To pee or not to pee: How long can cannabis be detected in urine?

Those who work in the armed forces, in law enforcement or industries requiring driving or operating heavy machinery may find themselves needing to submit to the occasional urinalysis to detect substances such as cannabis, cocaine, opiates and amphetamines.

 

Naturally, these employees might be curious about how urine tests work and what employers are looking for. If you are a cannabis consumer, for example, you might be wondering if that joint smoked last weekend is going to show up in the test results, too.

How long can cannabis be detected in urine?

Traces of cannabinoids and cannabis metabolites are detectable in human urine for up to 30 days. That said, detectability really depends on how much cannabis you have ingested, how it was consumed, how often it is consumed and how your body metabolizes cannabinoids.

Regular or heavier usage is associated with greater detectability. For example, notes The Mayo Clinic, a consumer who uses three times or less weekly would have traces of cannabis in his or her urine for as long as three days, moderate users who consume four or more times a week would test positive up to one week later, and daily users would show cannabis in their systems 15 to 30 or more days later.

“After the consumption of cannabis, cannabinoids are stored in our fat tissue and are metabolized slowly, and the speed of metabolism depends upon if and how quickly you are burning or storing fat,” explains Sarah Lovegrove, a registered nurse, cannabis educator and CEO of Sangha Collective. “The amount of time cannabis stays in our bodies is dependent upon a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, the amount and frequency of cannabis consumption, concurrent medication and substance use, dietary fat content, age, gender and composition of adipose (fat) tissue,” Lovegrove says.

How are urine tests performed?

A urine analysis is primarily looking for THC and THC metabolites, which can be detected within seconds of consumption. If the user ingests a product made with isolated CBD only, the test results will not detect the presence of THC and will come back as negative.

It should be mentioned that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the U.S. has noted “for practical purposes, all extracts that contain CBD will also contain at least small amounts of other cannabinoids. Although it might be theoretically possible to produce a CBD extract that contains absolutely no amounts of other cannabinoids, the DEA is not aware of any industrially utilized methods that have achieved this result.”

The urinalysis results will be positive if there is more than 50 nanograms of THC per ml present in the urine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out that “the urine test is based on detection of 11-nor-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol-9-carboxylic acid (9-carboxy-THC), a metabolite of delta-9-THC, which is the primary pharmacologically active component of cannabis.”

THC is broken down by the liver fairly quickly and, eventually, is eliminated through urine and excrement; metabolites stay in the body longer than THC itself. That being the case, it is important to note that the presence of cannabis metabolites does not mean a person was under the influence of drugs at the time of testing.

Urine testing is a non-invasive, common and inexpensive way to perform drug tests, but authorities can also test hair, which lengthens the timeline for detection, sometimes up to several months. Cannabis can be also detected for up to a couple of days with a blood test.

 

Gill Polard is the co-host of the High Friends podcast and the creator of The Her(B) Life website, which celebrates the feminine cannabis experience through industry interviews, essays and stories.

Want to keep up to date on what’s happening in the world of cannabis?  Subscribe to the Cannabis Post newsletter for weekly insights into the industry, what insiders will be talking about and content from across the Postmedia Network.