Can Eating Poppy Seeds Make You Fail a Drug Test?
Many years ago I applied for a job doing production work. This required me to go in for a drug test. To my surprise it came back positive for drugs. I hadn’t even had a drink, let alone used any drugs for over 10 years at that point. The tester asked me if I had eaten a poppy seed muffin for breakfast. Why yes, I had, I answered totally confused.
It seems that those wonderful poppy seeds come from the opium poppy. Even baked into a muffin or topping a bagel can cause the drug to show up on your drug test. For that reason, the federal government raised the threshold for opiates in testing done for work. It used to only take 300 nanograms per milliliter to fail the test. Now it takes 2,000 nanograms. You’d have to eat about a dozen poppy seed pastries to fail the test now.
So will eating those poppy seeds get you high? Sorry, only smoking them will bring you those results. So go ahead and eat those muffins.
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