinine levels, which is the chemical waste that passes through urine. If you drink an abnormal amount of fluid in an attempt to flush out the drug metabolites, you’ll also alter the creatinine levels. This is a red flag for the lab to run your sample through a more rigorous testing, at which point, they will find the drug metabolites.
Myth 2: Exercise Will Help You Pass Your Drug Test
It’s true that some drug metabolites are stored in your body fat with regular use, but exercising will only move them into your bloodstream at a greater concentration, making it even easier to bust you. Besides, as millions of Americans can attest, loosing fat can be incredibly difficult, and if you don’t have the willpower to avoid drugs in the first place, you certainly don’t have the willpower to go on an extreme exercise program.
Myth 3: Certain Foods/Drinks Will Produce a False Positive
You’ve probably heard the urban legend about poppy seeds making someone produce a positive test result for opiates. (Heroin, morphine, painkillers, etc.) While poppy seeds come from the same plant as opium, the seeds don’t actually contain opium—they are just coated in trace amounts of the substance though. Before food processing, however, poppy seeds are washed, which eliminates most of the opium residue. You’d have to eat a lot of unwashed poppy seeds to test positive for opioids, so while a few hand fulls might cause a positive test result, a few poppy seed bagels certainly won’t. The same applies to other foods and drinks.
Myth 4: You Can Take a Supplement to “Cleanse” Your Body
This myth has been around long before the “cleanse” or “detox” craze that’s hit the health industry lately. There is nothing you can take to “cleanse” or “detox” your body from drug metabolites. All these miracle supplements will do is waste your money and give you really colorful urine. Do you really think labs that perform highly-accurate tests everyday, which life and death medical decisions are made based on, can somehow be fooled by a $20 bottle of pills? You’d have to be high to believe that…
Myth 5: False Positives Are Common
Drug testing has been around since the 1980s and the science is basic chemistry, so there are hardly ever false positives. In fact, every positive test result is then run again with more scrutiny just to be 100% certain. False positives are a statistical impossibility.
Conclusion:
A lot of these myths about drug testing seem to stem from wishful thinking or excuses after the fact, but they won’t help you if you’re using drugs. Your best best, for your career, reputation, and your health, is to avoid drugs in the first place. You have nothing to gain by using drugs, and a lot to lose.
