What to Do Before a Drug Test: 9 Things Men Should Avoid That Can Cause False Positives

what to do before a drug test

There are 155 million people employed in the American labor force. These people come from different educational disciplines and do vastly different jobs.

The one thing many of them have in common though is that they needed to pass a drug test before they got hired.

Drug tests are a common barrier to entry for many places of employment, particularity those in the public sector. While non-drug users typically have nothing to worry about when getting tested, sometimes, false positives can be generated which can result in the loss of a job.

If you’re wondering what to do before a drug test to ensure your odds of passing it, be sure to check out these nine things to avoid below.

1. Watch Out for Cold Medicine

Cold remedies are great for helping you function when you’re feeling headaches, light fevers, or sniffles coming on. While we all know that cold medication tends to work, few of us know how exactly it does.

As it turns out, most cold medications utilize pseudoephedrine which is a synthetic amphetamine. Pseudo can be used in large amounts to make meth and if a drug test picks it up in your system, you may generate a false positive.

So, if you’re wondering what to do before a drug test, make sure you don’t land on taking cold medicine.

Here’s more about cold medicine and what to do before a drug test if you’re on it.

2. Hemp Seeds

Many products legally incorporate hemp seeds into their manufacturing process. You can find hemp seeds present in milk, oil, or you can ingest hemp seeds in their natural form.

While hemp seeds are perfectly acceptable by legal standards, drug tests sometimes can’t tell the difference between trace amount of THC in your bloodstream acquired via legal hemp seeds and illegal marijuana use.

For that reason, you’ll want to steer clean of hemp in any form before a drug test.

3. Sudafed

While we talked a little about cold remedies already, it’s important that we call out Sudafed by name on our what to do before taking a drug test list.

Sudafed is one of the top products that make people ring up as false positives during drug tests. For that reason, never take Sudafed within 72 hours of getting tested.

4. Azo

Azo is a great product to help people managing urinary tract infections. Unfortunately, it’s also been used in the past to try and cheat drug tests.

For that reason, when test administrators see the red or dark yellow color of your urine (a side effect of Azo use) they may throw out your test results. To be safe, don’t take Azo 72 hours before your drug test.

5. Breakfast Bars

Some breakfast bars, particularly granola bars, have hemp seeds in them. As we went over in our second point, hemp seeds contain legal amounts of THC which could get lead to you failing a drug test for suspected marijuana use.

As drug tests have become more sophisticated, they’ve gotten better at filtering through problems like hemp traces acquired from foods. Still, err on the side of caution and avoid breakfast bars before drug testing.

6. Tonic Water

Whether you drink tonic water straight or accompany it with some gin, you may find yourself on the wrong side of a drug test if you ingest it. Why?

Tonic water was originally a means of delivering quinine (a drug that’s derived from cinchona bark) from South America. That means that any time you consume it, you run the risk of generating a false positive for opiate use.

7. Ibuprofen

Here’s to hoping you don’t have a headache before a drug test because if you do, you’re not going to want to take ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is yet another legal drug that has been known to generate false positives for marijuana use or benzodiazepines consumption.

Because of that, you’re going to want to opt for Tylenol before testing.

8. Vitamin B

Vitamin B supplements are synthetically processed in part from marijuana plants.

While traces of THC in Vitamin B are negligible, a drug test still may react to its presence in your system the same way it might when it detects hemp seeds.

9. Poppy Seeds

Looks like hemp seeds are not the only seed troublemakers on our list of things to avoid before a drug test. Poppy seeds are also perfectly legal drug false positive generators.

Poppy seeds are typically present on bagels or muffins. They have been known to contain trace amounts of opiates since poppies get used to manufacture a number of illicit substances.

The possibility of poppy seeds generating a false positive after 48 hours has passed since ingestion is borderline impossible. Still, we recommend opting for sesame seeds when you’re within a 72-hour window of your test.

Wrapping Up What to Do Before a Drug Test

As you can see from our list above, there’s a seemingly unlimited amount of perfectly harmless things out there that can wreak havoc on your drug test.

While many of these false positive generators have a relatively low chance of hurting your results, we still recommend steering away from them on the off chance that your drug test is overly sensitive or not up to modern standards.

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Author: IzzyWeb