Originally posted by: Babbles
Originally posted by: IHateMyJob2004
Originally posted by: Xanis
Originally posted by: Citrix
so can i get high with poppy seed bagels?
No, you can get just a high enough level of opiates to register on a drug screening. I would imaging to get high of poppy seed bagels, you would have to A LOT of them.
Correct:
Drug tests don't look for THC, they look for the cehcmicals they break down into. That's how eating a poppy seed bagel can cause a false positive.
Most drugs of abuse that are analyzed are actually analyzed via your metabolite; most things get metabolized one way or another in your body and furthermore most extraction techniques may hydrolyze or oxidize the metabolite. Furthermore just about all analytes are derivatized with some tri-methyl silane (TMS) something or another. For instance when testing for cocaine, a laboratory is actually testing for benzoylecgonine.
I failed to mention it earlier, but in regards to that poppy seed "myth" everything is also dependent on what is called the Cutoff - otherwise known as LOQ (Limit of Quantitation) in other analytical industries. The cutoff is essentially the point where anything at or above is reported as positive and anything below is negative. There is another number called the LOD (Limit of Detection or simply Detection Limit) that is the lowest number you can see. For example, if I remember correctly at the lab I worked at the LOD for THC (actually the derivatized metabolite) was 2 ng/mL however the cutoff was 15 ng/mL. Meaning that we could actually quantitatively detect down to 2ng/mL however we only reported those results that were 15 and above. This is done for many reasons, and in the drug testing business the biggest one may be the situation where you have a result that is 15.1ng/mL and somebody may try to argue that because it is so close to 15 how do you know it is accurate? Well we know because our accuracy actually goes all of the way down to 2, so it is like people who test positive from 2.0ng/mL - 14.9ng/mL get a sort of free ride (also why some people think they can easily 'fake' a drug screen after smoking pot - we can actually see it but it just may barely be under the cutoff and as such is reported as negative).
So getting back to opiates, the typical cutoff level is 2000ng/mL, meaning that you need to have more than just a little poppy seeds in you to even get anywhere near that level. Furthermore, and my memory is pretty hazy on this (I actually hated that job so I have tried to forget most of it) for a person to be reported as positive for codeine they must have both morphine
and codeine as positive (i.e. >2000ng/mL). It has something to do with how codeine will break down into morphine in drug form, however it may not do so if it was consumed as poppy seeds - or something like that. So if for some bizarre reason you did test positive for codeine but negative for morphine your results will actually be reported as negative for everything.
Or I can have that completely turned around and swapped out codeine with morphine, I don't remember it 100% spot on but it is still something along those same lines.
