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People often see both terms applied when taking a sample or urine saliva, blood, or hair to look for drug …
How accurate are drug tests?
There are not drug tests that can consistently guarantee 100% accuracy. However, there are highly reliable drug tests with a 99% accuracy rate. Accuracy in drug screening depends on several factors.
- Technology: lab tests will usually be the most accurate, and quality instant tests can vary from unreliable to almost as precise as lab tests depending on their quality.
- The individual drug: some drugs can be detected more accurately than others due to their chemical makeup.
- Skills of the tester: an unskilled individual or organization can alter the precision of the results.
- Procedures: the procedures used to ensure the proper handling and processing of the sample can affect the results’ accuracy.
What type of drug test is the most accurate?
In terms of precision, the most accurate drug test you can get is a blood drug test. However, these tests have a short detection window, so you won’t find evidence of drug use beyond a few hours.
If you want a longer detection period, the most accurate test would be the hair drug test. While it is not as exact as a blood drug test, it can detect drug use up to 90 days before, but not earlier than 3-5 days. In addition to being extremely precise, both tests are almost impossible to tamper with.
Despite their accuracy and resistance to adulteration, blood and hair drug tests are not widely used. Why is that?
- They are the most expensive types of tests.
- They can only be done and analyzed in a lab.
- They require medically trained personnel and specialized equipment.
- Results can take up to a week.
- Blood testing is highly invasive.
What other accurate alternatives are there?
There are many reasons why blood and hair tests can be inconvenient. They may be too expensive for your budget or the results may take too long for your needs. Or maybe their detection windows don’t fulfill your needs: blood testing covers only a few hours, while hair testing starts detecting drugs after 3-5 days.
Fortunately, there are other options that can offer up to 99% accuracy while being cheaper, producing fast results and covering from a few hours to a few days of use. Urine and saliva drug testing are effective and quality tests can be almost as precise as lab testing.
Saliva drug testing can detect drugs between a few minutes and 3 days of consumption. Urine drug testing can detect substances between a few hours and a week. Unlike saliva drug tests, urine drug tests are easier to tamper with, but some offer adulterant detection to compensate.
How to make sure you buy an accurate drug testing kit?
You will find an abundance of urine drug tests in the market. While saliva drug tests are not as popular, you can find a wide variety of these drug screens. So, how do you make sure you’re choosing an accurate product? Look for the following tags:
- FDA approved
- 99% accuracy
- CLIA waived (for urine drug tests only)
