How Long does Weed Stay in Your Blood?

It’s a question frequently asked by cannabis smokers: how long do you stay stoned and for how long is weed detectable in your blood or urine? Useful to know before a drug test if you’re driving or simply out of interest. That’s why we present it all here for you in a nutshell.

How Long does Weed Work For?

How long will you stay stoned? This is what many cannabis smokers ask themselves if they have to go and do something serious after a joint. Such as driving a car, working, playing sport or visiting their mother-in-law. As you’d probably expect, you can never tell exactly. The length of time you stay stoned is different for everyone. One person can recover more quickly than another. Some of the things that play a role include weight, body fat and much more. And the strength of the weed may also differ. But let’s have a go. How long does weed work for on average? An overview!

Smoking Weed or Hash 

  • Work more or less the same after smoking.
  • The effect lasts for 2 to 4 hours.

Eating Weed or Hash 

  • After you’ve eaten space cake or edibles, for example, it takes around 45 to 90 minutes to become stoned. 
  • The effect lasts for 4 to 6 hours. In addition, there can be after-effects which may be felt for up to 12 hours after intake.

Using Cannabis Oil

  • After taking a dose of weed oil (drops under the tongue), you feel the effect after roughly 10 to 20 minutes. Do you want to make cannabis oil yourself? View all products including explanations.
  • The effect can last for 3 to 6 hours.

The fact that you can no longer feel anything from hash or weed doesn’t mean that it’s no longer detectable in your blood, urine or saliva. Even if you are no longer stoned, you still can’t drive immediately. Weed and/or THC has to be broken down before it is filtered out of your body. In the same way as the time you stay stoned, the duration of this breakdown process is different for everyone. 

Joint Roken

For how long is weed detectable?

There is considerable variation in how long weed stays in a person’s blood. The user’s fatty tissue plays a significant role in the speed of the breakdown process. When you smoke weed, all kinds of molecules and even tinier substances are released in your body. These substances are assimilated in the fatty tissue after which the breakdown process is initiated. Conclusion: do you have a lot of fatty tissue? Then you will store a lot of ‘weed molecules’ and your body will take longer to process everything. Are you someone with very little fatty tissue? Then you can store less and your body will complete the breakdown process faster.

Needless to say, the amount of weed or hash someone has taken is more relevant than the amount of fatty tissue. Is it just occasional use? Then the weed will stay in the blood for a shorter period. Are you someone who smokes often or even every day? Then the weed will remain detectable in the blood for a lot longer.

Weed Drug Test

Having a drug test in the near future and therefore need to know how long weed will be detectable? Then it’s useful to realise that weed is not only detectable in your blood. Drug tests for weed can be carried out in various ways. Namely, by means of urine, saliva, hair or blood samples. For how long weed is detectable differs per method.

  • In the case of blood samples the use of weed or hash is still detectable for up to 12 or 24 hours after smoking or eating.
  • A urine drug test (tested for degradation substances) is able to detect occasional use for up to approximately 5 days. In the case of regular or daily use, weed can be detected in the urine for up to a month.
  • A saliva test can show the presence of weed or hash (in the case of occasional to normal use) for up to 6 or 8 hours. People who smoke cannabis on a daily basis or who have poor teeth should reckon on a longer period. This can be up to 16 hours.

As you can see, the question as to ‘how long weed stays in your blood’ is not completely relevant. Weed can be detected for a lot longer in your urine. This is because a blood test only shows the presence of THC (the active substance in weed). A urine drug test examines the amount of breakdown substances. This is calculated by means of a so-called half-life period. This is the time your body needs to reduce the amount of breakdown substances by half.

To help dispel one of the world’s fairy tales: the chance that passive smoking can lead to weed being detectable in your blood, saliva or urine is very small. Even by taking part in hotboxing, the active substances in weed barely reach your body. Only in really extreme cases.

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Weed and Driving

To keep everyone as safe and well as possible, we would emphasize that the above information is no guarantee of a successful drug test for you. Additionally, we strongly advise you to refrain from getting behind the wheel for a number of hours after using weed or hash. Even after the previously mentioned 16 hours. Mixing weed with driving is highly dangerous for you and for others. 

Influencing a drug test

We don’t want to encourage anything but we do know that the rules can get ignored sometimes. Are you about to have drug test and you already realise it’s not looking good? There are many ways in which to influence a drug test. In any event, the methods below have resulted in a positive outcome from a drug test for some people. Most drug tests involve taking a urine sample. Are you undergoing a test in a car? Then it will be a saliva test.

Here are a number of ways in which you can prepare for a drug test after using weed:

  • Drink plenty of water! This will dilute your urine sample, for example, and you will rinse out detectable substances from your saliva more quickly. Please note: a huge amount of water can result in a strange test result. This may lead to a suspicion of fraud. This often results in you having to retake the test. 
  • Go often to the toilet. If in the days leading up to the test you go to the toilet more frequently than usual, you will reduce the amount of substances in your body a bit more quickly.
  • Zinc. This substance appears to strongly affect drug tests. In a positive sense for you of course or else we wouldn’t mention it. Zinc is able to reduce the detectability of THC or weed in your urine or saliva. You can take zinc in powders or capsules. They also say that putting a coin under the tongue appears to also help in some cases but I don’t think we should actually take that too seriously.
  • For saliva tests you could try rinsing your mouth with pure alcohol, Listerine or mouthwash. This method also may hardly work or not work at all but every little bit helps. Make sure you don’t swallow any of it. 
  • Detox cures. There are many cures for cleansing your body internally. Their effectiveness is difficult to judge because each detox session is different. Quick Flush is one example of a well-known detox method.

None of these methods guarantee success. We recommend that you don’t break the rules or try to manipulate drug tests. For the sake of your own safety.

Sources: Jellinek, drugs information team, ‘Health with CBD and other Cannabinoids’

drug test

U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson.

THC Test 

We fully understand that you might want to test yourself before undergoing a drugs test. Now, testing your own blood, urine or saliva for weed or THC is no easy matter. But one thing you can do is to test the stuff you buy for active substances. For instance, you may smoke weed and want to know for certain that it doesn’t contain THC. In this situation, you can use a Drugs Test for THC from EZ Test. This convenient THC test enables you to see whether the active substance is present in a bit of weed, hash, oil or concentrate. Of course, this THC test won’t provide you with a definitive answer as to whether weed is still present in your blood but it may give some help in that direction. After all, it could indicate that you haven’t smoked anything that contained THC recently. Furthermore, it’s also useful for when you buy something on the street and want to know whether or not you are being cheated. Not that we recommend that kind of buying! Anyway, you can simply order a THC test online in our webshop!

Other Drugs Tests

You can buy a drugs test for a whole range of other substances in addition to the THC test. Why must you test drugs? Anything you buy could be contaminated or cut. That means there may be things in there that shouldn’t be present. This can be dangerous or extremely unhealthy. It could lead to unexpected effects if it contains life-threatening substances. For that reason, EZ Test’s drugs tests are extremely useful. They can be used at home or even while out and about. You’ll then know within a few seconds whether your drugs are pure or not. Are you looking to buy a drugs test? We have various drugs tests in stock for you:

Warning: The EZ Test can provide only an indication of whether certain substances are present. No rights can be derived regarding the test’s accuracy. You can have drugs tested by an official body - this is the only way in which to find out exactly what the ingredients are. Additionally, an EZ test does not tell you how much of an active substance is present. Furthermore, the use of any kind of drugs is entirely your own responsibility.