RCs How do drug tests actually work?

[Treedweller]

Hello all,

I could have posted this in the wrong forum- not really sure, if i have feel free to move it.

*DISCLAIMER* I am not trying to avoid/enquire about how to avoid a drug test.

I am curious however, about the general mechanism of how a urine/blood/hair test works? Do these procedures have any way of picking up the alphabet soup of research chemicals that are available nowadays? Is it just a matter of running the test, flagging anything out of the ordinary and then identifying the specifics of the discrepancies? Obviously in different contexts different tests are used and i imagine there would be varying degrees of accuracy, but in a standard randomised roadside urine test for example, how likely would it be that something ultra-new like a novel cannabinoid or that phenmetrazine analogue would show up?

Essentially, will they pick up anything out of the ordinary and it is then just a matter of identifying that substance or is there a list of the major chemicals that could be found and how to identify them from test results?

In the same vein, if an analogue is close enough to the original structure, will a test designed to pick up the original molecule detect the analogue?

Thanks for reading and any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

 

[Keif' Richards]

No drug testing questions allowed at all from what I understand. No matter the content or intent. A drug test picks up on either a parent compound or its metabolite (the byproduct of the parent compound produced in vivo) through a variety of different analyses.

 

[Treedweller]

Cheers for the reply man, i understand if this gets closed i guess?

Following on from what you wrote, do these analyses have to be specifically designed for a particular chemical or metabolite? I don't have much knowledge about chemistry in regards to our biology but how would one determine what is supposed to be covered within the results? IE. how is it possible to determine that a strange result in testing is not just the result of a very specific physiology producing a false positive? Once again, this is just conjecture, i don't know anything about the specific chemistry stuff.

 

[sekio]

It depends on the type of drug test and the molecule in question.

Unfortunately there is no way to predict what will go positive on a dipstick and what won't. Dipsticks are normally ELISA assays, I thought, so they're measuring the drug or its metabolite binding to antibodies.