Does pseudoephedrine make you fail a urine test for meth?

Published July 3, 2010

Question by anthony p: Does pseudoephedrine make you fail a urine test for meth?

Best answer:

Answer by Ryan
Pseudoephedrine will show as pseudoephedrine. I don’t think you will have any trouble with it being mistaken for meth. UAs are pretty sensitive to different chemicals. You might remember that several olympic athletes got in trouble for having pseudoephedrine in their systems. It is a banned substance in athletics.

Edit:
Ok, you might get a false positive depending on the method used for testing the body fluid. Blood tests only differ in the length of time a drug can be detected, and the ability to predict when a drug was consumed. They are not more accurate than UAs in terms of false positives. What is most important is the method of analysis.

There are 2 main methods. One is called EMIT (enzyme multiplied immunoassay technique) This one is cheap and notorious for false positives. If you took pseudoephedrine in the last 2-3 days, you will test positive for meth about 30% of the time.

In high profile settings, a positive EMIT test must be confirmed by a second and different method of testing. This is more expensive but virtually fool proof. It is called GC/MS (Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry). If this type of test if performed, regardless of using urine or blood, cold medicine will not result in a positive test for meth.

So it really depends on your situation. Most employee testing is done by EMIT for obvious cost reasons, but if you are in a high profile job, they would probably follow up with the GC/MS. If you are worried about probabtion or a law enforcment type of situation, a GC/MS will have to be done for a positive test to hold up in court.

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