Before I started researching and writing about drug testing procedures and the various ways you can pass them, I was subject to a couple of drug tests which really annoyed me because I failed. At that point I knew nothing about using synthetic urine for a drug test.
One was for a part-time job, and I failed because I was found to be positive for smoking weed. I’d had one joint a week before. Absolutely ludicrous.
The second time I stopped smoking weed for two weeks before the drug test, and exercised loads, sweated, and drink plenty of water. I passed that. But it seemed like one hell of a lot of hard work to test clean. Plus, why the hell should I have to do all that just so I can smoke weed at the weekends, which doesn’t impact on my ability to do my job anyway?
So that spurred me on, and this guide is part of helping others avoid failure for no good reason. Consider this my full knowledge on synthetic urine and drug testing, based on my research and experiences.
It’s never going to be comprehensive, but I think this underground guide to using synthetic urine to pass drug tests is pretty much as good as you will get, in terms of the information you need to make the right choices to pass a drug test.
Why You Can’t Trust Drug Detection Times
Let’s start this guide by telling you exactly what you have to do to pass a drug test.
You have to be clean. That’s obvious, but it’s not a linear thing. You can’t just say “Don’t smoke weed for six days and you will be clean…..”.
How quickly you get clean will depend on several things:
- Your metabolism and physical make up
- The type of drug(s) taken
- The doses and the frequency of taking them
- The quality of what you are taking
- How much exercise you take
- The amount of water you drink
- If you do other things like smoke a lot of tobacco or alcohol
Some of the things that feed into all this will slow down the metabolizing and expulsion of the drug metabolites, while others will speed it up. But by how much those things happen, it’s impossible to tell.
You can’t even look at the average elimination times for the major types drugs, because that’s misleading as well.
Let’s take a look at a few here so you can see what I mean (these are elimination times for urine drug testing):
- Opiates up to 3 days
- Marijuana 3-30 days (this has a huge variation)
- Methadone up to 12 days
- Benzodiazepines four days (which can be up to 6 weeks)
- Hallucinogens (LSD mainly) four days but can be far longer
- MDMA up to 4 days
- Cocaine up to 3 days
Now that’s the average times for infrequent users. Let’s take marijuana as an example of how you simply cannot use those time brackets to know when you will be clean.
If you smoke a single joint the first time in months, you’ll probably be clean in a few days. If you smoke marijuana every day though, the metabolites build up in your body, and it could be two weeks or longer before the last of those metabolites exit the body.
Even worse for marijuana users, the shape of marijuana metabolites means they clinging to cells in the body. You could test clean for several days, weeks down the line, but then if you take a test a few days later, you could fail it.
The bottom line for a chronic weed smoker is it could take you 60 days or longer to get genuinely clean to pass a urine sample drug test. Although the durations are often shorter, that’s the same for many other types of drugs, you’re looking at as long as 4-6 weeks if you’re a chronic user.
So you have to either be genuinely clean, which is tough, or you have to obscure the fact you are not, which means using a fake sample.
What Happens When Go For A Drug Test?
When you go to your test, you’ll rock up with some ID and after waiting a few minutes, you’ll be led into a room. Because it will be an unsupervised drug test (supervised drug tests are usually only for law enforcement purposes), you’ll be able to go behind a screen or into another room out of sight when you submit your urine sample. That’s why synthetic urine is great for unsupervised drug testing.
You submit the sample and hand it over. Check the temperature strip on the side, which they have to do legally within four minutes of getting the sample (and legally you must have a reading between 90°F and 100°F), and record it. That’s it.
The lab assistant will then do some basic validity tests on your sample. This will include recording the temperature, specific gravity, pH, levels of creatinine and checking for the presence of any adulterants.
It will then be labeled up, and usually, within 24 hours the basic testing is done. This is called Immunoassay testing. If that doesn’t pick up any issues (by basically testing it against a reactive panel for each type of drug, hence five-panel drug test, 10-panel drug test etcetera) then you’re notified that you’re clean.
