Author: James Anderson

A Review of Methods Used to Detect Methamphetamine from Indoor Air and Textiles in Confined Spaces

Drug testing is used to find out whether a person has used a substance in the recent past. Drug testing can sometimes also detect passive exposure to drugs, such as secondhand smoke or prenatal exposure. The length of time following exposure that a drug can be detected during testing can vary. Now, I’m working with colleagues at NIDA to study how long patients’ urine can test positive for other drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine so that we can help clinicians learn to interpret those drug tests better also. If a drug test result is positive during substance use disorder treatment, health care providers may prescribe additional or alternative treatments.

Effects of Passive Exposure to Secondhand Smoke

These results were lower compared to a previous average of 1524 μg/m3 airborne methamphetamine from controlled manufacture 12 possibly indicating that the methamphetamine levels from a typical clandestine laboratory were underrepresented in this study. Consequently, Wright et al. 13 tested for airborne methamphetamine in a previously contaminated property from suspected methamphetamine manufacture 18,22. Personal sampling pumps at a 1 L/min flow rate connected to ORBOTM-49P treated Amberlite® XAD®-2 resin sorbent tubes were used for sampling of the property.

3. Clothing and Textile Methamphetamine Extraction and Detection

The longer and heavier use is, the longer it takes to leave the system entirely. This interval may be longer in individuals who participate in heavy, chronic use; it may be detected in urine for up to a week. The effects of meth can last anywhere from around 8-24 hours, depending on how much is taken, the time of day, how it was administered (IV, oral, etc.) how well the kidneys and liver are functioning, and the individual’s body chemistry. Overall, being in a room where someone is smoking meth is safer than being in a meth lab. You may exhibit some signs of meth use, such as increased heart rate or body temperature, and you’d likely fail a drug test. Most of what we know about passive exposure to meth comes from research on meth labs.

Q. Drugs aside—how much can be learned about someone from a urine sample?

In most cases, simply being in a room with someone isn’t going to produce a significant contact high. The length of time THC remains in your system depends on how much you smoke and/or how much you were exposed to. THC’s metabolites remain in your body for much longer than the duration of effects.

Materials and Methods

It’s a very effective vasoconstrictor (a medication that decreases bleeding by making the blood vessels contract). It works very well, but you do have to warn the patient that if someone tests them for cocaine for the next few days, they could test positive. Sample preparation before chromatographic analysis can include clean-up and/or derivatization.

My clinical background is as an emergency physician, and in that context, I was usually looking for an infection, blood, pregnancy—that kind of thing. Urine is often a quick and easy first screen for illness and unseen injury that can help people get the timely treatment they need. MDMA tablets were placed in quart cans and the headspace was sampled using the PSPME device. Overall, when compared with SPME fibers under the same conditions the PSPME device was found to have higher extraction efficiencies for the piperonal monomer and dimer product ions. The authors concluded that children in a room where someone had smoked meth would likely be exposed to meth in the air and on surfaces even after the smoking session concluded. After accounting for the amount of smoke that would’ve been inhaled in the body, they determined one smoke released a significant amount of meth into the air.

The emergency and referral resources listed above are available to individuals located in the United States and are not operated by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). NIDA is a biomedical research organization and does not provide personalized medical advice, treatment, counseling, or legal consultation. Information provided by NIDA is not a substitute for professional medical care or legal consultation. If an initial drug screen is positive, a second round of more precise confirmatory testing is done to confirm or rule out that positive result. Drug testing is different than “drug checking,” which helps people who use drugs determine which chemicals are found in the substance they intend to take. I would tell general practitioners that they can phone a friend and make use of their consultants.

Meth can still be detected in the body hours or even months after the last use, depending on the method of testing.
Typically, the detection interval in urine for amphetamine-type stimulants is 3 to 5 days after last administration.
Interestingly, in an internal report by Raynor and Carmody 40 a sampling train was developed to analyze methamphetamine from contaminated properties.
NIDA is a biomedical research organization and does not provide personal medical advice, legal consultation, or medical review services to the public.

This study showed that secondhand exposure to marijuana could show up on a drug test.1 The study’s goal was to understand the health effects that passive exposure had on non-smokers. When referring to the Canadian model, urine tests will result in a positive for marijuana metabolites when the urine screen is equal to or higher than 50ng/ml, and oral fluid testing looks for THC at 4ng/ml or higher on the initial screen. While these levels may seem low to the layperson, they are sufficiently high to avoid a positive result due to second-hand smoke. Preliminary work by McKenzie et al. 42 determined that SPME could be used as an air sampling method. For this, the authors performed passive and dynamic SPME sampling in a custom-made glass chamber coupled to a methamphetamine vapor generation unit comprising a mass flow controller, a vaporization unit, and a syringe pump.

The drug tests, more specifically, are designed to have cut off levels high enough to remove the possibility of the drug test being positive due to second hand exposure. In other words, the cut off levels of any test would have to be very low in order to catch second hand exposure, like eating poppy seeds, or being around weed smokers without smoking anything yourself. Clothing was contaminated with aerosolized street-manufactured methamphetamine then sample swatches were liquid extracted and analysed by LC-MS. Mean pre-wash methamphetamine concentrations were 205 μg/100 cm2 and 120 μg/100 cm2 for loose-weave cotton and tighter-weave denim, respectively. Nomex® coveralls had a concentration range of 160 to 570 μg/100 cm2 while polyester/cotton overalls had a range of 83 to 880 μg/100 cm2 of drug. These findings showed that further comparison on sorption between differing materials is needed, as methamphetamine concentrations on fabrics can vary.

Interestingly, Serrano et al. 15 found that washing clothing with commercial detergent and a household washing machine effectively removed greater than 90% of methamphetamine, comparable to findings stated by Al-Dirbashi et al. 44. This could mean that methamphetamine is not irreversible bound to fabric fibers, thus, the drug could re-emit. Exposure to contaminated clothing and textiles can be a source of third-hand exposure, so it is beneficial to understand the transfer and emission of methamphetamine to textiles. Typically, solvent extraction or SPME followed by GC-MS or LC-MS analysis is used for compound analysis on fabrics, though there are no universally recommended guidelines for extracting methamphetamine from textile materials. A recent study by Russell et al. 77 examined contamination levels on building surfaces after simulated smoking events of in-house-produced methamphetamine hydrochloride. Surface values of 0.25 to 2.96 µg/cm2 were obtained after simulated smoking of 0.2 g methamphetamine, with varying concentrations obtained from the different materials surface wipe sampled.