Yup. as dumb as it sounds, there may be something to this. Back when I was a young Corporal three of us in the unit "popped positive" for opium. Me, the command chaplain and Ernie Whitehead. His name wasn't Ernie, we just called him that because he looked like Ernie Thompson from the My Three Sons television show. The chaplain and I had a talk with the First Sergeant and everybody just kinda shrugged their shoulders and forgot about us. But not Ernie, for some reason they thought he was acting funny, and we had to watch him day and night. He was the most normal guy in the whole outfit. We all got retested and Ernie was the only one that tested positive again. So we followed him around the barracks and watched him at work. We knew he wasn't on drugs, and he finally got a negative test. We did have bagels in the mess hall and both Ernie and I ate them at breakfast We'd mentioned this to the Substance Abuse Counselling Officer, but were told it'd be necessary to eat a whole pound of poppy seeds to get a positive result. Maybe not. https://thehill.com/policy/defense/...d-poppy-seeds-citing-effects-on-drug-testing/
A pound of poppy seeds my ass. Not dumb at all. Mythbusters demonstrated this in spectacular fashion like 20 years ago.
Not a myth. When I worked for one of the three letter .gov's, we were explicitly warned to avoid anything with poppy seeds...
Yep anyone who works in a space were drug testing is mandatory (I do) will have been made aware of this years ago.
In my Navy years, early 1980s, we were also told to avoid poppy seeds. Afterwards, as a civilian I enjoyed poppy seed muffins.
you get a re-test from any legit testing service - my sister got tripped up by using cough syrup like the month before testing - they can eliminate these types of cross-contaminations if they have an idea what to look for ....
The problem with being active duty, is that they DON'T have to pay any attention to YOUR test. Had a buddy lose his security clearance, for popping positive on a "whiz quiz", for cocaine. Spent his own $$, got a hair follicle test done, which showed negative for anything. Navy said they didn't care, he popped positive, on THEIR test. That was around 1985-ish. Funny thing, I was in for 9-1/2 years, and got piss tested exactly 4 times: 1. boot camp (1980) 2. showed up to Orlando, for my secondary training (1981) 3. showed up to my ship (1982) 4. got sent to do a 3-4 month gig, with the ship's "Master at Arms" force (1984) Spent SIX MORE YEARS IN, and never got piss tested during that time! Which is probably good, since I was occasionally partaking in stuff that would've showed up!
Was overseas on a deployment in "83--'84 ,,, near the end of our time on dirt ,, we had a battalion wide piss test ,, a buddy of mine was a Cpl ,, he popped a positive test ,, he was a short timer ,, had a 4 year clean record ,,, good pro and con marks . Evidently he had enjoyed some of the local smoke . When he went up in front of the Blt CO ,, the CO said ,, you've got a clean record for 4 yrs ,, what ya got to say ,, my buddy said ,, Sir ,, the only thing I can think of is there must have been something in some of them cookies we were receiving from the states back at Christmas time . We were flooded with cakes , cookies , and fruit cakes ,, and all kinds of " to any Marine " mail from the states . The CO dismissed his charges .
