While a lot people will tell you that smoking marijuana will do no harm and it is healthier than smoking cigarettes, this is definitely not true. The THC and some other active ingredients in cannabis cause you to have a high which will affect how you manage yourself. Your decision making skills, focus, and determination all take a drive for the worse.

However, many people, from teenagers to businessmen to professional sports players enjoy smoking weed. While this article will not debating if weed is healthy or not, it will cover the main aspects of the marijuana drug test.

It has been statistically proven in a survey of a decent amount of employers that 81% of them have at some point and time gotten their employees to undergo a drug test – and a good portion of these still regularly use this procedure in their work place.

With the rise of popularity of the marijuana drug test in work places, and even at home, it is good that you know exactly what types of marijuana drug tests there are, how they test you for marijuana, and how you can pass them.

For most employers, they will prepare a surprise or regular (weekly, biweekly, etc) marijuana drug test to be performed in the work place. In sports, it is just as popular but is usually scheduled –for instance, the Olympics. Even for young teens at home, there is a chance your parent(s) decide to by a home drug test kit because they believe you may be using drugs.

So first off, you will need to know exactly what the drug test is looking for. What the marijuana drug test looks for is THC in your system. Basically, if it is a urine test, when you smoke marijuana, not too long after doing so, the THC chemicals make their way to your kidney area and will flow through with your urine and be removed from your body in a certain amount of time. The rate of removal for THC from your kidneys depends solely on how repetitive your use is, how big your use is, and your metabolism rate.

If you have to get a hair follicle test, unlike a urine test, it is meant for looking at the past and not the present. It takes 2 weeks for the drugs to actually get in your hair to begin with. The process with this is that the THC will find its’ way to your head and grow in as one with the hair – basically, the THC gets trapped in the hair and removal of just the chemicals is virtually impossible.

Now, the normal amount of time that it takes for marijuana chemicals to get out of your kidneys and urine is around seven to ten days but it can go up as long as a month in some cases if you are a long time user or it can vary as well if you have kidney disorders. Remember, THC is what gives you the high with marijuana, and medical marijuana does not contain THC, therefore it is not really meant to give you a buzz. THC is just an abbreviation for Tetrahydrocannibol – the most potent substance that is in marijuana.

Another type of drug test that may be performed on you to see if you have been using drugs would be the saliva test. Now the saliva test is not as accurate, but it can work in certain cases. The kits for saliva tests can cost you as low as a dollar per test and they do get the job done. The best scenarios for using a saliva drug test would include:

• After an accident in the work place or in a persons’ automobile to see if drugs may have related to the event
• If an employee seems suspicious and shows some of the signs of drug use, which can vary from drugs but usually stand out
• At a routine traffic stop on the highways
• When a police officer pulls someone over – add it with the breath analyzer
• To randomly test your employee or child

With saliva drug tests, after the drug is used, it is then in your saliva and will stay in there for an upwards of 2-3 days but in the case of marijuana and hashish, it will likely not be able to be found a day after use. Therefore, you can conclude that saliva tests are best for spur of the moment to see if a person is using drugs as of that day – a saliva drug test is also very hard to cheat on.

With marijuana, the signs that someone is using is rather easy to notice. For most people, the high is rather the same and causes you to do similar things. It usually starts off where the person is calm, and then they become loud, giggly, and hungry. After a little while, they will become drowsy and exhausted. In the meantime, the eyes can tell it all usually as they will become red and irritated after marijuana use. Other more obvious signs would include the person carrying dime bags, rolling papers, a pipe, a bong, wearing a Bob Marley shirt, or recently changing their religion (not) to Buddhist.

The problem with marijuana users is that it is just like any other addiction and they will need it to maintain a normal lifestyle. Every day, a marijuana user will be thinking of getting high and if it is an employee, you have to be worried about him losing concentration on work, doing a half assed job, or stealing money from the company.

So where can you buy these home drug test kits, how much do they cost, and how good are the home kits, really?

For the most part, home kits will hold up most of the accuracy, but it can never be compared to a lab. Here is a chart of a rough idea of the costs of various drug test kits:

• Urine test kits - $15-30 each [ Results in just a few minutes ]
  
• Hair follicle test kits - $50-75 each [ Needs to be sent to lab for accurate results / usually the lab processing fee is included in the purchase amount ]
  
• Saliva test kits - $1-10 each
  
• Blood Tests - require a health care professional to extract the blood from the person being tested and will need to be sent to a lab to be reviewed.

Cheating Drug Tests

Urine Test : Most people have already heard that there are various ways of cheating a urine drug test. Due to the fact that you usually have privacy when you are placing the sample in the cup, you are able to play a little dirty trick on the tester. Whether it be that you have a novelty penis which goes over your privates area and when you squeeze it, it urinates, or you bring a little bottle of someone else’s urine and use that instead, or you have fake, synthetic, or powder urine (just add water), as you can tell, there are a lot of ways to “rig” a urine drug test.

Another method you could use would to be to drink a lot of water prior to the test as it will make your urine diluted but the person reviewing the sample will probably request a retest at a later date because it would look intentional. Keep in mind, the highest concentration of drugs in your urine is usually in the morning at the first urination of the day.

One other way of cheating through a urine test which has been talked about a lot is to use detox products that a lot of web sites claim to do the trick. While not all of these works, some of these are actually capable of getting the job done. The best thing you can do is actually sit down and research on the various products to find one that isn’t just another cheap rip off.

Hair Follicle Test : It isn’t really that easy to provide a fake hair sample or to just get the chemicals out of your hair without removing your hair – making hair follicle tests even better as far as accuracy and security goes. There are shampoo products which are claimed by the companies that made them to remove the chemicals from your hair but the fact is that the chemicals are actually trapped in your hair so the chance of it working is highly unlikely.

Your only options if you know you will test positive for drugs in a hair follicle test would be to shave your head bald, but you may as well walk around with a crack pipe in your mouth because no one would be that stupid – day after you find out about hair follicle drug test you shave yourself bald?

An alternative would be to bleach or dye your hair which would probably remove the chemicals that are in it which were caused from drug use but the problem with that is it is only a temporary solution. If you were to get a hair sample taken from you as soon as you get your hair bleached or dyed, then it may work, but it is still a hit or miss. The problem is that after you start to sweat, the sweat and body oils that you release will get in your hair and because some chemicals are still in the roots area, your hair will be contaminated again.

Saliva Test : The saliva (oral fluid) test is very difficult to cheat your way through because it is taken right from your mouth. A swabbing stick will be placed in your mouth around your bottom set of teeth and gums for a few minutes to collect enough saliva for testing. It is virtually impossible to cheat your way through a saliva test but you can get lucky as the drug residue sometimes leaves really fast from your saliva. Generally speaking, a saliva test can date back 2-3 days but with marijuana and hashish (THC), it could only date back as far as a day and in some cases just a few hours.

While there are some methods of passing a saliva test that could potentially work, it’s unlikely that anyone would be prepared as a saliva drug test is usually meant to be random and surprising.
So saliva tests are definitely the best when it comes to spur of the moment, random tests and a few other reasons, but not really that great for the regular tests done in a work place every week or two.

You can now come to a conclusion of what type of drug test will work best for you to use on whoever you need to. Saliva is good for those times when someone seems suspicious at the work place, urine is good for the regular tests like at a methadone clinic, hair is good for those extreme jobs that need to date back a bit, and blood is only preferred in a few rare cases.

You have to remember that no test is bulletproof and when performing a marijuana drug test, the accuracy will vary depending on which test kit you use.