Drug Half Life and Accurate Drug Testing

Every drug has its own unique drug half life which can be used to determine if a person has ingested the substance recently. Whether illicit or legally prescribed, a drugs half life is the amount of time which is required for the trace concentration of a drug within the red blood cells to be reduced by one half. Simply put, a half life is the duration of time it takes for half the amount of a drug to leave the body. Heavy or consistent drug use will increase the half life of the drug while infrequent users will expel the toxins from their body at a faster rate and make it more difficult to expose in a home drug test.

Half life of the most commonly abused illicit drugs follows: Regular marijuana users retain a drug half life of 10 days while sporadic users have a THC half life (the active and traceable component in marijuana) of only 2 days. The half life of methamphetamines is 15-20 hours while the drug half life of cocaine is between 1-2 hours.

Half life of the most commonly abused prescription drugs follows: The painkiller opiates, such as Vicodin, hydrocodone, hydrocodeine, oxycontin, Percocet, and oxycodone all have a half life between 4 and 6 hours.  Anti-anxiety benzodiazepines such as Xanax and Valium have a half life between 14-18 hours.

Understanding the differences between the half lives of drugs is essential when determining the best method for drug testing. Knowing the drug half life of a particular illicit substance is crucial when using drug testing kits to assess if someone has been using and abusing drugs. When you can ascertain exactly how long traces of a drug remain in the subject’s body, it is much easier to determine which testing option you should use. Urinalysis and urine test strips work best for drugs with longer half lives such as marijuana and opiates. If you are trying to determine a pattern of past drug use, with substances which have a longer drug half life, you should use the hair follicle drug test because it can detect traces of drugs up to 3 months after they were last used. The hair drug test will still show traces of drug use amongst quickly expelled drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine as well as long half life drugs such as marijuana.  When trying to uncover and stop substance use and abuse, considering the half lives of each drug will enable you to find the most precise drug testing kit for accurate results unique to your situation.

Frank Shepard is a valued consultant on <a href="http://www.completedrugtestingsolutions.com/blog">drug addiction</a> and <a href="http://www.completedrugtestingsolutions.com">home drug testing</a>.