Pot, weed and grass are other names for Marijuana, the most popular
drug. It represents dry, green or brown leaves and flowers of Cannabis
Sativa plant and in slang is well-known as herb, hash, grass or ganja.
It contains more than 400 chemicals and also
delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. This ingredient has psychoactive
and mind suppressing nature and its percentage in the drug actually
defines the strength of it.
A common dose of pot contains 3% of THC
but it can be different. Initial effect lasts for about 2 hours and then
is gone, but this does not mean that THC leaves the system as well.
Therefore when we speak about pot staying in the organism we actually
mean THC.
THC can be indicated by doing drug tests of saliva,
hair, or urine, and blood. And in some cases it is really surprising how
long THC can stay in your standard saliva, hair, or urine.
Pot
leaves saliva quite fast and therefore it is more complicated to detect
it there. Home saliva drug test is able to identify pot in saliva after
an hour of use. But if a test is undergone after 12 hours it can be
inadequate as this is the time when the drug leaves saliva.
Urine
test is a bit different as its result depends on how often a person
smokes. It generally can be detected after two or five hours after drug
was smoked. The average duration of pot in the urine is between a week
and 30 days, but in some cases it can be even 45 days.
But even
if your saliva and urine are clean from THC this does not meant that it
left the system completely. It stays in hair follicles, and quite for a
long time. The drug appears in a bloodstream after you smoke and hence
reaches hair; so does THC. After a week, when hair has grown enough to
be cut, a test can be carried out. Hair require more time than anything
else to get rid of the drug – after 90 days it still can be present
there. What concerns body hair, they grow slower, and therefore a period
of drug detection in them can be about a year. However, such a test not
always can be relied on and it is not so accurate if compared with the
urine test.
The most influential factor for the duration of stay
of pot in the system is the frequency of smoking. When we smoke, THC is
absorbed by fat cells. After a period of time, however, our organism
scavenges itself from pot and the bloodstream becomes clean again. With
the frequent smokers it is different: THC stays in your fat in larger
amounts than the bloodstream can accept ant therefore the drug preserves
in the system for a far longer period of time.
The conclusion is
the following: each part of the system tends to react differently to
pot and keeps it in for different periods of time. Therefore, if the
test is carried out with a teenager or a grown-up and they are,
probably, using marijuana regularly, it should be taken into
consideration.