How Long Does Weed Stay In Your System? 10-30 Days, Really?

When you get a new job or get a medical examination notice and you know that you’ve recently smoked weed (maybe even last night), you might think that you’re screwed. Not necessarily; there are ways how to get the weed out of your system and pass a drug test. Let us first address the question of how long does it take to pass a drug test:

4 weeks.

20 days.

“Two weeks tops, man!”

“Bro, we smoke so much you ain’t gonna pass a drug test in a month, yo.”

THC in weed is a very lipophilic molecule
How long does weed REALLY stay in your system?

Basically, almost everybody has an opinion about how long does weed stay in your system. Who is right? How many days does it take to clean your system of THC enough to pass a drug test?

Well, it depends (and we’ll talk on what). How fast is THC eliminated has a complicated answer but for the sake of a rough estimate, here is the best one:

Anywhere between 10 and 30 days.

This is a ballpark figure, a typical time window of how long does marijuana stay in your system. What really matters is if you’re closer to 10 days or 30 days, right? Here is what I’m going to write about:

  1. What influences how long does THC stay in your system? How much you smoke, how fat you are, what kind of test you have to pass etc.
  2. How to increase your chances of passing a drug test – what is more, how to 100% guarantee you’ll pass even if you smoke a joint before you go to the medical examination (I’m not even kidding, a friend did that just to “prove a point” – or more likely just to “smoke a joint”).

Tip: If you want to pass a drug test in less than 10 days, you should check out detox kits. The best ones are the Toxin Rid kits – you can read the full Toxin Rid review here.

Top 3 Factor That Influence How Long Does Weed Stay In Your System

When it comes to THC elimination, there are quite a few factors that determine if you’ll be able to pass a drug test in 10 days or in 30 days. Some of the minor ones are sex and age – both influence THC metabolism into THC-COOH and elimination of THC-COOH via kidneys.

However, we will focus on the top 3 most important ones – and something tells me that you kind of suspect what are the factors that influence how much time it will take for your system to clean the THC out:

1. How Much You Smoke? (One-Times Users, Recreation Users, Chronic Users)

Marijuana elimination is not rocket science. Rule No. 1 is that more you smoke the longer with THC stay in your body. The question is how much longer will a chronic user need to get weed out of his or her body vs. a one-time smoker who went to Amsterdam that one time?

Here at StonersRetreat, we believe in science and, fortunately, there is a study published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology from 1989. Basically, they tested 13 chronic users and confirmed that they were THC-positive even 25 days after the last joint. So, it’s safe to say that chronic users need quite a long time to get weed out of their system.

This is largely confirmed by Mayo Clinic study (Mayo is one of the most credible sources) which published these findings on how long does weed stay in your body:

weed elimination times table
Source: Mayo Clinic/Mayo Medical Laboratories at http://www.mayomedicallaboratories.com/test-info/drug-book/marijuana.html

After a single use, for example, the weed stays in your system for 3 days on average. However, in the small print, we see that these THC detection rates can be influenced by other parameters as well – so it really can be anywhere from 1 day to 1 week, right?

“…there is no way of predicting or knowing how long someone would test positive with any kind of certainty.” Ryan Vandrey, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins University

The best we can do is work with the knowledge we have from the published research.

2. How Fat Are You?

Yeah, having fat is not good even when it comes to cleaning THC out of your system. THC is a fat-soluble molecule and it basically dissolves in our fat reserves. If you have a tummy or a big bun, that’s where the weed is stored. The time of how quickly we can pass a drug test for weed will be prolonged if you have more fat.

When we smoke weed, the active molecule THC goes into the bloodstream and from there in the fat tissue. Whatever THC is left in the blood will go out of our body via kidneys (translation – THC will be in your urine). The problem is that a week or even a month after we’ve smoked, the THC in the fat is being slowly released into the bloodstream and from there it goes to the urine. The length of stay of weed in your system is thus heavily expanded to more than 10 days.

Here the rule No. 2: The more fat you have, the more THC can be stored in your body and the longer it will take to get the weed out of your system.

Especially problematic is if you eat munchies after having a joint. I know, who doesn’t like munchies, but if you stuffing yourself on Doritos or Taco Bell, your body will start building fat tissue while THC is in your blood. This will literally build the weed in your fat and will prolong how long the weed will stay in your system.

body mass index influences how long does it take for weed to leave the system

Of course, if you want to speed up THC elimination in the long run, you should lose weight. Here are 7 tips on how to lose weight to get you started.

3. What Kind Of Drug Test Are You Facing? (cut-off rates are essential)

Most of the companies doing the drug testing use urine drug tests (in fact more than 90% of tests are pee-in-a-cup ones). Different characteristics of your urine sample, including THC content, are determined with test strips.