However, if positives show up, then it is subjected to more rigorous analysis, known as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry testing.
So mostly you’ll get your results within 24 hours, or at least the person commissioning the test will. If you are told it’s going to be another day or so, then that’s a sure sign that something has been flagged up.
But don’t panic just yet, because it’s widely known that up to 15% of samples get flagged as false positives. Usually, on a second run, those false positives don’t show up again.
you should have been asked about certain things before you submit your sample, but at this point, you might be contacted to ask if you have eaten anything or drunk anything, or are on any medication, that is known to provoke false positives like the humble poppy seed can for opiates (although this is getting rarer with modern analysis methodology).
How Synthetic Urine Works For A Drug Test
So now you understand exactly what happens with a drug test, you understand that for synthetic urine to pass is real, it’s going to have to be one hell of a good quality product.
You are literally smuggling in a fake sample and submitting it instead of your own urine. It will go through potentially three stages of scrutiny as I’ve outlined above, and it needs to be able to pass all of them.
At its most basic level, synthetic urine has to have the following characteristics in common with real urine:
- Balanced to be within the specific gravity range of human urine
- Must fall within the pH range that human urine lays within
- Has to look like real human urine
- Ideally, it should smell and froth like urine
- Has to contain creatinine (not creatine, creatinine is the waste product of it)
- The best synthetic urine will also contain urea and uric acid
Any synthetic urine review which doesn’t mention all that stuff should be binned immediately. Just don’t trust them. Those are the absolute basics, and if they aren’t mentioned then get out of there.
The most basic brands out there, brands that you should avoid, like Magnum, don’t contain most of those things, and the things they do are often not in the right proportion. They are basically cheap products that are never going to pass a modern drug test.
I’ll talk you through the best brands to buy later, but you’re literally looking at less than a handful of fake urine products out there that tick most of those points from the list above.
On top of that, you have to realize that the most common reason that people fail drug tests using fake urine products is not because of what is in the fake urine at all. It’s simply because it was submitted outside that magic temperature range of 90°F and 100°F, meaning it couldn’t be real human urine. But don’t worry, I will talk you through the different heating methods in a minute.
So how it works is you make your choice on the synthetic urine for your drug test, buy it (well in advance), and you will then prepare the sample around 30 minutes before you leave to take along and smuggle in.
It can be quite nerve-wracking, and you have to get several things right, so I want to talk you through all of that right now.
My Experiences With Using Fake Pee To Pass Drug Tests
The first time I used fake urine, I used Quick Fix. It has a good reputation built over several years, and I saw good reps about it online as well.
I also knew that it uses a heat pad. Apparently good quality one, but it can still kick out variable heat, or fail in some way. So the first time I went to do a drug test, this is what I did:
- First, I microwaved the premixed quick fix gently for about 10 seconds in bursts until there was a reading on the temperature strip of just over 90°F. Always do this if you have the time and means because it means the heatpad will not be working as hard to initially heat the sample up.
- Before I started the microwaving, I activated the heatpad. When the sample was in the right temperature range, I attached the heatpad that was already warm to it. This creates heat efficiency and lowers your chance of the heatpad running out of steam before you submit the sample.
- I also made sure that I prepared a flask of hot (not boiling) water in advance. But crucially, it should be pretty hot so it passes heat quickly. This is not something on the instructions of any fake urine product you’re fine, but you’ll see why it’s great advice in a moment.
- I then used two pairs of underpants, tucking the sample in between them so it was close my skin, but not able to get too hot against it. Over the top, I was wearing baggy jogging bottoms so that the fake sample wasn’t visible.
- I then went to the testing center and just before I went in, checked the sample temperature. I found that it had cooled slightly and was only just reading above 90°F. That was too fine a margin of error for me, so I then poured some of the hot water from the flask over it until the temperature raised a few degrees, which gave me peace of mind.
- After that, it was simply a case of going and registering, answering some questions, going behind a screen, and submitting a fake sample into the supplied cup. It’s important to point out here there was no hassle. I wasn’t searched, in fact they aren’t allowed to unless it’s for law enforcement purposes, and I wasn’t scrutinized closely at all to be honest.
