How Long Does THC Stay in Your Urine?

Weed is the most popular federally illicit drug in the United States. And employers know it. Indeed, cannabis is the most commonly detected drug in workplace urine drug tests.

Setting aside for a moment the totally legitimate criticisms of workplace drug screenings, and debates about the efficacy and accuracy of the tests and the generally humiliating, privacy-invading feel of the whole operation, let’s drill down into one simple question: how long does THC stay in your urine?

Overview: It’s… Complicated

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer. So let’s simplify things by re-framing the question. Certainly, you’re not here for an academic treatise on cannabinoid metabolism.

More likely, you want to know how long THC stays in your urine because you’re up against a drug test. So really, the question isn’t how long does THC stay in your urine? The real question is, when will the amount of THC in your urine drop below the threshold for testing positive?

To answer that all-important, make-or-break question, it’s crucial to understand why and how THC ends up in your urine in the first place and the variables that control how quickly your body eliminates it.

How Does THC End Up In Your Urine?

Trick question! THC, or more specifically, the delta-9 THC that gets you high doesn’t end up in your urine at all! So why fear a urine drug test?

Because urine screenings aren’t looking for psychoactive, illicit delta-9 THC molecules. Instead, they detect what your body produces as a waste product after it metabolizes the THC you consume.

That waste product is called a metabolite. THC’s version is THCCOOH, which scientists call a ‘carboxy.’ Your excretory systems are in the business of removing waste metabolites like THCCOOH. To do so, THCCOOH joins up with a uronic acid called glucuronic acid, which passes out of the body in your urine.

Summing up, when you inhale THC in weed smoke, your body rapidly metabolizes it, getting you high just as fast. Your metabolism turns that psychoactive THC into the THCCOOH, which you then excrete through waste products (urine and feces). All told, 15 to 20 percent of the THC dose makes its way out of your body by way of acidic urinary metabolites.

How Long Does Weed Stay in My Urine: Examining All The Variables

Urine drug tests for weed, then, are essentially trying to detect evidence that your body is still working on eliminating the waste products from your last encounter with THC.

They don’t show when you last smoked. They can’t tell if you were high when you pissed. All they reveal is that your body is still working on eliminating THCCOOH, which means that your mody had to have metabolized an illicit amount of THC. At some point, at least.

With a test so dependent on all of the complex bodily processes involved in human metabolism, no wonder it’s impossible to offer a simple, straightforward answer your burning question, how long does THC stay in my urine? Here, then, are a list of the most influential variables.

THC Dose

As mentioned above, researchers are confident that 15 to 20 percent of a Delta-9 THC dose ends up eliminated via urine. Therefore, the more potent your weed is, the more metabolites will end up in your pee. This also explains how test administrators can correlate the tiny amounts they detect with a real dose of cannabis.

Use Habits

Logically enough, more habitual smokers are vulnerable to urine detection longer than those with more occasional habits. Actually, a lot more. So make sure you know the detection times.

One-time cannabis users will piss clean in as little as five days, or it could take as long as eight. Smoke just a few times a week? One and a half to two and half weeks and you should be fine. Smoke every day except a couple? It’ll take you a month to a month and a half, or more, to eliminate all the THCCOOH from your system.

And if you’re a daily user, expect a two-month time frame before your urine drug test will come back negative. One major study reported that a subject with daily use habits took 77 days before posting 10 consecutive negative tests. Here’s a handy table of these average detection windows. Again, these aren’t hard limits. They’re averages. And your body could be above or below them.

  • 1-time use: clean in 5-8 days
  • 2-4 times a week: 11-18 days
  • 5-6 times a week: 33-48 days
  • Daily use: 50-65 days, up to 77

How Long Does It Take for THC to Leave My Urine?

The answer to the question, how long does it take for THC to leave my urine, is a fairly straightforward one on the surface. It takes as long as it takes your body to metabolize THCCOOH and expel it as waste.