Now, for weed, tests strips can detect anywhere from 100 ng/ml of THC to 20 ng/ml. These are the cut-off rates and we came to the third rule:

Rule No. 3: The higher the cut-off rates of a drug test, the more likely you are to pass that test. 

According to Paul Carry, director of the Toxicology and Drug Monitoring Laboratory at University of Missouri: “(for 50 ng/ml cut-off) it would be unlikely for a chronic user to produce a positive urine drug test result for longer than 10 days after the last smoking episode.” However, if the cut-off rate is 20 ng/ml, even frequent users would test THC positive after 21 days.

It is a held opinion that most companies use 50 ng/ml cut-off rates test. However, what the actual cut-off rates are is a highly valued secret. According to Quest Diagnostics, who do more than 9.5 million urine drug tests, the rate of people testing positive is rising every year. Does that mean that they are lowering the cut-off rate?

How To Know When Weed Is Out Of Your System?

The bottom line is that you never know for sure how long does it take to pass a drug test. The only thing we can be certain about is that failing to pass a drug test will result in a world of pain.

big lebowski weed reference
Like Walter Sobchak said.

To avoid getting in a world of pain here are few ways how to reduce the time that weed stays in your system (or in fact, pass a urine drug test while being high at the same time – yeah, ‘there are ways, Dude, you don’t even want to know’ (Walter Sobchak).

How To Get Weed Out Out Of Your System Faster

We can influence how long does weed stay in your system by detoxing. This basically means that you speed up your metabolism to flush the drugs out faster than it normally would.

As a part of that, there are two distinct approaches – doing a natural detox with home remedies (starts with drinking a lot of water) which are effective to a point, but the second approach of using products specially designed to reduce how long does weed stay in your system is much more effective.

And we’ll get to the how to pass a urine drug test while high – newsflash, it’s a synthetic urine method.

Weed Detox With Natural Remedies

This is the drill you probably already know about. I’ll go ahead and give you some natural detox pointers and then we’ll see if Walter Sobchak is impressed by natural remedies.

How to get marijuana out of your system naturally?

  1. Drink a lot of water. That your #1 rule there – the logic is that more you drink, more you pee and more drugs are naturally eliminated out of your system.
  2. Do physical activity, especially cardio. It will make you sweat and the weed should naturally clean out of your system via sweat. And you’ll probably smell of weed-sweat.
  3. Go to the sauna. Same rational here – sauna will make you sweat that sweet weed-sweat.
  4. Caffeine and other things that make you pee. Coffee or Coca-Cola, as well as B vitamins (like niacin), will make you pee and in theory that should reduce how long does weed stay in your system.
  5. Vinegar? I’ve read somewhere that drinking vinegar should speed up weed elimination. I don’t really get why.
  6. Pectin? Again, it should have to do something about weed sticking to the stomach lining and pectin flushing it out…I don’t know, these home remedies for weed are, well, not scientifically proven and here at StonersRetreat we’re all about scientifically proven ways of passing a drug test.

So is Walter impressed by the home remedies for passing a drug test for weed?

10 days for weed to leave the body
Walter is not impressed.

Here’s why: If you would be THC positive for 30 days without doing anything, natural detox for weed will bring the number of days down to maybe 25? Basically, if drinking sh*tloads of water and running would do the trick, so many people (more than half a million years in the US alone) would not fail a drug test.

Weed Detox With Detox Drinks, Detox Pills And Other Weed Detox Products

How long does weed stay in your system can be influenced with specially designed drinks and pills – the so-called weed detox drink and pills.

There is quite a variety of marijuana drinks and the bottom line is that they do work to some degree. Basically, you have better chances of passing a drug test by gulping down a detox drink like QCarbo16. However, they don’t do wonders – for example, if you should wait for 30 days to get the weed out of your system, with a good detox drink you’ll probably need something like 20 days.

If you really want to do a thorough THC detox and reduce the number of days it takes for weed to leave your system, you should go for a combo (detox drinks, pills, fibers combined).

The most common (and effective) weed detox combo is the Toxin Rid line. You should check out our Toxin Rid reviews here to see what we think of it (it’s actually a pretty good bet you’ll drastically reduce how long does marijuana stay in your system – even to about 1 week).

Here is the summary of how quickly can you pass a urine drug test with (if it would take 30 days the normal way):

  • With natural detox25 days.
  • Using detox kits – 7 days (with the best Toxin Rid products).

So if you have a drug test in a matter of days and you now know how long does weed stay in your system, you’re best of doing detox kits.

One thought on “How Long Does Weed Stay In Your System? 10-30 Days, Really?

  • September 10, 2019 at 3:59 am
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    This is the best information I found on the topic and I’ve been researching for about a week thank you

    Reply

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