Drug testing urine is pretty common nowadays, but that doesn’t mean you ever get used to it. Even though I’ve got the process down and am always pretty confident I’ll pass (and so far I always have), I’m still always a tiny bit nervous until I get those final results back from the lab. Which brings me to the topic of this post… which is that, regardless of how commonplace drug testing urine has gotten to be, you should treat EVERY drug test you take like it’s your very first time if you really want to pass.

Drug Testing Urine – Don’t Get Lazy!

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve known more than one person who didn’t pass a urine test just because they got kind of lazy, frankly. YES, it’s a pain in the butt to dilute before you go to your appointment. You have to drink a hell of a lot of water (which can be uncomfortable, to say the least), and you have to keep track of taking a bunch of supplements for covering up your dilution, yada, yada, yada. But you know what? If you really want to pass a piss test, you just gotta suck it up and do it.

Pretty much everyone is so freaked out and paranoid before we take our very first drug test, that we take every single thing about it dead serious. The problem is, once you successfully pass a drug test it’s easy to start thinking, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all. So what’s the big deal?” Well let me tell ya, that is dangerous thinking – because when labs are drug testing urine, they take each and every test REAL serious so you’d better too. If you start cutting corners when you dilute, thinking that you can get away with not doing this thing or that, then you’re playing with fire, man.

What Labs Are Looking For When Drug Testing Urine

Probably the most important advice I have for anyone who has a drug test coming up is to TEST YOURSELF AT HOME before walking into the lab. You can find home test strips for a few bucks each at most major pharmacies, and investing in two or three of them is pretty cheap insurance considering what’s at stake.

And if you’re really desperate to pass a drug test, you might want to also buy a specimen validity test. Those will set you back twenty to thirty bucks, but if you have the money just shut your eyes and do it. Because when a lab is drug testing urine, they aren’t just looking at whether or not you test negative for THC metabolites. They’re also looking for evidence to see if you diluted. If you’re doing a trial run at home first (which I HIGHLY recommend that you do), then a specimen validity test will let you know if you’re doing it right so that the lab won’t flag you for dilution.

Passing a Urine Drug Test Is Totally Do-Able

Bottom line, even though preparing for a drug test can be a hassle, it’s all worth it if you pay attention to each step and do it right. The hassle is nothing compared to losing your job, not being able to get a job, or especially failing a probation test. Big Brother’s drug testing urine isn’t going to go away anytime soon, but with some serious due diligence it doesn’t have to have a major impact on your life.

Myths About How to Pass a Drug Test for Marijuana

There are lots of popular home remedies passed around by very well meaning, but also very misinformed, pot heads. Including cranberry juice, Certo (also known as Sure-Jell), and niacin. You can find some facts about home remedies here.

One of the most prevalent myths about passing a drug test is that you should drink tons of water for days or weeks before your test. The roots of this particular myth are actually grounded in reality (as most myths are), but the real facts about it have become distorted over time.

Possibly the biggest misconception about passing a urine test for marijuana is that you can get rid of THC metabolites by ‘detoxing’ your body – in other words, completely cleansing your body and getting back to square one. This misconception is constantly perpetuated by companies who want you to buy their detox products.

But in fact, because THC metabolites store themselves in your fat cells, the only genuine detoxification you could do would be to somehow lose a lot of weight (and fat) in a big hurry. Needless to say, not a very realistic plan. But if you’re in the position of needing to know how to pass a drug test for marijuana, don’t be discouraged by these facts!

How to Pass a Drug Test for Marijuana – What Does Work?

Hands down, plain old dilution is the MOST effective method for how to pass a drug test for marijuana. But the big problem with it is that most smokers don’t understand exactly how to do it, and more importantly they don’t know how to hide it from the drug testing labs.

Dilution does NOT mean drinking lots of water daily for a long period of time, and it also doesn’t mean adding water to your urine sample during your drug test. For passing a urine test, dilution means drinking enough water in a very short time span to overload your kidneys with fluids. When this happens, your kidneys are temporarily unable to filter the toxins in your body (including THC metabolites).

To put it another way, your urine becomes so diluted  by all the fluids you drank that the metabolite levels are too low to even measure, and voila – you test negative. But this also means that your urine won’t contain any of the elements that it’s supposed to have (including color!), which is the big red flag to testing labs that you’ve deliberately diluted and are trying to beat your drug test. Any serious discussion about how to pass a drug test for marijuana, by using dilution, isn’t complete without information about how to get around this problem.

How to Pass a Drug Test for Marijuana and Get On With Your Life

In order to pass a urine drug test for marijuana, you need to be aware that testing negative is only half the battle – you also need to pass the ‘tampering test.’ There can be NO evidence that you deliberately tried to dilute your urine, or you could fail your drug test on the spot. But fortunately for you (and unfortunately for testing labs), there are some amazingly simple ways to hide dilution. I’ve done it myself many times now, and I’ve passed every single time.

How to pass a drug test for marijuana is serious business, but that doesn’t mean it’s a reason to panic. Go here to find out more about how to pass a drug test using dilution.

