CBD and Drug Testing

Time and time again, the question arises: Will CBD show up on a routine drug test? And the answer is surprisingly not as simple as a yes or no. Some have claimed that they’ve failed regular office drug screenings after using CBD. Others say they’ve never had a problem.

But what are the facts? Well, CBD will NOT show up on a drug test so long as you are taking strictly industrial hemp-derived CBD products provided by reputable sources. As per the 2018 Farm Bill, industrial hemp-derived CBD products were legalized at the federal level. Such products contain no more than 0.3% THC by dry weight. And, as we know, THC is the primary cannabinoid culprit in failed drug tests.

However, CBD products containing 0.3% THC or less do not contain nearly enough of the psychoactive compound to trigger a failed drug test. The average cut-off values of your standard THC drug screening, at their most minute levels, measure between 4 and 50 nanograms of THC within your system.

We’re talking billionths of a gram, so you’d think that a drug test could detect that 0.3% THC in CBD products, right?

Not exactly. Take a 30ml tincture of Full Spectrum CBD oil, retaining a 0.3% THC content. We won’t bore you with the math, but that entire tincture contains about 0.00036 nanograms of THC in the entire 30ml tincture. That figure, which is clearly much less than 4 nanograms, stands far below the necessary cut-off value to trigger a failed drug test.

For a more vivid (and less fractionated) image of this data, let’s convert these numbers to picograms, equivalent to trillionths of a gram:

• You need between at least 4,000 and 50,000 picograms of THC in your system to fail a drug test 
• A 30ml tincture of Full Spectrum CBD oil, retaining a THC content of 0.3%, contains 0.36 picograms of THC
• You would need 11,111 times the amount of THC in a CBD oil tincture to fail a drug test

So what about those who claimed that they’ve failed drug tests after taking CBD products? The harsh reality is that they probably took a product with untrustworthy manufacturing processes, or they ingested a THC product with a high-CBD content, thinking it was a product containing just CBD.