Author: Gary Jackson

How long does marijuana stay in your system? Blood, urine, and hair

There isn’t much you can do to speed up the amount of time it takes for THC metabolites to leave your system. Cannabis that’s ingested may remain in your system slightly longer than cannabis that’s smoked. More potent cannabis, which is higher in THC, may also stay in your system for longer. Some of these factors, such as body mass index (BMI) and metabolic rate, aren’t related to the drug itself, but to how your body processes it.

After use, cannabinoids reach the hair follicles via small blood vessels, as well as from sebum and sweat surrounding the hair shaft. Blood tests typically detect recent cannabis use, or use that has occurred within the last 2–12 hours. However, in cases of heavy use, it’s been detected 30 days after last use.

How Long Does Weed Stay in Your System?

If you are an occasional user, weed can stay in your saliva for up to 72 hours. Weed can be detected in saliva just an hour after consuming cannabis. After using cannabis, our liver metabolizes THC into THC-COOH which is then stored in urine. Effects appear almost immediately after smoking cannabis. However, it may take 1–3 hours for effects to peak when cannabis is ingested.

Tests can detect weed for up to 30 days in your urine, up to 24 hours in your saliva, and up to 12 hours in your blood. Each person has a unique metabolism that processes marijuana at a different rate, further complicating the picture. Even among people of the same gender and age, individual lifestyle choices such as level of exercise and eating habits may also affect the amount of time required to pass a drug test. Those with higher levels of fat content store cannabinoids more readily than leaner folks. On average, urine tests can detect THC from three to seven days.

Exercise and sweat

So if you want to flush marijuana out your system, start drinking a lot of water a few days before the test. The amount of produced sweat is subjective, and so the accuracy of this testing method is somewhat limited—and it’s hard to control if someone wore the patch all the time, of course. THC metabolites can be detected in sweat for about one to four weeks.

THC can still be detected in new hair growth for up to 90 days. When you use marijuana, your liver breaks it down into metabolites. About 20% of the metabolites leave your body through urine, while the other 80% are removed as feces. A urine drug test looks for the metabolites in your urine. It would be much more helpful if everyone would provide last smoked info, body stats, and if they passed or not.

Will one hit of weed make you fail a urine test?

We strive to create content that is clear, concise, and easy to understand. I honestly think it’s hilarious that a well-written article’s comments page got turned into a Quora of repeat “Will I pass? Daniel, don’t hold me to it, but I think you’ll pass, especially since you’ve lost a lot of weight. You’ll need a lot of food rich in fiber and antioxidants so stick to fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to detox faster.

This is drawn out to around one week for a more sensitive 20 ng/mL threshold. Medical News Today says first-time smokers may have cannabis detected for “about 3 days,” while more consistent smokers at three to four times per week can have it detected for “5-7 days” afterward. Daily smokers can expect tests to detect weed for at least 30 days. A quick internet search reveals lots of options with most kits containing blends that include things like milk thistle, dandelion, ginseng, and more.

The half-life of THCCOOH is hours in occasional users compared to 3-13 days in regular users. Once a specific test is selected, the experimenter must then choose its sensitivity, or the cutoff concentration of THC-COOH above which a test is considered positive. The most common cutoff for most marijuana urine tests is 50 ng/mL, but cutoffs can be as low as 15ng/mL and as high as 100ng/mL—each of which result in widely different detection windows. A 2017 study published in Drug and Alcohol Review analyzed hair samples collected from 136 subjects and found detectable levels of THC in 77% of chronic consumers and 39% of light consumers. However, there’s mounting evidence that hair follicle drug testing cannot detect cannabis accurately.