But remember, the important thing is for enough THC to leave your urine so that you pass your test. Having totally clean urine, in other words, isn’t completely necessary. What’s important is how much time you have to let your body do its thing.

But since everyone’s body is unique, the amount of time it takes for THC to leave your urine will depend not just on dose and use habit, as explained above. It will also depend on additional factors, like your diet and exercise, your body weight and body fat index. Even your age and hormone function play a role.

Metabolism refers to the many, many chemical processes going on inside your body to keep you alive and functioning. Metabolizing cannabis is part of all of those processes, so increasing your metabolic rate—how fast your body is working through all those processes—will cause THC to leave your urine more quickly. This is why a number of factors influence the length of time that THC can be found in urine.

Factors that Decrease How Long THC Stays in Your Urine

So let’s look at a couple of these factors. First, diet and exercise.

Yes, food can actually increase your metabolism, but some foods work better than others. Fatty foods, for example, only raise your base metabolic rate by up to five percent. But proteins can raise your metabolic rate from 20 to 30 percent! Eat more protein, and THC will leave your urine more quickly because your body is metabolizing at a higher rate. Research also shows how hot, spicy foods can have a dramatic impact on increasing metabolic rate, too.

Exercise and physical activity play a big role, too. The more you work your muscles, the more your muscles need energy to burn. That’s why exercising regularly can give you a higher metabolism. You’re essentially training your body to burn more energy at a faster rate.

You’re also building muscle, and muscle tissue demands way more energy than fatty tissues, increasing your metabolic rate even further. That’s why weight and body-fat index matters, too. The more muscle you have versus fat, the faster your metabolism will be. And the more mass your body has, the more energy it needs to burn.

These physiological factors impact the average times listed above. So for example, two people can consume the same dose of THC or consume cannabis with the same frequency but still have different timespans for how long it takes THC to leave their urine.

The person with more muscle, or who exercises more and is more active, or who eats more protein, or who is younger, will fall on the shorter end of the average timelines listed above. The other person, with more fat, who’s less active or older, will fall on the longer end of the average timelines based on dose and use frequency.

Cleanse Using a Detoxification Program

If you have at least seven days before your test, a detoxification program will speed up the body’s natural cleansing process and completely rid your body of the THC in your system in about a week. These programs also come with home testing kits to verify you are clean.

Cleanse the Same Day

If your test is coming up sooner, certain detox drinks are known to flush your system the same day you drink them keeping you clean for a period of four to six hours.

Inhaled Or Ingested?

How long does THC stay in your urine after you eat edibles compared with smoking or vaping weed? Considering how different an edibles high can feel next to a high from smoking weed, one might expect the THC levels in urine to vary.

In truth, they do. Edibles will make THC stay in your urine a bit longer, from several hours to an extra day. But that’s not a significant enough degree to make a real difference in the outcome of your test.

In other words, both methods of administering your THC dose are going to put enough THCCOOH in your urine to make you fail a urine drug test. But because of the way your body processes THC when you eat it—converting it to a psychoactive metabolite called 11-hydroxy-THC, and then into THCCOOH, which the test detects—edibles can leave you at risk longer, based on your use habits, compared to smoking or vaping cannabis.

Physiological Factors

When it comes to your own body, two factors play a key role in how long THC stays in your urine. The first is your metabolic rate. If you have a higher metabolism, you’ll excrete THCCOOH faster.

The second is your level of hydration. The more fluids you ask your body to process, and the more urine you thus produce, the quicker THC metabolites will leave your body.

Summing Up: How Long Does THC Stay In Your Urine?

Drug urine tests for weed have all kinds of shortcomings and inadequacies. But they are good at one thing: revealing whether or not the person being tested has consumed cannabis, in some form, at some point in the past. Unfortunately, for many employers with zero tolerance policies, that’s enough to fire you or move on to the next candidate. Knowing how long THC stays in your urine, therefore, is crucial knowledge for anyone who uses marijuana, regardless of how often or how much.

(Updated from a previous post.)

The post How Long Does THC Stay in Your Urine? appeared first on High Times.

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