How to Detect Urine Adulteration and How to Prevent Drug Test Tampering

Although drug testing has become a practical, inexpensive way to determine whether your staff or your family has been abusing drugs, people has found ways to tamper testing samples to pass drug tests and yield negative results. Urine adulteration is a very popular way to cheat drug tests and the knowledge and understanding of how these adulterants work and how they affect drug testing is an important key in preventing drug test cheating and adulteration.

Urine adulteration is a common method practiced by those who want their drug testing results to come out negative even if they have the presence of illegal drugs in their system. Below are the most popular means of urine adulteration used to manipulate or tamper urine specimen and samples.

1. Substituting urine samples. For drug users, this is the easiest way to cheat drug tests but luckily, this is also the easiest cheat to detect or catch. Clean urine from another person (or even lemon soda) is secretly deposited into the drug testing collection cup to pass drug tests. Posting watchers or observers in the collecting room can prevent this method and discourage people from substituting urine samples. Different drug testing kits also have temperature strips located in their collecting cups, which can indicate freshness of the urine sample.

2. Adding substances to the urine sample. A lot of drug users try to cheat drug tests by adding readily available household items such as salt, vinegar, bleach, iodine tincture, detergent or eye drops to urine samples to pass drug tests. Different methods, though, can be used to detect the presence of these adulterants in urine samples. Adulteration strips, which come optional when purchasing home drug testing kits, can detect if urine has been diluted or tampered with by other substances.

3. Eating or drinking substances that can alter drug test results. Commercially available detoxifying kits and herbal concoctions claim to clean your system and help you pass drug tests, while some people drink copious amounts of water, cranberry juice or vinegar before drug testing to lower the concentration of the drug in their systems. Adulteration strips or simple tests can detect the levels of Creatinine, acidity and ionic strength in the urine. This, in turn, can determine whether a urine sample has been diluted or if the person being tested has been drinking a lot of water or diuretics just before testing.

4. Directly diluting urine samples. Another easy method that drug users do to cheat urine drug tests is to dilute their urine with normal water with the hopes of lowering the concentration of drugs in their system so that it passes the cut-off levels of the drug test. This can usually be detected if the urine sample is too clear or if the temperature of the sample falls below normal. Creatinine levels may also be checked to determine the possibility of urine adulteration.

More and more drug users and abusers slip away unnoticed even if they are put through stringent drug testing. With tons of information over the Internet on different ways to cheat drug tests, stringent testing for illegal substances has become a more difficult challenge. With the proper methods, good drug testing kits, keen observation and the awareness of how these cheating methods work, you can at least be confident that drug users won’t go by unnoticed in your home or work place.