The bottom line is that I passed that drug test. However, I did find the whole process of messing around with the heatpad, and having to check it and rely on a flask of hot water (if I had not prepared that I would have had to find a restroom with a hot water tap) stressful, and I vowed I’d see if there were better methods out there afterward.
Most Synthetic Urine Reviews Don’t Tell You This
A few years back, I started to notice (along with some other people) that the number of failures being reported on forums and social media for certain brands of fake urine was suddenly going up. Particularly those done at the big guys like Quest Diagnostics.
The suspicion began to grow that they had figured out a foolproof way to spot fake samples. Because this continued for over a year or more, and it seemed to target most of the brands out there, but not all, people started to look into it.
It turned out that every single brand that was being spotted during analysis contained artificial preservatives called biocides.
That included most of the brands that had previously had a big following, like Magnum and U-Pass. In one suite, the drug testing labs had spotted a common footprint that allowed them to rule out most fake samples.
The truth is that the brands that pass now have to fulfil the following “holy trilogy” of criteria:
- They must contain as many of the ingredients that could be looked for during validity tests as possible, along with displaying other characteristics of human urine.
- The heating method, whether it’s a heatpad or heat activator powder, must be good quality and keep the sample within that narrow 10° temperature range required to be valid as a human sample.
- The fake urine mustn’t contain biocides.
The reason most reviews of fake urine out there don’t mention all this is because they are pushing those awful brands which are out of date in terms of formula, and that rely on biocides to preserve them on the shelf.
What’s The Best Synthetic Urine To Buy?
I really hope this guide to using fake pee for drug tests successfully has helped you. There’s enough here in terms of detail to get you through a basic drug test.
Don’t get me wrong here, the more expensive the drug test, and the more that drug test matters to the person commissioning it, the more likely you are to get caught out using fake urine. But, the basic employment drug testing, from simple five panel testing, all the way through to the higher levels of panels and scrutiny that federal employees undergo, what I’ve told you here will get you through.
So let’s conclude here by telling you what the best synthetic urine brands out there are. You already know the criteria they have to fulfill to be in this very exclusive club.
At the budget end of the scale is Quick Fix. I’ve already talked about it, as it’s the first fake urine product I ever used.
Quick Fix has a basic formula that has most of the basic characteristics required. However, it doesn’t look amazingly like urine, and it doesn’t smell like it either. But for a basic pre-employment drug test, and costing only $40, it’s the best value fake urine product out there.
Next up the scale for me is Sub Solution. That’s what I’ve used for the two drug tests since my first. Drug tests I passed using Sub Solution.
It costs $80, twice as much as Quick Fix. But you getting twice the product. It contains all the basics of Quick Fix, plus 11 other chemicals found in human urine. It even looks, smells, and froths like urine.
The other good thing about Sub Solution is it doesn’t rely on a heat pad. It uses heat activator powder, so you don’t even need a microwave.
Simply transport the sample to the place you’re going to submit it. Before you go in, tap in about 1/3 of the heat activator powder and gently shake it. If it needs warming more, add a little more. In as little as two minutes, you’ll have a perfectly heated sample.
Last on my list is the ultimate fake urine out there. It’s made by the same company that makes Sub Solution (Clear Choice).
It’s called Quick Luck, and it’s almost identical to sub solution, but with a couple of important benefits that mean, there’s very little “luck” about using it.
Firstly, it’s premixed, whereas Sub Solution comes a powder you have to mix with water to prepare the sample. That makes it perfect for on-the-job/short notice drug testing.
Secondly, it’s slightly more complex in the formula, so it stands an even more chance of passing even the highest level of scrutiny.
So there you go, that’s everything you need to know to successfully submit to pass a drug test. Everything I told you here works just as well for males as females, and because you’re going to be behind a screen and out of sight, you don’t have to worry about the position you submit the fake sample in either.
Giving you the lowdown on my passions around avoiding drug tests and being smart.