Urine Testing

More and more providers are entering a lucrative market. Urine tests in the military, at school, at work - even parents want to control their children with urine tests. We got 25 test kits from a doctor friend and wanted to know, how much does someone have to have smoked for such a test to be positive?

The cost for the 25-pack: 237.40 francs, so that makes about 9.50 francs per test. However, if someone goes to the doctor and has a test done, it will of course cost more - the 9.50 per test is only the purchase, the work of the doctor/laboratory is added, so that 50 to 100 francs are then to be paid for it.

The first thing I did was test myself, of course. I waited for the urge to go to the toilet, then took a plastic cup and went to the loo. Since you only need three drops of urine to do the test, I first drained some urine, stopped, and then urinated maybe a deciliter of my yellow juice into my plastic cup, stopped again, and the rest then went into the toilet.

I took some urine out of my plastic cup with an eyedropper (which comes with each test kit), and dripped three drops into the test's designated opening. Then I could watch the urine slowly run into the evaluation window. There it left only one line, which means that I was positive.

We repeated this procedure in different ways. Once it happened that I didn't smoke pot for four days in a row, so I tried again. But the test still showed positive. Likewise, all reasonably regular smokers tested positive in all tests, whether they had smoked one before the test (and were therefore effectively stoned), or even if they had not smoked anything for a few days before the test (and were therefore definitely sober).

These tests showed quite clearly that a positive THC test has nothing at all to do with the mental state of the person tested, but merely indicates whether breakdown products of THC can be found in the urine. However, these degradation products are no longer psychoactive, so they do not enter the system. Only THC enters the system - and this is then converted into THC metabolites (i.e. degradation products) and excreted. However, the elimination is very slow, so anyone who smokes pot on a fairly regular basis (e.g. every week) is sure to be positive. Even if he or she has not smoked for seven days… (Continues below.)

So we regular smokers were always positive. In exactly the same way, all the people we tested who did not smoke pot (e.g. parents) were negative. Therefore, we needed a person who was certainly negative, but still willing to smoke a joint. We found this person. She had smoked the last joint about four months ago. The first test was negative (see 1st picture). We smoked a small joint together, the test person smoked four puffs. About two hours later we did another test and the subject was positive, the test had detected the breakdown products and revealed the subject to be smoking pot. By this time, however, the subject was practically sober again…

Then we gave the subject some tests, asking him to continue testing daily if possible. The question was, of course, when would the subject become negative again? The series of pictures shows very nicely the course of this experiment. The first picture shows the negative first test, followed by the positive second test after the joint, and then we see that the first line becomes firmer and firmer over the entire test series.

The test used is a qualitative test, i.e. it only tells whether someone is positive (one bar) or negative (two bars). The test does not indicate the smallest amounts of THC degradation products (so-called cut off). Only when the amount of THC degradation products reaches a certain level, the test indicates positive. This can be seen very well in the THC line: It becomes denser and denser in the test person (who of course did not consume any further joints during the entire testing) until it is as clear as it was during the first test before the joint. A sample is considered negative even if the line is only faint, but this is still an indication that THC degradation products are present, albeit in a low concentration (a line is formed when the amount of THC degradation products is lower than 50 nanograms per milliliter of urine).

By the way, a doctor who performs such a quick and cheap test can check the result with a quantitative test. This then determines the effective amount of THC degradation products in the urine, but is also much more expensive than the test we use. On the other hand, this type of test is considered to be very reliable; the test we use gives a reliability of about 98 to 99 percent, which means that one or two tests per hundred give a false result.

The bottom line is that if you smoke pot regularly, you will be positive in such tests. Whether he is stoned or not!

Before the joint	THC use	After the joint	Day 1	Day 2
Day 3	Day 4	Day 6	Day 7	Day 18