Urine Drug Tests – Why You Should Be Particularly Concerned About Them

While there are other forms of testing, the type that you will almost always face is a urine drug test. The process is very straightforward. Once your organization informs you that you need to submit to a drug test, you will have to visit a drug testing laboratory within their specific window of time. After submitting a sample of your urine to the laboratory, it will be checked for the presence of opiates, marijuana, methamphetamines, cocaine and amphetamines. Most every drug besides marijuana leaves your system within a few days to a week, so urine drug tests are of particular concern to pot smokers. Evidence of marijuana use can linger in your body for up to a month.

Once the laboratory has finished its analysis, your organization will receive a report showing whether you tested positive or negative for each substance. In some cases the lab will give you the results of your urine test before sharing them with your employer. If you fail your test for any reason, even if you have never used drugs in your life, be warned that you face an uphill battle proving your innocence.

Detection Periods For Urine Drug Tests

When faced with a drug test, many people first try to figure out how long marijuana stays in your system, and how long they need to stay clean. Although a quick Google search will return tens of thousands of websites with detection time tables, every single one is simply an estimate. Factors such as usage frequency and the composition of your body all play a role in the length of the detection period. This means your detection period could be significantly different from someone else in a similar situation. No two people will be exactly alike when it comes to figuring out whether or not you’re clean enough to pass a urine drug test.

The only 100% guaranteed way to pass a urine drug test is with some form of substitution. You can either substitute with the urine of someone you know (as long as you know they’re clean), or you can use real powdered urine. Of course, substitution is difficult if your drug test is supervised, but for some people it’s worth the risk. After substitution, the next most reliable way to pass a drug test is dilution. Dilution involves drinking a large volume of water on the day of your test, and then taking supplements that will hide the fact that you’re diluting from the lab. If done properly dilution has a success rate of around 99%, so it is still considered very reliable.

The Last Resort for Passing a Urine Drug Test

There are also many commercial detox drinks on the market that are touted to help someone pass a drug test. Their effectiveness rate is much lower than either substitution or the home dilution method, although some people swear by them. The bottom line is that if you need to pass a urine drug test, examine all your options and then make the choice that seems right for your situation.

First of all, if we’re talking completely 100% natural here, then the only option you have is to just abstain and let time take care of it. Unfortunately, that’s not an option for most pot smokers. But does that mean passing a drug test requires ingesting a lot of junk into your body? I guess it depends on your perspective.

Lots of folks who smoke pot are into green living, including when it comes to their own body. But there are many different philosophies about how to stay healthy, and here’s where it gets sticky. If we’re talking about basic vitamins and herbs like vitamin-C, B-complex, milk thistle, etc., even the most hard core purists wouldn’t have a problem with passing a drug test naturally. I consider myself pretty hard core when it comes to what I put into my body, but if I want to pass a drug test I know I’ve got to relax the rules a little, frankly.

How to Pass a Drug Test Naturally – You Might Need to Make a Few Compromises

The ways to pass a drug test that actually work don’t necessarily require you to drink poison, but you do need to be prepared to ingest some things you might not ordinarily. We’re not talking things that will have a lasting effect on your body, but they are things that aren’t what I would consider to be natural by any stretch of the imagination. For me, one of the biggies is Gatorade, which is loaded with sugars and food coloring. But it’s also loaded with natural salts that I know will make the density of my urine look normal when I’m diluting, so I just bite the bullet and drink it.

How to pass a drug test naturally means you should also take some creatine monohydrate, which some people consider kind of iffy. Creatine is in lots of foods that we eat, and if you have normal levels in your body it gets filtered by your kidneys and comes out in your urine as creatinine. Not all labs test creatinine levels, but most do nowadays. If you’re diluting, then you’ll have washed most of the creatinine out of your kidneys and it’s a red flag to labs.

How to Pass a Drug Test Naturally – Doing the Least Harm

But still, if you really want to pass a drug test without taking any more junk into your body than is absolutely necessary, then you’re better off buying all the ingredients and doing it yourself at home. It’s still better than buying a commercial detox drink, which is also loaded with unrecognizable chemicals along with food coloring. Making your own detox drink means that you at least know exactly what you’re putting into your body. Maybe that’s not exactly what you wanted to hear, but it’s the most honest answer I have for how to pass a drug test naturally.

The information you’ll find on this website is specifically for pot smokers, and it all got started when I had to start taking drug tests at my place of employment. What I’ve learned about how to pass a drug test has been a real eye-opener, to put it mildly. Probably the biggest shock is how much money we smokers spend (millions!!) on products that don’t even have a chance in hell of actually working. Desperate people will take desperate measures, and the companies who sell detox products are counting on it.

There is no ONE detox method that will work for every kind of drug (regardless of any marketing hype you may have read), because different toxins are metabolized in our bodies in different ways. The method I recommend for passing a urine drug test for pot is dilution, but dilution probably won’t help you if you need to know how to pass a drug test for any other substance. For the detection times of drugs other than cannabis, see ‘Links to Useful Resources’ over in the sidebar area of this page.