Home Drug Test Thresholds & False Positives

Video Transcript

"The important thing to keep in mind when taking or using an at home drug test is the notion of threshold of testing, false positives, false negatives and what I men by that is that each test and each drug is going to have a different limit as to where they can or can't be directed by said test. And when you get the instruction book with the test you buy it is important to go through and read what the thresholds are, the span of time each drug can be testing. Ideally the best time to test for a drug in somebody's system is as soon after the drug is used as possible but if you are testing somebody else, a child or a spouse, to figure out whether they are using drugs that might not be possible because you might not know that. So flipping through this book I can learn the cut offs of concentrations of certain drugs that can be detected and there is also little chart that is going to tell me the minimum time that a drug can be detected in the system and the maximum time you can wait before that drug can be detected so just to give you an example when it comes to marijuana or THC, the active ingredient for marijuana, the minimum time detected is within 6 to 18 hours after use so you can't test within an hour of somebody having smoked marijuana or consumed it in another way because it won't have been taken in by the body to the point that it can then be output in the urine and then tested. The maximum time is up to 28 days after. These are general guidelines. It can vary with peoples' intensity or frequency of use and of course other factors, prescription drugs that are taken, purposeful dilution of the urine sample, adulterants, all these things can alter these test results as well. "