The Myths of Cheating a Drug Test

Cheating or beating a drug test seems to be the popular thing amongst people that are trying to get a job or people that are trying to stay off of probation. For as long as people can remember many household products and over the counter medicines has been a way of cheating the system. People have been using the items to confuse prospective employers and drug labs so that they wouldn’t get caught with an illegal substance in their system. The question that should be asked though is, “is it effective?” Some of the biggest myths of drug testing are said to be the changes in diet will change your levels for a test, which is absolutely false. Contrary to popular belief eating red meat will NOT raise the creatinine levels in a diluted sample. Dog urine can NOT be substituted to pass a drug test. A person being tested can not steal his/her sample from a testing lab, simply because the participants aren’t even allowed in the lab. Increasing metabolism will not reduce that amount of time a drug can be detected in a persons system, eating a high calorie diet, or starting an intense exercise program also will not reduce the amount of drugs in a persons system. So, "Does it work? Yes, it does," says Amitava Dasgupta, PhD, a professor of pathology and drug testing expert from the University of Texas-Houston Medical Center. "It's a cat and mouse game." (Zwillich, WebMD) It has been said that many household chemicals or over the counter drugs change the acidity or the pH in the urine and in some cases it can really deem a testing sample useless. However there are downsides to changing the acidity or pH of your urine depending on what job a person’s trying to get. If a sample has been tampered with too much some employers and drug testing centers will automatically kick the sample out without testing for specific drugs. “Doping” a sample with salt, soap, bleach will automatically flag the urine sample as tampered-with also. If a person’s not a heavy marijuana smoker