Despite legal pot, clean urine still needed for some employers

“Synthetic Urine” is one of the cottage industries surrounding marijuana because employers are still asking employees to pee in a cup – even in Washington where we have legal pot.

So how does fake urine work? We found some answers on the the Internet.

One instructional YouTube video said, “All you need is access to a microwave. Before microwaving we need to shake the ‘quick fix’ and remove the cap. Place the quick fix to center of your microwave, microwave on high for 10 seconds.”

It sounded like it could be a scam. The YouTube infomercial left us skeptical, so we turned to an expert at the University of Washington.

Laboratory medical director at UW, Andy Hoofnagle, explained the science behind the business of fake pee, “You can synthesize it because it’s basically salt and a couple of other small molecules.”

Synthetic urine can be 99 percent exact, but there is a small fraction that can’t be replicated: the human element.

“It’s that one percent that each of us, that humans, contribute that you can’t really easily contribute in a laboratory,” said Hoofnagle.

But the question panicked employees headed to the bathroom want answered is, is 99 percent good enough to fool a drug test?

Yes, it can be.

“The reason it would fool a drug test is that even if you tested it for the things we commonly test to make sure it isn’t just tap water, those are going to be present,” Hoofnagle said. “It will have the right amount of salt, it will have the right pH, it will have other things that make it look like urine.”

So, at first glace, it would pass the test.

But Hoofnagle says he could still figure out if you’re using fake urine fairly quickly. “I mean it’s not fair, because I have some pretty fancy equipment at my disposal. It would take me less than an hour to figure out if it’s a real urine sample or not.”

If you’re caught using fake urine, expect to lose your job and have absolutely no recourse to get it back, according to attorney Tom Spiggle.

“Even if you were one of the few employees who can only be fired for cause, which are very few people in today’s market, any employer would look at that and say an employer would have cause to fire you for […] conducting a fraud, submitting urine that’s not yours,” explained Spiggle. “Most employees that are at will, you could be fired on the spot and you would have no cause to sue your employer.”

And in some states, using a synthetic urine product could lead to even more than losing your job.

“Well certainly in states that have criminalized it and they can show that you did it knowingly…you could face criminal charges,” said Spiggle.